Mailman 3 September 2009 - Edu-sig

Beautiful sample programs?
by Helene Martin 29 Sep '09

29 Sep '09

Hello, As some of you know, I teach high school classes in Seattle. Students have been loving Python so far! They've been able to dive right in and get some interesting results. I was wondering whether any of you had suggestions for Python programs to look at, dissect, extend and emulate. I'm looking for something reasonably small like a simple music player, some kind of calculator app, a collection manager or something like that. I'd rather it be an existing open source project someone started out of necessity (rather than me creating something contrived for the exercise). I've poked around a bit but haven't found anything I thought would be perfect either because of scale (I'd rather keep it to a handful of files), complexity or just plain code ugliness. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Hélène Martin. http://garfieldcs.com

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multiple inheritance and __mro__
by kirby urner 24 Sep '09

24 Sep '09

Here's a lesson plan working directly in the shell, though it'd be fine to call this up as pre-saved scaffolding. Sometimes you just wanna project and type live while talking, students following along, asking questions, or watching on ShowMeDo or one of those. >>> class Reptile: def __init__(self): self.blood = "cold" self.me = 1 self.free = True >>> class Mammal: def __init__(self): self.me = 1 self.blood = "warm" self.free = True def nurse(self): return "milk" >>> class PSF_snake(Mammal, Reptile): def say(self, something): print something >>> me = PSF_snake() >>> me.blood 'warm' >>> me.nurse() 'milk' >>> class PSF_snake(Reptile, Mammal): def say(self, something): print something >>> me = PSF_snake() >>> me.blood 'cold' >>> me.nurse() 'milk' >>> Notes to teachers: Notice that it matters in what order the parent classes get listed (fed to the child class) in the class definition. In the Mammal, Reptile case, the blood is warm, whereas if Reptile is listed first, the blood is cold. Notice also that you get a nursing method either way, because of how method resolution looks. If Mammal is listed after the Reptile class then the interpreter simply has to look a little further into its heritage, in order to find the right DNA. Kirby

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Resources for Python teachers... (spanish language etc.)
by kirby urner 22 Sep '09

22 Sep '09

For those not tracking announcements and for edu-sig archives: Guido's Python tutorial in Spanish: http://docs.python.org.ar/tutorial/contenido.html Other translations in the works... http://www.pylearn.com/fa/wiki/index.php/%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%AD%D9%87%E2%80%8C_… (note the above unicode translation from Farsi should work, even though it's butt ugly) Carl T has been working on gathering some of this intelligence. I helped link him up with Syrians Here's some Arabic re Python: http://itwadi.com/byteofpython_arabi Getting the edu-sig page translated into various languages may not be a priority, not my call. I've sent word of the Litvins text to Palestine where elite schools might start using it, we shall see. A goal is to not recapitulate the mistakes of USA-based computer science curricula which tend to be ethnocentric in unfortunate ways. Kirby Urner 4Dsolutions.net

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Fwd: Fwd: Python for Secretaries
by Andre Roberge 21 Sep '09

21 Sep '09

Sorry, I forgot to include edu-sig in cc. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Andre Roberge <andre.roberge(a)gmail.com> Date: Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 1:07 PM Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Fwd: Python for Secretaries To: Catherine Devlin <catherine.devlin(a)gmail.com> Hi Catherine, On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Catherine Devlin <catherine.devlin(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, edu-sig. I'm not a teacher; I've taken an Intro to Python lecture > around the Ohio region a bit, that's all. I have a bug in my brain to > put together some material (a good website and a class) aimed at > business users. Laura suggested that I get your input, which makes > huge amounts of sense. > > There's a new wiki page for the project at > > http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonForSecretaries > > - your ideas and resources, please! I'm finding that I need to mine > information on some of these officey tasks from some very coarse ore; > shortcuts you can provide will be quite welcome. Thanks for creating this wiki page. I have nothing to contribute to it but I created a link to it on the edu-sig page, under Miscellaneous for lack of a better place. If others have better suggestions, I'll be glad to take them into account. (http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/#miscellaneous) André [snip]

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Fwd: Python for Secretaries
by Catherine Devlin 21 Sep '09

