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Pool

Our Union here in Bristol has some of the weirdest pool tables I’ve played on. Outwardly, they are just normal tables.

Start playing, however, and you find they are Crazy Pool Tables! Watch as your ball curves away from the pocket as if by magic! See balls travel in strange parabolas around undiscovered black holes within the distorted space-time fabric that coats the tables! Gasp as balls rebound from the sides of the table only to be magnetically drawn back!

It’s pool on a whole new level. Well, a whole new non-level really I suppose.

Python

I also wrote my variant of a “Hello World” script in Python. Python is a pretty high level scripting language. This meant that, rather than printing out the usual Hello World message, it:

1. Gets access to Rhythmbox via RB’s bonobo interface
   
2. Pulls song information about the playing track
   
3. Writes the info to a file
   
4. Uploads the file via ftp to the site where it appears above
   

This all takes around twenty lines of code. It is some of the first code that I have really enjoyed writing in a while. The python console interpreter is really good for trying things out and allowed me to put together the script in an hour or so. Pretty good considering it’s the first python I’ve ever written. It shows the lengths that have been taken with Python’s inbuilt modules that you can do so many things easily.

It really shows that the language is pretty powerful if a first-time user can knock out a script like that, I have to say. It makes Java look positively verbose, C look like a long tome. Suffice to say, writing this small script has definitely opened my eyes to python as a language and I shall probably be exploring it more over the coming weeks and months.