BenCrowder.net » Python

Pedigree chart sharing

Ben — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:10:24 +0000

I needed a web app to share pedigree charts with my sister on the other side of the country, so I wrote one. It’s called Pedigree, and all I have to do now is fill in the chart online, save it, and send the URL to my sister.

Here’s what the pedigree looks like:

You can put anything you want in the boxes, actually, which means you can do family pedigree charts that look like this:

Or you can make a chart listing each person’s occupation, or their age at death, or whatever else you want. It’s flexible.

Pedigree is still very much a work in progress — you can only do three-generation charts for now, and all pedigree charts are public to anyone who knows the URL, you need a Google Account to sign in, and the code isn’t very beautiful — but hey, it’s a start. :)

Behind the scenes

I took those table-based pedigree charts I worked on a few years ago and wrote a Python program to automatically generate them, then expanded it into a Google App Engine app yesterday.

Interlude: Python is beautiful. PHP, not so much. I’ve been spoiled. Python is elegant and beautiful and a joy to code in. (Ditto for Ruby.)

Second interlude: I spent two days trying to get web.py working on my Bluehost server, with no luck. I ended up switching to Linode, but more on that in a later post.

Third interlude: Google App Engine is sweet. I’m liking it and plan to use it for some future projects.

So, the Pedigree code is open source (public domain, actually) and is on Github. If anyone wants to help out, feel free to tackle any of the issues posted there. (I also feel compelled to add that the chart display algorithm isn’t particularly beautiful. I cringe when I see it, but it works.)

I do plan to extend it eventually to take JSON or XML input so you can automatically generate a pedigree from another program, rather than having to type it in manually. And I want to come up with a better manual input method. (The current one feels a little clunky.)

Whither from here?

I’ll continue designing Beyond, of course, but I’m also very intrigued by this idea of small, separate tools to get the job done — the Unix philosophy. We’ll see what else comes of that. (And who knows, maybe that’ll end up being the right way to build Beyond.)

Flash in the pan

Ben — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 05:24:47 +0000

It’s been a while. :) So, I ended up buying a Mac Mini, and last week I upgraded the RAM to 2 gigs so I’m sitting pretty well right now. (With the original 512 megs the Mini had at first, things were dog slow, especially when I tried to run Photoshop or InDesign. But now it’s quite fast. I am happy. :))

In other news, at work I’ve been coding a board game in Flash. It’s effectively my first Flash project ever (years and years ago I edited a company map in Flash, but it was so long ago that I can hardly remember it, and I was only maintaining it, so it doesn’t really count). Flash is smooth. I’m not completely satisfied with ActionScript, but it certainly works well enough, and I’m sure more experience with it will make it better. Overall, my time with Flash has been good and fun.

Finally, I’m hoping to get back into more Ruby/Python/Perl coding before too long. My new job’ll require some XML magic, for which I’ll probably use Python and XSLT. And in my typographical work on the side I’ll be doing a lot with TeX and either Ruby or Python.

All of which is to say, hopefully I’ll start blogging here more often. :)

Goodbye, OpenLaszlo

Ben — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 23:56:13 +0000

After a month of OpenLaszlo, I’ve had enough. Coding in XML just isn’t my style, I’m afraid. (And yes, I know you do half the coding in JavaScript, but that doesn’t change anything.) I don’t think that means XML-based programming languages are inferior or anything like that — if I spent more time wrapping my head around OpenLaszlo, I could probably feel better about it (or I’d have one heck of a sore head). But I don’t have that kind of time. Nor was I getting enough of a “coolness” factor, the way I do when I work with Lisp. This experiment leads me to suspect that I probably wouldn’t like Flex much, either.

So, I’m going back to the basics. Simplicity is good, and so I’ve taken the app I’m working on and pared it down as far as possible. So far, in fact, that I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to do the whole thing with Javascript, HTML, and CSS, with a web service providing a connection to the server (written in ASP.NET most likely, though I’d prefer Python and may end up going that route), and anything else in Python. I might use MochiKit or Dojo to make the Javascript end easier to code, but I’m not sure yet if I really need it. (Why not Rails? Well, the server is unfortunately a Windows box running IIS, and I’ve heard that Rails doesn’t perform all that well on IIS. I wish I could get the server moved to Linux, but that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, Python is still very nice to work with, and I haven’t caught wind of any performance issues with it on IIS.)

At any rate, this stack feels a lot better. When I was working with OpenLaszlo, I felt like I was in a straitjacket. Not much fun. Or “open.” (Again, keep in mind that these are subjective impressions; who knows, maybe OpenLaszlo is your style.)

In the meantime, I’m reading Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp and liking it.

[tags]OpenLaszlo, Flex, Javascript, XML, Lisp, Python, MochiKit, Dojo, Paul Graham[/tags]

Something is rotten in Redmond

Ben — Mon, 01 May 2006 13:54:20 +0000

Here at work we use ASP.NET, doing most of our coding in VB.NET. After a year and half of this, can I just say that I feel like VB.NET is rotting my brain? Sure, it’s a real language, but the more I use it the dumber I feel, like I’m not really programming at all. On the other hand, when I code in Python or Perl or Ruby (not that I’ve done all that much coding in any of these, but I’m starting to), I feel smarter. Is this just an anti-Microsoft emotional reflex, or is there something to it? I don’t know. I doubt it’s actually anti-Microsoft, because C# feels like more of a real language (and I can’t really say anything about it because I haven’t looked at it at all).

