Linux Course coming along well… Converting a string to a Dictionary…

The linux course I have setup at my local church has been doing very good.  Today we had a course on the basics and potentual of the command line interface.  Talk about an excited bunch.  We learned all the basics, cd, rm, mkdir, less and most importantly man.  We even went into how to use the command line to do very special things like, whatching movies from the text or, for the heck of it, seeing my baby’s first crawling in asci art.  OHHH yeah!  Talk about cool!  They are very excited to learn that their competer that can only run text based linux has some great life in it left.  All in the console.  Next week, we learn some more CLI stuff and move into Kino the video editor.  Hope to post our video we make in class online.

In my GSoC work I had learned a spiffy feature, I needed to convert a string into a dictionary.  Pete was able to work it out, after my many failed attempts

Check it out!

variableDict = {}
string = dictExtraInfo["variables"]
pairs = string.split(“,”)
for pair in pairs:
variableDict[(pair.split(":")[0])] = pair.split(“:”)[1]
print variableDict

dictExtraInfo what the text that needed to be converted.  If you didn’t figure that out yet.   Dang spiffy.  Thanks pete.

Progress in PyStart, Katri’s site, and My Linux Course

Challenges every step of the way.  But each day I make it just a little further.  I have re-honed my effort and now spend most of my day working on it.  For example, this morning I woke up at 3:30 and decided to hack a while.  I have made good progress with it, the file saving is almost totally ironed out.  I have started the file loading, which is coming together rather well.  And the gui is getting cleaner and cleaner all the time.

I am very thankful for the time that Pete has taken for me.  He is really able to see my project as a whole much better than even I can.  Doing a project like this is huge for me.  I was shocked that one of the example saves I was doing ended up being 1.4meg.  WOW never thought I would ever make a program that could produce such large files. (That wasn’t the goal, mind you.)  I remember programming in basic on my 8088 and thinking how cool it was that I made a program so big it had to read the floppy in the middle of running.  I would say to myself, “I have finally made a cool program, ’cause my computer can barely handle it.”   Those where the days.

I have confidence my GSoC midterm review went well and rumor has it I get the money today or tomarrow.

Speaking of money, I want to get the moeny in USD is there a way I can easily send it to my bank in the states without losing it?  Or would it simply be better to take my loses for the weak USD and pay my debts in euros. Money, such a complicated thing.

Katri has progressed alot on her site. Last night she mentioned that she would like to take an online course on html.  I know of w3cschools.  Are there any that the ubuntu community recommends?  I have taught her xhtml so sites that teach that would be much less confusing.

Last, my Linux Course has been doing well, we have an excited group of finns.  I know, it’s amazing!  We have gone over the installation this last week.  This week we will be learning about the filesystem and how to work with settings files.  For example, opening a file as SU or editing files, where these files are located, and basic terminal use.  Wish me luck.

Thanks!

An addition to PyStarts Gui and GSoC Questions….

I needed to create a small dialog to enter details for created lessons. Authors, HTMLFile locations, etc… At this point I realized I could refactor this code and make it pass variables in a better manner. So I will be slowly moving the my code to a more organized manner. At this point it is becoming hard for me to visuallize my code. At only 550 lines you would think I could see and understand things better, but it hard.

Knowing this give me a lot of respect for people that read HUGE programs. An amazing ability… props to ya’ll for that.

Last night on voice call with my Mentor we went over the questions of the students servey questions, which don’t vary much from the Mentor’s. It sounded crazy but they had answers like the following (with my comments):

F. I still have not made contact with my mentoring organization.
ARE YOU INSANE! I sure hope people don’t have to answer that.
A. Every day.
They didn’t have Ceriberal Connection so I guess that will have to do.
F. Our interactions exceed my expectations both frequency and quality-wise.
I will say it over and over, This is on the top best things I have done in my life. Few things beat this one out.
B. Somewhat active (e.g. I read and sometimes responds to mailing lists, some interaction in community communication channels)
I feel the community is doing the best they can. Ubuntu is a huge project and if I am not pleading for help why should they do things for me if they are helping others.
C. I am on schedule.
I wish I were ahead. But I think this project is jsut what it is supposed to be. Possible, but not impossible. I need to be pushed or I don’t think it is far. I hear about people in GSoC that burn threw a week of programming and finnish. Sadly, I don’t think that is proper. It is to help programmers be inovative. I hope that the mentor for those programs will require more of them than the plan.
A. Exceeds my personal expectations
I have had so much FUN! It is great learning programming in this manner. I am not in the frame of mind where I see something on a computer and think, “I could do something like that, how could I make that even better.” The hard part is holding my self down and sticking to my current commitments.

and last…

Category: Overall Sanity Check
Question 1: Do you feel that Summer of Code is going well enough for you?
A. Yes
Heh… I thought it funny at first to have that ask that. But I guess there are others that don’t feel so great. I am sane as any programmer could be. It weighs on my mind at just the right pressure.

Don’t forget, anyone that would like to review my code… http://launchpad.net/pystart/ it would be nice if we had a few more people I could chat with if they have the time.

I hope to get my money from GSoC before I leave on vacation. Boy, that would save me the worries about the credit card. (That means I am confident that I am doing good enough to keep going with GSoC. )

Thanks Ubuntu!

Jason