Little toys none of which are really worthy of a full-fledged "project", either because they're a single file of code or because regardless of size, once committed they're actually done and don't need much future attention.
t9.py is an exploration of words with ambiguous T9 (phone
text interface) encodings. The interesting bit is the scaling
issue... or lack of one: it handled a 230K wordlist, producing 10k
result sets, in about 30 seconds... on an EEEpc. Completely naive
implementation, no optimization (and thus no wasted optimization :-)
I did use string.maketrans and string.translate but that
was more because I'd used them before and they're actually a pretty
natural fit for this task. (I did switch from lists to sets, but that
wasn't performance-related either - the wordlist I was working from
had a variety of entries that weren't unique when downcased, and it
didn't occur to me to just use sort -fu on it.)
Footnotes:
While debugging a very strange problem (a simple shell loop that was
occasionally continuing around before the body was done, leading to
multiple parallel runs of something that was supposed to be
serialized) I came across Debian Bug #445956 - "script dies on SIGWINCH."
The bug report simply notes that script "dies", reporting "Script
done, file is typescript", which is true... but incomplete. It turns
out that script has a parent and child process, and only the
parent dies; the child (and whatever was being run inside
script) continues to run!
In the long run, the important thing is that bsd-utils actually
got fixed (the bug mentioned above is closed by 2.13-9, though that
is post-etch and post-gutsy.) In the short run, it would
be nice (at least for me) to have a workaround...
My first attempt was simply to use signal.signal to set
SIGWINCH to SIG_IGN (in the python wrapper that actually
runs script for me.) Not good enough - the bug is in code that
is setting a SIGWINCH handler in script itself.
Second attempt was to call sigblock... but for portability
reasons (somewhat tied to embedding python in other code, if I
correctly interpreted the postings excusing its absence - I didn't
look to closely because having a good reason didn't actually solve my
problem :-) python's signal module can't do sigblock. Oh
well, ctypes to the rescue; fixed_script.py shows an
example of the workaround. Worked for me, both in my application and
in standalone tests using screen to change window sizes (I use
ratpoison and generally don't want windows to take up less than
the entire screen, so outside of testing like this I don't generally
care that I can't easily resize windows... I only noticed in this case
because I reattached the screen session from two different machines,
which had different (fixed) window sizes :-)
Footnotes:
tratmenu - clone of ratmenu (from the man page and my usage of it) using curses instead of X11. Takes the same options so that I can use it for some ultimately text-based applications (like picking surfraw engines from a list, or picking hosts-to-ssh-into from a generated list of things I have access to.)
This is another project that stalled until I started with the "simplest thing that can work"... one by one, I
OptionParser
q' for quit)options.shell
Each of these was only a couple of minutes and mostly a matter of looking up parts of the curses API or the ratmenu manpage. There are still a few things that I don't care much about but may implement for completeness:
snazzy vs dreary --style options--align left/center/right
--fg/--bg colorsAlso, I may add an explicit "if $DISPLAY is set, run the real ratmenu
instead" option, just so that I can have a common command regardless
of context, though that doesn't actually work for things which might
or might not need a window unless I also add an xterm_or_not wrapper.