After a short break I'm back on the Python Challenge. Some levels involve a bit more than just writing a program. There's an element of the cryptic crossword about them. They have added a wiki with suggested solutions that you can access once you know the answers for those levels. My solutions are not so neat, but then I have not been exploiting the full power of Python. I need to get into the wonders of regular expressions and some of the cleverer list processing.

I actually solved one level accidentally when viewing the image involved with Paint Shop Pro, but I did it by writing a program as well afterwards to prove I could do it.

I've made a few additions to my FOAF file. These consist of a few extra friends and some extra information about me. I'm taking a risk and putting my email address in there, but my spam filters should block any extra spam if the scum actually read these files. The easy way to see the file is via the link on my name at the top of the page. I'm still mulling over my plan to use the data on this page. I've found some Python that reads a FOAF and so just need to mangle it into the form I want and get pyblosxom to read it.

I anyone I know objects to having their name and webpage in my file then let me know. Your email addresses have been hashed, so you should be relatively safe from spam.

I bought my first PC about 7 years ago. I had been using an Amiga, but it was becoming less supported and the interesting stuff was happening elsewhere. So I handed over a large wad of dosh to a company called dotlink who were based a short distance from where I work now in Wembley. This was a Pentium II 350MHz machine with 128MB of memory, a Matrox G200 8MB graphics card, a CD-ROM and an 8GB hard drive. It didn't work when it arrived so I went to their base to get a new motherboard. Back then you got Windows 98 and I used that for some time.

Things moved on and this was upgraded to an AMD Duron 650 and later to a Duron 1200. I gradually replaced everything in that case, including the power supply. I think only the floppy drive is original now. Recently it started playing up and I suspected the power supply was faulty. It was also very noisy. I had long lusted after things like the Shuttle barebones PCs that offered a powerful PC in a quiet, compact form. I couldn't quite stretch to one of those at the moment, so I went for the Antec Aria. This comes without a motherboard, but my Asus fits it nicely. It has space for three hard drives and an optical drive. The front panel has USB, audio and firewire ports and a card reader. I also upgraded to a new NEC dual-layer DVD writer.

This case is nicely designed. The side panels just need a press of a clip and the top panel a single screw. Inside is a drive tray that can be easily removed. Fitting my board involved removing the power supply and attaching lots of wires for the switches, lights and front ports. In all I spent a couple of hours to get it all right.

I am still using my old CPU cooler which is not the quietest, but overall the PC is now a lot quieter than it was. I hardly notice it under the desk apart from the blue lights in the front panel. Most things are working apart from the front Firewire port that needs an adaptor to connect to my card and the card reader seems to need a Linux kernel patch that I may try later.

Pictures can be seen at my Multiply site.

Google is the internet as far as a lot of people are concerned. It's where you start any session to find what you want. I've been very impressed by their progress. I used other search engines in the past, but now I just Google it.

They've acquired a few products by buying them in, e.g. Blogger, but have also created many of their own innovations. The best known example is GMail. I signed up for that to see what it was like. It's pretty good, but I'm just using my 2GB for extra storage just now.

The have also added Search History, which may have more privacy implications, and Desktop Search, which I find very useful at work.

Today I read that they have added the facility to personalise your Google page with news headlines etc. This is quite neat as it integrates GMail more. For many years I have had a home page at Yahoo! that did something similar. If Google could add some cartoon strips I may have to change my browser home page.

I'm onto level 8 of the Python Challenge. Still enjoying it. The last level required installing an extra library that I read somewhere was required. One of the problems is not knowing what facilities are available.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Python has the power of Java with the simplicity of Basic. Mind you, complicated list manipulation is still a little complicated.

Over the last 25 years I have written lots of computer programs for fun. A lot of these have been graphics related. I spent a lot of time on the Mandelbrot set on the BBC Micro (Basic) and on PCs (Turbo Pascal). I also did a bit of ray tracing (3D graphics rendering). During my Amiga days I played with the E and Arexx languages, but didn't produce much. Programming for a GUI environment was starting to get complex.

In my working life I've used lots of programming languages (various Basics, Pascal, C++). In my current position I use Magic and Oracle PL/SQL. This is all database related. There has also been some Java and I have applied that knowledge to a few little fun projects such as encryption. One of these was the Ciphersaber project.

Java is a very versatile language and widely used, but then I came across Python. This seems to be as versatile as Java, but with a clearer style of programming. It's very open and available on just about any platform. There are some very good tutorials on-line, e.g. Dive Into Python , but I had been trying to think of a project to really get into it.

Then I found the Python Challenge. This is a series of cryptic puzzle that require writing some programs to solve them. Each leads to a further web page with the next puzzle. I think there are 22 of them so far. I am on number 5. I know what to do, but need to work out how to implement it. Some of the early puzzles could be easily done in any language, but later ones rely on Python libraries. I'm enjoying the experience so far, but I'm prepared for some frustration. There is a forum where you can get some hints if you get stuck. This can be useful if you don't know about the Python features you need to use. It's a bit like playing one of the old adventure games in some ways. I was never that good at those, but I like a mental challenge.

My first computer was a BBC Micro Model A back in about 1980. It cost around £300 and came with a mighty 32K of memory and loaded software from audio cassettes. It was actually a very neat machine with a very good implementation of the BASIC language. Some very good games were produced for it including the classic Elite. I upgraded mine a little by adding another 16K to allow me to use the better graphics modes and run more games. I wrote various programs for it including my first Mandelbrot program.

I sold my BBC a few years back for £30 with a load of games and the cassette deck I used. It was still working fine. One thing it had over modern computers was that it started up instantly, but then you had to load some software to do anything practical. I never got around to getting a floppy drive.

Now someone has gutted an old BBC and installed a 600MHz PC with a 40GB hard drive as shown here. He runs Linux on it and can even run old BBC games via an emulator. It's a very neat job using the original keyboard and not making extra holes in the case.

I'm not into that sort of hardware hacking, but I may be building a new PC soon. The power supply in my big tower may be dying and it's very noisy. I've long lusted after something smaller and quieter. I've now discovered a couple of possibilities to remedy this. The Aspire X-QPACK is quite funky with it's transparent panels and carrying handle. There's also the Antec Aria is more restrained. Both will take my current components with space for extra hard drives. Both cost around £70, which is not cheap for a case these days, but worth paying for the benefits. For that Antec throw in a card reader as well. I'm mulling it over for now.

One again George Lucas has missed the perfect release date for a Star Wars film. Let's hope this one is better than the last two. I grew up with the original films and these prequels have been too full of talk and mumbo jumbo.

Meanwhile, I'm off sick today after major sniffles and sore throat struck yesterday. I hope it's not the flu that I had recently returning. That was horrible.

For those in the UK, don't forget to vote tomorrow.

Knoppix is a 'live' CD Linux distribution. This basically means you can boot your PC from the CD and hav a working Linux system without having to install anything. I tried an older version a while back, but it didn't like my hardware and seemed to mess up my Windows system. This time I tried version 3.8.1 and it worked fine. I'm intending to install it over the Windows, so it's irrelevant what it does to the hard disk for now.

I just have to work out how to install it to the drive. There's an install script, but that complains about a lack of available partitions and fires up QtParted, a user-friendly partition manager. I'm still working out if I can use that or if I should get geeky with some command-line tools as suggested by Simon. He is running an earlier version at home.