Laptop diaries XII, Python

I wrote my first Python program over the weekend. The program determines if the file system is in jeopardy of bursting and sends a text. I have copied this in full to this blog as while the implementation technology is defunct, the problem remains real, although IFTTT are doing a good job of solving it. How to perform a mail to text is not documented here. It’s mainly about using associative arrays and dictionaries …

Building a Yahoo MapApp

This article is a pointer to my original one on the sun/oracle blog. I wrote up how to build a Yahoo maps application. The idea was to build a map showing the approximate location of members of a group for the purposes of planning meetings. The date should be noted and that using Yahoo didn’t seem that odd at the time; it’s been replaced in market and mind share as the programmatic map application by google and privacy implications are much higher. This item is as much a technology diary as anything else.

ooOOOoo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished here in April 2016, the screenshots are missing from both, if I wish to restore them, I’ll need to put them on the wiki. …

Some musings on programming languages

Over the last few days, I bumped into Tim Bray, (well, more accurately arranged to meet him). Somehow or other we got onto scripting, had a chat about languages and purpose. I’ve been mucking around with TCL/TK over the last few years and struggling to make it look right under my Linux builds. (The Laptop Diaries series may get there when I return to it). I reflected Tim’s view that TCL had probably missed its adoption window to Mike Ramchand, and he showed me ‘zenity’, which he uses to build the GUI for his dynamic system configurator. (‘zentity’ is part of Sun’s S10 Gnome distribution, although not its not on my Red Hat build.). Its obvious that I’m going to have to move on. Frankly, I should find perl or python easier than tcl; I started with COBOL and now use SQL or shell. …