You build a nice big room-sized cage, and in one end of it you put five monkeys. In the other end you put the banana. Then you stand by with the fire hose. Sooner or later one of the monkeys is going to go after the banana, and when it does you turn on the fire hose and spray the other monkeys with it. Replace the banana if needed, then repeat the process. Monkeys are pretty smart, so they’ll figure this out pretty quickly: “If anybody goes for the banana, the rest of us get the hose.” Soon they’ll attack any member of their group who tries to go to the banana.

Once this happens, you take one monkey out of the cage and bring in a new one. The new monkey will come in, try to make friends, then probably go for the banana. And the other monkeys, knowing what this means, will attack him to stop you from using the hose on them. Eventually the new monkey will get the message, and will even start joining in on the attack if somebody else goes for the banana. Once this happens, take another of the original monkeys out of the cage and bring in another new monkey.

After repeating this a few times, there will come a moment when none of the monkeys in the cage have ever been sprayed by the fire hose; in fact, they’ll never even have seen the hose. But they’ll attack any monkey who goes to get the banana. If the monkeys could speak English, and if you could ask them why they attack anyone who goes for the banana, their answer would almost certainly be: “Well, I don’t really know, but that’s how we’ve always done things around here.”

Full post:

http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/dec/05/python-3000/

The only thing thats clear is that when you know you should be doing work – you end up on facebook. (of course, Im reffering to facebook most often for random reasons, you can substitute it with checking your email, randomly browsing the Internet, watching youtube clips, visiting social bookmarking sites, and i don’t have to tell you that the list goes on and on. But facebook is a good example in this case). So why is browsing the Internet so addicting? Why is it that instead of doing work, programming for example; something that’s lots of fun but hard (usually, or at least at first) to start, we end up going to facebook? An obvious reasoning would be that we are just very curious to see what changed since we last visited (1 min ago) and what your friends posted, updated, and etc, even if you are not very interested. You feel helpless to resist this certain curiosity which forces you to keep checking or else you feel unsatisfied. It becomes a second nature, and you might not even be aware of doing it. The worst part about it is that when you are done somehow so many hours passed, but you didnt even do anything! There must be a reason for this, surly? Maybe understanding this reason would help us think of ways to overcome it?

This does make sense from an evolutionary point of view, however. Imagine that you are a primitive human-being and are in a forest. It is most beneficial for you to know exactly whats going on around you, and keeping track of movements all over the forest will definitely help you survive. This would make sense, all those small updated on the news feed on facebook are like the movement and actions of those around you in a forest. And you feel this great curiosity to keep checking it, which leaves you unsatisfied if you don’t.

This seems like a reasonable reason. However it’s not very clear how to solve it, but knowing the reason might make it easier for us to take action. There is a difference between knowing it, and realizing it.

Why exactly is repetitively spending time on the Internet bad? The obvious reason is that it interferes with studies, work, and everything else. But there is more to it than that. Have you ever noticed how when you are browsing the Internet time passes very quickly? And you always feel like you did not do anything at all….just checked a few websites…and many hours seemed to pass by. This is burning time. I mean, what kind of fun is it, when you spend a huge amount of time doing something which doesn’t give you anything, doesn’t improve you in anyway, and you have no memory of doing it! It significantly shortens a person life, because time spent online passes very quickly. If you try to stop using your computer at all for even a day, you will suddenly notice that you have a great deal of time, perhaps it will be very surprising, and you will actually be able to think of stuff and enjoy living.

These are the reasons as to why i think that spending time online (doing nothing, basically) is very bad, and above i explained a possible reason as to why it might be so addicting.

Ive been thinking about how to make a popular blog. It’s not a very easy question, and may require a little bit of luck to get right. I’ve seen some python blogs before, but not many that are simple and aimed at bigginner- middle class programmers. The very first idea that crossed my mind was; a blog about recent events on the internet. Surly people visit the internet alot, and spend alot of time on it. No matter how you look at it, such a blog would have succssess as the internet is rapidly changing and new news, posts, events, updates are constantly happening. The downside to such a blog would be simple, however. There are far too many social sites, or even bloggy-news sites which are quite big, and rapidly add any new information about a certain general topic (IT related things for example). And social bookmarking sites such as digg and reddit also tend to have the same effect, or even, a better approach than a global-internet-blog.

So, what other options are there? How can a good blog be done?

Perhaps it is better to write blog about a very specific topic, one that is not extreamly mainstream, but that will attract the attention of a group of people. Granted, such a blog would never become word famous but it might have great succsses if it’s done good.

What other options are there? Looking at the recent popular and fastest growing wordpress blogs at the moment we’ll see a list that looks something like: LOLcats, fail blog, news blogs, and etc. What does this mean? what do people want to read from blogs?

Blogs are all about getting information out there from a person, which is constantly (maybe even daily) updated. People could read blogs for several reasons such as; the topic is just interesting to them, they want to learn about new things, keep up with a certain product (a companies blog), or read about other people thoughts.

