Monthly Archives: June 2009

# PyMT

Posted by Eric Shull on June 29, 2009 3 comments

Tom has been skeptical of Python (I’ve never figured out why), but I now have something to change his mind. Last week I stumbled across PyMT, a cryptic name in which the last two letters stand for one of Tom’s favorite subjects: multi-touch.

PyMT is in version 0.2 and it’s built on pyglet. There’s one tutorial that shows how easy it is to create a GUI with PyMT.

The one thing I’d like to do is get rid of the red dot that appears on clicking. It’s meant to indicate a finger pushing on a multi-touch surface, but it would be nice to be able to make some simple apps without having a giant pimple appear under the cursor whenever one clicks. That said, the multi-touch capabilities are pretty impressive for v0.2

Update: There are some videos demonstrating the software. My personal favorite is the first one featuring the Dell XT2. Having a tablet (albeit not multi-touch), I could get some good out of the 36 lines of code running the app in the demo.

# Override decorator

Posted by Eric Shull on June 24, 2009 None comments

While working with pyglet one day, I made the mistake of subclassing the window class and overriding the __init__ method, which prevented the window from showing. To fix this, it’s easy enough to add a call to super(Window, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs), but I went a different route. Here’s a decorator called override that puts it in for you:

def override(function):
    def wrapper(instance, *args, **kwargs):
        super(instance.__class__, instance).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        return function(instance, *args, **kwargs)
    return wrapper

To use it, simply use the decorator notation in a subclassed method:

class MyWindow(pyglet.window.Window):
    @override
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        # code goes here, no need to call super!

Trying out a new theme! – ASCII-One by OddWebThings.com

Posted by Tom Schultz on June 20, 2009 None comments

Well, we discussed changing the site theme a few weeks ago and everyone seemed in favor of this one, so here it is! Thanks to SmashingMagazine.com for posting about this cool theme and of course thanks to the creators at OddWebThings.com or making it in the first place!

Also, just an fyi for people is that we hope to be switching domains in the future.

Pointlessrants.com currently mirrors our blog but we want to drop daspecster.com completely.  We’ll notify you when we start makin changes!

No Crossfire Bridge? C’mon…

Posted by decoy on June 13, 2009 1 comments

I recently ordered parts to build a new tower.  Part of my order included two ATI Radeon 4870‘s and a motherboard that supported Crossfire.  When I came to the moment of truth when I was going to link the cards with the Crossfire bridges, I realized that all of the bridges that I had laying around were for SLI.  The motherboard that supported Crossfire and SLI came with two different SLI bridges and no Crossfire bridges.  Both of the Radeons came without Crossfire bridges as well.  If it wasn’t for NewEgg selling lone Crossfire bridges (for ridiculous prices), I would be up the creek.

At any rate, I feel like I’ve been cheated.  I recently switched over to ATI.  While I was still an nVidia fan, the cards (and motherboards) always came with SLI bridges.  Why isn’t this the case with ATI?

Have you had a different experience?

Podcast Episode #7 – Search Giants

Posted by Tom Schultz on June 11, 2009 None comments

Hey, we’re behind again! But I think we had a good podcast.  We are introducing a new member of the pointless rants team, Ben, who’s also in the IT field.

Topics:

  • Serverfault.com
  • Google Wave/app engine
  • Microsoft Bing.com
  • Pointless Rants!
Pointless Rants Episode #7 [ 40:57 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thumb Drive Power

Posted by Eric Shull on June 8, 2009 1 comments

When I started my summer internship about a month ago, I bought a thumb drive to use with the typically locked-down corporate workstation. I wanted to experiment with portable programs to see what I could to enhance my productivity. It’s been interesting, but by far the most useful tool is PortablePython, which installs directly on the thumb drive. It comes packaged with more than I’ve installed on my personal computer. I’ve used it to automate a number of tasks, using Launchy to call batch files that run Python scripts which do text manipulation. I also found a pretty cool extension called SendKeys which is a remake of an old VB script that sends keystrokes to the system.

What do you do with your thumb drive to make yourself more productive?

Excel 2007 with Multiple Monitors

Posted by decoy on June 2, 2009 2 comments

I’ve been added as a writer to this blog for a few weeks now, but I haven’t had a great idea for a first post.  I was at work today when I realized I should probably share a trick that I discovered to avoid one of my largest Microsoft pet peeves.

If you open multiple Excel files, by default the files will exist in one Excel instance.  You can’t view the files on different screens.  I’m sure this saves on resources by using shared code, but I’d prefer to spend the resources for usability.  By editing the Excel file extension actions, you can change this poor behavior.

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