My Project Ideas for Google Wave

Posted by knorby on November 10, 2009 under Python, coding, doit, google, internet, wave | 3 Comments to Read

Silly:

  • fortune/doit – Implemented. See Wave Fortune. You can use it be adding wavefortune@appspot.com to your contacts. I mostly made this bot to satisfy my fortune lust, and to get more familiar with app engine and the wave bot api.
  • wompus/adventure – Not sure I am actually going to do this one. If I do, it will be the wompus. Basically, the problem to solve is effectively storing state for such games. Wompus is tiny, and the games are short, so it wouldn’t take much thinking. Adeventure/zork would require a lot more work, and I honestly don’t care that much.

Tools:

  • logging interface – It occurs to me that wave might work great in a situation where I think e-mail falls short now: data/msg dumps. I see this sort of thing at my jobs a lot. I get a log messages I generally don’t care about, and I filter them out, and as a result I sometimes miss something. A similar case is something like a bug tracker, where so many replies can be generated that the thread is easy to ignore. Centralization would help a lot I think, but again, I am not sure I care.
  • RPN calculator - Nothing really to explain here. Could do save the calculator’s state in past blips, and make them editable. The end result would be a collaborative calculator of sorts. Could be interesting.
  • something with jMol – Not too much thought here. When I was a student in the Computational Material Science group at ORNL, I ended up playing with jMol a bit from javascript. Some sort of gadget/bot combo could do some interesting stuff, but again, I don’t care.

I will post more about my thoughts on wave later on, as I have many mixed thoughts on it. Google has a lot to do, both on wave itself and extensions that they should provide. I am hesitant to work on large projects, as I don’t want to have google copy my work, or experience some odd situation with app engine. I don’t think anyone, google included, has any remote idea of what to expect from wave yet.

Walter’s My Secret Life Fortune Library

Posted by knorby on June 9, 2009 under Android, Python, doit, fortune, google, humor | Be the First to Comment

I downloaded the Android Scripting Engine (ASE) on my G1 last night (oh yeah, I got a G1), which adds in Python and Lua functionality in a basic way. Along with the Text-To-Speach library, I hacked up a quick script to playback random DOITs. The slow, dull computerized British voice inspired me to make a fortune library off of Walter’s My Secret Life, the secret sex diary of a British Victorian gentleman. Though I first found of this book’s existance in actual book form, it is online. Anyway, I hacked up a quick script to scrape that site into a fortune library, which you can find here. For copyright reasons, the script is the only thing I am putting up. The script is written in python with lxml (you may need BeutifulSoup as well). It is horribly documented, but you should just need to run the script. To make it a library you can use with fortune, you need to run strfile on it, which the script should do if it is in the path. The book is 12 volumes, and almost every paragraph is lurid. The script is hacked together, so there might be some problems, but I haven’t found any glaring ones yet. By the way, the playback is fantastic.