Programming

Night module

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Unfortunitly it is 0430 and I’ve got to get up early for work :'(

Finally had free time to day to shave off that infernal beard.. After so many months it is kind of nice to be reminded I’m more human the Wookie haha.

Spent tonight doing some light but thoughtful work,

Terry@Dixie$ pwd; /bin/ls -1                                               9:26
/home/Terry/code/Python/src/neo/testing/alpha
dialogs.py
main.py
neo.py
options.py
translate.py
Terry@Dixie$                                                               9:29

I have arranged things from the testing directory to it’s own work dir to clean up. Not to mention to continue work in a more module oriented pattern then the monolith and scratch files I have been using to test the first mock up of the programs UI.

  • dialogs -> will hold code common to user interaction through ‘pop up’ windows.
  • main -> the begining of it all, will probably be wrapped in a shell script
  • neo -> the GUI’s mock up code for the main window, need to split stuff off into sub modules when more work is done.
  • options -> the option subsystem, currently part of a config parser; to be expanded greatly
  • translate -> quick references to tools we will need later (subject to changes)

There is also a .neorc INI file for the testing 🙂

My near-future to do list right now is, in no particular order:

experiment with improving the wrapping paper on pkg_info; regex might be an improvement to the current process what ever the possible speed changes are. It might also be beneficial to look into using a pipe in order to ease start up times.

expanding dialogs into some thing more complete, currently it only has a routine for an error message.

Figure out how we can create a suitable display area for the output of a shell command (such as ‘make’).

I think I could probably do double the amount of work per day on this, if I didn’t have to do it before bed… Which has the bad limit of only being able to do things until my mind gets to the point that I just have got to sleep or the clock passes a point where I need to hit the hay, in order to get enough sleep for work in the morning.

I am lucky though, I’ve had almost 3 day’s off and only light duties tomorrow.

searchlet test level 7

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Almost finished my work on npm from early this afternoon.

Took care of getting the mock up to actually search the ports tree for a given string, considering incorporating a simplified version of psearch but I can worry about that later.

Did most of the right view of installed software today, it still has a problem but this is good progress:

Click to enlarge

Some of the listings are screwed up and trigger a TypeError, I know I’m doing some thing wrong some where but not sure where yet…. At the moment I am about ready to hit the hay.

Some future tasks include fixing that, adding a toolbar to the mockup, a place holder (or working) msg display area. And moving on to other mock up’s.

So far, it is not pretty but the mock up is doing quite well. Hopefully fiddling with layout management and spacers will not be to much heartache under QT3 without having to use the Designer tool. Hmm, you know it might even be possible to make things a bit more flexibble rather then choosing one of the mock ups as the basise of the final forms overall appearance.

Any way one slices it though, it is time for BED.

GET ME THE **** OUT OF HERE !

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I’m sitting here across the building…

Trying to build a working mockup of my main widget that’ll handle searching ports for the entered string through the GUI and volia !

Family is driving me out of my fsck’ing mind.

Just for once in my life, I would love it if I didn’t have to stay up to after 4 in the damn morning just to get stuff done because I can’t be left alone during the afternoon !!!!!

Every one else asleep == I can get stuff done

Any one else awake == 75% less chance of being able to hear my brains internal dialogue, let along get work done (much lower chances).

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Some where between merryment and torment, there lays the occasion =/

I’m definitally not looking forward to the holidays… but time stops for no man.

Not really in the mood for coding tonight, I’m tired.. Started work at like 0130 last night, finished and started reading about QT, then logged off for bed ’round 0400… And fell asleep after 0600 !!!

Looking over some of the first things I ever wrote programming wise. The creation dates are mostly november 2005 although the binary of dev-cpp is marked as feburary 2005 on my moms PC. To be honest, I have no real idea why I started learning programing =/ And it’s been at least 2 years since day one with C++.

I probably decided, I’d been around PC’s long enough and wanted to try taking it to the next level, maybe that is why… I don’t really know but I am glad I did. I know what pushed me into the level of computer studies I have, was a little trip through the WWW in that direction and the fish, ehh spider was hooked. I think it was The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO that hooked me, I wanted to learn more.

