Yesterday’s London Python Dojo

Yesterday was the March Python Dojo, hosted as usual by the ever-generous Fry-IT, with a book donated by O’Reilly. We started with a couple of not-so lightning talks from Tom Viner — talking about his team’s solution for last month’s puzzle — and Nicholas Tollervey — talking about bittorrent. An artfully-worded late question had @ntoll on his soapbox for a while on the subject of copyright and payment to artists, until someone spoiled it by suggesting that maybe we ought to write some code in Python!

After the usual, only slightly convoluted, voting experience, we decided to pick up one of last month’s runner-up challenges: creating a compression-decompression algorithm. Naturally most people started from some kind of frequency table, replacing the most common items with the smallest replacement. The approaches ranged from a hybrid Huffman-UTF8 encoding to an attempt to replace common words by a $n placeholder, where the n would increase as the word became less common. The winner for the most optimistic approach was a lossy algorithm which dropped every other word on compression, replacing it on decompression by the most likely from a lookup table. Tested against a corpus of Shakespeare’s works it produced some quite readable poetry.

As an aside, I can assert after a wide-ranging survey that (a) the preferred editor background is dark (black or dark-grey); and (b) in spite of all the tech at their fingertips, programmers still reach for pen and paper when they need to work something out!