chording keyboards

one of these days i'll build myself a chording keyboard, so i can walk around with my netbook in a backpack running knoppix+adriane like a wanna-be cyborg. cursory googling turned up a few good links, foremost among them the spiffchorder for its usbness. http://chorder.cs.vassar.edu/spiffchorder/forside http://cuddlepuddle.org/~adam/pickey/index.html http://www.chordite.com/ http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/paper/fkm.htm#U4 wow, there are some scary people out there who take the cyborg thing way too seriously. now i know what my fate would have been had i never married.

epdlab

looks like enthought people have come out with their own ide: epblab. i followed source build instructions below, and it wasn't too painful. if i had to do it over again, though, i think i would use the easy_install or just grab the whole enthought package. i ended up needing to update wxgtk, wxwindows, ipython, and configobj in addition to the enthought suite stuff. https://svn.enthought.com/enthought/wiki/Build/ETS_3.0.0b1/Py2.5/Generic_Any_Any looks like epdlab uses editra for the integrated editor. not bad, though i think i will stick with emacs for now. if i were forced to use windows and had to start from scratch, though, i would cling to editra and epdlab like they were a marine float in a typhoon. and i would be sure to get the python ide and other plugins from the editra site.

enthought webinars

enthought is giving webinars, both free and open to the public and some that are restricted to paying customers. very interesting, very handy, especially the downloadable movies. i gotta keep tabs on this.

pypy woes

i fought mightily to compile some of my existing code with pypy. the docs warn that much of ordinary python is outside of rpython, and they are right. the speed ups i saw with things that pypy could translate to c were indeed impressive, but it was just too hard to shoehorn real-life python into rpython, even for some fairly simple parts of the code. i know this isn't what rpython is for, but i was hoping... maybe i'll try out cython and see if it's better than just writing c for scipy.weave.

fuzz testing with python

fusil is a fuzz testing framework for python. supposed to be easy to use and has dug out bugs in a number of codes otherwise assumed to be stable. many more links and info about a number of different types of tests are available on the pttt. minimock, for example, looks like one i could probably use a lot.

python 3d apps

came across some interesting 3d applications in python free-cad is a multi-platform 3d cad program with extensive use of python. not only does it have an embedded interpreter, all the pieces are python modules that can be imported to an external python. even the qt interface can be modified/controlled from python. these guys really did it right. uses opencascade (with pythonocc), coin/inventor, pivy. it claims some nastran support, but the mesh module seems to be entirely geared toward visualizing exterior triangle surface meshes and not for analysis. more fem support is on the dev roadmap. mgltools looks like a very powerful viz tool similar to the old dx. seems to be geared toward molecular stuff, though.