Blackkettle

So… first green fields Major Project in a while. It’s a Rails app, but I’m shifting to PostgreSQL and Amazon EC2/S3 for a bunch of it, so there’s going to be a fair amount of new learnings here.

It also feels slightly odd to be jumping back into Rails again. I’ve not done any new Rails work for a little while; the majority of my consulting has been on apps frozen at 2.1, so it’ll be good to be working on the fresh code-base.

I’ve shut down Other People Work for the next couple of weeks to get this project out of the door, although I reckon that what with various travel and visiting plans, I’ve only got about 2/3rds of that time to play with.

No time to hang around here blogging, there’s work to be done!

I’ve just kicked off a new project, and because I’ve been looking for an excuse for a while, I thought I’d give Django a try.

Python was an interim language which I toyed with a while ago, but I discovered Ruby before I got that comfortable with it. Nevertheless, I did enjoy it, and I am familiar enough with it that the language barrier wasn’t an issue. After a couple of days, it became clear that Django just wasn’t cutting it – I’ve reverted to Rails as a result. There were two main problems I had which made me shift, and I don’t think it’s just me being stuck in my ways.

The first of these was that Django doesn’t have anything like Rails’ migrations. These are an absolute godsend, to the extent that on the past couple of PHP projects I’ve been shanghaied into, I’ve duplicated their functionality as much as possible. They save me so much time and hassle.

The second is the half-hearted nature of Django’s testing framework. Admittedly, I was using 0.95 rather than the development version, but it’s really quite paltry compared to what you get out of the box with Rails. I just couldn’t get comfortable in the same way as I found I did quite quickly when I first started learning Rails.

It’s quite possible that these problems will go away by the time Django hits 1.0, or even that they’re addressed well enough in the development version that I’d be happy with that. I have serious reservations about learning a framework with a development version, though – it’s too easy to stumble on a dev bug and not know if it’s a fault in your own code.

I’ll probably come back to Django at some point – it’s got a lot to recommend it – but for me it’s just not quite there yet.

Just made a quick update to the Lexicon page. In a nutshell, it turns out that you can animate PerspectiveCameras in exactly the same way as Model3Ds, because they support a Transform property. I haven’t had a chance to play with it properly yet, but it means no more fiddling with Vector3DAnimations to change LookDirection any more. Woohoo!

Oh, and it looks like the same applies to Lights. More Woohoo!

For some reason, the Normals property on a MeshGeometry3D is per vertex. Who ever heard of a point having a normal? It’s weird. Just thought I’d point that out.

The post is here.

A quick round-up of posts and pages I’ve spotted that mention or link to Shaxam:

• Tim Sneath
• Mike Swanson
• Dan Lehenbauer
• Channel 9

There may be others I’ve missed, but those are the ones I’ve been told about…

Ok, it looks like I was wrong in my previous post. I can’t see an obvious way to launch a plugin on load in Layout. There’s a button to set it up in Modeler, though… Why the difference? I’m going to have a delve into the depths of the Layout config files to see if there’s anything obvious I’ve missed.

I’m a great believer in unit testing, and test-first development. Unfortunately, the concept of automated testing doesn’t sit especially well with developing LightWave plugins (as I am with Shaxam). This project is an attempt to answer that. (more…)

This project is at the “wouldn’t it be cool” stage so far. The idea is to compile Ruby as a LightWave plugin, and add an extension to give it access to the LightWave SDK. This would make it a feasible alternative to LScript for prototyping, which I can’t help but see as a good thing. There’s also the outside possibility of being able to use RubyInline (or something related) to generate actual compiled plugin code, which I think would be outstanding.

More on this as it happens. I might have a little play today, and see what I can see.

For those of you who haven’t been following along, here’s a brief state-of-play update. I’m working on Shaxam.com, which span out of Turning The Pages, and has had me learning lots about LightWave’s SDK and file formats and the 3D parts of XAML, and is the most fun and interesting work I’ve been involved with in years. I’ll be posting here info about what I’ve learnt, a few questions for those involved, and progress updates as and when necessary.

The main output so far has been a simple plugin to convert static LightWave objects to XAML meshes, with as much detail intact as possible. Head over to shaxam.com if that interests you. On sale RealSoonNow(tm) will be a plugin to handle animation data. We’re about 95% there functionality-wise, and it’s looking better all the time.

I’m working on all this with Mark, who is fiendishly good with LightWave, and keeps pushing my code further than I was expecting, which is a good thing.

Anyway, that’s it for now. More updates as and when, you know the drill.