A fair game.

I've been a carrom fanatic since I was a kid. It runs in the family. The standard carrom game is a 4-player game with 2 teams and the team which scores 29 points first, wins the game.

Last week at a friend's place 4 of us were playing carrom and one of us had to leave early. To not let go off the board, we wished if there could be a standard carrom strategy with 3 players. The discussion and thoughts led to a fair game strategy. I thought of sharing it here, in case just like us, you don't find a 4th player. 

2/4-player game

It's pretty well documented on Wikipedia and wikiHow 

3-player version

This is a modified version of 2/4 player. 

• Each player has to pocket 6 coins - 3 black and 3 white (18 coins distributed equally among 3 players) 
• Pocketing the queen must be followed by pocketing another coin in the same strike
• Point system is a bit different from the standard game
• The game is over when one of the player reaches 29 points 
• A player with least points wins the game 
• When a board is over, the winner gets 0 points, the other 2 players loose the points 
• If winner pockets the queen, the other player looses 5 points 
• Here's the points tally based on certain chain of events to understand the point system 

Event	Player A	Player B	Player C
Player A won the board and pocketed queen as well  Player B pocketed 2 coins  Player C pocketed 4 coins	0	9	7
Player A won the board and didn't pocket queen  Player B pocketed 2 coins  Player C pocketed 4 coins	0	4	2

• Foul system
• If a player takes another black/white after pocketing 3 black/3 white coins, it's considered a foul. The pocketed coin would come back on the board and also the player needs to put an extra coin from his already pocketed coins on the board

Let me know how you feel about it in your comments below. 

Installing python newspaper on El Capitan

I've beeing struggling to install newspaper library on El Capitan. Finally found a command with which it would install without any issues.

sudo STATIC_DEPS=true pip install newspaper --ignore-installed six

Errors which I was getting, for lxml:

  cc -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -dynamic -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe -fno-common -fno-strict-aliasing -fwrapv -DENABLE_DTRACE -DMACOSX -DNDEBUG -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wshorten-64-to-32 -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -Os -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -DENABLE_DTRACE -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -pipe -I/usr/include/libxml2 -I/private/tmp/pip-build-ckZpLW/lxml/src/lxml/includes -I/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/include/python2.7 -c src/lxml/lxml.etree.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.11-intel-2.7/src/lxml/lxml.etree.o -w -flat_namespace

    In file included from src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:346:

    /private/tmp/pip-build-ckZpLW/lxml/src/lxml/includes/etree_defs.h:9:10: fatal error: 'libxml/xmlversion.h' file not found

    #include "libxml/xmlversion.h"

             ^

    1 error generated.

    error: command 'cc' failed with exit status 1

    

    ----------------------------------------

Command "/usr/bin/python -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/private/tmp/pip-build-ckZpLW/lxml/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-K1rk1V-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile" failed with error code 1 in /private/tmp/pip-build-ckZpLW/lxml

and for six module:

  Found existing installation: six 1.4.1

    DEPRECATION: Uninstalling a distutils installed project (six) has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version. This is due to the fact that uninstalling a distutils project will only partially uninstall the project.

    Uninstalling six-1.4.1:

Exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 211, in main

    status = self.run(options, args)

  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip/commands/install.py", line 311, in run

    root=options.root_path,

  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_set.py", line 640, in install

    requirement.uninstall(auto_confirm=True)

  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_install.py", line 716, in uninstall

    paths_to_remove.remove(auto_confirm)

  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip/req/req_uninstall.py", line 125, in remove

    renames(path, new_path)

  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip/utils/__init__.py", line 315, in renames

    shutil.move(old, new)

  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/shutil.py", line 302, in move

    copy2(src, real_dst)

  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/shutil.py", line 131, in copy2

    copystat(src, dst)

  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/shutil.py", line 103, in copystat

    os.chflags(dst, st.st_flags)

OSError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted: '/tmp/pip-8Vwuj2-uninstall/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/six-1.4.1-py2.7.egg-info'

Content without the Webview

I've always liked the Reader View in Safari browser (and now I believe evry other browser has it)

For those who don't know what Reader View is, it removes all the clutter from a web page and shows only the text and few relevant images.

Before applying the Reader View

After applying the Reader View

I've been working on an Android application and wanted to implement something like Reader View for the News section in the application. Webview didn't seem to be the perfect solution.

I thought what if I could extract the text from html on the server side and just send the text to the client and then show the text in whatever format I want to show it. This approach also saves the bandwidth for the user, as less data would be downloaded.

I came across this Python library, newspaper, which did exactly which I expected it to do. With just couple of lines of code I could extract the text from the html page. Sample code:

from newspaper import Article

article = Article(url)
article.download()
article.parse()

news['text'] = article.text.encode("utf-8")

I'm using a firebase based server and the extracted text above could be saved directly at the firebase URL. The client simply connects to it and shows the news.

This is how the news looks on the client at the moment. It's implemented using the plain old TextView.

Of course, a lot has to improve still. Time to explore TextView Spannable! 

Links

• Newspaper Python library: Link
• Iphone's Reader View: Link

Better logging with logging

I've been using Python for more than 2 years now. It's sad that I never came across the amazing logging library. I was relying on the plain old print and used .format to its full potential.

Now that I know about logging, I can't think of using anything else.

There are various approaches to initialize the logging module. I prefer the one with the config file. That way it's easier to configure the format etc.

This is a sample python code using the logging library

import logging
import logging.config

logging.config.fileConfig('loggerconfig.ini')
logger = logging.getLogger('server')

def testmodule():
    logger.info("This is a test info message")
    logger.critical("This is a test critical message")

testmodule()

Output of this sample code:

[10-11-15 23:55:12]  INFO     test                      This is a test info message (testmodule:8)
[10-11-15 23:55:12]  CRITICAL test                      This is a test critical message (testmodule:9)

This is the sample loggerconfig.ini file used to achieve the above output

[loggers]
keys=root,server

[handlers]
keys=consoleHandler

[formatters]
keys=simpleFormatter

[logger_root]
level=DEBUG
handlers=consoleHandler

[logger_server]
level=DEBUG
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=server
propagate=0

;Available debug levels
;CRITICAL 50 ERROR 40 WARNING 30 INFO 20 DEBUG 10 NOTSET 0
[handler_consoleHandler]
class=StreamHandler
level=DEBUG
formatter=simpleFormatter
args=(sys.stdout,)

[formatter_simpleFormatter]
format=[%(asctime)s]  %(levelname)-8s %(module)-25s %(message)s (%(funcName)s:%(lineno)d)
datefmt=%m-%d-%y %H:%M:%S

format and datefmt are the most important fields in the config file which you need to edit to get the desired output. List of all the attributes are documented here

An eye-saver.

Came across this interesting tool called f.lux which adjusts display's color temperature based on location and time of the day.

I downloaded it for Windows from here and looks like it's available for all the major operating systems