Archive for August, 2008

In the past, people have hassled me to make it easier for them to install my applications and libraries on OS X. I’m not very skilled with OS X, and searching for how to do this task took some time. I’ve made a script that does this in a modular way for Python. Specifically, this article describes the process of making a Python module or extension installer for OS X, similar to the Python installer for Windows.

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I just released pygooglechart 0.2.1. It has several bug fixes and minor additions, but the major change is that it now supports QR codes. You can quite easily create a QR code with pygooglechart as you can see below.

from pygooglechart import QRChart

# Create a 125x125 QR code chart
chart = QRChart(125, 125)

# Add the text
chart.add_data('Hello, World!')

# "Level H" error correction with a 0 pixel margin
chart.set_ec('H', 0)

# Download
chart.download('qr-hello.png')

This will download a png from the URL:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=125×125&chl=Hello%2C%20World%21&chld=H|0

The image downloaded looks like this:

QR codes are new to me. I’ve only seen a QR code on a bus stop advertisement once in Sydney but I’m sure more will pop up.

I wrote an application to generate a wireless (802.11) heat map based on signal strength. The reason for it was to find the best place/area (for my laptop) to be with the highest signal strength. Below is a screenshot of the application (with the ESSID and BSSID removed for security reasons).

This heat map has about 100 samples in it, which are shown as white dots. There is a balcony at the top of the image and the common office area on the right, which was drawn by hand (hence the waviness). As you can see it has pinpointed the location of the access point in the red area.

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