I must admit that i do not have any super-awesome conclusion to make of all this, just some interesting ideas and observations that ive been having.

Tags: blog ideas, blogging, blogs, how to make a good blog, ideas, interesting, internet, python, super-awesome, what to do, wordpress

• official url: http://pymedia.org/

After some googling you’ll be able to install it (it’s not available for apt-get but it’s not very hard!)
pymedia can be used to parse, demultiplex, multiplex, decode and encode many of it’s supported formats, such as wav, mp3, ogg….etc.

Here’s some code I edited from the tutorial to show you the main idea for audio:

import pymedia.muxer as muxer, pymedia.audio.sound as sound, \
      pymedia.audio.acodec as acodec

class playsong:
      def__init__(self, sName):
           self.sName = sName
           splt = str.split(self.sName, ‘.’)[-1].lower()
           dm = muxer.Demuxer(splt)
           print ‘format = %s’ % splt
           f = open(self.sName, ‘rb’)
           s = f.read(8192)
           frames = dm.parse(s)
           song_data = dm.getHeaderInfo()
           for info_type in song_data:
                print ‘%-10s :%s’ % (info_type, song_data[info_type])
           if frames:
                for fr in frames:
                     dec = acodec.Decoder(dm.streams[fr[0]])
                     r = dec.decode(s)
                     print self.sName, ‘playing…’
           snd = sound.Output(r.sample_rate, r.channels, sound.AFMT_S16_LE)
           while len(s):
                if r:
                     snd.play(r.data)
                s = f.read(512)
                r = dec.decode(s)

if __name__ == “__main__”:
      p = playsong(“INSERT FILENAME HERE”)

This is it! With this you can play your music.
All you need to do is insert a filename instead of the (quite obvious) INSERT FILENAME HERE place. The first part of the code figures out it’s extension (splt) then it passes it through some parameters and some of the data gets parsed by the decoder. Then, when it finally has enough data a snd parameter gets defined and a final loop is created which reads and plays the whole file.

As you can see, pymedia is capable of all the needed audio processing, and video too (I might put something up about that later)
I will definitely work with it a bit, it would be nice to combine it with a GUI such as pyGTK to form a player of some sorts
I’ll keep you updated on any new/interesting usages of pymedia/interesting topics.

A common example is factorial.

If we write a function which returns the factorial of an input (n) it will look like this:

def factorial(n):
      if n == 0:
           return 1
      else:
           return n * factorial(n-1)

This is a recursive function. First, it checks if the input is equal to 0. If it is, the output will be 1. If however it is not, then the function returns n * factorial(n-1) which is calculated by factorial(n-1). This process keeps on going until what the function needs to calculate is factorial(x) where x = 0. In which case it will return 1.

Try it out youself:

>>>factorial(5)

120

>>>factorial(100)

3628800

Some great online (easy to find, with a google search) tutorials are:

pyGTK 2.0 Tutorial by John Finlay

• http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/index.html

And the pyGTK docs (mostly useful for widget references)

• http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/index.html

Socket coding in python isnt very complicated. There are several things to keep in mind.

First, we set up a server. A server is accepts connections from clients. A client is another file which has similar code, but it is what connects to the server.

Here is how to set up a server (there are two types of sockets, STREAM, and DGRAM. I wont go in detail on their difference but i’ll be using the STREAM in all my code examples as it’s the best option for 98% of the time):

from socket import *

s = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)

port=  2000

s.bind((‘localhost’, port))

s.listen(5)

client, ap = s.accept()

So, what happend here? it’s mostly self explanatory  but i’ll go  over it. First we import the socket module. Then define s so be the socket, the port to be 2000 (could be any number, as long as it’s 4 digits, and the same in both server and client codes). After that we bind the server to a host and port. In this example the host is ‘localhost’ which is lan network connection (the sockets only send info on your local internet connection, so they are not ‘online’). also empty quotes are the same thing, ”.

with s.listen(5) the server listens for client connections, and with client, ap = s.accept() we define client and ap to be the information on the client which was accepted by the server. (the server pauses and waits for a connection).

——–client code

The client code is set up like this:

from socket import *

c = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)

host = ‘localhost’

port = 2000

c.connect((host, port))

What happend here? again, mostly self-explanatory (and very similar to the server code) but i’ll go over it.

We import the socket module, then define c to be a socket, again using localhost and the same port as the server (2000). With c.connect((host,port)) the client tries to connect to the server with such info (the host and port).

This is it! pretty simple. Now, once the client has connected to the server you can use some other commands like

client.send(‘..’) to send something and client.recv(‘….’) to wait until something is received.

Sockets are mostly used in Instant Messengers (Might make a post about those, one day).

It’s a great place to check for python code/tutorials and other interesting topics, of course!

Mostly python-oriented, I hope this blog will be an interesting one to browse for python beginners to more advanced users! and just to check out some interesting topics and ideas.

If you ever have any suggestions for content, or want to submit some awesome python code, you can always message me at root4is2@gmail.com and i’ll gladly put it up.

I hope you’ll like what you see!