Plutonic Rainbows

Music for Installations

Out next Friday (May 4th) is the long-awaited Brian Eno box set, featuring some previously unreleased music; despite what the PR machine might say. You can order it from Amazon or Bleep.

Error

Did anyone spot the glaring error in the last script? It misses the len(indata) which calculates the file size. I have corrected that now. Thanks to everyone who contacted me.

Coda to Sublime Text

Panic's Coda 2 is an expensive piece of software when you are only writing in Python. I recently moved over to Sublime Text. It's actually free, if for the occasionally prompt to buy it. If you're on a budget, I totally recommend it.

Copying Again

A simple script that just checks the file size and copies the file to a target destination that you specify. That's done when you pass in script, file_from, file_to = argv at the very beginning.

from sys import argv

script, file_from, file_to = argv

file_in = open(file_from)
indata = file_in.read()

print "The file called '%s'is %r bytes in length" % (file_from, len(indata))

file_out = open(file_to, 'w')
file_out.write(indata)

file_in.close()
file_out.close()

Functions in Math

I've been looking again at functions and how they work. They are great for simple math but can do a lot more besides. With that in mind, here is a simple way of multiplying numbers with user input. Remember to tell Python to use float when handling numbers.

def calc(value1, value2):
    return value1 * value2

print "\nLet's multiply two numbers.\n" 

value1 = (float(raw_input("Enter a number: ")))
value2 = (float(raw_input("Enter another number: ")))


answer = calc(value1, value2)

print "\nThe answer is {0:.2f}.\n".format (answer)