[digg=http://digg.com/linux_unix/Fujitsiu_LT_C_500_touchscreen_in_Ubuntu] Just as a small note to anyone trying to get this to work, the fpit driver has a bug in every version of ubuntu up to and including hardy; upgrade to intrepid and you get fully a functional touchscreen again, using this xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "touchscreen"
Driver "fpit"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS1"
Option "BaudRate" "9600"
Option "MaximumXPosition" "4096"
Option "MaximumYPosition" "4096"
Option "MinimumXPosition" "0"
Option "MinimumYPosition" "0"
Option "Passive"
Option "SendCoreEvents"
Option "TrackRandR" "true"
EndSection
Just don’t try using KDE4 unless slow-motion work sounds appealing 
XFCE is reasonable though, so Xubuntu is an option (and what I’m running on it right now).
Now, on with the PyQT4 coding…
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[digg=http://digg.com/programming/Target_shooting_scores_and_analysis_with_python] Ray asked to see what the output of the kada2 script I’ve been working on looks like – only problem is that I’ve been using a real datafile for development, so it has people’s names in it. To avoid any shoutyness, one quick python script to read in the members.kda file and write it back out to test.kda with all the names changed to John Smith; then a quick run with this file as the members.kda file and some imagemagick conversions and viola, the current kada.py output.
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As I mentioned before, after writing a python script to read in Kada’s data files on the rifle club shooters’ scores and calculate new ladders, the next step is output that’s a bit fancier than the straight ASCII text dump:
Novice Air Ladder
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1 Joe D'Plumber 45 91.833 94
2 Joe D'Plumber 36 87.500 91
3 Joe D'Plumber 18 87.167 92
4 Joe D'Plumber 16 85.833 91
5 Joe D'Plumber 26 85.167 92
6 Joe D'Plumber 31 81.167 87
Tito D'Builder 2 76.000 76 *
7 Joe D'Plumber 7 74.000 82
Tito D'Builder 2 69.000 75 *
Tito D'Builder 2 67.000 68 *
Tito D'Builder 2 66.000 70 *
Tito D'Builder 1 64.000 64 *
8 Joe D'Plumber 10 63.167 78
Tito D'Builder 1 62.000 62 *
9 Joe D'Plumber 4 61.750 76
Tito D'Builder 2 61.500 72 *
Tito D'Builder
… Read the rest
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Bought for the RCMS project, it’s a hand-held tablet PC (seen here in its docking station). Celeron processor and 256Mb of RAM and a whopping 60Gb hard disk space. Back when we got one for the CVRG robotics lab in 2002, it was the best thing available and cost thousands – today it cost me just over €160 by the time it landed on my door, with customs and vat and whatnot.
The plan is, get the touchscreen working (the fpit driver works but it’s not calibrating properly), and using python, the QT4 library, QT Designer and pyqt, to build a program that could replace the venerable RO Report form used in the rifle club:
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One of the downsides of working on a pre-startup project is that you really can’t say much about it. Seriously. You think Cryptonomicon seemed paranoid about security? You’ve just never met the folks who safeguard possible IP for college spin-outs. Yowza. And it’s a shame because some of this stuff is really rather nifty, and it’s been good to not only do some high-level design of low-level stuff, but also to get back to implementing in C and for high-capacity stuff as well.
However, side projects are totally fair game
At the moment, most of my side-project time has gone into a quick script for the rifle club in college. It has to read in a text file and do some basic statistics on the data therein. PHP would blaze through this in a web setting, but to my mind, PHP is out of its depth when not running on a webserver so I thought something else would be more appropriate. Perl is certainly up to the task, as is Ruby and I’ve been wanting to learn Ruby for a while, but some upcoming PhD stuff requires me to know Python, so I figured this would be a good starting point for it, so apt-get install python and away I went.
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