Monday, October 27, 2008
Site down
Looks like some clever hackers found a way into my site and planted some oh-so-fun phishing scripts in there. I was contacted earlier today by my host, and informed that they've suspended my site until we can get it worked out. Here's hoping it won't take long.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
I am voice actor. Hear me flail!
I was asked to provide vocal noises for the guy in the large plastic ball in this DriveTime spot that we produced at work about a month ago. Most of the stuff in the early part of the spot had to be mixed really low under the main voiceover, but you can hear me loud and clear (well, muffled and clear) when the guy goes rolling toward the camera. No pay for this gig, but it was fun all the same.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Python decorators: getting a little closer...
After further searching, I finally ran across a very well-written article that attempts to explain Python decorators from a very basic level. While it hasn't brought to mind any situations in which I would want to use decorators in my code, I at least have a handle on what exactly they are and how they work.
To clarify my earlier post, one of main things that (at first) didn't click for me with regard to decorators was how exactly they allowed the programmer to effectively modify a function after it was written. Sure, I'd learned that you could assign a function to a variable and pass it around like any other piece of data, but even in that context I saw the function itself as essentially static. If I passed a function as an argument, I only expected the target function to call the function I passed as-is. I never thought about the possibility that a target function could actually do something else with/to the function I had passed.
As with other things I've unearthed in the process of learning Python, I have a hunch that this would've been easier to learn if I had a more formal background in computer science, and that's probably the biggest frustration that still crops up as I dig through Python documentation. Bits of programming terminology are often casually thrown around with the assumption that the average reader knows what they mean. One example is the term "first-class objects" that can be found at the head of the article linked above. I've seen that term used in several places, but even though the sentence immediately following the phrase in the above article is related to the phrase's definition, I still had no idea what it meant until I dug it up via a Google search. The way it was phrased in that article, it felt like the status of Python functions as first-class objects was a separate concept from that which immediately followed it, so I was left thinking, "Okay...so what are first-class objects?"
That's probably not the best example of my frustration, though. I guess the point is that it feels like there's a gap somewhere. At one end there's good introductory material, such as the tutorial by Guido von Rossum that covers a lot of ground-level topics. At the other end there is very nice reference material that covers the individual modules in the standard library, the data types that the language offers, etc. However, between Guido's tutorial and the other reference material there's a bit of a void, because some of the reference material makes reference to programming concepts that aren't explained in Guido's tut. I'm not necessarily implying that they should be covered by Guido's tutorial, but it's a gap all the same, and one that many in the Python community seem to ignore. Perhaps that is an inaccurate observation, and I'd be more than happy to be shown evidence to the contrary. However, from my observations, many experienced Python programmers seem to assume that you're either a newbie learning the basics, or you're a fellow pro. The folks in the middle who aren't totally new but aren't full-on professional programmers seem to get overlooked.
The most frustrating part is that I feel like I'm square in that gap. Yeah, I've been scripting/programming since I was about 12, but sadly that doesn't necessarily mean that I have a complete understanding of modern programming terminology and concepts. I've taken very few formal programming courses, and those few took place a long time ago. Everything else I know has been the result of self-study and on-the-job experience. However, the farther I delve into this stuff, the more I feel like self-study (at least what I'm currently doing) isn't cutting it.
So here comes the million-dollar question: do I stick with self-study and see how far it gets me, or do I go back to school? I've been around enough self-taught animators to know that it's possible to get to the very top of that game without formal instruction, but I don't know if the same holds true for the world of programming.
To clarify my earlier post, one of main things that (at first) didn't click for me with regard to decorators was how exactly they allowed the programmer to effectively modify a function after it was written. Sure, I'd learned that you could assign a function to a variable and pass it around like any other piece of data, but even in that context I saw the function itself as essentially static. If I passed a function as an argument, I only expected the target function to call the function I passed as-is. I never thought about the possibility that a target function could actually do something else with/to the function I had passed.
As with other things I've unearthed in the process of learning Python, I have a hunch that this would've been easier to learn if I had a more formal background in computer science, and that's probably the biggest frustration that still crops up as I dig through Python documentation. Bits of programming terminology are often casually thrown around with the assumption that the average reader knows what they mean. One example is the term "first-class objects" that can be found at the head of the article linked above. I've seen that term used in several places, but even though the sentence immediately following the phrase in the above article is related to the phrase's definition, I still had no idea what it meant until I dug it up via a Google search. The way it was phrased in that article, it felt like the status of Python functions as first-class objects was a separate concept from that which immediately followed it, so I was left thinking, "Okay...so what are first-class objects?"
That's probably not the best example of my frustration, though. I guess the point is that it feels like there's a gap somewhere. At one end there's good introductory material, such as the tutorial by Guido von Rossum that covers a lot of ground-level topics. At the other end there is very nice reference material that covers the individual modules in the standard library, the data types that the language offers, etc. However, between Guido's tutorial and the other reference material there's a bit of a void, because some of the reference material makes reference to programming concepts that aren't explained in Guido's tut. I'm not necessarily implying that they should be covered by Guido's tutorial, but it's a gap all the same, and one that many in the Python community seem to ignore. Perhaps that is an inaccurate observation, and I'd be more than happy to be shown evidence to the contrary. However, from my observations, many experienced Python programmers seem to assume that you're either a newbie learning the basics, or you're a fellow pro. The folks in the middle who aren't totally new but aren't full-on professional programmers seem to get overlooked.
The most frustrating part is that I feel like I'm square in that gap. Yeah, I've been scripting/programming since I was about 12, but sadly that doesn't necessarily mean that I have a complete understanding of modern programming terminology and concepts. I've taken very few formal programming courses, and those few took place a long time ago. Everything else I know has been the result of self-study and on-the-job experience. However, the farther I delve into this stuff, the more I feel like self-study (at least what I'm currently doing) isn't cutting it.
So here comes the million-dollar question: do I stick with self-study and see how far it gets me, or do I go back to school? I've been around enough self-taught animators to know that it's possible to get to the very top of that game without formal instruction, but I don't know if the same holds true for the world of programming.
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