Posts tagged Python

Last week I was at the EuroPython 2006 conference in CERN, Geneva. CERN has WiFi coverage everywhere. I felt like I was in the future. Nokia 770 is a wonderful little device when there's WiFi everywhere. I never had to pull out my laptop from the backpack (except during my talk). After three months of constant usage I can say that am very happy with my 770. (A few other folks also had 770s, but not everyone was happy with them.

There's an LCD monitor standing on the desk next to my laptop at work. I use MergedFB to get a combined 1024x786+1280x1024 desktop. (Here's my /etc/X11/xorg.conf if anyone with a Radeon card is interested.) GNOME doesn't fully understand this setup yet (bug #147808). It thinks I have a single large 2304x1024 desktop, and it sets the wallpaper accordingly. I can tile or stretch an image, but I cannot set separate images for each monitor.

During the last week I hacked on PySpaceWar extensively. I just released version 0.9.0 with these nice features: Added an in-game menu. You can drag the viewport around with the mouse (use the right button). Automatic zoom in. Much better source code organisation (and unit tests). Distutils setup script. It's the first time I've ever used distutils, so please let me know if it works for you.

An interesting Python programming contest ended today. The task was to write the shortest Python module for converting a string of digits to seven-segment display format. The module was to be used like this: >>> from seven_seg import seven_seg >>> print seven_seg('0123456789') _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | | | _| _||_||_ |_ ||_||_| |_| ||_ _| | _||_| ||_| _| Solutions were measured with the Unix command wc -c seven_seg.

I keep my home directory in a Subversion repository. A month ago that repository broke down. Subversion developers were unable to help me without access to the repository, which I didn't want to grant, since my repository contains some private data (Jabber account passwords and the like). I spent a day debugging the problem until I found the cause (a loop in a data structure). Then I was too busy to do anything, and a month went by without regular backups.