Jornades de Programari Lliure

Dimecres comencen les VII Jornades de Programari Lliure. Programa al Google Calendar.

Si m'ho puc apanyar, vull anar a

• Dijous 12:30 - 13:00.
  Aprenentatge de la Programació al Citilab: Squeak i Scratch
• Divendres 13:00-14:00.
  eyeOS : Portant el Sistema Operatiu a la Xarxa
• Divendres 15:30-16:30.
  Eines de virtualització lliures per a sistemes GNU/Linux
• Divendres 16:30-19:00.
  Taller d’Arduinos (open-hardware)
  

M'ho pugui apanyar o no, dissabte aniré a la Jornada de Python (de 10:00 a 14:00), doncs he dit que faria una xerrada sobre Sugar, l'interface d'usuari del XO o OLPC o $100 Laptop

Happy Geek Dad

Stumbled upon Jason R. Briggs' Snake Wrangling for Kids:

"Snake Wrangling for Kids" is a printable electronic book, for children 8 years and older, who would like to learn computer programming. It covers the very basics of programming, and uses the Python programming language to teach the concepts. Examples are presented for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

You are flying! How?

Read the rest of the strip

Yay! Barcelona Python Meetups are here!

Back from the first Barcelona Python Meetup Group event. The event was good, with two talks:

• Maik Röder, based on the Eight tips to start with Python. Maik added an additional tip (use PyFlakes, a faster PyChecker) and asked the attendants for our own tips: IPython (a great shell that I should be using again) proved to have many fans! I mentioned my love for ctypes.
• Ramon Navarro Bosch, on Design Patterns in Python. Ramon recommended us Alex Martelli's Google TechTalk video on the topic.
  

If the event was good, the post-event (beers, croquetas and bravas) with Maik was great and I'm bringing home lots of food for thought. Most of the talk was about Funittest (Making it easy to go from use case to functional test). Maik uses daily a high level Test Driven Development flow:

• write the functional test, to get aligned with the user's needs/customer value,
  
• write unit test, that can be driven faster and focus in the approapiate level of abstraction
• write the code

My impression is that his ideas have lots of commonalities with Fit and Fitness, and the story-based-testing that they advocate. Maik said that Funnitest's theoretical foundation can be grasped in The Braidy Tester articles; I'm adding them to my to-read list...

Beyond functional testing, the programmer's flow, the business-technical gap, Barcelona, Sevilla, tele-working... an intriguing an promising idea: the I-told-you-that-this-was-a-wrong-decision year-end bonus.

New phone: PyBluez and Gammu to the rescue

My Sony Ericsson K610i may end up being friendlier to my ThinkPad. I downloaded the binary version of Wammu and have been able to send an SMS from my PC via bluetooth, send a file to my phone, retrieve calls, contacts, calendar info...

Wammu sits on top of

• Gammu (a project which encompasses applications, scripts and drivers for managing various functions on cellular phones and similiar devices) with Python bindings
  
• PyBluez (a Python wrapper for Bluetooth)
  
• wxPython (a Python API for the great wxWidgets toolkit, formerly known as wxWindows)

Looks like synchronizing with Google calendar will require some hacking, unlikely to happen any time soon. Add to that the general calendar mess in my life, where there is the phone, Lotus Notes, Google Calendar and MonkeyGTD tiddlywiki.

The Wammu logs start with

(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):1 - "OBEX SyncML Client"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):2 - "Dial-up Networking"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):3 - "Serial Port"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):25 - "Music Streaming Service"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):23 - "Remote Control TG Service"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):23 - "Remote Control Service"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):15 - "PAN Network Access PointNAP (...)"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):4 - "Hands-Free Gateway"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):5 - "Headset Gateway"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):6 - "OBEX Object Push"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):7 - "OBEX File Transfer"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):8 - "OBEX IrMC Sync Server"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):17 - "HID Mouse & Keyboard"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):9 - "OBEX Phonebook Server"

I'm guessing that this comes from PyBluez, and that, as soon as I change the binary installation of Wammu with the original Python packages, it should be quite simple to take advantage of some of this services, or, at least, start some educated googling.