So for the past couple of days I've had a little break, so I decided to write a tutorial/walkthrough on how to deploy Django with Apache & mod_wsgi. When deploying the Python/Django port of my blog, I found it wasn't easy to do. My issue was that there weren't any tutorials online that walked you through all of the steps; all of the information seemed to be scatered. So I decided to write my own. If you're interested, you can find it under the "Pages," section (or here is a direct link).

On top of that too, I decided to add in Markdown support for content here. I was going to install CKEditor but I figured Markdown was simple and quick enough. Normally I would go over to the CKEditor Demo and write my content in there, then paste it into a text box here, but this is much more convient to do. On top of that, I added an extra thing that will let me chose whether I want to work with straight up HTML or Markdown syntax.

Over the past week I've had some free time, so I decided to do something I wanted to do: move this website over to a Python based system.  The weekend before the last, I spent some time in a car ride learning the Django framework and really fell in love with it.  The old CMS script was something written using PHP and the CodeIgniter framework.  I spent the better part of 3-4 days porting over the code, and about 3 days getting the server setup and web app deployed. The only thing that I lost was the "1st," "2nd," "3rd," "[4-0]th," endings on the date.

I might later make a post talking about the pros and cons of using each but in a nutshell this was my experience:

Since Django deployment was such a pain for me, yet I figured it out, I'll be posting a tutorial soon on how to do it.

I meant to post this about a month ago, but I've been quite busy.  Anyways...

I mentioned in the last post that I was working on a Chip-8 Emulator.  While it was a quite interesting project and I learned a lot from it, I decided to discontinue the project a month ago.  My reasons were that I hadn't spend time on it in a bit (it was supposed to be a short 2-3 week project), but school work caught up with me and interrupted any progress.  I did a fair amount of reasearch on the Chip-8 architecture and got some (but not all ROMs to work).

For the project, I wrote a small python utility to print out the data of a ROM (insanely useful for implementing op-codes).  The brunt of the code was made with C and SDL.  It started out using the 1.2 version of SDL, then SDL2 came out right after development began.  In the late stages of the project, I thought it would be interesting to switch to the new API.  It went smoothly.  Sound/Audio (which is just a "beep," noise) isn't implemented.

But in retrospect, I got out of it what I wanted to learn; "How does an emulator work?"  It was a worthwhile experience for the time I put into it.  I'd love to acutally work on a different (more purposeful) type of emulator.  But for now, I've got some other stuff that I need to get done.

If anyone wants to see it, I posted it to my Github page under c8_sdl. It's released under the GNU GPL v3 license.

So I haven't posted anything in a while, but I'm finally done with my internship this Summer and I now am back at school!  It's only been a week so far, so nothing interesting has happened.  In the time that I didn't post though, I was able to get the first public version of my Arduino Serial "library," pushed onto github.  So if you want to take a look at it, it's right here.

As for a next one, I'm working on a Chip 8 Emulator.  I've been able to get some stuff for it done, but I haven't implemented all of the inputs/outputs for it yet.  The "CPU," is done, but not fully tested.  So far it can run a few demos.

So I haven't updated this at all in about a month. The main reason is that I've been busy both with my internship and my personal project.  For the later, there has been a lot of reading involved (most of which I don't even use).  But it's all beneficial.

I just got done with the basic testing phase for my personal project, and now I'm refacorting most of that code for release of it.  I hope to have it ready this weekend.   Most of my work for it probably will be documenting it and writing examples.

What is it about you ask?  Serial communications.  It's actually an older project (built at a 10 hour hackathon,) that I wanted to improve and extend it.  You'll see it soon on Github.