Pomodoro Technique in bash & python

The first one:

I don't know much python, so... what is btog? I see the declaration and I see you changed the value, but I don't see you do anything with them. Confusing.

EDIT: Oh now I see what you did.

On both files:

This btog thingy is not very elegant. You should create a counter variable that stores the information whether you are in the first step or not and let the function/class decide which line to choose (if...else...). It's not so important in a small project like this, but anything larger than that would be confusing this way.

Question: Why did you use functions in the first and classes in the second? A reason or just playing?

Last edited by Awebb (2011-02-11 07:36:35)

There's no need to have those class definitions. They don't serve any purpose, nor their attributes for that matter.
Simply insert the data to the notifier constructor.

I didn't got what btog is for in the python version.

First off, sleep works in seconds but options say its in minutes so you get a message to take a break every 25 seconds (even tho it says minutes).

You don't need

os.popen(0"pkill -9 -f pomodoro.py")

Python will exit automatically but if you want to explicitly exit

sys.exit(0)

is preferred, (0 being the exit code, 0 means successful execution, other codes indicate an error.

Were you trying to do a status icon? (i noticed the png path)
if you were, this should get you started

def Statusicon(tttext):
    def quit_si(widget, data = None):
        if data: data.set_visible(False)
        gtk.main_quit()
    
    statusicon = gtk.StatusIcon()
    statusicon.set_from_file(image)
    statusicon.set_tooltip("there are %s minutes until your next break" % tttext)
    statusicon.connect('activate', quit_si)
    statusicon.set_visible(True)
    gtk.main()

Bear in mind tho you will probably have to rewrite your app to get it to work, and gtk programming isn't the easiest so i might be pointing you in the direction of a big can of worms

Finally I'm not sure what you intended the --stop flag to be used for but at the moment it misses out the loop and goes straight to the 'job done' message.

Anyway this is a good introduction to python http://openbookproject.net/thinkCSpy/

As far as the bash script goes, again you don't want the 'killall' and you might want to look into making use of cron, and just having a script to generate cronjob entries, not that theres anything wrong with the way you've done it.

For bash scripting http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ (don't worry its not that advanced).

anyway good first scripts, enjoy

Ah I see, clever, no sys.exit wouldn't kill the other process in this case, I didn't realise what you were trying to do.

If this is a learning exercise you might want to look into daemonising it and communicating using signals, daemonising could be a bit heavy weight although instructive from a learning how linux works point of view, there's what seems like a good example here, im sure google will provide more. http://www.jejik.com/articles/2007/02/a … in_python/

Using signals would definately be beneficial tho, something as simple as this at the start of the script

open('/tmp/foo','w').write(str(os.getpid()))

getpid() gets the unique process id of the current process and writes it to file /tmp/foo

Then you can use

pid = int(open('/tmp/foo','r').read())
os.killpg(pid ,signal)

('kill -l' will give you a list of signals), sigkill (9), will do basically what you were doing before but slightly safer, sigstop (19) will stop a process and sigcont (18) will allow you to start the process again.
so

os.killpg(12345,9)

will kill the process with pid 12345, and is a drop in replacement for your popen call, assuming you sort the reading and writing of the pid.