| --- Log opened Wed Nov 21 00:00:24 2007 |
| 00:17 | | AnnoDomini is now known as AD[SLEEP] |
| 00:41 | | You're now known as TheWatcher[T-2] |
| 00:44 | | You're now known as TheWatcher[zZzZ] |
| 00:49 | | * Reiver pokes Vornicus |
| 00:49 | <@Reiver> | I has a stupid little program to write, but I am running into brick walls of syntax in Python. |
| 00:49 | <@Reiver> | And I mean /basic/ syntax. |
| 00:49 | | * Reiver feels frankly quite silly. |
| 00:49 | | * McMartin is also an expert |
| 00:50 | | * Reiver feels kinda embarrased asking such stupid questions of you, McM~ |
| 00:50 | <@McMartin> | Ask anyway =P |
| 00:50 | <@McMartin> | Otherwise you stay ignorant, |
| 00:51 | <@Reiver> | Point. |
| 00:51 | <@McMartin> | Besides, Python has some surprising corners, so if you happen to think one of those is basic, then you'll be bitten fast |
| 00:51 | <@McMartin> | Or if your editor is a twit about tabs. |
| 00:52 | <@Reiver> | I'm trying to write a small, very small program that simply loads a file, finds a specific line in it, and changes a value in it for me by a certain amount. |
| 00:52 | <@Reiver> | Starting Position Offset Z := 0 |
| 00:52 | <@McMartin> | Problem 1: ":=" is Pascal. |
| 00:52 | <@Reiver> | This being a data file, that line shows up about three hundred times. |
| 00:53 | <@McMartin> | Oh, that's a file line |
| 00:53 | <@Reiver> | I want to be able to batch-change them. >.> |
| 00:53 | <@McMartin> | n/m, continue |
| 00:53 | <@McMartin> | Hmm. Well, so, your first problem is that you can't really update a file in place. You'll have to read the whole thing in and produce a new file with updated values. |
| 00:53 | <@McMartin> | Is whitespace significant? |
| 00:55 | <@McMartin> | (as in, would "Starting Position Offset Z := 0" mean the same thing) |
| 00:55 | <@Reiver> | Whitespace is significant. |
| 00:55 | <@McMartin> | OK. |
| 00:55 | <@McMartin> | Your problems then are: |
| 00:55 | <@McMartin> | (1) Getting the data in |
| 00:55 | <@McMartin> | (2) Making sense of it |
| 00:55 | <@Reiver> | ...And piping out to a new file line is probably for the best anyway. |
| 00:55 | <@McMartin> | (3) Making the changes |
| 00:55 | <@McMartin> | (4) Outputting the results |
| 00:55 | <@Reiver> | Er. New file altogether~ |
| 00:56 | <@McMartin> | For (1), look into file.readlines(). (2) is probably best handled with split(), but might be doable just with substrings. |
| 00:57 | <@McMartin> | (3) needs to respect the constraints, and may be tricky |
| 00:57 | <@McMartin> | (4) is probably best handled via and laternate mode of print |
| 00:57 | <@Reiver> | Cheers! |
| 00:57 | | * Reiver dives into the help files for those functions. |
| 00:58 | <@McMartin> | Look up "print>>" in the tutorials. |
| 00:58 | | * Reiver nod. |
| 00:58 | <@McMartin> | But actually, start just with "print" so you can eyeball the results. |
| 00:58 | <@McMartin> | By substrings I mean the a[0:14] syntax. |
| 00:58 | <@Reiver> | Hm |
| 00:58 | | * Reiver glances at the file. |
| 00:58 | <@McMartin> | a.split (":=") would make it ignore whitespace, but then when you were outputting you wouldn't have proper spacing without using format strings. |
| 00:59 | <@McMartin> | Which is "string" % (tuple, of, values). |
| 00:59 | <@McMartin> | And will do things like automatically justify strings/numbers/etc and is really nice. |
| 00:59 | <@McMartin> | Ando nl |
| 00:59 | <@McMartin> | And only "obvious and simple" if you've spent a decade programming in C and its derivates already =P |
| 01:00 | <@Reiver> | Does it help that I just doublechecked, and the string "Starting Position Offset Z := " + int |
| 01:01 | <@Reiver> | * Is reproduced precisely in the entire file? |
| 01:01 | <@McMartin> | So, that's 56 characters long |
| 01:01 | | * Vornicus dislikes print. |
