2 posts tagged “programming”

There and back again...

Over this past New Year's Eve I sat and listened to Leo Laporte and Amber Macarthur's podcast Net @ Nite. The subject that night was of course New Year's Resolutions and what resolutions the callers to the program had in mind for year 2007. A common resolution that came up again and again was a commitment by various individuals to learn a programming language.

Quite honestly this struck me like a bolt of lightning  because I had been telling myself for years that I would eventually sit down and learn one of the newer languages but for one reason or another I just kept putting it off. Well, I'm putting if off no more!

 

So, in the first two weeks of January I began exploring what languages were available, which ones were used for what purpose, and how easy it would be if for a new student to pick them up. By mid-January, I had settled on the Python Programming Language. I spent a couple weeks learning intensely from various tutorials online as well as discovering the Python411 podcast. In the first week of February I purchased my first two Python books: Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, second edition by Michael Dawson and Python for Dummies by Stef and Aahz Maruch.

Python, for those who aren't familiar with it, is an interpretative object oriented high level programming language that is similar to PHP, Java, Ruby and Perl.

The founder of the language, Guido Van Rossum, named the language after Monty Python, the British comedy troupe, whom he was quite fond of. It is open source, which appeals to me, and they seem to have a very friendly community, which I also dig.

NINcryption

While learning the Python language it has become clear to me that I really only learn things of this nature by creating my own programs. I find that these self created programs, silly as they may be often force me to seek out new solutions to programming problems, which in turn enriches and furthers my knowledge base, which brings me to my current programming project, NINcryption.

NINcryption is program that will allow fans and roleplayers of NIN's "Year Zero"  album to immerse themselves a bit more into the Art is Resistance role-playing movement . It gives them the ability to encrypt messages into a binary code I've devised that is comprised entirely of the letters "n" and "i". The program also allows you to decrypt other messages from fellow members. It is a fun way to send messages back and forth, even on public webpages, without making every message entirely public. It is not intended of course to be secure by any means, since it is only a role-playing tool.

Right now the program is in alpha. I've got the encryption, the decryption, saving and loading of files worked out. Additional features that I have planned and that are in various stages of development include GUI implementation, Python language/NINcryption packaging as either an .exe file or a .zip file, error exceptions, and Macintosh compatibility that still need ironing out. I'd like to keep it open source and under the GPL so that anyone who would like to have fun with it can.

Besides I haven't obtained approval from Reznor or his cohorts, so I want to stay out of trouble there as well. I'm hoping to get closer to beta release by the time the "Year Zero" album is released to the masses on April 17th. I fully intend to host the finished file on my server, as well as posting links to it in The Spiral (the official NIN fan club), and also a link on Sourceforge.

I understand that by just about every standard this is a very simple program. I don't expect it to necessarily excite many of my fellow programmers out there. I only offer in my defense that what I love about the project is the potentiality that I might be able to enrich the Alternate Reality Game that has arisen from the Year Zero material. Doing so would fill my need for creating art that has both form and function. If you have suggestions, links or information that could help me with this project, I would appreciate it.

At the risk of being flamed, I am also interested in what you think about this project. Worthwhile fun, or complete waste of time?

This morning has been a mixed message so far. On the one hand I found a neat piece of shareware software, NBasic, that emulates the BASIC programming experience that we in the older set enjoyed way back in 1981-1983 on our Tandy TRS-80(or as my friends use to call it, a Trash 80), Apple IIe, or in my case on theTI-99/4A.

So I went searching for the old programming books I had kept around somewhere with all the classic programming codes for all sorts of 16 bit madness, but alas, no luck. I can't even find the bit of source code for a Yahtzee game I had worked on for the Apple IIGS as a senior project in my computer sciences course from high school. Too bad, I was hoping to clean up the code and finish it off.

On the positive side, during all of this searching I stumbled on my copy of Bella Morte's album "The Quiet", which I had thought lost long ago. So here I am probing the furthest reaches of my brain, deep into my childhood memories trying to recall some 16-bit BASIC code while listening to Bella Morte's "Logic".

In a bit I expect to get back to editing THIRST and salvaging data from an aging Compaq who, even after backup and a Windows reinstall by a tech, appears to be input/output challenged. Which is a bad thing as we don't have the backup anymore and now the only way to reach the original source files for our first two albums is to get the data off of the C drive of this particularly nagging computer hopefully on to the slaved D drive. If all goes well, hopefully we can get the D drive installed in one of our more stable machines and preserve the data.