It’s December 2007 and I’ve come a long way. From a Windows XP user with no love of DOS. To practically living in a shell and thriving on *BSD systems. C++ I have not used in a long time, snored through Perl… nice tool but not my style. Java, from a book but never cared much for writing in it. C, because I wanted to see the differences between C++ and C, and what I found was a language I liked 10,000 * more lol. Always hated shell script… but came to value it as a great tool once I got used to it. Python and I didn’t hit it off and Ruby I had scoffed at early on before I decided on C++ as my first language.

One day, out of boredom I sat down and said, “Ok I’m learning Ruby” and a love affair was bourne. For my current task, I’ve been cramming the Python and QT like a mad hatter!

HTML, I also muddled with fromtime to time but rarely used. Eventually, writing in XHTML kind of replaced my need for a word processor haha! I’ve also had a longing to learn Ada but have never had the time :@, Scheme syntactically I find a bit strange but I guess I’m not used to lisp like languages.

I wonder, where the next couple of years will lead me, GOD only knows.

Thinking…

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A few concept drawings of what I have in mind

Style #1: simple interface (emphasis on searching and ease of performing common actions)

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Style #2: orthodox interface (commander like with toolbar, I like this one xD)
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Style #3: balanced interface (I think it would be better with the left being a |installed software | build messages | tab-thingy).

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Personally I think the first style is easier to use if your not familiar with what your doing, can you get more simple then ‘search, click, click’ with a big set of buttons?

The second I really like because I think it makes best use of space and presents the most important information quickly.

The third, I think is probably a better choice since it combines #1 and #2’s ways of doing things into a fairly simple yet compact amount of space.

To be honest, I would kind of love docking / undocking elements and a very ‘cool’ look, like XFire or XMMS L&F with a Gimp or Designer style of operation but I think that would probably be a lot of work and a bit confusing to new people =/

searchlet prototypes

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Oy’vey why does it have to be so easy to take a nap after chow with that dang couch =/

I suppose it is just as well that I’m finishing Dune tonight as I work because in this case the sleeper must awaken 😉

I’m trying to finish work on a routine to search the ports tree and generate the necessary stuff for a widget to display. The next phase is to experiment with how signals and slots workout through Python. Then build a more complete ‘searchlet’ module that can be integrated once the rest of work on the GUI is done. When I get a chance I’ll try to post a screen shot of the minimal searchlet in some portion of completion.

I’d also like to work on a few mock ups in designer or a few drawings in kolourpaint of possible configurations of the GUI.

edit:

I’ve basically finished the routine for searching the ports tree via psearch and getting it to display:

click to enlarge
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I think I’ve also figured out how to connect a C++ signal to a slot in the Python code but I’m still testing with that. The Signals & Slots mechanism is one thing that I do like a lot about QT. I’ve yet to use the Designer tool for any of this but for ease of use I probably will beyond test modules like the one pictured above.

I am using C++ documentation for most of this, so I am pretty dang glad that the best docs I’ve ever found in my time aroung computers has been the OpenBSD Manual, Vim’s :help stuff, and Trolltechs excellent offerings on qt documentation through the assistant program and the WWW. I also love that konqueror has qt, qt3, kde, and kde3 time saving web shortcuts like the wp (wikipedia) one I use so often.

Enter the Dragon

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Well, so for work goes well for day one.

I’ve spent most of the day working on the configuration system, at this point it would be a lot easier to have a configuration file, so I set about to work with Pythons SafeConfigParser class and the format of the config file and options, e.t.c. There is still more to do but it is a great start, especially considering that I am not entirely comfortable with OOP under Python

I’d say greater then half the code for installing and updating the ports tree is done enough for further testing, the only issue right now is the reaction to errors sup’ing or portsnaping.

I am some what tempted to try and have a wrapper of sorts that will abstact the issue of using QT or KDE specifics but I don’t think there would be any point. I need to dig deeper into the PyQT/PyKDE, QT, and KDE documentation soon so I can work more gui_error.py.

widets ? qt : kde;

It would be nice to use as many elements of the KDE bindings as possible, so it fits better with systems running KDE, yet it would also be nice to keep to the QT bindings more strongly so it is less tied to KDE.. In the end it will probably be which ever I’m more comfortable with.

My primary goals in the coming days is to finish the options and errors modules while I start work on the ‘searchlet’, which should handle searching through ports. Until a concreate mock-up can be made of the entire main window, I think I should keep the search stuff as far away from the rest of the program as I can.