| 01:02 | <@McMartin> | So, if you want to rely on that, you could look at x[:56] on each line and see if it matches. |
| 01:02 | <@Reiver> | And then you have an integer, which spends 95% of its time at 0 and 5% of its time anywhere between 8 and ~297e |
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| 01:03 | <@Reiver> | I intend to be dropping the whole lot of them by -10, -20, or whatever. (It will require eyeballing of the final result to get the correct figure, y'see. It's shifting things into position in a game engine.) |
| 01:04 | <@McMartin> | string-to-int is int("14"), say |
| 01:04 | <@McMartin> | And int-to-string is str(14) |
| 01:05 | <@Reiver> | So once I've found the a[:56] = "Starting Position Offset Z := ", I then want to steal the remaining text on the line and convert it to an int how? |
| 01:06 | <@McMartin> | a[56:] is the rest |
| 01:06 | <@McMartin> | so int(a[56:]) should do it. |
| 01:06 | <@Reiver> | Ah! |
| 01:06 | <@McMartin> | You may have to call strip() on it to remove whitespace. |
| 01:07 | <@Reiver> | That, uh |
| 01:07 | <@Reiver> | Makes far more sense than I had expected~ |
| 01:07 | <@Reiver> | (Also, does the length of the comparison affect speed significantly? I could shorten the string to just the text and get the required line anyway; it's just the output that requires the whitespace.) |
| 01:07 | <@McMartin> | x[i:j] is characters i through j in string x, including i but not j |
| 01:07 | <@McMartin> | This makes sense because that way you can have [:i] and [i:] partition the string after i characters, as just demonstrated~ |
| 01:07 | <@McMartin> | And x[i:i] is the empty string. |
| 01:08 | | * Reiver nods. |
| 01:08 | <@Derakon> | Reiver: never prematurely optimize code. |
| 01:08 | <@Derakon> | If, after you have it doing the right thing, you find that it's not fast enough, then you can try to make it faster. |
| 01:08 | <@McMartin> | And, uh, if comparing strings of length 56 is too dear, stop running the script on your alarm clock. |
| 01:08 | | * Derakon snerks. |
| 01:08 | | * Reiver grins. Right, then~ |
| 01:09 | <@McMartin> | Bear in mind that reading anything from disk will, regardless of read time, take several million instructions worth of time. |
| 01:09 | <@Reiver> | Ah, yes. |
| 01:09 | <@Reiver> | And this file is 1.91 MB. |
| 01:09 | <@McMartin> | You are, as they say, "I/O bound". |
| 01:09 | <@Derakon> | That's nothing, comparatively speaking. |
| 01:10 | <@Derakon> | I mean, I regularly scan through many 400+MB files at work. That takes several minutes. |
| 01:10 | <@McMartin> | He's doing less than a regexp match on each line. He's still I/O bound. |
| 01:10 | <@Reiver> | Indeed, though I've been dealing with a lot of programs that can take the better part of a minute to output a formulatically generated 205 KB file, so I've gotten cautious about speed~ |
| 01:11 | | * Vornicus regularly scans /usr/share/dict/words using egrep, and gets nigh instant results. |
| 01:11 | <@McMartin> | If you're scanning it regularly, it's probably in the memory cache, Vorn. |
| 01:11 | < Vornicus> | By "regularly" I mean "once every few days" |
| 01:26 | <@Reiver> | Cheers, McM. |
| 01:26 | <@Reiver> | It was fairly elementary stuff I know, but I haven't touched Python in over a year and a half... >.> |
| 01:27 | <@McMartin> | I don't consider format strings elementary if you weren't a C programmer first. |
| 01:27 | <@McMartin> | Slices are your friends, though they generally aren't what you use since usually you want whitespace to not matter |
| 01:28 | <@McMartin> | Speaking of format strings, I need to learn OCaml's versions thereof. |
| 01:32 | | * Vornicus fiddles, wishes he could read the data that's in the art files. |