21 Sep '09

Hi, edu-sig. I'm not a teacher; I've taken an Intro to Python lecture around the Ohio region a bit, that's all. I have a bug in my brain to put together some material (a good website and a class) aimed at business users. Laura suggested that I get your input, which makes huge amounts of sense. There's a new wiki page for the project at http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonForSecretaries - your ideas and resources, please! I'm finding that I need to mine information on some of these officey tasks from some very coarse ore; shortcuts you can provide will be quite welcome. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Catherine Devlin <catherine.devlin(a)gmail.com> Date: Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 10:45 PM Subject: Python for Secretaries To: diversity <diversity(a)python.org> I'd like to ask for more input on a personal ambition of mine that has a diversity tie-in. I blogged about it here: http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/2009/06/python-for-secretaries.html The idea is a website and a class designed to show businesspeople a little bit of programming that they can use in the computer tasks they already have. Not to make them into real programmers (at least, not yet), but to show how they can automate some of the tasks that work makes them do anyway. (If a few of them end up becoming passionate hobby programmers, or even switching careers, and joining the ranks of contributing Python programmers... well, OK, that hope is the ulterior motive from our point of view.) I'd like your ideas on - what should be covered - any existing sources of documentation to draw on - tasks to automate I like the title "Computer Programming for Secretaries (and other businesspeople)", even though not many people are literally called "secretaries" anymore, because it's a very unpretentious title - it would emphasize that it's aimed at people who don't feel like they could survive a serious programming course. There are lots of beginning programming guides out there, but as far as I know, they are all aimed either at students, or at people who already know that they want to get deeper into programming; people who want to program for programming's sake. I'd like something for people with a totally different goal. It would differ from regular beginners' classes in that it: - would highlight ways to use data in typical business apps (yeah, that means MS Excel, Access, etc.) - this is *not* prominent information right now even for experienced Pythonistas - would feature exercises in business tasks rather than games, mathematics, etc. The diversity tie-in is this: here in the USA, a sampling of businesspeople working in most any office has a MUCH broader cross-section of the population than Python has now. Any recruits Python gets from such a population would almost certainly broaden us. Also, "secretary" has feminine implications in the U.S., and I wouldn't mind if that led to a female-heavy group of students. So, anyway. I'd love your suggestions (here or as blog comments). Oh, and - this is only one of my many ambitions and responsibilities, which means I'm not even going to get seriously started on it anytime too soon. Please, if you have the passion and the time, STEAL THIS IDEA! I'd love to hitch belatedly onto a train that *you* get going. -- - Catherine http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/ -- - Catherine http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/ *** PyOhio * July 25-26, 2009 * pyohio.org ***

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Django thread from Diversity list
by kirby urner 17 Sep '09

