Odds & Ends
On these pages you'll find the results from some of my hobby projects. These have nothing in common but the fact that they are written in Python. Sources are available for anybody who's interested. Nothing on these pages is "real science" but still might be usefull in a practical application.
A Python module to retrieve book info by ISBN number
I implemented a Python module to retrieve information about books from different sources, including Amazon and the British Library.
Installing Ubuntu 9.04 on a Soekris Net-4801
A detailed howto on installing Ubuntu and turning a Soekris in a LAMP server.
Syncing windows mobile 2005 to google agenda
A short howto on syncing a windows mobile 2005 device (a HP IPAQ rx1950 PDA) with activesync 4.2 installed to Google agenda. It can be done!.
Module for shell like commands
Command.py is a module that allows you to use a shell like syntax in your python code. E.g. you can use pipe characters '|' to join tasks. The gory details as well as download instructions cab be found here.
Variable Substitution
Varsub.py is a simple python script to define and refer to variables in arbitrary files. It has a page of its own.
Genetic Algorithms
To see whether it is possible to solve a real word problem (rostering of classes on a high school) with a genetic algoritm I wrote a simple program to see which were the prominent factors that influence the results. The results are not shocking but insightfull.
Database Applications with CherryPy
Sometimes you need a quick solution to build a small database centric application. For example, you might want to store some research data or build a book catalog. It is simple enough to build a user interface in CherryPy but existing object relational frameworks are not simple enough to my taste and while they provide access to a database they still leave you the task do build a decent user interface.
To solve both the database access and the user interface challenge in one go I wrote two Python modules .
Computer Linguistics
Currently I'm playing around with some linguistics and data retrieval related problems. Basically I want to find webpages whose content is closely related to the pages referred to in my bookmarks. Therefor I need a crawler plus some way to correlate the content in a meaningfull way.
Because my bookmarks are both in dutch an in english, I need some way to guess the language e.g. to compare pages in a hopefully more meaningfull way than word correlation alone. This is very much a work in progress but what results there are you will find here .