We have a new mascot for the project: Rockie the Flying Squirrel Cat

Rockie, Our New Mascot

There are currently 2 flavours of Ad-positioner in process.

• ad-positioner_0.3.0 is available here, until we use so much bandwidth that my webhost complains, at which point we have to figure out how to put it up on sourceforge. 0.3.0 uses EasyGUI
• ad-positioner_0.2.0 is available here. 0.2.0 is command-line python.

This is not as unsafe as you might imagine, because I have got index pages in all these directories.  For instance: http://sourcefreedom.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ shows that index page.

Here is a view of the first dialog of the script.  Click on it to see a full-sized version.

The current py-script opens a cute set of dialogs, but it doesn’t do a whole lot yet… current-flow is a pdf to show you what is planned.

More info soon..

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If you are interested in reviewing the tutorial or you are a beginner and want to start learning python, email me at wolf (at) sourcefreedom.com.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# keymaster.py
password="xul"
password2="moo"
answer=""
# Loop around forever (until the break statement is used)
while password2==password2:
# Ask the user for the password
answer = raw_input("\nI am the gatekeeper. Are you the Keymaster?\nIf you are the Keymaster, enter the key: -> " )
# Read in what they type, and put in it $answer
# If the answer is the password, break out of the while loop
if answer == password:
break
if answer == password2:
print '''

ascii art cow

....\"Have you mooed today?\"...
.... \"I am a Little Cow!\n\"...'''
print "\nMoo? Moo??! \nI asked if you were the Keymaster, not the CowMaster!!\nThe keymaster would never say \"",answer,".\" \nGo and find the keymaster! \nDon't come grazing around here until you do!\n\n"
# If they get to here, they must really be the Keymaster,
# and not just a little cow
# otherwise the script would keep looping
print "\nWelcome Keymaster.\nWe must make the way ready for the return of Xul!"
The three possible outputs look like this

outputs of keymaster.py

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I discovered easygui at http://easygui.sourceforge.net today. It will probably take some more study, but I believe it answers the question well enough. My course is only eleven weeks long, and there just isn’t time to learn a whole programming language in that time. There certainly isn’t time to do it and at the same time cover all the logical basics we are tasked to cover.

Just as a quick example, I ran part of their tutorial, and changed it around to be more entertaining to me.  This was extremely simple to figure out and I think it will be much more rewarding for a beginner than what I am currently teaching, where the most graphical element is the turtle module.

The steps:

1. First you have to go to http://easygui.sourceforge.net and get the newest version of easygui for your version of Python.  Because easygui is itself a python script, you should be able to get it to work well regardless of what operating system you are using.  I am using Ubuntu 9.10.  My editor of choice is Kate.  Kate is the default text editor on the KDE desktop environment.  If you are on a Windows machine, you can use Idle, which comes bundled with Python, or you might consider getting Notepad++, which is a free high-functionality replacement for notepad.exe.

2. Once you have downloaded and uncompressed easygui, you need to put it somewhere in your PATH where Python can find it. The creator of EasyGUI suggests putting it in your Python site-packages directory.

On Windows, the site-packages folder is typically

C:\pythonXX\Lib\site-packages

For Python version 2.6, for example, the site-packages folder is

C:\python26\Lib\site-packages

The Ubuntu Linux location changed between Python version 2.5 and version 2.6.

• For version 2.5 it is: /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages
• For version 2.6 it is: /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages

Before you can put anything into the dist-packages directory, you will probably have to do:

sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages

I found I had to use sudo to put the file in the dist-packages directory, even with the directory permissions adjusted. 755 means the owner can read, write to or execute the file, while others can only read and execute. That means I had to be root to move the file into that directory. I used the cp command to place the easygui.py file in the folder.

sudo cp /home/wolf/Documents/Projects/py-proj/easygui.py /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages

3. Once that is done, you can check the installation by typing the following in the Python Interactive window:

>>>import easygui
>>>easygui.egdemo()

You can also do it this way, if you don’t want to use the dotted notation…

>>>from easygui import *
>>>egdemo()

This will bring up a GUI window with examples of all the possible EasyGUI modules. Using the latter import structure makes your own source code shorter. You will not have to mention the imported module over and over. The former import syntax helps make it plain where the functionality is coming from, but requires a lot of extra typing.

EasyGUI Modules - egdemo() -

4. I copied the first example from the EasyGUI tutorial link and adjusted the indentations to 4 spaces, which is standard on my system.  I then changed the dialog’s wording to make it more entertaining. I used triple-quotes ”’ to get the line-breaks where I wanted them, because hard returns inside triple-quotes do not break the string.  Inside single or double quotes, a hard return will break the string, and cause a traceback error. Triple-quotes are made by hitting the single-quote key 3 times.

Kate window

Feel free to change things around, when you run this exercise.  You don’t have to use the topic of Ice Cream, for instance…

The first window used to be a “Hello World” window. It appears in the code shown in the Kate window at about line five. I changed it to say more about the program.

1st easyGUI dialog

The second dialog, I created by copying the first and changing the info between the triple-quotes. The code starts on line ten. Notice that the triple-quoted text doesn’t follow the indentation rules at all. It is all the way to the left.

Second EasyGUI Dialog

The third dialog is a list of Ice Cream flavors. The choices apear in the code at around line 18, and are in no particular order. I added a few flavors, also in no particular order. In the outputted dialog they show in alphabetical order, even though the list is not alphabetical.

Pick-List Dialog

The next dialog comes from line 23, where a single line in the code can make a whole GUI dialog. It ffirming your choice of flavor.

The final dialog, from line 27 in the code, allows you to escape “Cancel” or run the program again, “Continue.”

This took just a few minutes to do and has given me ideas for all sorts of ways the basic CLI Python exercises could be more fun.

1. having a way to announce a winner in the event that somebody actually gets three of a kind. 
2. making some graphical effect in the CLI world.

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