17 Sep '09

Here's a thread from diversity(a)python.org, archived here for easier linking (open archive). The connections to education are multifarious e.g. PBS has web sites for teachers running in Django. Mostly I'm thinking high schools are going to design more around an inhouse intranet (not outsourced) so that year books, school plays, sporting events, all go to a central repository. If it's more like GeoDjango, then you've got some core infrastructure for "place based" education, a theme in my blogs, maybe even with immersive videos ala Google Street Views? The thread itself speaks to the diversity of the Django community, stressing its friendliness and openness to not-Django and not-Python developers. For example we had lots of input from a Smalltalk guy (keynote). As the followup makes clear (by James Bennett, a core player), this is somewhat of a tradition with DjangoConf, and a good one. Some of you will have already seen the below as we have some cross-enrollment. Kirby ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: kirby urner <kirby.urner(a)gmail.com> Date: Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 5:06 PM Subject: Diversity Report from DjangoCon To: diversity(a)python.org <report type="diversity"> Just a quick Diversity Report for readers here.... The 2nd annual Django conference was held here in Portland, Oregon, DoubleTree Hotel at Lloyd's Center (eastside, easy access to downtown by Max light rail). We had lead developers from Australia, UK, and of course Kansas. To the community's lasting credit, "why Django sucks" was an allowed topic at open mic, where we had Armin Ronacher, the Austrian dude behind Werkzeug (not to be confused with Flugtag by Red Bull), very like Django but rather prettier in some ways, now branching into Solace, all about i18n. Gender did not arise as an issue. When I delivered the PSF snake to the core leadership, I handed it off to a tech lead at NASA, Katie Cunningham. In my experience, women show up in the workplace more frequently at higher levels (CHR, CFO...), so as geeks rise in status and clout, they'll naturally encounter more FOSS bosses of the female persuasion, only a matter of time, not really worried about it. What was more remarkable was how open we were to Smalltalk and Perl communities, also Apple's new Sproutcore community, where Ruby is the more used agile in some ways (Sproutcore is still a small project, sorta comet on steroids, has dreams of becoming a Flash killer someday). We didn't see much Microsoft, although I did get Sara Ford's tweets about Codeplex releasing Sperm (don't ask -- it's the right DNA according to Redmond). When it comes to diversity, I think this is where Python really shines: it's a tight design yet a showcase for turn-of-the-millennium great ideas e.g. list comprehensions, special name __ribs__... significant whitespace. In this sense, it's cosmopolitan, like Holland itself (not just Amsterdam). Portland, with aspirations of becoming more like Amsterdam in some ways (i.e. we want our own Paul Treanor maybe? **), is proud to be selected as the conference venue next year as well, same bat time, same bat station, mas o meno. Congratulations to all on a conference well organized. Congrats to Andy McKay in particular, with already well-developed Python muscles from working in Plone, recently back from Kenya and Malawi, where Django is used to switch cell phone text messages regarding children in need of medical attention (the numbers are already improving). Ian Bicking, a keynoter and track talk presenter (virtualenv, pip...), recently back from Buenos Aires, was eager to foster this kind of collaboration with the medical community, nurses especially (they seem open to open source by training i.e. sharing core knowledge in the face of grave needs is a fact of life in that profession). He quoted from Richard Stallman's GNU manifesto, underlining why he'd always liked it (since first encountering it as a teenager, inside of gnu emacs): because it took the bull by the horns. Back to our diversity theme: make room for Harry Potter and the whole DaJango Code lore, fortified castles, opportunities in Europe (not to mention "down under"). I've got more in my blogs, for those curious about the details. http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/09/django-conference-day-1.html http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-from-djangocon.html http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/09/djangocon-day-2.html http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/09/geodjango.html http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/09/djangocon-day-3.html http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-djangocon-talks.html The PSF snake totem (sent by FedEx ground) also made it to PPUG, where the Idealist.org away team was just back from Switzerland instead of the usual Buenos Aires (Jason Kirtland, Michel...). Adam Lowry was also at Djangocon. http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/09/ppug-200998.html http://wiki.python.org/moin/PortlandPythonUserGroup I've continued to pioneer good relations with Middle Eastern players, via Ambassador Tag (written about earlier in this archive), a gender studies professor among other things: http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/09/ppug-200998.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/sets/72157622226456717/ </report> Kirby PS: for those who don't remember my earlier posts, I'm a diverse kinda guy, mostly hang out on edu-sig community list with Sir Laura (diversity resident), Gregor (Vienna circle, manages Python's SL turtle module), Andre (university president in Canada), other characters.... ** http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/index.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: James Bennett <ubernostrum(a)gmail.com> Date: Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 7:04 PM Subject: Re: [Diversity] Diversity Report from DjangoCon To: kirby urner <kirby.urner(a)gmail.com> Cc: diversity(a)python.org A couple of comments and addenda from another participant... On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 7:06 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner(a)gmail.com> wrote: > To the community's lasting credit, "why Django sucks" was an allowed > topic at open mic, where we had Armin Ronacher, the Austrian dude > behind Werkzeug (not to be confused with Flugtag by Red Bull), very > like Django but rather prettier in some ways, now branching into > Solace, all about i18n. FWIW, that's becoming something of a tradition; last year's US DjangoCon established the theme of keynotes by relative outsiders to/critics of the Django community, and I'm glad that this tradition was kept up. Conferences make it far too easy to toot one's own horn, and having smart people around to keep us reality-based is a good thing :) > Gender did not arise as an issue. When I delivered the PSF snake to > the core leadership, I handed it off to a tech lead at NASA, Katie > Cunningham. In one sense I guess it's true that the "issue" did not arise, but by my (unofficial) count the gents of Django outnumbered the ladies roughly 20:1. There were a few new faces, though, which I take as at least somewhat encouraging despite the otherwise dismal gender-canyon ("gap" being too small a word) present at the conference. > I've continued to pioneer good relations with Middle Eastern players, > via Ambassador Tag (written about earlier in this archive), a gender > studies professor among other things: One other multinational item of note: Dimitris Glezos' talk on Transifex, a web-based tool which greatly simplifies the process of collaborating on and contributing to translations of software projects of all sorts. Slides are here: http://djangocon.pbworks.com/f/dc09tx.pdf Finally, it's worth pointing out that DjangoCon had what may be a first for a Python-oriented conference (at least, a first at those I've attended): in the evening after the second full day of the conference, a group of us who'd been hanging out in the hotel lobby before heading downtown were invited out to the adjacent park to witness the wedding of Mark (a developer from NASA) and Ariel, whose surnames I'm not quite certain of at the moment. Once I get in touch with them to find out how they'd like photos of that event to be handled, I hope to get some of them up on Flickr. -- "Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct."

