GNOME-Clocks Development Continues

The last couple of weeks have seen a major clean up of GNOME-Clocks code, and on-going development of Alarms by myself and Timer by Eslam Mostafa.

Below is a screenshot of the recently completed New Alarm dialog box in GNOME-Clocks:

Dialog box for a new alarm in GNOME-Clocks

The development of Timer has been headed by Eslam Mostafa (http://eslammostafa.blogspot.de/), and is looking quite good as can be seen below.

Timer running in GNOME-Clocks

With the near completion of both Alarms & Timer, much of the basic development of GNOME-Clocks is rapidly coming to an end. As a result, an important decision remains – how to implement and integrate GNOME-Clocks. Should we write an entirely new daemon in Python? Or tie into an existing framework such as Evolution?

Finally, we would like to invite anyone else interested in GNOME-Clocks development to join us in #gnome-clocks on GimpNet. The GNOME-Clocks repository is now available on gnome’s servers at: http://git.gnome.org/browse/clocks

Bug reports & suggestions are both welcomed and appreciated!! Thanks for reading!

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More Python fun!

I think I’m finally, slowly understanding why math is a pr-requisite for computer science classes. Being halfway through my current math class is making Python make a LOT more sense than it did the last time I tried to learn it 8 or 9 months ago. Where all the if, else, range & functions didn’t make much sense, now they do (cause’ they’re basically the same as in math).

Exercise 35 was especially fun for me – I felt like I was building the most basic of MUDs, which was very fun. What made me smile and laugh though was my annoyance with the wording of descriptions, mostly since ‘you’ was in just about everyone, which I was always taught was a big ‘no no’ back when I was learning to build MUDs years ago. But, it was fun none the less and led me to wonder about MUD servers written in Python. A quick google brought up a handful of options: Evennia, GrailMUD, and a couple others which I see references to but don’t appear to actually exist anymore (ie AMC:SW-ERP), which is sad if unsurprising.  Some downloading & playing is definitely in the cards 🙂

Math, Python & GTK+ 3

Today has been, either entirely unproductive or very productive depending on your point of view. My house is still a mess & we certainly didn’t eat ‘well’ today by any stretch of the imagination, so in that respect at least, it was most unproductive. However, I feel like I have been productive today, if only in my head.

This morning I started out reviewing math in anticipation of my 2nd test tomorrow, and figuring out my fancy new TI-83Plus graphing calculator. I’ve never had a graphing calculator before, and thus spent a good couple hours googling & paging through the manual figuring out how to graph stuff, set up tables, find zeros, etc. I still haven’t figured out how to do everything by any stretch of the imagination, but I do feel like I have a decent grasp on the basics at this point which is nice. And, at least tomorrow I won’t be the only one sitting there doing long division & multiplication without a calculator!!

Most of the rest of the day, starting shortly after lunch has involved learning Python. Seif Lotfy got me started a couple days ago reading the Python GTK+ 3 Tutorial and I’ve been messing around with the examples from there without really having any clue what I was doing. Today he sent me over to ‘Learn Python the Hard Way‘ by Zed A. Shaw and I spent most of the afternoon & evening reading & working my way through the first 20 examples (and pestering Seif with questions). At this point, I’m feeling like I have at least some clue of how python actually works, and am trying to decide whether I should finish ‘learn python the hard way’ first or go back and start re-reading the tutorial on GTK+ 3, to see if it makes more sense.