Living Code

Hello, my name is Sergio Arragones and I am writing to you for assistance in a matter that will be of great economic benefit to us both.

My late father was VICE PRESIDENT of the large American investment bankerage of Bear Stearns and he managed to put aside over two billion US dollars of bailout money from the puppet government of Mr. George Bush.

Unfortunately, he was killed in a incident of ROAD RAGE when his bullet-proof Mercedes convertible was driven into the bomb barricade of the New York UN Building by the SUV of an off-duty Police Officer.

While my family is still grieving over his tragic death, and attempting to get the suspicious circumstances investigated, I must act quickly to move these funds to your Nation for safekeeping. As a Citizen of the Monarchy of Canada, you may receive these funds for me until I may cross from New York State to the Province of Quebec, at which time you will transfer the funds over to me, keeping 10% (TEN PERCENT) for yourself, along with my Gratitude.

In order for me to transfer the Fund to you, you will need to create a PayPal account for this purpose. Do not use an existing PayPal account, as it may already have been compromised by nefarious hackers and BotNets. Also, you will need to download the Python libraries which allow you to code to PayPal directly. In addition, you will need libraries for Google Checkout the Atom Publishing Protocol.

On a server under your control (the server must be physically located in the Sovereignty of Canada. THIS IS IMPORTANT) you must set up a WSGI server. You may use Django or TurboGears for this, or use the reference WSGI implementation. I recommend you use PYTHON 2.5 or greater as many of the tools you need will be part of the STANDARD LIBRARY.

Once you have the Foundations of a Web2.0 server administered, contact me at the return address of this message and I will give you instructions on how to proceed for the transfer of funds.

My family thanks you.

Sincerly,

Dr. Rev. Sergio Arragones, Esq.
New York, NY
United States of America

Source code: sketch_080314a

I've been playing around some with Processing, this is the result. As I mentioned in my earlier article, Processing and NodeBox are quite similar. Processing has some more interactivity (better keyboard and mouse handling) built in, and it can do basic 3D. NodeBox has better color handling (gradients) and remarkable libraries (WordNet). But what it really comes down to is that NodeBox is Python (much easier to extend) and Processing is Java (still easier than straight Java, but a lot more code to do basic extensions). Now all we need is a quick-start programming environment like these for Flash (and before you tell me the Adobe Flash tools are for artists--I have used the Flash IDE and it is possibly the worst IDE I've ever experienced. Which is odd, because the Flex IDE is one of the best, better than XCode/Interface Builder in some ways).

All of which is the long way to say that I enjoyed making this little animation in Processing, but I'm ready to go back to working in Python now, thank you.

Well, I've been working off and on for a few days on a Processing applet. The only reason I like Processing better than NodeBox is because I can embed the results in an applet on my web site. At least, I could if WordPress didn't keep stripping out the embedding markup.

[Update: I did finally figure out how to disable the auto-conversion. What a PITA. Now I just have to figure out what I've broken by doing that.]

Frustrations like this are why I was writing my own blogging software. The main holdup on writing my own blogging software was the fact that it is damn difficult to get anything but PHP to run persistently on Dreamhost. Actually, even WordPress runs as a CGI, so maybe its hard to run PHP persistently too. Anyway, it would take a lot of effort to move all my sites to a host that lets me run WSGI apps, but at moments like this, I think it would be worth it. WordPress has sucked yet more hours of my life away.

Going to bed, sick with loathing for WordPress. Again.

The March Vancouver Python and Zope User Group meeting snuck up on me.  It is tomorrow night, March 4th, in the conference room of the Bentall Five building.  Same location for three months in a row, that's got to be some kind of a record!  For anyone who has not attended recently and would like to, there is a map on the VanPyZ website. Tomorrow's talk will be by Brett Cannon:

The once and future Import: How import works in Python 2.6 and beyond, and what it means for you.  

This should be interesting. The import mechanism has some interesting hooks, and Brett has been re-working it for some time now. Also, the recent meetings have had a great turnout with lots of good conversation, both during the meeting itself, and afterwards at the pub. So come on out, if you're in Vancouver.  And if you're not in Vancouver, well from whereeveryouare import yourself.  See you there!

André Roberge has started a project to embed programming challenges in his Crunchy project. Crunchy is a way to embed both Python code and an interpreter into a web page, making it great for Python education projects. I like the idea of collecting both sources of programming challenges, and solutions to them in Python, as a way of spurring interest. Discussion around alternative solutions could get pretty interesting. Anyway, rather than try to coordinate this through the comments on André's blog, or via email, I created a page on the Python wiki to help organize this: Problem Sets. I listed the 99 Prolog Problems that Andé pointed to originally, and a couple more sources of programming challenges I was aware of. Hopefully more people will fill in both the sources, and some solutions. I've started to put up a few solutions, but this is definitely something that would benefit from more participation.

If you know of a good source of programming problems (or want to create one), or want to provide some solutions of your own, or even just kibbitz, please dive in!