Moderate Realism

Just saw a tweet from Rene saying that he’d enjoyed last night’s Dojo at Fry-IT. I did, too, and for much the same reasons: the small group format makes for a more engaged, friendlier evening. We were carrying on with our not-so-spectacular text adventure game built in previous weeks. Altho’ there had been discussion about different groups working on separate pieces which would then come together, I think our eventual choice for all groups to work on the same thing was the right one. As Nicholas — Dojo organiser and former teacher :) — pointed out (correctly): if you’ve all been working on the same piece of code and the same structures, it’s much easier to follow the show-and-tell at the end.

In the spirit of previous Dojos, which had been very much led by TDD-aware people, I’d got all test-y in our group and we spent way more time in generating meaningful tests than launching into functional code. (As well as reworking the crufty parser which everyone had to cope with). As far as I can tell, *none* of the other groups were testing. Just goes to show… testing really does slow you down for no nett gain ;)

It was definitely interesting to see the different styles & approaches adopted by the different groups. As well as their attitude to the source material: most were “respectful” of the descriptions and objects supplied (by Bruce & John) but others simply hacked them about to suit their requirements. And one off-the-wall group simply made up their own thing, generating random monsters doing random things. As far as I could tell.

Although this format worked well, I think varying from time to time is good — as we have been doing — not least because different approaches suit different people and we want people to keep coming! Thanks as always to Nicholas and Fry-IT for organising / hosting / feeding. Pictures are up here. (Apparently that site’s Django driven, in case it makes you any more likely to click on the link…)

Not uncommonly, I suspect, Python was introduced here at work in stealth mode: it wasn’t on the list of products starting with “MS” which we genreally use, but it got the job done and the management has been pragmatic enough to accept its use to the extent that it’s now installed on the baseline image for company PCs and laptops.

So what do we do with it? Well, a surprising amount when I start to enumerate it. As is often the case, quite a few of the uses are of the “glue” style: creating an easy bridge between two other pieces of software, one of which is often the operating system. As an example I years ago wrote a (tiny) piece of code to enumerate the installed printers and pipe them out to a file. Our in-house business app calls the Python and picks up the result to display to the user as a pick list. That’s just one example among many others, some of which are so small that I tend to forget that they exist until some bizarre corner case arises which means I have to revisit the code. They just work and go on working.

A by no means exhaustive list of Python Pieces off the top of my head:

* That list of printers
* The startup wrapper for our main business app
* sql2xl — provider of data to the masses (and indirectly responsible for a world of Frankensheets, I’m afraid).
* Sales Boards - our Pygame-driven availability-visualisation app
* reports - a compact module combining simple dialogs and sql2xl
* screengrabber - capture parts of the screen to save to the database
* imageviewer - simple pygame-based image display
* convert images provided by our customers to thumbnails and place them on a replicating database for our handheld scanners
* convert a batch of Word docs to PDF & PCL
* simple manipulation of DXF maps to add our internal site ids
* absolutely loads of occasional AD / filesystem / WMI scripts for the sysadmins
* the internal contacts / portraits webpage
* web-based password reset for our HR system
* web front-end, mail ingest and alerting (a la Roundup, I admit) for our Helpdesk system

.. and a whole slew of other stuff which pretty much exists to demonstrate just how versatile Python is :)

For a long time I’ve not been able to give my active_directory module the attention it’s needed, in spite of several people helpfully providing patches to, eg, escape slashes in monikers, bind to the Global Catalog and do other useful things. However… the need to do various things with it at work plus some questions from interested users has resulted in a flurry of housekeeping and — hopefully — improvements. It’s not done yet but, assuming I can sustain the effort, you should see the result in a few days time.

As with much of my stuff, the functionality I implement and the time I spend on it is largely a function of what the sysadmins here at work want me to for them (and how much else I can squeeze in at the same time). Just at the moment there are several initiatives to claw back wasted disc space and do other housekeeping exercises. So I get to allocate some time to my projects. Let’s see how long it lasts…