ChortleVision

… okay theres not much more to say than the title, but we won second place in the pyweek game development competition! yay!

CSL-II project page

The ratings for all the entries

Team CSL made another game for pyweek :) im a bit exhausted so i’ll just mention the url of our project page and post a screeny :)

http://pyweek.org/e/csl-2/

The Unfortunate Undoing - "Live. Go to work. Live. Have a family or don't. Live. Let the could have beens haunt you. Live. A pseudo-adventure rumination on life."

Well okay, its not really.. but sort of. For those not in the know, in jaunty the update-notification daemon no longer provides you with a little icon in your notification area to tell you you have updates, its annoying, its really annoying. I barely ever remember to update because of it, so i wrote a small python script to put a little notification icon up there when i have new updates and thought i would share it with the rest of the world.

if you want to use this, you will want to put it in a file called update_notifier.py and make it executionable. then stick it in ~/bin (or wherever you want really). I also added it to my list of startup programs running the following command:

nice -n20 /home/gord/bin/update_notfier.py

the reason for the nice -n20 is that checking the entire repository for new packages (does not download new package lists, just checks your current ones via python-apt) can eat up cpu power, nice just makes sure it won’t get in your way hopefully. - it runs once every 24 hours (my update mechanism only gets new info once every 24 hours, no point i doing more surely?)

here come the code:

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
#       update_notfier.py
#
#       Copyright 2009 Gordon Allott
#
#       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#       it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#       the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
#       (at your option) any later version.
#
#       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#       but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#       MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#       GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#       along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
#       Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston,
#       MA 02110-1301, USA.

import pygtk
import gtk, gobject
import apt
import os, sys
import subprocess

class AptNotifier(object):

    def __init__(self):
        self.icon = gtk.StatusIcon()
        self.icon.set_from_stock(gtk.STOCK_INFO)
        self.icon.connect('activate', self.icon_activate)
        self.icon.set_visible(False)
        self.refresh()

    def icon_activate(self, icon):
        subprocess.Popen('update-manager')

    def check_new(self):
        cache = apt.Cache()
        cache.upgrade(True)
        if len(cache.getChanges()) > 0:
            # we have changes if we get here, return True
            return True

        return False

    def display_icon(self):
        self.icon.set_visible(True)

    def destroy_icon(self):
        self.icon.set_visible(False)

    def refresh(self):
        """ checks for new update items """
        if self.check_new():
            self.display_icon()

        else:
            self.destroy_icon()

        return True # we return true to make the timeout repeat

    def run(self):
        gobject.timeout_add(60*60*24*1000, self.refresh)
        gtk.main()

def main():
    notifier = AptNotifier()
    notifier.run()
    return 0

if __name__ == '__main__': main()