Review: Programming in Python 3

By Peter Backx | Published: December 14, 2010
Programming in Python 3, second edition

“The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code — not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death.” – Guido Van Rossum

Last summer, I read the second edition of “Programming in Python 3″ and wrote a book review for DZone. Unbeknownst to me, the review has been on the Book Zone for a while, so I thought it about time to mention it. Sadly I haven’t been able to program as much Python as I would have liked, but when I do, I still use the book and still stand behind my initial review.

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Orbital Decay, Building Spaceships

By Peter Backx | Published: December 10, 2010
orbital_decay

Ever since my brief Shattered Galaxy stint I’ve been loving the whole custom spaceship battling game. You get an empty hull and lots of options of how to fill it. The trick is the select a good combination of defensive and offensive weaponry. If you like this kind of puzzling, you’ll love the two games in this post.

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Three Ways to Trace in ActionScript 3

By Peter Backx | Published: December 7, 2010
actionscript_tracing

It’s been a while since I mentioned the all important discipline of tracing in ActionScript to get an inside look at what your application is doing. Getting feedback from your program at important points can mean the difference between hours of debugging and a quick analysis of the issue at hand. Previously there was the FDTracer plugin, but this is no longer needed. There are actually three much better ways that suite different situations.

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Posted in Flash and ActionScript | Comments closed

Indie Game Fund Proposal for the Extension of Gravity Bone

By Peter Backx | Published: December 3, 2010
gravity_bone_level_1

Gravity Bone could be the indie game equivalent of Portal. If only it was a little longer. 2 years ago Brendon Chung’s Blendo Games released Gravity Bone. More a concept than an actual game. It’s still worth playing today.
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Canvas and Video, 2 HTML5 Eye Catchers

By Peter Backx | Published: November 30, 2010
video_canvas_fig2

You can learn the HTML5 canvas and video tag today and prepare for the future of the web. The entire web is abuzz with HTML5 news and tutorials, there has never been a better time to learn HTML5. In this post, I present a first of many resources to get started.

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Who Knows the Secret to JavaScript Mastery?

By Peter Backx | Published: November 26, 2010
javascript_ninja

Want to become a JavaScript ninja? Right now JavaScript is the one language that is universally supported on pretty much any platform imaginable. With HTML5 being the hype of the moment, the demand for good JavaScript programmers is going to explode.

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The Case for Facebook Pages

By Peter Backx | Published: November 23, 2010
facebook_strategies

It has finally happened. Streamhead now has a Facebook page. The idea has been growing on me for a few months now, but yesterday I reached some kind of threshold and just got on with it. Very fashionably late.

Why now you wonder? And how did it work out? Well, I’m glad you asked.

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State of the Web, Getting Started

By Peter Backx | Published: November 19, 2010

After day one of Devoxx, the talk that I found most engaging was Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith’s State of the Web. They argued that Apple’s AppStore (and to a lesser extend Google’s App Marketplace) has created a gigantic marketplace of people willing to download and pay for applications. Previously this market was unserved, because the web does not have place to browse, it’s all about searching.

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Essential Google Analytics Resources Will Get to the Bottom of Your Stats

By Peter Backx | Published: November 16, 2010
google_analytics

Now that I got Google Analytics working for my application, I’m even more impressed by this little piece of software than I already was. Even with only a partially instrumented application, I’m already able to set up funnels, track conversions and see in which steps I lose customers. So it’s about time I studied the ins and outs of Analytics.

Click through for some invaluable resources

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Java PayPal IPN Servlet

By Peter Backx | Published: November 12, 2010
Java GAE servlet to handle PayPal IPN

For those following along my adventure to integrate with PayPal, here is the next step. I’ve created a Google AppEngine Java servlet that handles the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) messages PayPal sends your way. I’ve made the servlet freely available on GitHub in the hope of fostering some cooperation.

Because there are a few issues.

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