I’ve attended a few of Michael Kennedy’s Python courses over at TalkPython.fm. He’s a great instructor and he really knows his Python. (As well he should, as host of Talk Python and co-host of Python Bytes) His usual courses at Talk Python are pre-recorded and I believe this was Michael’s first time doing an online live class under the Talk Python banner. (Before the pandemic, I think Michael would conduct live, in-person classes for companies)

Over the 16 years that this blog spans I must have, at some point, mentioned that I believe sometimes we get knowledge when we’re not ready to receive it.This isn’t some spiritual or new age thing (although you’ll hear Chopra and/or Tony Robbins talk about the phenomenon). It’s simply my lived experience. Sometimes you come across some knowledge, but there’s some underpinning knowledge missing or maybe some life experience you don’t yet have to put your new knowledge into context. So sometimes this leads to a difficulty in learning the concept and other times you just don’t get the point of it and file it away or throw it away - no need to waste neurons on this!

Python

A user of my Extra Life Donation Tracker program discovered that I had introduced a regression for brand new users who didn’t have a persistent setting. I thought about it overnight and it was exactly what I thought it would be - when I switched away from threading for the GUI, I forgot to add a way to tell participant.py to reload its settings values. I also decided to take a page from a programming podcast I heard recently and change the settings GUI to only have a “Save” button instead of a persistent save button AND a Save button. Especially when I wanted most people to hit persistent save, and that’s not what they’d most likely do by default. So I ended up making 5.2 release to fix both of those issues.

I was writing a GUI for Pydvdauthor, my program for creating DVDs on Linux from an MPEG file. I wrote this in order to help me create the XML files necessary for dvdauthor. Here’s what the GUI looks like right now:

I updated the project on freshmeat, but they haven’t updated my main page yet. You’ll know because the tar file will be 0.1.6. I’m pretty excited as this is my first non-toy program GUI. With time it’s gotten easier and easier to do them - they were quite intimidating at first.

After spending the past three days futzing about, I’ve finally configured things on my new server so that GNaughtyNice will once again run. So visit the link on the right-hand side of my blog and see how Naughty or Nice any word is!

Today I started learning Python. I picked it because it’s not only one of the hottest languages right now (outside of C#/Mono), but because GRAMPS is written in Python. I haven’t explored this deeply, but I know for a fact that plugins can be written in Python, if the entire program itself is not Python. (Also, it’s named after one of the funniest comedy troupes the world has ever known!) I have chosen “Dive Into Python” as my tutor in this new language. I found only two things that annoyed me, one was a minor annoyance and one was a tad more annoying. The minor annoyance came from the fact that the author broke nearly 50 years of tradition and didn’t start the book off with a “hello world” tutorial. Yeah, he talks about how he’s not going to bore the reader with all the crap that I always glossed over in the other programming books. I mean, this book truly is what it claims to be - it doesn’t teach you how to program, it teaches you Python. I already know how to program from having taken 2 semesters at Cornell and learned BASIC, Java, C, C++, and a bit of Perl. But to break so many years of tradition! (To be fair to the author, he does type out print ‘hello world’ in the installation chapter, but it’s supposed to be your first program, not the first thing you type into an interactive shell!)