Higher – Revision for Friday 18th of March

Please look over the following SSD areas

Be able to name and describe how the following standard algorithms work.

  • Linear Search
  • Input Validation
  • Find Maximum
  • Count Occurrences
  • Find Minimum
  • Reading from a file

Describe how the following translators work

  • Interpreters
  • Compilers

Differences between high and low level languages

How to use a subprogram

Use of parameters in subprograms

Differences between functions and procedures

 

Creating the binary background

I’ve changed my background from a stock internet photo to one I created myself.

First of all I wrote a little python program that generated a random 0 or 1

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
 
import random
message=""
for item in range(3000):
    number=random.randint(0,1)
    message=message + str(number)

print(message)

 

blueBinaryI then took a screenshot of the resulting console window and cropped it with IrfanView. I made a negative of the image and swapped the RGB colours before saving it as a PNG file.

I then uploaded the file and set it as a time background, it needs a little crop as it’s a couple of pixels too wide on one edge.

I’m sure you can think of a way that you could use this technique to create even better backgrounds with patterns or hidden messages.

HTML 5 – template

Below is a HTML 5 template that can be used to create a website. This type is document is used by web authoring software to give a consistent look to all of your pages.
The template below is very basic and gives a simple layout of
HEADING
IMAGE
LINKS
TEXT
Can you spot which HTML Element blocks do what?

Read more

Python Tables

tableI was asked in class how we can create a table in Python. There are a number of ways to do this but the easiest is probably to use the .format method.

The program reads in data from a CSV file before displaying the information in a two column table. There is a lot of internal commentary you can strip out leaving just the code.

The main part of the program is line 28. Where the contents of names and scores are displayed one line at a time with padding to make them appear to be in a table.

Read more

Higher – Python – Reading from a file

Python-logo-notext.svgA lot of people find reading from a sequential file difficult. Well lets break it down, first of all what is a sequential file? A sequential file is a text based (ASCII or UNICODE) file that is made up of both printing and non printing characters. The end of the file is signalled with EoF, often programmers put data in separate lines using a new line character. Sometimes the files are in CSV format, which means that each line holds a records worth of data.

The basic premise of any Python read file access is

  1. Open file for reading
  2. read each line
  3. close file

This post will mostly be focused on different ways of doing step 2.

Read more