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VPython with Ubuntu 9.04
by kirby urner 13 Sep '09

13 Sep '09

Re: Vpython.org -- installing on Ubuntu Linux 9.04 Jackalope I just received a Starling-1, a kind of OLPA clone of the XO, except black and without the tilt and swivel, mesh networking. OLPA = one laptop per adult (relates to NALB). Photos that relate to this post: http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/sets/72157622351057626/ It's more the classic Ubuntu desktop, a Debian downstream with some value added, customization in particular as with a 10.1" screen, you're wanting something other than a Compiz spinning cube, I'm pretty sure. Comes with Jackalope reinstalled. This unit replaces my Ubuntu Dell laptop, which fried its own motherboard, still has salvageable .py files, some pix. Queued for in-house attention (could mean a long time then). So the VPython install text seems to assume that if you've got enough Linux chops to operate Linux, then it's best to treat you as a developer and walk you through getting the whole source code tree, meaning C++ files, stuff about GTK+, about Boost. Fortunately, the docs tell the 9.04 user specifically which -dev trees to grab off Synaptic, in addition to Boost. Don't forget numpy (that's in Synaptic as well). If you compare these instructions to what people with other versions have to slog through, you might thank your lucky stars (I know I did). I recommend following the provided advice to mkdir in parallel to the folder you get from extracting the bz2 file: Then follow instructions to reach up a level from the newly created empty build directory and down into the neighboring tree i.e. mkdir visual_build cd visual_build ../visual_tree/configure --prefix /usr/local don't use /usr/local/lib as your prefix or you'll get everything in /usr/local/lib/lib/python2.6/site-packages You want to anchor at /usr/local on the standard 9.04 configuration, where site-packages is in /local/lib/python2.6/site-packages. There's an obscure point to copy a .pth file into /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages as well (which I did). Clearly I'm not writing enough to replace the INSTALL.txt here, not my intention. This is more some encouragement to developers wanting to work on a VPython curriculum, still probably Python's best answer to Ruby's quasi-native access to OpenGL. Once I had visual installed and had run some examples, a turned to 4dsolutions.net/ocn/python/hypertoons for my implementation of a randomized network of interconnecting cartoon tunnels (the key frames for the network of switch points, with "tunnels" being animated in-betweening twixt whatever two stations). I found a bug in my rbf.py, which I've mangled over the years, including to put bread on the table at one point. I'll be uploading a fix this evening. Kirby Urner @thekirbster @ It's a Beautiful Pizza Lindsey Walker Show myspace.com/4dstudios http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/09/4d-studios.html

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Another idea of Conway
by Gregor Lingl 13 Sep '09

13 Sep '09

Hi all, on vacation in the Tyrolean Alps one evening I've found the time to implement another (I assume less well known) idea of John Conway. Just for fun. from fractions import Fraction fracs = [Fraction(f) for f in "17/91 78/85 19/51 23/38 29/33 77/29 95/23 77/19 1/17 11/13 13/11 15/14 15/2 55/1".split()] def fracgame(): z = Fraction(2,1) while True: for f in fracs: n = z * f if n.denominator == 1: break yield int(n) z = n def pow2(z): n = 0 while z % 2 == 0: n += 1 z //= 2 return (z == 1) * n def what(): fg = fracgame() while True: z = next(fg) n = pow2(z) if n != 0: yield n what = what() print(next(what)) print(next(what)) # the following will take 1 or 2 minutes ##w = 0 ##while w < 100: ## w = next(what) ## print(w) Comments or discussion may follow when I'm back to Vienna. All the best, Gregor

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casino math, ooops sent this only to Gregor not the list
by Laura Creighton 13 Sep '09

