Lonely Lion

The kittens have been slash dotted: http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/05/02/14/2253252.shtml?tid=159&tid=133&tid=106

6000+ feedings and climbing. Pretty neat. I’m not sure if this is going to totally crap out the server or not. The cat feeder is currently a combination of cgi and a pickle, it’s good to see it scale so well.

John Hunter, the creator of matplotlib, gave a presentation at chiPy last night. It was extremely impressive. The last time I looked at matplotlib was over a year ago. At the time, I dismissed it as “good for science, not so good for building one off charts.” Now, a year later, the product is still great for science, but I’m happy to report it’s also great for guys like me that need to make a bar chart from time to time.

A really excellent presentation, and an excellent package.

Trolltech – Trolltech to Extend Dual Licensing to Qt for Windows

This is really great news! I’ve always thought it was a little pushy for Trolltech to offer Qt as GPL under OSX and Linux, but require a hefty payment if you’d like to develop for Windows.

Now I can finally invest some time into learning Python Qt without feeling like I’m wasting it on a toolkit that doesn’t do Windows without a significant investment. At least, significant to a non-commercial gentleman like myself.

What great news. Thanks Trolltech.

Yikes, this took longer than I expected. It’s my first COM program. Apple published pretty good documentation, but not great. I think the the real sticking point was the way iTunes wanted directory paths.

This script adds some functionality to the Radio Shark I bought a few days ago. On the Mac, anything you record will be popped into iTunes automatically, not so on Windows. All my recordings are set to go into c:\radio. This script moves them into iTunes. Maybe Radio Shark has a trigger that could kick this off? Otherwise, I’ve set up a scheduled job to run it at 4am.

import win32com.client
from os import listdir, remove
from time import sleep
o=win32com.client.Dispatch("iTunes.Application")
dir='c:/radio/'
files = listdir(dir)
if len(files) > 0:
    for file in files:
        file = dir + file
        t = o.ConvertFile2(file)
        while t.ProgressValue < t.MaxProgressValue:
            sleep(3)
        remove(file)