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[upsidedown]

Luckily I don't like people too much and I decided to buy a house in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado 20 minutes to get to a gas station moving about 50mph. Needless to say I don't interact with very many physical human beings

Sounds idyllic to me

The mom of someone I know got this virus and fell for it, luckily his mom told him about it minutes after she had called them, he called me and told me about the screen she had seen. I told him to tell his mom to turn off the computer right away and to lock all of her bank accounts and credit cards. I told her to login from a machine she knows is safe and start changing as many passwords as she possibly can.

Over the next week the person had attempted to get into her accounts on more then one occasion. she could have lost everything she had. It shows that people do fall for these kinds of things all the time.

It's a good thing that they turned to you and you gave them that good advice. Every chance I get I try and educate and keep reducating my partner and her mum as well as my mum about these assholes. Luckily both the parents are older and don't own a computer or smart phone so that cuts the scamming opportunities to pretty much a phone call and they are both cantankerous enough to tell the scammers to go f*** themselves

As I'm now finished this project I'm using EG for I'll hopefully be able to move to my next job and start to program something to use for my HTPC

As a sidenote but back on to EG. Is Python a hard language to learn and integrate with EG. I've seen some of the code that you have written for other users and I have to admire what you have done. I assume that this has come over many years of learning about coding and computer / windows operating systems

Looking at the documentation on the forum makes for a big eye opener to the newbie

Thanks

[kgschlosser]

Python is probably one of the easiest programming languages to learn. The vocabulary makes sense. As with any programming language it is all about vocabulary and syntax. Python is nice because it doesn't use special characters to define blocks of code.

If you have an android device you can search the play store for an application called "Learn Python" It is going to make you feel like you are in kindergarten again, but it will defiantly get you through the basics.

EG is a super powerful automation tool if you get into using real time scripts. This is where you will be able to handle carrying out different tasks based on an events additional information. An example would be a weather report from a weather plugin. There is simply to much information in something like that to contain all of the information in the event name it's self. Any additional information gets attached to the event as a payload. So if you get an event for a forecast change you can grab the payload data for that event and create an OSD with the new forecast information.

Do you have any programming experience at all? If you do then Python will be really easy to learn. If you don't it is still extremely easy to learn. You have the worlds largest single source of information at your fingertips, You can find answers by searching the internet or you can ask me and I will do my best to explain. I have been told I do a really good job at taking things that are really complex and making them easily understood by someone that is learning.

[upsidedown]

Do you have any programming experience at all? If you do then Python will be really easy to learn. If you don't it is still extremely easy to learn. You have the worlds largest single source of information at your fingertips, You can find answers by searching the internet or you can ask me and I will do my best to explain. I have been told I do a really good job at taking things that are really complex and making them easily understood by someone that is learning.

Hi and thanks for your reply

Yes I do have some programming experience but mainly with Basic oriented code. So yes I understand the concepts pretty well. Not so much to do with integrating with Windows and other program parameters (like EG) as most of the stuff I have done has been standalone programs.

I'm hoping that EG will be sufficient as far as anything I need to do but having Python scripting as a more powerful addition might come in handy at some point

All I need now is to find a worthy project to experiment on and not upset the wife with the amount of time I'll probably need to do it

Hopefully my older brain hasn't lost too many cells to be effective at learning another programming language

I'll certainly look at those suggestions you gave for inspiration

All the best and thanks again

[kgschlosser]

I do not know how old you are, but I will say that you are never to old to try something new and never to old to learn. The curve may have changed but the ability is still there.

Having the Basic programming knowledge is going to help a huge amount. You should have an understanding of how the data should travel through code. I can't remember if
basic had functions or not and I am pretty sure that it didn't have classes. So these might be new concepts to you but are really easy to understand.

You know how "if", "else if" ("elif" in python) and "else" work.

Here is an example of some of the vocabulary in Python

Say we have this string of text "How is your day?" and we want to check this string to see if it has the word "your" in it.

Code: Select all

text_string = "How is your day?"

if "your" in text_string:
    print 'found the word "your"'
    
if "hello" not in text_string:
    print '"hello" was not found'

the vocabulary makes sense for what you are doing.

In the Basic programming language you had to declare a variable. This told the compiler what type of data you were going to store in the variable. You could never change the type of data that was going to be stored. In python you do not need to do this, variables do not need to be declared and a variable can change the type of data that is stored in it at any time. This can get tricky if you are not used to it.

Python for the most part takes care of all of the memory management bits and cleans up after a reference to a variable has been deleted or is no longer being used. This makes it far easier to code in python.

As far as the Windows API access in Python. This is not easy to do and if not for a beginner. Python is written in C and so was the majority of Windows. The developers of Python were nice enough to create an interface or API to bridge between python code and C code. It is not an easy thing to use all the time. There can be all kind of quirky issues. Here is an example. In python you have a single data type for an integer and an unsigned integer, "int". In C you have a bunch of data types for an integer depending how the size of the number and if the number is a negative. So there is no direct conversion.

I started programming 5 years ago at 40 years old. It has taken me 5 years to get where I am today. I had zero help getting me to where I am, and I am 100% self taught, no one has shown me how to do something other then looking at examples online that didn't fit 100%.. I did not only learn Python in this time. I also learned C, C++, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, WQL and a few others.

[upsidedown]

I do not know how old you are, but I will say that you are never to old to try something new and never to old to learn. The curve may have changed but the ability is still there

Just ticked over 60 and retired so I need to use it or lose it

Here is an example of some of the vocabulary in Python

Say we have this string of text "How is your day?" and we want to check this string to see if it has the word "your" in it.

Code: Select all

text_string = "How is your day?"

if "your" in text_string:
    print 'found the word "your"'
    
if "hello" not in text_string:
    print '"hello" was not found'

That seems pretty straightforward but I guess it's the bit where you would need to get values from another program / function and integrate with Python / EG that will be the hard bit

Anyway as you've said there is plenty of good help available to read so I just need to get my head around it when or if the time comes

I started programming 5 years ago at 40 years old. It has taken me 5 years to get where I am today. I had zero help getting me to where I am, and I am 100% self taught, no one has shown me how to do something other then looking at examples online that didn't fit 100%.. I did not only learn Python in this time. I also learned C, C++, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, WQL and a few others.

You are a better man than me. I find it hard enough to remember the syntax for one language at a time let alone all of the ones you've learnt

[kgschlosser]

the data comes in from various places, USB, Serial, Network, Wireless. what you do in Python is you make a bridge to the connection type and you listen for information coming in. The hard part is sometimes parsing that information, you may have to send a request out that connection in order to get the information that you want from a device or program. This is exactly what is being done when I collect information from Windows or send Windows commands to do various things. The connection point to Windows is quite involved more so then most other devices or programs.

Most of the time there are already libraries that have been written by other people to handle the low level portions of the communications. So for instance sending data over a Serial connection. You can use a python library called PySerial. when you use that library all you then need worry about is the format of the information being sent which is the high level communications.

[upsidedown]

Thanks looks like I've got a bit of learning to do

All the best