I have. I don’t know, but I suspect it’s like this

import random

def main(argv):

    if len(argv) < 2:

        sys.exit(1)

    f = file(argv[0]).read().splitlines()

    name = [random.choice(f).lower()]

    letter = name[0][0]

    for fn in argv[1:]:

        words = file(fn).read().splitlines()

        words = [w.lower() for w in words if w.lower().startswith(letter)]

        if len(words) == 0:

            return False

        name.append(random.choice(words))

    return " ".join(name)

if __name__ == "__main__":

    import sys

    result = False

    while not result:

        result = main(sys.argv[1:])

    print result

S’mae!

Yesterday evening I attended my first Welsh lesson with the University of Wales, Bangor. We were given a sheet with resources online including a link for downloading a Welsh spell checker, nothing for Open Source users or Linux though. There are things out there for Welsh learners and speakers in the open source world though.

Firefox

If you’re not using firefox, you should be, I’m not going to go into why because plenty of people already have.

A Welsh dictionary for the spell checker to in Firefox can be installed from this page. There is also a setting that allows you to specify the languages that you want to read webpages in. To do this go to Edit -> Preferences and then click on advanced. You should see a section titled “Languages” with a button labelled “Choose”, click on that, select Welsh and click add.

If you are particularly brave you can have a go at setting firefox to be bilingual English/Welsh by following these instructions.

Online Dictionary

There is an open source Welsh-English dictionary developed by the Apertium Project that allows quick lookups saves a lot of time thumbing through pocket dictionaries.

Online Welsh-English Dictionary

Bilingual OpenOffice

Agored (A project from the University in Aberystwyth) have a bilingual version of OpenOffice unfortunately it seems that there is only a windows installer. The code may be Open Source though so versions for other platforms may be available in the future. I certainly hope so.

I wonder if this is targeted advertising and they actually want people like me.

Thank you ulti for the title

Today I got my grubby hands on an openmoko neo1973. It’s cool.

It is lacking wifi networking and there doesn’t seem to be an interface for reading SMS messages although there is a basic one for sending SMS, written in python, that you can install yourself. Also there is no Preferences interface, so you have to know a bit about linux to be able to do things like set the data and time. But the Neo1973 isn’t currently intended for use by the general public but by developers.

I’m hoping to be able to get a bluetooth networking working so I can control it and it can talk to my computer within a reasonable distance.

If you want to take the above science “test” that I took you should do it before reading the rest of this post. 8th grade is usually attended by students aged 13-14.
(more…)

This is a photo somebody took for me of the jukebox whose software I have been editing recently. I didn’t create the software or it’s interface, my involvement mostly centred on allowing the software to display non-ascii characters such as ñ as the machine is being sent to Costa Rica.

I also translated some of the text into spanish as the translations I had been given were woefully poor, saying things along the lines of “You have no credit on the left”, which would be fine if the machine was intended for use by right wing dictators. I also cleaned up the database so that the music categories made sense and allowed the Costa Rican colon to be used in the machine, previously there had been a limit on the value a coin could have which was not appropriate when 500 colons is the price of four jukebox tracks.