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…

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.

The free rifle ladders look identical to that page.

The next three pages are from report.pdf, and generally aren’t meant to be posted for the club, they’re more for the club committee to track stuff as it’s happening in the club:

Those two pages are fairly straightforward (and mostly used to track performance of the folks who are shooting in the ladders for things like squad selection and so forth.

That page is somewhat less than perfect right now! The pie charts aren’t awful for seeing what’s happening, but the labelling is awful. More work required…

Here are the actual pdf files if you want them:

ladders.pdf

report.pdf

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     1  60.000    60  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  55.500    71  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  55.000    58  *
10         Joe D'Plumber     3  53.667    62
          Tito D'Builder     1  52.000    52  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  50.000    50  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  49.000    49  *

This does the basic job that the original system did (actually, it does a bit more – the asterisks mark out those shooters who haven’t yet shot enough cards to get on the ladder, but they’re still listed as an incentive for them to shoot more cards – the current system doesn’t do this). It’s not really doing all that can be done, however, and it’s certainly not all that fancy-looking. Especially in a scripting language, where the whole point is to do fancy stuff quickly through toolkits. So, … Read the rest

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:

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. 

First, the problem. There’s a program my college rifle club uses called Kada, which tracks members names and details and scores and produces charts of the club’s “ladders”, a sort of running competition which tracks shooters’ performances over the year (there’s a small prize at the end). The problem isn’t Kada itself – it is pretty much a textbook case of how you develop a user interface, even if it is character-mode. Keith, who developed Kada, spent ages refining the user interface by actually using it and talking to … Read the rest

Okay, no. I gave it a try for a good week. And by the end of the week, I don’t have any way to change basic stuff like fonts or colours, completion is still a mystery, line numbers are buggy, and I’ve not yet seen one single function that made me say “y’know, it’s a pain, but it’s worth it”. I wound up getting not one extra page added to the RCMS project during the entire week because of emacs configuration hell. Frac that for a game of soldiers.

I’ll stick with vim 7. Completion? Got it. Reformatting code? Got it. Testing code syntax in the editor? Got it.

And now, on with the actual work. Y’know, the thing we’re meant to use the editor for in the first place?

Hmmm. I started programming on an old ICL OPD (anyone else remember microdrives?). There was some fooling about afterwards with an IBM PS/2 system (woo-hoo, 40Mb of hard disk space!), but the first time I hit what I thought of as a real machine was on a unix account in the first week of college. And that’s when I first hit the biggest question any starting computer engineer hits (or used to hit, back then): Vi or Emacs.

Back then, I chose Vi by default, in that it was the first thing I came across and command/edit mode switching actually made sense to me. And I used vi for a good while afterwards, until I finally found, and immediately switched to, vim. I’ve used vim ever since for any task where I could use it on any platform where I could get it (in fact, not being able to use it for wordpress blogging ticks me off). Being able to run around a source code file in command mode and dd or y lines from here and p them over there, or J them together or call up boxes with an <F4> remap to give me a nice easy-to-spot function header, those are things I’ve gotten down to the reflex level at this stage. In short, I like vim. It’s small, fast, uncluttered. And don’t talk to me about tabbed editing and intellisense and debugger integration please, that’s been in vim for quite some time if you want it (and frankly, if you’re using Visual Studio anything and telling me it has a better editor, you seriously need to stop wasting your time). Not to mention the fact that everytime I’ve seen something like intellisense in actual use, it’s been used by some rather lazy programmers. Which isn’t to say … Read the rest