Work on the searchlet as I call it, shouldn’t be to hard to keep self-contained since I prefer to work on smaller pieces and properly prototype things when I can, I’m not a real fan of monolithic masses =

Basically 7 tenths of that battle will be wrapping my head around working with the KListView and QListView widgets. Once I’ve figured that out, it’ll be simple enough (I hope) to figureout how to make it work with displaying a search through ports. It’s just I need to get a grip on the ListView widgets before I can do that lol.

Either way, I think I have done enough for one day… 0700 Zulu Time and it would probably be nice to have a little sleep before work tomorrow 0.o

A little horsing around before bed, not pretty but considering I don’t know QT from a hole int he ground… And I’m doing this with C++ documentation for Python, I think it’s a nice ‘Hmm, how do you make a QListView object?” test:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Neo Ports Manager (NPM) -- refer to the LICENSE file for terms and conditions

"""

"""
import sys, os
from qt import *


def main( argc, argv ):
    a=QApplication( argv )
    listViews=QListView()
    listViews.resize(640,480)
    listViews.setCaption("Qt Example - Listview") # Sets window title
    # Add some columns to the list view
    listViews.addColumn('Qualified name') 
    listViews.addColumn('Namespace')
    # element is how to create a new list view item for display
    element = QListViewItem(listViews, 'qName', 'namespaceURI') 
    # Now lets populate an array of items into view
    els=[ [listViews, 'dir1', 'descr1'], [listViews, 'dir2', 'descr2'],
          [listViews, 'dir3', 'descr3'] ]
    for j in els:
        QListViewItem(j[0], j[1], j[2])
    # And sort it descending by col 1
    listViews.setSorting( 1, False )


    a.setMainWidget(listViews)

    # draw & exec
    listViews.show()
    a.exec_loop()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main(len(sys.argv), sys.argv)

I don’t like that QListViewItem(j[0], j[1], j[2]) line but I was trying to translate from the C++,

for ( int i = 0 ; i < attributes.length(); i++ ) {
    new QListViewItem( element, attributes.qName(i), attributes.uri(i) );
}

And I’ve yet to figure out how to better cook this up, still reading the docs here…

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Some how, I think if I was the type for it, I would be stone cold drunk tonight… but as it is, I am sober as a codfish =/ Getting lit never helped any thing and my Families history is enough that it is not a fond concept. Although I must admit, a nice mixture of wodka, rum, and a little lemon juice does sound like an interesting idea.. Oh well, a spider can think lol.

trying to see if I can get QT (and possibly KDE) bindings for Ruby installed, I’ve had no luck with qtruby yet but so far korundum-3.5.5 is doing good, hope I don’t jinx it =/.

That’s not why I feel like getting drunk though, but even if I was that kind of person I’ve got to much crap to get done then to worry about it.

It is strange, how being busy is a two edged sword, in that it does have it’s advantages but it can be so damn exhausting some days !

damn, the build just blew, would be bloody nice if it would tell me *which* library is missing. Oh well, it’s not important. Hmm, what else to work on…

Wasting time with the Euclidean Algorithm

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The other night, I was very bored so… When I remembered reading about the Euclidean Algorithm on Wikipedia, which is a method of finding the greatest common denominator (gcd). I fed several implementations through ye ol’time(1) to get a rough idea of what differences they made.

At first I did it in Ruby and C for comparison, then I recompiled the *.c files with maximum optimization. Tonight I added a set of Java and Python files to the setup, I’ll probably include Bourne Shell and Perl later for fun.

For any one interested,

C // no optimization
./iteration 0.00s user 0.00s system 50% cpu 0.003 total
./recursion 0.00s user 0.00s system 66% cpu 0.002 total
./original 0.00s user 0.00s system 57% cpu 0.003 total
Ruby
./iteration.rb 0.01s user 0.00s system 59% cpu 0.014 total
./recursion.rb 0.00s user 0.00s system 79% cpu 0.010 total
./original.rb 0.00s user 0.01s system 75% cpu 0.010 total
C // optimized, -O3
./iteration-o 0.00s user 0.00s system 48% cpu 0.003 total
./recursion-o 0.00s user 0.00s system 32% cpu 0.005 total
./original-o 0.00s user 0.00s system 37% cpu 0.004 total
Java
java EuclideanIteration 0.39s user 0.38s system 66% cpu 1.165 total
java EuclideanRecursion 0.48s user 0.30s system 72% cpu 1.066 total
java EuclideanOriginal 0.36s user 0.42s system 67% cpu 1.155 total
Python
./iteration.py 0.01s user 0.01s system 59% cpu 0.034 total
./recursion.py 0.01s user 0.01s system 65% cpu 0.032 total
./original.py 0.01s user 0.01s system 65% cpu 0.031 total

done with:

ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [i386-freebsd6]
gcc version 3.4.6 [FreeBSD] 20060305
javac 1.5.0
Python 2.5.1

The C versions were the same sources but compiled with -O3 for the optimized
version.