| 01:45 | <@Derakon> | Hrm. Dragon Spirit is also very hard to play at 2x. |
| 01:46 | | * Vornicus <3 format strings. |
| 01:55 | | * Vornicus fiddles. Wishes he had the resources to produce nearly as much art as he needs, in a style similar to the original. Does not have much skill. |
| 01:57 | <@Derakon> | What're you working with here? |
| 01:57 | < Vornicus> | King's Bounty. |
| 01:58 | <@Derakon> | And what're you trying to do? |
| 01:58 | < Vornicus> | Remake it, so Dad can play it without having to fuck with such silliness as DOSBox. |
| 01:58 | <@Derakon> | Ah. |
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| 02:53 | <@Derakon> | Okay, you know what's even worse when played at 2x? Recca. |
| 03:15 | < Vornicus> | okay. 13 each water, forest, mountain, desert; 7 castle; hill grove plains dungeon town sign treasure grass; 4 armies; 3 battlefield obstacles; 8 artifact overworld icons; 8 artifact tiles; 4 continent navigation charts; 8 static menu icons. 102 static arts, not including splashes. They're all the same shape. |
| 03:20 | < Vornicus> | hill grove plains dungeon town castle intro win lose. 9 splashes. |
| 03:22 | < Vornicus> | 25 creatures, 17 villains, 2 avatars, 4 animated menu icons. 48 animations. |
| 03:26 | < Vornicus> | oop, 104 - also need 2 bridges. |
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| 19:33 | | * AnnoDomini needs to make a JavaBean to pass programming this semester. |
| 19:34 | <@AnnoDomini> | http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Digital_clock_changing_numbers.jpg <- A clock which looks like this. |
| 19:34 | < MyCatVerbs> | Mmmm, baked beans. |
| 19:34 | | * AnnoDomini is sadly clueless. |
| 19:36 | <@AnnoDomini> | So... nobody knows where one could download a clockBean? |
| 19:37 | <@AnnoDomini> | (If not, I will have to waste a weekend of my life on this crap. Maybe more.) |
| 19:37 | | * jerith recommends the Brilliant Paula Bean. |
| 19:37 | < MyCatVerbs> | Oh deities, no. |
| 19:37 | <@AnnoDomini> | Nono, it was 'Brillant'. |
| 19:38 | < MyCatVerbs> | Aieeee. |
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| 19:54 | < Vornicus> | Anno: probably your best bet would be to create a 7seg "font" and use that. |
| 19:54 | <@AnnoDomini> | ... GENIUS! |
| 19:54 | | * AnnoDomini hugs Vornicus. |
| 20:06 | <@AnnoDomini> | Hm. Is there a way to use an actual premade font here? |
| 20:11 | < Vornicus> | Probably. You'll have to package it into your bean though, and that I don't know how to do |
| 20:17 | <@AnnoDomini> | Hrm. That's what I want to do, as I'm loathe to risk adding it as a system/JDK font via sneakage. |
| 20:42 | | * AnnoDomini ponders being sneaky, and using several labels with - and | characters for the segments. He figures that would actually be less a chore than using the graphics mode. |
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| 23:06 | | * gnolam ponders variadic functions. |
| 23:09 | <@McMartin> | Almost always a premature optimization, at least for any language with sensible collection types. |
| 23:10 | | * AnnoDomini checks once again if anyone knows how to include a font in a JavaBean? |
| 23:11 | <@McMartin> | I've never really messed with Beans beyond the method naming conventions, sorry. =/ |
| 23:12 | <@AnnoDomini> | Uh... then any way to include one in a .jar? |
| 23:13 | <@McMartin> | Oh, sure, that's easy. .jar files are just .zip files that are guaranteed to have specific files in them. |
| 23:14 | <@McMartin> | How to make data be read out of the same jar that a classfile was read from is almost certainly possible, because everyone does it, but I'm not sure offhand if there's an easy way. |
| 23:14 | <@McMartin> | The hard way is to find yourself in the classpath and open yourself up with the java.util.JarFile class. |
