Before presenting my B.Sc. thesis I decided to join the guys of UnFUG in a round of 5-minute lightning talks called “Pimp my x86″. I did a quick writeup on node.js but as there was enough time, everybody went on to show off their recent projects and scripts. As my thesis is currently taking up most of my time I could only share the following scripts, one that I use on a regular basis and one I only did to familiarize myself with the pygame library for Python.
node.js
Sadly the beamer showed only little contrast but I think I made a point showing the great development node.js is currently going through. It’s a nice alternative approach to scalable networking systems for real-time applications.
For information on the library visit nodejs.org and take a look at the great example applications like this one.
sshm rewrite with bash-completion
A quick script I hacked together because the default sshm implementation could not handle parameters, port parameters other than the default and it didn’t come with bash-completion. The code is far from optimal but it works. It mostly follows execution conventions that the traditional sshm proposed but the file format is incompatible.
The python file goes somewhere in $PATH, while the shell script should be put in /etc/bash_completion.d/ (or similar on your system).
Controlling your Ubuntu / Linux Mint desktop with a joystick (via pygame)
The pygame library for Python offers modules for joystick support and I had some time (obviously) on my hands so I hacked together a set of scripts to control my desktop machine with a gamepad / joystick. With 4 buttons and 2 axis I could give it some pretty neat functionality, even if I’m pretty sure I will never use it again. 
The Python script starts a configurable process for each combination of button-click and axis-movements. For my tests I put together a shell script that uses wmctrl to navigate through my virtual desktops and added simulated keystrokes (with xte) to control my screen and irssi in a terminal.