Wednesday, September 30, 2009

work on redocnE

I've finished the code for redocnE, and now am debugging. Robbie is helping me out, and right now my biggest problem is with turning a (properly formatted) string into a dictionary. I'm trying to use exec() to get it, and have been getting a syntax error. I actually think that, while I'm interested at home, I may work on it a bit there. if so, results soon. I would upload the code now, but I can't figure out how to do that with blogger, so I'll only worry about then when I really have something to upload

--David

Monday, September 28, 2009

First Post! redocnE and compsci.

I'm starting computer science now, and my first project is redocnE - a simple cipher application, with multiple methods of encryption and decryption. Note that a large number of these methods I'm using the code for from a similar program, although one without any UI, pycipher. (http://agorf.gr/code/pycipher.html). I have emailed the creator of this program, telling him, and it is open source. Still, if this is objectionable to you, I'd be fine with switching to a new project, although I'd finish this myself. Ciphers I'm writing myself are a method of user-defined cipher, ANi_encrypt (a particularly bad character rearangement method I made a while ago, and am only including for backwards-compatability.) and a Bookcode. From pycipher, I'm taking Ceasar, Atbash, autokey, Vigenere, and Beaufort ciphers. This gives me a total of 9 encryption methods, and I'm taking care to use a very modular program structure that lets me add new ones easily. As of now, redocnE (the name is "Encoder" backwards) is nearly done, with only a bit of the user-defined cipher to do, and a lot of debugging.

Oh, If you're wondering about the ANI part of the program names and so on, It's Absolutely Nothing Inc., a company I came up with as a joke a few years ago and now credit basically anything I make with. Any modules called ani_????.py are modules I (or, maybe, a friend i've convinced to start learning python) made for a program, but designed to be useable for other ones.

For the future, I do have a few project ideas, although most would likely be beyond my ability now. I'm interested in pyGTK (which I may actually learn directly, without GASP, unless you think this would be far too hard), Object Oreinted programming, and networking (I have an idea for a p2p shared FTP server/client, but that would be hard to do.). I like the idea of learning pyGTK for GUIs and a few graphical apps, but I'm not interested in writing games much at all.

Anyway, one more thing, just kinda for me to brag about - yesterday I finally managed to get Linux (Linux Mint 7) working on my home computer, so I think I'll probably use the opportunity you're giving us to do some work at home and not come to class occasionally.