Mike Gs Home

Python complex sorting and structs

Michael — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:59:09 +0000

Recently I came across this when I had a need to do a complex sort with multiple pieces of information. I had four or five pieces of information that I wanted to store per object in the array, and then I wanted to sort by just one of those pieces.

For instance, if you wanted to create a list of information about TV shows such as the name of the show, the channel, and the time it is on. Then I wanted to sort by any of those elements, such as the time the show is on, it would be very inconvenient to use anything but this way. I used something like:

class TVShow:

      def __init__(self, _showName, _showChannel, _showTimeOn):

            """ This creates the object where the info is stored for later"""

            self.show = _showName

            self.channel = _showChannel

            self.showTime = _showTimeOn

      def __repr__(self):

             return repr((self.show, self.channel, self.showTime))

This is similar to a struct in other programming languages, and is very nice. From there you can create a list of these TVShow objects, and sort by any element in that object.

Something like this would work if the list of objects was called show_objects:

# sort by the time of the show

sorted(show_objects, key = lambda sObject: sObject.showTime)

If you have to do complex sorts using Python I would definitely recommend this way. The site http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting/ has a lot of the info on how to do this.

Recap

Michael — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:37:55 +0000

For the people who have not seen this, but have watched the Lost series finale, I am putting a link to a very in depth recap of the last episode. Obviously there are spoilers, so if you do not want to know what happened don’t read.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20313460_20387946,00.html

In case you didn’t know…

Michael — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:29:56 +0000

Turbine was acquired by Warner Brothers yesterday, which now makes me an employee of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment.

Guru

Michael — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:22:50 +0000

Guru dies at age 48. In case you aren’t familiar with hip hop he was a fairly influential artist that mixed jazz and hip hop to create his own unique blend of music. Him and his music will definitely be missed.

Burchfield

Michael — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 03:22:49 +0000

I came across the artist Charles Burchfield when I went to the RISD Art Museum a while back, and I thought he was interesting artist. I liked his use of perspective in some of his images as well as the broad stokes. I thought he did a very nice job of keeping details in the painting where it counted such as the glossy wet feel of the road in the first image since that was in the foreground more.

A brief synopsis of his style and life can also be found on this website www.artgallery.sbc.edu

Fringe

Michael — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 02:56:08 +0000

I am definitely hooked on Fringe, and I am looking forward to seeing the rest of the final Lost episodes. So in honor of J.J. Abrahms I am posting a talk that he gave that I thought was awesome. If you have not seen it I recommend it.

J.J. Abrahms TED Talkl

Art Work

Michael — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:28:38 +0000

I am starting to update my artwork site. Check it out if you get a chance. I don’t mind feedback either.

Bean town

Michael — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:34:28 +0000

Now that it’s summer, we have been able to get out more and see more of the city. This past weekend my Mom and stepdad came into town for a visit, and we had a great time showing them around. We got to walk around more of the city, and I started to get more a perspective of where everything is in the city. Until this past weekend I didn’t realize how close everything really is in the city. I will post some more pictures shortly.

School has started back up, and I am taking a Digital Ink and Paint course. It has been mainly pretty technical so far. We have mainly been doing things such as cleaning up the lines of an image in an animation, and then adding paint to it through a bucket tool. Using Flipbook this process is really simple, and after only a couple of weeks I have learned to speed up the process of scanning and painting images for 2D animation. I also recently got a copy of 3D Studio Max and Mudbox, so I am hoping to work on a model using those to learn a bit more about modeling and texturing.

Everything else is going well. It has been a busy summer of visitors, but it has been fun. The weather should be fairly nice here, so I’m hoping that this could be a good weekend for us to finally have some time to sit by the pool.