Skip to content

Tag Archives: application launcher

Senior Project, Application Launcher, System Customizations

11-Jan-10

It has been a while since my last update, and since then we have gotten completely usable two-glove audio output, without accelerometer-based articulations. It is very cool (we can kind of play the Tetris A Theme, but no one is very good at using the gloves yet). Just today we got the accelerometer all working; we have rotation and vertical motion output fit to the correct ranges. Despite having the software all written, we don't have the gloves working with full articulations due to the issue of actually mounting the accelerometers on the gloves and the Arduinos on the wristbands. We have already bought most of the components we'll need to do this, so I expect to have the entire thing working by the end of this weekend. When we finish, I'll post the final parts list, pictures, and latest code, along with instructions for constructing your own pair of musical gloves as a DIY project. Next!

I haven't been very motivated to finish it since the current version works fine, but I'm almost done with a re-write of my application launcher. The new version will by extensible via plugins and will be able to run in the background (as opposed to starting up every time you summon it). Aside from the rewrite, I added some neat shorthand directory launching support, which allows me to open "/home/ifx/Code/Launcher/final" by typing "/lau/f" and pressing enter. Regex is pretty neat.

Finally, I think I'm going to make a post about all the interesting customizations I have made to my Arch Linux install. These would include my mouse gestures (I have some that actually do useful, non-obvious things), my Conky configuration, and, of course, my .bashrc.

Things That Have Happened, Things That Have Not, and Senior Project Status

12-Nov-09

As of the time of posting, I have ten Google Wave invites. I've been playing with Wave a bit, and it is pretty neat, but not extremely impressive. I have seen real-time collaborative document editing before. Using Wave for chat is fairly cumbersome (no send on Enter). I have also gotten a few crashes, and it isn't incredibly snappy.

All that aside, it is very cool and I do see how it can be useful. Even if just discussing a random topic, the fact that you can reply to related comments and have the whole discussion appear in a tree promotes organization. I am using a neat LaTeX extension that allows me to embed editable LaTeX markup which is automatically rendered and displayed inline. Related to this, I am using Wave with the math teacher to plan for my third trimester class "Seminar in Independent Mathematical Research" (I'm very excited, I might post about my topic ideas later).

I started learning Go recently. For practice, I'm re-writing my Python solutions for Project Euler in Go. Here is Problem 259:

package main
 
import (
    "fmt";
    "strconv";
    "strings";
    "./fraction";
    "time";
)
 
func simplify(nums []*fraction.Fraction) map[string]*fraction.Fraction {
	out := make(map[string]*fraction.Fraction);
	var r *fraction.Fraction;
	if len(nums) == 1 {
		out[nums[0].String()] = nums[0];
		return out;
	}
	for offset := 1; offset < len(nums); offset++ {
		lefts := simplify(nums[0:offset]);
		rights := simplify(nums[offset:len(nums)]);
		for _, left := range lefts {
			for _, right := range rights {
				r = left.Add(right);
				out[r.String()] = r;
				r = left.Sub(right);
				out[r.String()] = r;
				r = left.Mul(right);
				out[r.String()] = r;
				if right.IsZero() != true {
					r = left.Quo(right);
					out[r.String()] = r;
				}
			}
		}
	}
	return out;
}
 
func groups(symbols string) ([]string, int) {
	out := new([512]string);
	out[0] = symbols;
	c := 1;
	for i := 1; i < len(symbols); i++ {
		gout, gcount := groups(symbols[i:len(symbols)]);
		for g := 0; g < gcount; g++ {
			group := gout[g];
			out[c] = symbols[0:i] + "|" + group;
			c += 1;
		}
	}
	return out, c
}
 
func numlist(s string) []*fraction.Fraction {
	vals := strings.Split(s, "|", 0);
	out := make([]*fraction.Fraction, len(vals));
	for i := 0; i < len(vals); i++ {
		t, _ := strconv.Atoi64(vals[i]);
		out[i] = fraction.New(t, 1);
	}
	return out;
}
 
func simplify_nums(nums string) map[string]*fraction.Fraction {
	return simplify(numlist(nums));
}
 
/*
func simplify_nums(nums string, out chan map[string]*fraction.Fraction) {
	out <- simplify(numlist(nums));
}
*/
func main() {
	start := time.Seconds();
	reachable := make(map[uint64]bool);
	seqs, nseqs := groups("123456789");
	for i := 0; i < nseqs; i++ {
		reps := simplify_nums(seqs[i]);
		for _, k := range reps {
			if k.IsPos() && k.IsInt() {
				reachable[uint64(k.Num())] = false;
			}
		}
	}
	/*
	channels := make([]chan map[string]*fraction.Fraction, nseqs);
	for i := 0; i < nseqs; i++ {
		channels[i] = make(chan map[string]*fraction.Fraction);
		go simplify_nums(seqs[i], channels[i]);
	}
	for i := 0; i < nseqs; i++ {
		reps := <-channels[i];
		for _, k := range reps {
			if k.IsPos() && k.IsInt() {
				reachable[uint64(k.Num())] = false;
			}
		}
	}
	*/
	var total uint64 = 0;
	for k, _ := range reachable {
		total += k;
	}
	fmt.Printf("Sum: %d\n", total);
	fmt.Printf("Total Time: %d\n", time.Seconds() - start);
}

If anyone wants "fraction.go", I can upload it.
I tried using goroutines (commented in the code above) to speed things up via concurrency, but it didn't seem to have any effect on the speed (though memory usage increased) and CPU usage only spiked on one core. Not sure what the deal is with that; I'll look into it later.

So far as I have played with it, I like the language. Go has a respectable standard library, which is something many new programming languages (that I have seen) lack. If I code anything interesting enough, I'll make a post about it.

About my Application Launcher: I'll be splitting it up into a daemon process and a GUI process which will communicate using D-Bus (probably, haven't decided yet). I will be adding filesystem searching using Glimpse and locate. Glimpse is pretty damn impressive. It provides very fast searching of file contents, support for fuzzy matching, and the index is quite small (for everything under my home directory the index is ~34 MB).

Related to this, I am going to be looking into Fuzzy Matching once more (see music on the command line). Already existing for Python, I found this. Haven't tested it yet. I downloaded a few papers on Damerau-Levenshtein distance and Levenshtein automata, but probably won't start implementing anything for the next week or two.

Finally, my Senior Project. By the end of this trimester (~1 week) Nate and I plan to have audible note output using data from the contact sensors. We will integrate the accelerometers next trimester, and should have plenty of time to debug and test afterwards. At the moment, though, due to a combination of college applications, homework, and sickness, we are a bit rushed. I don't expect it to be an issue: a good, solid work day this weekend should be enough to catch up.

As a last note, I'll mention the album I've been listening to while writing this up: "Suzumiya Haruhi no Gensou". Orchestral versions of many songs from Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu. Surprisingly good.