Something that I've wanted to add to this blog was a pagination feature, but I didn't see the need for it now because I only had a few posts. But it's now added and enabled. By default, I have it showing only five posts per page. One of the reason why I love Django is because of its pagination tool, which really makes my life easier. You can see the paginator in the upper right hand corner of the blog. I might move the location later on, but it looks nice and cosy right up there.

I actually had the update done before the end of last weekend, but I was a little lazy on uploading it to my webserver. As for future stuff, I'm going to get a contact page up soon as well as some more tutorials/walkthroughs.

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.