Category: programming

  • Exploring btrfs for backups Part 4: Weekly Culls and Unit Testing

    Back in August I finally had some time to do some things I’d been wanting to do with my Snap-in-Time btrfs program for a while now. First of all, I finally added the weekly code. So now my snapshots are cleaned up every three days and then every other week. Next on the docket is…

  • Exploring btrfs for backups Part 3: The Script in Practice

    Night of the second day: # btrfs sub list /home ID 275 gen 3201 top level 5 path home ID 1021 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots ID 1023 gen 1653 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2146 ID 1024 gen 1697 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2210 ID 1025 gen 1775 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2300…

  • Exploring btrfs for backups Part 2: Installing on My /Home Directory and using my new Python Script

    I got my new hard drive that would replace my old, aging /home hard drive. As you read in part 1, I wanted to put btrfs on it. This is my journey to get it up and running. Plugged it into my hard drive toaster and ran gparted. Because of the peculiarities of btrfs and…

  • Creating Nice-Looking Buttons in QML on KDE

    Back in October I created a GUI for my Python amortization table program.  One of the things I lamented was that the buttons in QML look like crap.  I want my buttons to look like buttons, not blue patches no a white screen.  I don’t really know what made me look, but yesterday (during the…

  • My Second Ever Useful GUI Program

    A while ago I wrote about my first ever useful GUI program.  And in one of the series of posts that followed I explained that the reason I hadn’t made a useful GUI program before now is because all the typical stuff has already been made over and over.  We don’t need any more tetris…

  • Developing My First Plasmoid: The QML Code

    Back in February I posted the code to the data engine I developed for my plastmoid.  At the time I’d wanted to clean up my plasmoid before posting it on here, however, I’ve become stuck on a key feature so I was hoping that maybe by posting the code I could get some help.  (As…

  • Developing my first plasmoid: The Data Engine (in python)

    I figured it’d be neat to show you how my plasmoid works so you could use it when developing your own plasmoids.  Here’s the main.py of my data engine.  The indentation is off, in case you try to copy and past this in. Here are the imports: from PyQt4.QtCore import * from PyKDE4.kdecore import *…

  • Developing my first plamoid Part 2

    OK, so it’s been a year since I last blogged about working on this program.  I tried working on the data engine in August and then got stuck right around the time I started my first semester of grad school so I had to drop it, even though it got stuck in my head and…

  • Automatically Posting your Top 3 Artists from Last.fm onto Twitter (with Python!)

    I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week.  So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me.  Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday.  I’m…

  • Programming to the Rescue: Amortization Automation

    What I love about programming is the instant feedback.  In most programming languages, after you set up a framework for the barest bones of a program you can then run it at every step of the way to confirm that you are moving towards your goal.  What I love second-most about programming is the fact…

  • 365 Graph

    Today I worked on a python program to create a graph of the views of all my photos in my 365 Project set. Here’s the result:  (click for full size) I was curious how they stacked up and I wanted to see if I could detect any patterns.  Except for a few outliers, they’re mostly…

  • Why there are over 2 dozen music players

    People often groan when they hear of someone making another game of Tetris, Window Manager, or audio program.  After all, people ask, “Do we really need another?  Why can’t you just contribute to fixing annoying bug X in gTetris/KDE/xmms?”  I’ve always been on the side of the argument that said – “So what!  They’re doing…

  • Gnome Music Player Showdown

    I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0.  (Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example)  It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox.  As I mentioned here, I switched to Rhythmbox in May 2007 (a…

  • Code Monkey

    This song is awesome and, best of all, it’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so I can share it with you all without fear of the RIAA breathing down my neck! I first heard Code Monkey on a recent episode of Linux Outlaws. It’s a song about a code monkey who is having…

  • A Novel iTunes Exploit

    Brought to us by Randal Monroe of xkcd: Also, you much check this one out both for its mention of Python and the Asus EEE PC.