13 Sep '09

In a message of Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:21:12 +0200, Gregor Lingl writes: > >Laura Creighton schrieb: >This pattern does not occur in my sample configuration: > > ( (11, 6, 2, 1), > (11, 10, 4, 1), > ( 9, 2, 6, 3), > ( 9, 4, 8, 3), > ( 7, 12, 10, 5), > ( 7, 12, 2, 5), > ( 5, 8, 4, 7), > ( 5, 6, 12, 7), > ( 3, 10, 8, 9), > ( 3, 2, 6, 9), > ( 1, 4, 10, 11), > ( 1, 8, 12, 11), > (13, 13, 13, 13), > (), > () ) > >it has only even ranks in the second and third column, occurring >pairwise in these columns, and odd ranks in the fourth one. I don't think that it is a matter of being dealt them, sorry to be unclear. I think you may have to make them and then break them. So now it is not clear to me if your algorithm handles that. >I do not have a special algorithm to solve Pile On, but only search >the game tree using backtracking. Normally that gets out of hand. >The point is that I believe to have found one *special* layout that >can be investigated completely by hand, because due to its >symmetries there occurs only a very limited set of possible moves. Indeed, and thank you very much for it! :-) >I think, that still some labour is needed to retrace my arguments. >But if you are convinced (or only strongly believe) that I am wrong, >you have an easier way to proof it: simply solve the configuration >given above (and possibly show me, that resolving those patterns >you displayed above is needed to do so.) Yes indeed, and while I am quite busy this week, I will try to do so. Right now I am trying to hack PySOL-FC so that you can input a starting configuration of cards, and also save each state change so that you can replay a game that you have won. But today is not a day for hacking for me, so this will take me a while to do. >Very thrilling! Glad to know the problem is keeping somebody else up thinking about it too! :) Best, Laura > >Regards, >Gregor ------- End of Forwarded Message

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Re: [Edu-sig] casino math (unit three) (Saturday night fever)
by Gregor Lingl 13 Sep '09

13 Sep '09

Laura Creighton schrieb: > I have to think about this more, but on a very quick first reading it > seems that you have missed a strategy that I have needed in order to > solve some tough PileOn games. > > And that is breaking up groups of 2 or 3 that you already have built, or > dealt. Given these 3 piles to start with > > A B X X > C D X E > F G X B > (and then some more) > This pattern does not occur in my sample configuration: ( (11, 6, 2, 1), (11, 10, 4, 1), ( 9, 2, 6, 3), ( 9, 4, 8, 3), ( 7, 12, 10, 5), ( 7, 12, 2, 5), ( 5, 8, 4, 7), ( 5, 6, 12, 7), ( 3, 10, 8, 9), ( 3, 2, 6, 9), ( 1, 4, 10, 11), ( 1, 8, 12, 11), (13, 13, 13, 13), (), () ) it has only even ranks in the second and third column, occurring pairwise in these columns, and odd ranks in the fourth one. (The thirteenth row is out of the game) So initially there are no three equal ranks in the third column and no X occurring in the second or third column can appear in the fourth. > the correct way to solve things may be to put E and B in the empty > slots, take one X from the first pile and put it on the second > and take the other and put it on the third. Then move the B > from the empty slot back to pile one. This also does not occur in my initial configuration, as some B in the fourth column can only reappear in the first one and not in the second one. One (ond only one) move combining a seven from the first column with two sevens from the fourth one appears in my proof of non-solvability of this layout. > The same thing has also > been needed when piles are > > A X X B Also this pattern does not occur: each row has only two different even ranks. Of course only an a bit closer investigation (as discribed in my pevious posting) shows that these patterns also do not occur during the game. > > as well. > > Does your algorithm handle that, or does it assume that things that > are stuck together belong together? No this is not assumed. I do not have a special algorithm to solve Pile On, but only search the game tree using backtracking. Normally that gets out of hand. The point is that I believe to have found one *special* layout that can be investigated completely by hand, because due to its symmetries there occurs only a very limited set of possible moves. I think, that still some labour is needed to retrace my arguments. But if you are convinced (or only strongly believe) that I am wrong, you have an easier way to proof it: simply solve the configuration given above (and possibly show me, that resolving those patterns you displayed above is needed to do so.) Very thrilling! Regards, Gregor > > Laura > >

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