I’ve assigned each outcome a score, 3 for what I feel is fastest, 2 for the intermediate (often close) and 1 for the worst and totalled it:

method  C RB C(-O3) Java Python Total
iteration 2 1 3 2 2 10
recursion 3 2 2 1 1 9
original 1 3 1 3 3 11

And the code, which I tried to keep similar. Also the gcd()/mygcd() routines were always implemented as a function because of the recursive version in the tests.

#include <stdio.h>

#define A 1071
#define B 1029

int
mygcd( int a, int b ) {
 int t = 0;
 while ( b != 0 ) {
  t = b;
  b = a % b;
  a = t;
 }
 return a;
}

int
main(void) {
 mygcd(A, B);
 return 0;
}


#include <stdio.h>

#define A 1071
#define B 1029

int
mygcd( int a, int b ) {
 if ( b == 0 ) {
  return a;
 } else {
  return mygcd( b, a%b );
 }
}

int
main(void) {
 mygcd(A, B);
 return 0;
}


#include <stdio.h>
#define A 1071
#define B 1029


int
mygcd( int a, int b ) {
 while ( b != 0 ) {
  if ( a > b ) {
   a = a-b;
  } else {
   b = b-a;
  }
 }
  return a;
}

int
main(void) {
 mygcd(A, B);
 return 0;
}

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w

def gcd(a, b)
  while b != 0
    t = b
    b = a % b
    a = t
  end
  return a

gcd( 1071, 1029 )
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w

def gcd(a,b)
  if b == 0
    return a
  else
    return gcd(b, a % b )
  end
end

gcd( 1071, 1029 )
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w

def gcd( a, b )
  while b != 0
    if a > b
      a = a - b
    else
      b = b - a
    end
  end
  return a
end

gcd( 1071, 1029 )

class EuclideanIteration {
 static final int A = 1071;
 static final int B = 1029;

 public static int
 mygcd( int a, int b ) {
  int t = 0;
  while ( b != 0 ) {
   t = b;
   b = a % b;
   a = t;
  }
  return a;
 }

 public static void
 main( String[] args ) {
  mygcd(A, B);
 }
}



class EuclideanRecursion {
 static final int A = 1071;
 static final int B = 1029;

 public static int
 mygcd( int a, int b ) {
  if ( b == 0 ) {
   return a;
  } else {
   return mygcd( b, a%b );
  }
 }


 public static void
 main( String[] args ) {
  mygcd(A, B);
 }
}


class EuclideanOriginal {
 static final int A = 1071;
 static final int B = 1029;

 public static int
 mygcd( int a, int b ) {
  while ( b != 0 ) {
   if ( a > b ) {
    a = a-b;
   } else {
    b = b-a;
   }
  }
   return a;
 }


 public static void
 main( String[] args ) {
  mygcd(A, B);
 }
}

#!/usr/local/bin/python

def mygcd(a, b):
    while b != 0:
        t = b
        b = a % b
        a = t
    return a


mygcd( 1071, 1029 )
#!/usr/local/bin/python

def mygcd( a, b ):
    if b == 0:
        return a
    else:
        return mygcd( b, a %b )


mygcd( 1071, 1029 )
#!/usr/local/bin/python

def mygcd( a, b ):
    while b != 0:
        if a > b:
            a = a-b
        else:
            b = b-a
    return a


mygcd( 1071, 1029 )

An interesting Apple

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Could this bring the power of the command line, to the GUI?

An interesting idea, I wonder how it works from a security and flexibility point of view.

One reason I enjoy the Unix Shell is it is very easy to solve problems with the vast and expandable workbench provided. And to automate various tasks quickly, not to mention many good programs are extensible/scriptable 🙂

The only sad thing for new users of traditional unix-likes is that the interfaces are often different, such as Emacs Lisp Vs Vim Script, Various Shell scripting languages vs DOS/Windows batch files e.t.c. Although most of the best programs I’ve used do run on many different platforms hehe.