Since my last posting,  Christmas and New Years happened… *sigh*. As much as I enjoy the time off (haha, we all know a university student never gets time off), I hate having those “what have you been up to?” conversations with friends that lets face it, I don’t have time to talk to every week. Why can’t they just follow me on twitter? haha.

Anyway, I’ve had a recent techy upgrade. I don’t often treat myself with larger items, I tend to spend most of my money on spur of the moment purchases or spending time with my friends however since I’m finally getting back into the swing of working full time (it’s only taken 10 weeks). I find myself with extra cash, my first purchase was a lovely 23″ monitor (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/23-Digimate-L-2362WD-Black-Wide-Full-HD-1080P-VGA-DVI-1920×1080-10001-300cd-m-5-ms-Speakers), it is very nice and replaced one of the screens I had before. I then got another for christmas from my parents, which completed the set.

My desk is messy in this picture, this is how is always is. I live at this desk for around 10 hours a day, It’s not great but it’s my student life. Whenever I see any of the workspace pictures on lifehacker, I always wonder how these people have the time to keep their desks to clear. Mine is usually got paper and books all over it. It really could use some re-organisation at some point.

What else has happened? Well I’ve been working on my courseworks, I’ve currently handed in 2 of the 3 that are in before the exams and one of those was my third year project progress report. For those of you interested, this document gives the markers an idea of how far we have gotten in 10 weeks. We include initial designs, gantt charts etc as well as literary review. Mine was a little too long :s, I wrote 10 pages of text… which is not approximately 3000 words as the specification said. Oh well, I hope my supervisor enjoys the read.

Finally, as anyone in the UK or knows anyone in the UK knows. We’ve had snow! It’s really not as great as people made out… university was closed today because there was supposed to be a big storm last night. Luckily it’s starting to thaw and won’t snow again any time soon.

Darius Out!

I’ve been learning some python over the last few weeks, thought I would give it coding a Openbox Pipe Menu a go. It’s not very useful and some of the guys in the Crunchbang Forums helped me to fix my bugs. Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/env python -W ignore::DeprecationWarning
import sys
import cgi
import twitter

if __name__ == "__main__":
 twit = twitter.Api(username="", password="")
 status = twit.GetFriendsTimeline()
 print "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>"
 print "<openbox_pipe_menu>"
 print"    <separator label=\"Twitter\" />"

 for u in status:
    tweet = u.text
    tweet = tweet.replace("\"", "'")
    tweet = tweet.encode("utf-8")
    tweet = cgi.escape(tweet)

    print "    <menu id=\"%s\" label=\"%s\">" % (u.id, tweet)
    print "        <item label=\"View Tweet\"><action name=\"Execute\"> <execute>firefox http://twitter.com/%s/status/%s\ </execute> </action> </item>" % ( cgi.escape(u.user.screen_name), u.id)
    print "        <item label=\"Tweet by %s\" />" % (cgi.escape(u.user.name))
    print "        <item label=\"%s\" />" % (cgi.escape(u.relative_created_at))
    print "    </menu>"

 print "</openbox_pipe_menu>"
 sys.exit(0)

I don’t suggest you make use of it, this is the alpha version but I intend to add some conversation thread and caching into it at some point. I’m also learning some perl but I haven’t really made anything other than programs to test things.

I’ll try and post something tomorrow, after all the site is called Wednesday Morning.

Darius