Old Projects: pytiger

I mentioned on Twitter that I wanted to blog about some old projects. The first one is more than a year old, but it still may be useful to someone.

Back during college, I was implementing a file sharing client with Twisted - the GUI was first written using wxPython, and then rewritten in PyGTK (the reasons for the rewrite I can expound upon later, if anyone wants to know). It's not publicly released, mostly because it never got past being a chat client. Anyway, a part of the file sharing protocol involved tiger tree hashes to verify the data as it was downloaded. I couldn't find an implementation in Python (and attempts to write it myself failed), so I found some C source code and manually bound it to Python (via its C extension API). This was my first exposure to extending Python via C — I later used some of this knowledge to fix up the Python bindings for Awn.

The Python part is licensed under the Apache License v2, the tiger (tree) code is public domain-ish. (see COPYING for details)

The code can (as of the publication date) be found in a junk bzr branch on Launchpad. If you wish to continue work on it, I can move it to a full-fledged project — just contact me about it via the comments.

Edit (2009/03/24): Due to interest in the code, I've created a project for pytiger at Launchpad.

Donate to LGM! (and other conference-related items)

For the 1% of Open Source software enthusiasts who haven't yet seen this yet: Donate to support the development of free/libre/open source graphics software by helping developers meet in real time, in person, (etc.) at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008! I'm a big fan of Inkscape, because it lets me, as someone who is not very artistic (nor has very good (precise) hand-eye coordination) to create and manipulate logos and icons with ease. My graphics programming skills are essentially non-existent, so I figured that I could be more useful by donating some cash to help a developer of one of the participating projects travel to the meeting.

And here's the shiny (but not flash-shiny) information-rich button that they're using to show how much more money they need to reach their goal: (I should note for the American-income-tax-minded that this is a tax-deductable donation.)

On a somewhat related note, I'm planning on going to LinuxFest Northwest 2008. Fortunately for me, both the conference and the transportation is free. People who have either followed me for at least a year or have read through the archives know that I went last year. I plan on going on Saturday again (this year, April 26), and I'm bringing my XO laptop with me. If things work out right (i.e., my stupid printer decides to work), I'll have a nice, big Awn icon (again, thank you Inkscape!) taped to my bag. It'll be an interesting experiment to see who recognizes it.