Python

Oscar scanner is a project I mentioned in an earlier post. I wanted to follow up on that with my progress. It’s basically working now, more or less, after some hiccups trying to run it on Arch, and lack of time or motivation, ordering wifi adapters, etc. I have a video up demonstrating it’s use.

I have a short video of my the Adafruit UPC scanner in its 3D printed case being used here:

I don’t know if its because I’m now settled into the dad life or what, but I’ve been taking on more personal projects lately, working on them until I loose interest or find something else. Of course, leaving them in various states of completion, some times returning later. Sometimes its just lack of motivation, sometimes I hit a wall, a few cases are delays since continuing requires hardware or something that costs money. Sometimes its just lack of time. A big part of it is the problems I’m working on don’t hold my interest or seem of little point. I seem to be working on tutorials or guides, or very little that isn’t already well tread. I want to learn new skills, but I also want to solve real problems, or tangible improvments to something. I’d love to get involved in some real projects (but I can’t commit due to time), not run through a tutorial that gives me an example program to write that no one would actually use. That said, here is what I have in the hopper that I’ve slowly been trudging through.

Koding is a cool site that provides a web-based development environment that is perfect for budding programers and veteran programmers who want an easy to use sandbox environment to develop in. For free you get a VM that that comes pre-setup so that you can develop in several languages including Python, plus database backends ability to install more resources (you get full root access to your VM).

A lot of coders use it to stage or live demo a project, and of course the VM automatically shutsdown when you log off. You can expand the VM’s but that’s the point you start paying, or once your project needs some real resources, or you want to bring on additional team members, etc.

Oscar is a Python project utilizing the Raspberry Pi w/ UPC barcode reader to scan barcodes on items you keep stocked in your pantry or fridge, when scanned, ideally when you run out of an item just before throwing the packaging or container away, it will populate your grocery list with the item reminding you that you need to pick up more of that item on your next shopping trip. Since it’s written in Python, it could easily be adapted to run on almost any device with Linux on it and a USB port that is networked. I’ve been working on a fork of it for Python3/Arch and using the miniature UPC reader from Adafruit.

In my attempt to code more, I’ve been looking for a purpose or a problem to which I can apply what I’ve learned or use as a reason to acquire new knowledge. One of the things I’ve been working on a clone of a Mac OS X application an acquaintance of mine is writing. This has begun my foray into writing using the PyGObject API for GTK along with the Ubuntu GTK indicator API. The PyGTK library is deprecated (GTK 3 going forward), which is what most of the examples I’ve found online use where as there is less documentation and discussion for PyGObject. In keeping with using the latest I am writing it in Python 3.

Some of the lessons I’ve learned from the Matasano Crypto Challenge has already had unexpected practical application for a common issue I encounter at work. Sometimes, people forget things, don’t document things especially in dev environments (hopefully not so much in production), one of those things is passwords, passwords for database accounts, or for an account that has some authorization the application needs. If a dev forgets a password or can’t find where it was documented, it’s many times better to just recover the password, rather then reset the password, especially if the account is used by the application in local dev environments, etc.

I have been honing my Python skills on a couple of projects recently. One is the famous (or infamous) Python Challenge which has been interesting, but its not where I have spent the bulk of my time. The other is some work related scripting in jython for Websphere automating some tasks for developers (pausing and resuming activation specifications) in their test environment.

But was has challenged me the most and captured the majority of my attention is the Matasano Crypto Challenge. The nature of the challenge is they send you several tasks to complete successfully using the language of choice (in my case obviously, Python) and in the process you learn about encryption. More to the point you learn several basic weaknesses and common attacks used to crack encryption.

Those of us that use WebSphere Application Server in our environments as our J2EE application server have a very powerful tool to administrate or automate tasks from the command line, wsadmin. wsadmin is a command line utility that allows you to issue commands in a single server or network deployment (multiple servers in a single administrative domain or “cell”). If you are reading this you probably know all about it and its support for Python, or Jython environment as a language to issue commands and run scripts to handle a variety of tasks.

This is my first post using Pelican as my new blogging platform. I had considered using OctoPress but encountered too much trouble getting the ruby stack to work properly without dependency problems, even following directions or tutorials. So I looked for a Python alternative and found Pelican. I found it was much simpler to get running just following the directions. Plus, I know Python, so I’m obviously more comfortable with it then Ruby. I’ve never dealt with Ruby directly until OctoPress and my prior experience only included reading about it.