Regardless, I do know that I’d much rather code in Ruby or Python than in VB. Life is precious — why punish oneself? Oh, yeah, because that’s what everything runs on at work. ~sigh~ It’d be nice to convert everything over to Ruby on Rails, but alas, it’s probably not going to happen here.

[tags]ASP.NET, VB.NET, Python, Perl, Ruby, Ruby on Rails[/tags]

Brain candy

Ben — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:36:09 +0000

Last night I stayed up late reading Learning Python. Most of it was ordinary programming stuff — “This is a function” — but here are the three things that got me excited and almost gave me goosebumps. First, being able to return tuples from a function (so you can return multiple values from a single function). Wow. Second, map(), which lets you run a specified function on a list. (It’s equivalent to iterating through the list and calling the function manually, but much cooler.) Third, lambdas. Hmm, how can I describe lambdas? In-line functions? That’s not a very useful description per se, but oh well. :) Apparently lambdas are one of the things that make Lisp so cool, and I can see why. I’ve been reading about metaprogramming and it looks quite interesting (and ESR mentions it in his article, linked to in my last post). Yum. :)

I doubt I’ll ever go back to C now. :)

[tags]Python, Lisp[/tags]

Python goodness

Ben — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 23:44:18 +0000

The more I read about Python, the more I’m liking it. (See Eric S. Raymond’s Why Python?, for example.) I suppose that if I upgraded to Tiger, the binding problem I had would go away. So, if that does indeed happen, I suspect I’ll be doing most of my Mac development in Python rather than Objective-C. :)

[tags]Python, Mac, Objective-C[/tags]

Python around my neck

Ben — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 06:35:11 +0000

I’m supposed to be in bed (early meeting tomorrow morning) but I figured I’d quickly mention this. I downloaded and installed PyObjC today and tried to get the sample program (from Apple’s website) working, and I was so close, but for some reason my Xcode (1.5, on OS X 10.3.9) wouldn’t show the Averager in the binding tab of the info dialog. I’m pretty sure I followed the instructions correctly, and I even watched the Quicktime movie to double-check that I was doing it right, but with no luck. Oh, and I downloaded the project from their site and opened it and the info dialog said it was hooked to Averager (for “value”) but when I expanded the value thingie, it went away and I was left with just “System Defaults” and the other one, which I can’t remember at the moment. Anyway, I’m not sure what the source of the problem is here, but I may just go back to Objective-C for now…

[tags]Python, PyObjC, Cocoa, Objective-C, Xcode[/tags]

Wordsmith

Ben — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 20:14:17 +0000

In my linguistics classes, we’re doing stuff with text processing/analysis software (like WordCruncher) that’s Windows-only, and it’s a shame. How hard would it be to write a text analysis engine in Perl or Python and a frontend in PyObjC? It can’t be that hard… Perhaps I’ll use that as my learning program for Python — start small and build up. So, the next question then is what text analysis software ought to do. There’s got to be a ton of different ways to look at a text computationally — wordprint analyses, statistics of various types, etc. The engine would also have to support tagging the text, so you could say “This word is a verb, 3rd person singular present active indicative” or “This is a conjunction” or whatever. I really only have experience with WordCruncher, but in my research class we looked at some Oxford tools a month or two ago which seemed to be the same sort of thing.

But in all reality, to make this project worth my time (and to keep my interest), it has to be something I care about. Adding statistics on end won’t cut it. So, what does it need to do to be useful? For me, it’d be nice to make a list of the top x (50 or 100 or 1000 or whatnot) words in a text. Foreign language texts are important to me as well, and I can see this tool (let’s call it Wordsmith for now) being of some use in preparing texts for Riverglen Press “publication.” In fact, that’s a good way to ensure that it will be useful, to me at least — focus it on helping with production for Riverglen Press. Excellent…

[tags]text processing, Mac, WordCruncher, Perl, Python, PyObjC[/tags]

Help! Help! I’m being oppressed!

Ben — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 05:44:45 +0000

At the library today I browsed through the Python section (QA 76.73 .P98 or so, if you care to know :)) and picked up O’Reilly’s Learning Python. Spent the last hour going through the first chapter and a half. Good stuff. It’s surprisingly easy to learn, and gosh it’s fun! (I think my delight stems from 1) the fact that I haven’t really learned any substantially new languages in a while and 2) it’s interpreted, so results come immediately, and 3) it’s a cool language.) This language-learning thing is addicting. I can’t wait to learn Ruby and Lisp/Scheme and more Perl… Anyway, the main thing is to start coding real things in it, so I’ll have to come up with some small mini-programs that’ll help me get my bearings. And then it’ll be time to learn PyObjC and see if it’s feasible for writing Beyond. I think it is — Apple’s website seems to indicate that you can do anything you need to with it — and it’ll be soooooo nice not to have to take care of memory management. :)

And yes, TextMate is still slow. Backspacing, especially. Hmm. If I can’t figure out a way to fix it, it’ll be bye-bye TextMate and hello again to vim. (TextWrangler is okay but the interface is kind of clunky.)

[tags]Python, Ruby, Lisp, Scheme, Perl, TextMate, vim, TextWrangler[/tags]