| 23:16 | | * AnnoDomini hrms. It looks to be simpler to just do the hacky coloured "-" and "|" for the segments. |
| 23:16 | <@ToxicFrog> | There's some special filename you can use, like resource:///foo |
| 23:16 | <@ToxicFrog> | That will open files inside the jar rather than in the filesystem. |
| 23:16 | <@ToxicFrog> | I don't recall the details, though. |
| 23:17 | | * gnolam decides against variadic functions. |
| 23:18 | <@gnolam> | I'm stressing the poor AVR enough already. |
| 23:19 | | * AnnoDomini had an opportunity to mess with VGA today. |
| 23:19 | <@McMartin> | int 10h! |
| 23:19 | <@McMartin> | A000:0000! |
| 23:19 | <@AnnoDomini> | Using a FLEX10K board. |
| 23:21 | <@AnnoDomini> | It's more fun than doing problems from the damned archaic, bug-ridden PDF which the rest of the class is using. The teacher said I don't have to do those, and will be doing VGA and keyboard-handling stuffs. I don't mind. |
| 23:21 | <@McMartin> | Heh. |
| 23:21 | | * AnnoDomini yays for being good at something. |
| 23:22 | <@AnnoDomini> | I got the monitor to display something like a nordic national flag. Only I kinda exceeded the resolution. |
| 23:22 | <@AnnoDomini> | 10 bits on horizontal and vertical, but only 640x480. |
| 23:22 | | * McMartin nods |
| 23:23 | <@McMartin> | The A000:0000 thing was from the days when VGA usually meant 8-bit 320x200. |
| 23:23 | | * AnnoDomini thinks he understands what he needs to do to create the Snake-like thing to pass the class. |
| 23:24 | <@AnnoDomini> | Storing n previous states in a sort of array register thingy. Now I only need to work out how to do keyboard inputs. |
| 23:24 | <@McMartin> | Do you have hardware interrupts? |
| 23:25 | <@AnnoDomini> | I'm not sure. Not very good at Microprocessor Technology. |
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| 23:25 | | * AnnoDomini is not sure what they are, even. |
| 23:25 | <@McMartin> | the way Real Computers do it, the keyboard sends a stream of events to the controller, which accepts them as interrupts, interprets the values, and puts them in a buffer for the main system to use. |
| 23:26 | <@McMartin> | A hardware interrupt means that at any point the hardware can command the CPU to start running from a different PC. |
| 23:26 | <@AnnoDomini> | I see. |
| 23:26 | <@AnnoDomini> | But I don't know. We haven't touched that thing yet. |
| 23:27 | <@McMartin> | Ah. In that case, "It Depends." |
| 23:27 | <@McMartin> | (tm) |
| 23:28 | <@McMartin> | Digital joysticks usually end up essentially being mapped to a magic memory location that is a bitmap of which direction/buttons are being pushed |
| 23:28 | <@AnnoDomini> | I guess input will be some kind of register. On keypress, it changes value to the key's code, and stays that way until something else is pressed. I don't know. |
| 23:28 | | * AnnoDomini is overdue for sleepage now, though. |
| 23:28 | <@McMartin> | If that's all there is, you're sitting pretty |
| 23:29 | <@McMartin> | Writing a full featured keyboard controller that properly handles chording, etc, would be a royal pain. |
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| 23:29 | <@AnnoDomini> | IIRC, we're being given a rudimentary keyboard handling VHDL component. |
| 23:29 | | * AnnoDomini sleeps now. |
| 23:30 | <@McMartin> | Sleep well |
| 23:30 | <@McMartin> | And yeah, in that case my only wisdom is "find its interface when you get it." |
| 23:50 | <@gnolam> | Hmm. This comms protocol specification references messages that don't actually exist. |
| 23:50 | <@gnolam> | Why on Earth haven't we noticed until now? |
| 23:50 | <@gnolam> | Hmm... maybe it was lost in a revision? |
| 23:50 | | * gnolam checks SVN. |
| 23:52 | <@gnolam> | ... nope. |
| 23:52 | <@gnolam> | Been like that all the time. Huh. |
| --- Log closed Thu Nov 22 00:00:30 2007 |