Jeroens blog

I’ve created a new Maps screencast that covers the use of the display_point parser function of Maps as it works in version 0.5. I’m assuming you have seen the display_map screencast before you watch this one, although the basic syntax is covered again quickly.

I’ve also made the projects for both screencast publicly available. If you have wink, the application I used to create the screencasts, installed, you can simply modify the projects, add your own stuff, and render your own version. I’m hoping some fans of Maps use this possibility to improve the screencasts and help their fellow Maps users.

• Download display_point screencast project (~33MiB)
• Download display_map screencast project (~10MiB)

Yesterday I made my first screencast ever. [ Check it out! ] It explains how you can display a map using the Maps extension for MediaWiki, how you can customize it, and how to interact with it. I’ve linked it from the Maps extension documentation page. Depending on the feedback I’ll get, I might make similar ones explaining how to create maps with markers, how to aggregate coordinates onto a map with Semantic MediaWiki, and how to use the Semantic Forms hooks of Semantic Maps.

Note: the application I used to create this screencast with does not have build in spellings correction, so expect at least one mistake in every 20 words or so

Last few days I had some time (while sitting on the train) to have a good look at the second part of the Python docs tutorial. I’ve now got a good understanding of everything up to classes, and know the most important language specific notations, behaviours and features.

So far, Python strikes me as a really nice language, with quite some features I haven’t come across before. Especially the data sequence types are neat, and you can do multi inheritance. There are a few things that I find rather odd though. These include the ability to simply add methods and fields dynamically to classes, and the inability to make class fields private, or write-only. This obviously goes against the encapsulation principle. A minor, but really awkward behaviour difference to the other languages I know is the working of the ‘whole division’-operator (in Python this is //). It works by doing a normal division and then math.floor’ing it. For positive numbers, this is no problems, but for negative numbers, you end up having a value that’s 1 off. For example, -7 // 2 will return -4, instead of -3.

Anyway, the final part of my Python studies will be to get a closer look at the Standard Library, how I can best compile applications into executables, and what GUI (and other) libraries I can use.