Python experiments.

I’ve been tossing around with some web application ideas in my head, one of them being a system for looking up item information on Thottbot, and using it in an guild item trade system. At the moment, there is no system in place for Thottbot to be used by a third party application, so I decided to write an ugly parser for the HTML, based on searches... in Python as per usual. It’s very incomplete at the moment, and I’m slowly working it up to the point where one could do:

import libthottbot
results = libthottbot.search('westfall stew')

And get a tuple containing dictionaries with metadata for the individual items. There is however a copyright implication in that the Thottbot data is copyright, so you couldn’t just use the library to go and write your own complete frontend to Thottbot and pass the data off as your own. It’s a bit like BitTorrent in that it’s an system that has legal (personal or “fair use”) applications yet someone can abuse the software and create a huge debarcle. I’ve been sure to try and parse in information about contributors as well, because they need credit for their Cosmos-collected data. :)

I’ve also uploaded a copy of ddrgen to the svn repository with the extras I wrote. I should check if they’re finished too... and try and add support for Windows XP/amd64. On that subject, I’m currently in discussions with Wacom in beta testing an amd64 version of driver for my tablet, and Logitech can’t give me a date as to when I’ll have an amd64 version of iTouch. Wacom: 0.5, Logitech: -2... no, -3 because they haven’t yet fixed the bug (that I reported to them 5 months ago) in iTouch where you have to enter the secure mode code with a US keymap. Luckily XP has some basic support for the keyboard in that I can change the volume and use some of the media keys. I’m also still without a free virus scanning solution (it seems that Avast’s validation email still hasn’t come through, and AVG are doing a “wait and see”), though Spybot S&D picks up a number of things.