Arc Riley (my mentor) told me about how stupid a platform Debian GNU/Linux was for devs. I realized what he meant when I tried to install PySoy. Debian’s repositories are a bit too outdated. I had to compile about 3 packages from source. Well anyway I am eager to get to the part that involved my work.

Pysoy makes it extremely easy to create spheres and cubes and impart to them a certain velocity or rotation. Superb work really. Since my task involved working with diffused light, ambient light and specular light, all I had to do was create a sphere and a cube and get them to rotate so that I could make out the defects in my imagination of diffused and ambient light and the specular highlights. Here is the code ( beautiful, a few lines and the job is done, superb stuff this PySoy thing ):

#!/usr/bin/python

import soy

sce = soy.Scene()

scr = soy.Screen()

win = soy.Window(scr, 'Mesh shape test', background=soy.colors.Black())

cam = soy.bodies.Camera(sce)

cam.position = (0.0, 0.0, 20.0)

lig = soy.bodies.lights.Light(sce)

lig.position = (-10.0,10.0,2.0)

pro = soy.widgets.Projector(win, camera=cam)

mat = soy.materials.Rhodonite()

key = soy.controllers.Keyboard(win)

key['q'] = soy.actions.Quit()

key[ 1 ] = soy.actions.Quit() # 9 = esc key

wcn = soy.controllers.Window(win)

wcn['close'] = soy.actions.Quit()

sha1 = soy.shapes.Box(1.5, 1.5, 1.5)

cube = soy.bodies.Body(scene=sce,mesh=soy.meshes.Shape(mat),shape=sha1)

cube.position = (2, 0, 0)

cube.rotation = (0.25, 0.25, 0.25)

sha2 = soy.shapes.Sphere(1.0)

spr = soy.bodies.Body(scene=sce,mesh=soy.meshes.Shape(mat),shape=sha2)

spr.position = (-2, 0 , 0)

spr.rotation = (0.5, 0.5, 0.5)

That bit of code creates a sphere and a cube and imparts rotation to them at a particular velocity. My work (involving the implementation of specularity, diffusion and ambience) can be seen in the svn.diff I have attached below.

Pics of the output can be seen at my new gallery installation

Oh by the way, here is the svn.diff

And this is what my mentor had to say:

Comment 6 by ArcRiley, Today (22 hours ago)
Verified.

Shriphani’s work shows an eye for detail and has done a fantastic job with this task.

Comment 7 by will.guaraldi, Today (3 hours ago)
Marking this as completed. w00t!

I have to thank Google for having given kids the opportunity to contribute to the open source world. At the GHOP, I have written docs and messed with OpenGL. I want to do another task, hopefully involving Django (not advocating its use but creating a site or something like that.).

Dear Student:

Congratulations! One or more of your submissions under the Google Highly
Open Participation contest has been deemed to be of high enough quality
to be incorporated into the Python distribution.

So my work at the GHOP( task 165: Python on Unix is accepted !!!

For those who want to verify this, I uploaded the document to the discussions page and it is over here.
I hope I get the all important t-shirt from them. I’ve got to fill a form and fax it to them. This is one email which won’t find its way to the Trash directory.

I am about to finish my essays and this blog might be devoid of the enthusiasm I put in my posts. So please bear with me.

Now, I was thinking about the stickers for mukt.in yesterday. I didn’t know a lot about sticker design myself so I had to figure out something. I made myself a list of points to be kept in mind while designing a sticker. They are:

1. Imagine the object that the sticker will be stuck on. In our case, it might be cellphones (Superkiddo stuck a gnome sticker on his cellphone at mukt.in 1), laptops (I stuck two stickers on mine) and desktops (I don’t know who did this as there was only one desktop over there).

2. Pick a color that will go well on any laptop out there. My laptop is an acer travelmate with a brushed metallic finish on the keypad. A white background with a very professional font on it should look fine. A silver background seem too regular to me as the Intel inside crap or the “designed for windows xp” nonsense (it is on my toilet tank now) stickers come with silver backgrounds.

I got an idea about a firefox extension yesterday. I could make an extension that checks a website for change in content (The GHOP task page) and reports the new task through a popup. I will finish soon (hopefully)

rxKaffee, a dear friend on IRC gave me a free shell account on his new ubuntu server. Thanks rxKaffee.

Now the bad news, Argo (the server I worked on when I was at NIPL) has been permanently shut. I do remember the first time I dabbled with django on it. Made the User Request Management System on it and whatnot. Seemingly Sam Watkins (the owner of NIPL) is no longer able to generate funds for it. I am now free to provide the request management system to users. Probably it will be of use to someone somewhere. I will be putting it up today. I guess that this was inevitable considering the huge number of requests and the relatively low funds that came to the NIPL project.

Well, I will write again.