Python has the ability to alter its sys.stdout as to redirect its print commands to pretty much anything.

If, for instance, you want to print to both standard output and to a log file, you can create a class to handle the stdout like such:

class MyOutput():
    def __init__(self, logfile):
        self.stdout = sys.stdout
        self.log = open(logfile, 'w')
 
    def write(self, text):
        self.stdout.write(text)
        self.log.write(text)
        self.log.flush()
 
    def close(self):
        self.stdout.close()
        self.log.close()
 
sys.stdout = MyOutput("log.txt")
print "blah blah blah"

This class would implement stdout’s write and close functions. We then assign the stdout to an instance of this class. Inside the write/close implementations, we also add functionalities to write the texts in a log file as well. We flush the file buffer on each write because otherwise, we would only be able to see the file content when sys.stdout (therefore MyOutput) closes.

With this, outputs of print will both show in the screen and in the file log.txt

Just got Snow Leopard and installed Boot Camp 3.0 on Windows? Boot Camp 3.0 is definitely a well welcomed update. The trackpad works much better now with 2 finger tap for secondary click, it finally works like in OS X. Even better, you can now access HFS+ without third party apps in Windows. Definitely nice for Windows 7 x64 users that MacDrive doesn’t even support. But one problem that seems to trouble people in the forums is that navigating to /Users/[yourname] in Windows shows an empty folder. You can’t access your music or pictures or anything from Windows.

One possibility is the presence of a .Xauthority file in your $HOME directory. Delete the file and you may access your home directory in Windows. Remember that running X11 will recreate the file. Delete it again.

To automate the whole process, consider creating a script that lets you boot into Windows worry free.

tell application "Finder"
	if exists file "~/.Xauthority" then
		delete file "~/.Xauthority"
	end if
end tell
do shell script "bless -mount /Volumes/[your Windows device]/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly" with administrator privileges
do shell script "shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges

Put this in AppleScript editor and save it as a .app to make it executable. You can manpage the bless command for more options. You can also change the icon like any other app. At that point, you can invoke this via QuickSilver and a GUI dialog will prompt you for password.

It’s also possible that there are no .Xauthority files in the subdirectories so simply type in explorer the subdirectories to access them directly. ie: D:/Users/[you]/Desktop

This simple tutorial shows how you can create a program with Python and Qt to allow for image files from Explorer/Finder/Nautilus to be dropped in a list widget and create list items with thumbnails

First we subclass a QListWidget to handle events

class DragDropListWidget(QListWidget):
	def __init__(self, type, parent=None):
		super(DragDropListWidget, self).__init__(parent)
		self.setAcceptDrops(True)
		self.setIconSize(QSize(72, 72))
 
	def dragEnterEvent(self, event):
		if event.mimeData().hasUrls:
			event.accept()
		else:
			event.ignore()
 
	def dragMoveEvent(self, event):
		if event.mimeData().hasUrls:
			event.setDropAction(Qt.CopyAction)
			event.accept()
		else:
			event.ignore()
 
	def dropEvent(self, event):
		if event.mimeData().hasUrls:
			event.setDropAction(Qt.CopyAction)
			event.accept()
			l = []
			for url in event.mimeData().urls():
				l.append(str(url.toLocalFile()))
			self.emit(SIGNAL("dropped"), l)
		else:
			event.ignore()

The initialiser simply allows drops into the widget. It also makes sure thumbnails are well visible.

Then each event performs a check to make sure the object being dropped is indeed a file. Finally, at the drop, the class sends an event with a list of local files dropped. Of course all handling could be done within the class but I will eventually need to manage dropped files in a parent form so an event is used here.

self.connect(self.pictureListWidget, SIGNAL("dropped"), self.pictureDropped)

In the parent class, I first connect the signal I defined in the custom list widget.

def pictureDropped(self, l):
	for url in l:
		if os.path.exists(url):
			picture = Image.open(url)
			picture.thumbnail((72, 72), Image.ANTIALIAS)
			icon = QIcon(QPixmap.fromImage(ImageQt.ImageQt(picture)))
			item = QListWidgetItem(os.path.basename(url)[:20] + "...", self.pictureListWidget)
			item.setStatusTip(url)
			item.setIcon(icon)

Here the Image and ImageQt modules of PIL are used to process the images. The Image class can help to create a thumbnail of the opened image. ImageQt can then convert the Image class into an ImageQt class which is a subclass of QImage. QIcons can only be constructed from QPixmap so we build one from the ImageQt class and send it to make a QIcon.

There you go, you now have a working list widget which allow image files to be dropped and can list them with thumbnail.

Of course, this snippet doesn’t check for other file types being dropped. More code would take away the focus.