Oftentimes, when you design programs or objects or anything else, you have to make sure that people who lack certain prerequisites can still use what you designed. They must not fail badly, and they must still be at least a bit usable in extreme circumstances. For example, a car’s doors must always open from the inside, even if the battery is dead and the locks are magnetic. Therefore, the mechanism opening the doors must be purely mechanical.
These last few days I've installed and been playing the Sims 2. For those of you who don't know it, it's a game where you manage the lives of various people (henceforth called Sims). You have to tell them to get dressed, go to the bathroom, take baths, go to work, flirt with other Sims, buy them the things they need, etc.
This weekend I had no internet connection thanks to a DSL upgrade (well, more like downgrade, since I’m getting half the speed I got before) and since I had Python, PIL and a webcam, I decided to see what I could do.
After playing around a bit with PIL and motion recognition in images, I decided to write an image stitcher.
Fans of Gmail Checker, rejoice. Your favorite Gmail notifier is back with a vengeance. The slew of changes I made in the last hour is a veritable deluge, but I will attempt to describe them in a few short sentences.
I return once more, with a startling proposal. In the scientific spirit that governs this here blog, I am about to shake the mathematical world to its very foundations.
The basis of what I am about to lies shortly after prehistoric times, when the ancient Greeks started drawing stick figures on the ground, and thus realised that the ratio of the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter is a constant number, and is approximately 3.14, as we all know.
My newest creation, Gmail Checker, has just been released. You can get it from the downloads page.
Gmail Checker is (yet another) Gmail notifier. It sits in your system tray and checks your Gmail account(s), notifying you when you have new mail. It supports multiple (unlimited) accounts, Gmail for your domain, is open source (source will be posted soon) and has many customizable options.
It is written in Python using wxPython, which means it runs under various operating systems, but I haven’t tested it on anything other than Windows. The current download link is a setup file that installs everything required to run it, which is why it’s a bit large (3ish MB), but you can also just get the source (50ish KB) and run it anywhere were Python and wxPython are installed.
These past few days I realised I’m a bit rusty on my appication programming, having mainly programmed scripts and websites for quite a few years. I decided I wanted to go back to the good old Visual Basic days, but if possible without VB. Since wxPython is apparently the best toolkit available for Python, I decided to give it a try.
Needless to say, I was swamped. Sadly, despite the best efforts of the people working on this project, the documentation isn’t exactly the best. I had no idea what to do, but I knew that I’d need an graphical IDE if I was going to design anything using this thing, so I downloaded Boa Constructor (get the CVS version).
I write once more to introduce you to my newest creation: An MSN notifier bot.
What this bot will do is send you a message on MSN at a specified time/date and notify you. You just add it to your friendlist and tell it the date/time and what you have to do, and it will notify you.
You can see a list of commands by telling it “help”. Also, because MSN sucks, the bot crashes somewhat more frequently than I’d like (which would be “never”), and can only add up to 150 people on its friendlist, so it’s sort of a limited thing. If you think you aren’t going to be needing it any more, please say “remove” to make it remove you from its friendlist to free a slot for another person. Also, if anyone knows of a better MSN protocol implementation in Python than msnp.py, please post a comment here and let me know.
It is time for another one of my updates, and this time I bring you an important scientific discovery. I would like to bring to your attention a new logical fallacy, which I herewith name “argumentum ad urmomum”. It appears that noone else has ever thought of this name1, so I would like to claim it myself.
This last month I have grown very fond of Ubuntu. I have installed it on some 4 PCs around the house and at work, and it works very well (also, I love Beryl). While I haven’t completely switched from Windows, Linux beats Windows on a server by far.
One of the things I could never get to work is local hostname resolution under Ubuntu. None of the PCs I installed it on could resolve hostnames in the local network (LAN, for those of you who didn’t understand that other term). I searched for days and days, and finally I found how to do it somewhere, but now I don’t remember where.
