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 clones, word processors, or music programs.  Recently I had reason to create my second program.  A while ago I created a an amortization calculator in python which you can find here.

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 * from PyKDE4 import plasmascript #for flickr import views

Those are pretty standard.  The last one is the part of my engine that interacts with flickr.  Right now I have some work to do to get that presentable, but all you need to know is that it outputs XML to this main part of the data engine.

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 that I am using my computer to solve a problem and free myself from tedium.

The plot twist at the end is awesome, but so is the programmer’s debate going on, especially since we were talking about this at work this week. Another great xkcd from Randall Monroe:

Over the last two days, between playing Portal and Age of Empires III (both of which are…awesome!), I’ve been doing a little more flickr hacking. This is very closely related to my previous Flickr program where I checked if my pictures were ready to be moved into the next views groups.

This time I wanted to see which of my photos were not in any groups. So in the case that I’ve missed putting a photo into the 25 views groups because it’s a few pages back and I really don’t have time to go back through all of my photos to find the pictures to put into the groups. I tried that once and it was excrutiatingly slow - even slower than figuring out if it was time to graduate my pictures out of the views groups. So here’s the output of my current program:

So, thanks to a problem I had with rigging up Nick in " Sugar", I’ve temporarily lost interest in animation.  This happens to me all the time, and I think I’ve mentioned it before in previous blog posts that I’m too lazy to look up before that I tend to gain and lose interest in my hobbies.  For example, I haven’t touched the Wii since I beat Mario Galaxy during Christmas and until this recent problem with “Sugar” happened, I hadn’t done any programming in about a year.  Even my interest in photography has ebbed so much that I let my subscription to Digital Camera Magazine lapse.

You can find it here or on the right-hand side under “My pages”. This is a program that’s been in my head for about four days and which I spent most of yesterday working on until I realized I was going down the wrong path. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This program is my attempt to bridge the borders which artifically divide us in the blog world, while also providing myself with a convinience. The page, if you haven’t visited it yet, displays blogs from my blogroll all on one page. Live Journal, a blogging site, allows you to do this, but only with other LJ users. Similarly, Tripod blogs allow you to do it only with other Tripod users. However, they failed to appreciate the power of hacker bloggers, such as myself.

It took me the better part of about 2 hours to figure out how to get everything to work correctly, but I am finally done with my program, GNaughtyNice. It figures out how naughty or nice a word is by using the Google search API and searching once with the porn filter on and once with it off. You can access this great feat of programming at http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/GNaughtyNice.html

I think it’ll probably make a pretty god party game. You also need a Google search API key because I only get 1000 searches which could get used up quite quickly if this were to become popular enough.