Blogs

A recent project of mine involves research and development with an XBOX 360 Kinect Sensor. Being a python guy, I started searching for python bindings to some OSX-supported framework. When you just get started looking into this area it can be a little confusing. There are a number of layers to the software stack to enable one to accomplish anything meaningful. This is just a short and general blog post outlining the basics of what I have discovered thus far, to help anyone else that might also be getting started.

Permalink – writemycode.net

In the spirit of a very similar blog post, I decided to expand upon a specific area of that article…

Consider a question like this:

I want to do this. Create 10000 files, (filename can be just combination of time and random number). File size should be 4k. And I want to time this. say how many seconds it will take.

How can I do this on bash?

Thank you.

I had just received my brand new MacBook Pro a few days ago. Amazing machine. Probably the best laptop I have ever laid my hands upon. It was the early Feb 2011 model so I got a crazy good deal. But something caught my eye that I just had to investigate…

I’m a bit obsessive when it comes to small issues that I can’t resolve, and this is just still bothering me. I noticed that when I smooth scroll (trackpad or smooth wheel logitech mouse) on such content as webpages, or Mail, that there is a flicker in the display of text and context. It depends on the size and orientation of the content, whether it will flicker more or less. My eyes just couldn’t ignore it and I figured it couldn’t possibly be normal functionality. Thus, step one of my problem solving began: Google search.

A question came up in the Maya-Python mailing list that I thought was a really good topic, and should be reposted.

Someone asked how you can create maya UI objects and embed them within your main PyQt application. Specifically he wanted to create a modelPanel and embed it so that he would have a camera view within his own PyQt window.

Second video in the python for maya series, just released through cmiVFX!

Python For Maya – Volume 2 #

If you watched the first video, you now have a good grasp on Python. Sweet. Let’s plow through some more involved concepts like python juggernauts!

This is a follow up post to my previous one on Installing PyQt4 for Maya 2011

Recently while putting together my next video tutorial for Python for Maya, I came to a section where I wanted to demo PyQt4 in Maya2012. But I was concerned that viewers would have to go through the complicated steps of building PyQt4. I noticed that other people have made available precompiled PyQt installers for windows (here) but I could not find any for OSX or linux. So I decided to put together a build.

Just released my first online video tutorial, through cmiVFX

Python Introduction Vol 01 – Maya #

Amazing at Animation? Master of Modeling? Conquistador of Character Rigging?

But how is your Python?

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Preface #

I’ve been programming in python for over 5 years now, and I love the language a lot. I would look for any opportunity to accomplish my coding tasks using python, as opposed to learning new languages. PyQt4 for user interfaces, Django for web design, etc… And when python just isn’t an option, I have done my share of php, javascript, objective-c and so on.

Recently I started thinking that I should probably expand my programming knowledge a bit to make myself more marketable.

Update: #

I am now hosting a built package for Maya2011: MyQt4.7.4-maya2011-x64-osx-10.6.pkg And for Maya 2012+, see: Installing pyqt4 for maya2012

Personally, when trying to run PyQt from within Maya 2009 / 2010 using the pumpThread method, I never had much luck. The best I ever got was the ability to bring up a dialog but not without locking up the UI, even though the pumpThread tool is meant to address that.

We finally decided to release the source code for AtomSplitter, since we were getting some feedback that the application builds weren’t 100% working on every possible system.