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jpm48on Python built-ins worth learning (2019)

Wow, didn't know this one (just added to my lecture notes!) thanks

jpm48on Ask HN: Anyone here have good material for learning how to sketch from scratch?

"Just getting started", I feel the same with the guitar. Been playing since I was 12, 40 years on with quite a few breaks still love it and having fun will never be a pro! I work with loads of great artists, I really can't draw (but am according to the deeds of my apprenticeship a qualified draftsman!) but still love to doodle and sketch. The awesome artists I teach and work with always amaze me, mostly the really good ones always have a sketch book with them and always doodle. This is the key, love it, practice it and enjoy :-)

jpm48on Criterion: A cross-platform C and C++ unit testing framework

Most likely a combination of asciinema https://asciinema.org/ and https://github.com/cirocosta/asciinema-edit (You can do it by hand as well, but the tools are easier). Use the Quantize and speed options

jpm48on Fred's ImageMagick Scripts

Have a look at OpenImageIO it may help. The otool can do lots, and if not you may be able to use the API's (C++ or Python) https://openimageio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

jpm48on Show HN: Rich-CLI – A CLI toolbox for highlighting, Markdown, JSON and rich text

One thing that may be nice is a pager mode. If you feed into more or less with a pipe you loose the syntax highlight.

jpm48on Show HN: Rich-CLI – A CLI toolbox for highlighting, Markdown, JSON and rich text

This is going to be useful for many things in my teaching. I've just got my students to install Rich / textual for my python coding course as I've featured it as one of my Modules of the week. https://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/msc/PipeLineAndTD... So this will come in handy. Great work.

jpm48on Approved Cameras

I've watched several that i've thought have been written by AI / GPT.

jpm48on $2,500 Ethernet Switch Effectively Isolates Audiophiles from Cash

wow, this is amazing, I wonder if std::make_unique<audio> would be better as it aligns the bytes as well ;-)

jpm48on Krita 5.0

SeExpr is great and used a lot in animation / shader development in things like Renderman from Pixar, it was great to see it in Krita https://wdas.github.io/SeExpr/

jpm48on Scientists find preserved dinosaur embryo preparing to hatch like a bird

If you like SciFi this is a good take on that question. The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/48643567-the-doors-of...

jpm48on Decap of a tiny chip that plays Christmas songs

Years ago we took one of the happy birthday tune cards and connected it to the floppy drive hinge on a PC, the developer was convinced we had installed a TSR program to play it every time he inserted a floppy, not realising it was a hardware hack. Weeks of fun until he found out.

jpm48on Yamaha RA-100 Rotating Speaker Organ Amp

This is a massive part of the Pink Floyd (Dave Gilmour) sound, he use the RA-200's https://www.gilmourish.com/?page_id=83

jpm48on Can we trust Microsoft with open source?

The chaos I'm getting with vcpkg at present seems to say not! I love the idea of vcpkg and it used to make life so much easier as I gave my students a list of packages to install for their homework and all was fine. Recently packages seem to get updated and break, there is no "easy" way to specify versions of packages. And in general it takes months to fix simple bugs. There seems to be over 1K issues at present. I know it's a difficult project but still could be done better.

jpm48on What =delete means

I put

private : myclass(const &myclass )=delete;

Just to be safe :-)

jpm48on Deeper Than Pixels: A Reading List on Video Games

I recommend this book to my students, Bob writes so well. His crafting interpreters book https://craftinginterpreters.com/ is also brilliant, I wish I could write so well.

jpm48on Design patterns let you apply existing solutions to your code

I teach students who write code for VFX software, Simulations and Games so it is a "creative endeavour" :-)

jpm48on Design patterns let you apply existing solutions to your code

I always give my students these to read when I teach design patterns :-) https://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=44 http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=81 "The “Design Patterns” book is one of the worst programming books ever. Yes, really. I’m 100% dead serious when I say that I think it has set (and will continue to set) the progress of software development back by decades."

jpm48on Apple proposes adding "model" element to HTML that displays 3D content

It's a schema specification with various plugins. I guess it will mainly be about the geo specification for models (and perhaps ignore the shaders etc). Documentation is hard to come by, you basically have to look at the source / examples.

jpm48on Apple proposes adding "model" element to HTML that displays 3D content

Interesting they show support for USD(Z) in the example. USD will be the standard for most VFX houses and make tooling for various web based systems so much easier.

jpm48on Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?

I use the terminal and the touch command all the time to create empty files before adding them to a project (for example touch include/MyClass.h src/MyClass.cpp )

jpm48on Why Python 4.0 might never arrive, according to its creator

I guess they mean python2 1/2 == 0 python3 1/2 == 0.5 (threw me the first time when I moved as I use this to demonstrate the differences in integer devision in C based languages).

jpm48on SIMD for C++ Developers [pdf]

This is really nice, I teach intrinsics to my MSc students so will add this to their reading list. This is a recent set of notes I gave them showing how to go from simple CPU only to Threaded SIMD + OpenGL https://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/post/GridVis/grid...

jpm48on Cycles X

I think one of the main issues for Big studios is the whole pipeline is based around Maya / Houdini and it is easy to get artists who know these tools. It's hard to switch and takes time (see how many studios are still using Python 2.x as a switch to 3 will break so much). I know a lot of people are beginning to look at blender (mainly due to cost and the new licensing models from Autodesk). It is really expensive for studios to use now.

jpm48on Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux

First initial test (after 3hrs to update everything!) I can't create an OpenGL Core 4.1 Context with SDL2 Oh well it's late now will investigate more in the morning.

jpm48on Initial preview of GUI app support for the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Looking forward to testing my OpenGL lecture code on this, it works under Windows and Linux natively so working on WSL will be a major bonus for me :-)

jpm48on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

yep first thing I thought was how did this get through the research ethics panel (all research at my University has to get approval).

jpm48on GitHub, fuck your name change

This explains my WTF moment when teaching a class full of students to push to the github classroom using push -u origin master and it being rejected and having to use main!

jpm48on Show HN: "100 Page Python Intro" eBook

A lot of talk with issues of setup here. I have been using https://trinket.io/ with my lecture notes / students as a good way of getting started. Especially now we are teaching online and not using our dedicated labs with python already installed. It works well and you can use turtle.

jpm48on Pip has dropped support for Python 2

At present I have no choice but to use Python 2.x as Maya and Houdini (animation software) are still shipped with Python 2.x The industry has know for years about the EOL but it's going at a glacial pace due to issues with PySide / PyQt and Python 3. https://vfxpy.com/

jpm48on Ray Tracing in pure CMake

plus 1 for this, I have been using CMake with my students for a year (moving from qmake) and this in conjunction with vcpkg to install stuff has been a breeze. This book is great too https://crascit.com/professional-cmake/