New beginnings
Well it's been a while since I last blogged, and I felt the need for an update. So what's been happening? Quite a bit.
Python Packager (http://python-packager.com)
Python Packager is going fairly strong. In the last month it's got 362 visits, 267 uniques, and 1,544 page views. Most visits are from Italy, and most of the others are from the U.S. and Egypt. So far 90 applications have been packaged, and there are 71 users. The website's currently being hosted with HostGator, but the packaging service is running on my laptop. The problem is of course that when users choose multiple binaries, the size starts to add up. The packaging process often only takes 10-15 seconds or so, but uploading takes up to 15 minutes sometimes (I've only got a 100kb/s upload pipe). Combine that with the fact it's multi-threaded, so often 3-4 applications are being uploaded at once and it seems like the service isn't responsive. I've noticed that people are even re-submitting their application, I suspect this's because of the long packaging time.
I have a few ideas I'd like to take the website/service. Consolidating the web server and the build service onto a single OS instance would be lovely, because there wouldn't be the need to transfer the binary. Another idea would be to add an application store/share. So people can opt to make their application public once packaged. Others could browse the "store" for other applications, paid or otherwise. Just a thought. It really depends how busy I am, and how much demand there is.
Working at Intralux
I got a job, no less. At a boutique light producer called Intralux. The job's surprisingly rewarding, and the money's pretty good. It's the perfect job for the holidays really, until University commences again in March.
Extending the business
I've decided to extend the business, and enter into the mobile development arena. I'll be focusing on Maemo 5 for now, and see how I go. Mobile computing seems to be the talk of the town at the moment, and supposedly the future of computing. We'll soon see how it all plays out anyway. The mobile arena looks somewhat segregated at the moment, especially for development. Off the top of my head you have the iPhone, Android, Maemo 5, and webOs. They all use different languages for development, and graphical toolkits. What a mess. I'm already familiar with Linux, and Qt's API's, so that's my reason for choosing Maemo 5. Plus I'm getting a Nokia N900 soon. Which brings me to my next point.
Enjoying the holidays!
Christmas day was great. I met up with the family, and had lunch at a resturaunt on the Brisbane river - John Oxley. I've ordered a Nokia N900 from Amazon, and it should be here in a few days - I can't wait!
Prettify/Comment string in Python
The other day I was in dire need to find a way to wrap a string in Python with hashes, in order to comment it out. Simply prepending a hash to every line wasn't good enough, where I needed to wrap the entire string, which was most likely several lines. So I came up with a function called prettifyString. A little mundane I admit, but it took me an un-usually long time to come up with a solution. Hope this helps anyone else out there.
def prettifyString(s):
''' Wraps string in hashes.
#####################
# #
'Hello World' -> # Hello World #
# #
#####################
'''
# Get longest line to determine width
longestLine = 0
for line in s.split('\n'):
line.strip()
if len(line) > longestLine:
longestLine = len(line)
# Add header
newString = '%s\n#%s#\n' % (('#'*(longestLine+10)),
(' '*(longestLine+8)))
# Add body
for line in s.split('\n'):
line = line.strip()
newString += '# %s%s#\n' % (line,
' '*(longestLine-len(line)+4))
# Add footer
newString += '#%s#\n%s\n\n' % (' '*(longestLine+8),
'#'*(longestLine+10))
return newString
# eg...
print prettifyString('Hello\nWorld...')
Python Packager
Well I've been working on something for quite some time now called "Python Packager". And now I've finally released the source code to it. Anyway, check it out at http://python-packager.com. It's alpha-ish code, and not too stable. But it's a start, and if it seems to benefit anyone I'll keep polishing it.
Okay then.
Hi there. So. I have a blog. This is new.
I've been sitting on this domain, well for probably years now. I never really did anything useful with it, besides from using it for email. So I figured I'd start a blog. Mostly to get stuff off my mind, and hopefully develop some ideas. Who knows what'll happen.
So who am I? I'm Jackson Cooper. A 20 year old from Brisbane, Australia. I'm an ex-uni student (I.T), and currently un-employed. These past few years I've been interested in the open source world, and hopefully this blog'll give me a chance to develop new ideas/projects. I love working with the programming language Python, and the software library Qt.
I'm currently working on two projects, Python Packager and a translator for Qt translation files using Google Translate. Both of which I'm hoping to open source. I'll blog about them later.