Every year after christmas the El Niño Cup takes place. It is a tournament where the result is less important than exercising and having fun. There is a team day, where every team plays Volleyball, Basketball and Unihockey, and a single day, where the disciplines are Badminton, Table Tennis and Archery.

Last year I wrote a program to ease the drawing. It is a fairly complex problem:

  • Every participant must have six matches, two for every discipline, against members of its category (men, women, mixed…)
  • There should be not two matches against the same adversary (except if the category has less than 7 players)
  • Between two matches there should be a break of at least the duration of one match

This year I enhanced the program some more. The amount of tweaking the program output by hand is now almost zero. Just some games remained to be exchanged to satisfy the at-least-one-break condition.

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Im Gegensatz zu PCs ist bei OS X Python bereits vorinstalliert. Leider fehlt jedoch ausgerechnet IDLE, so dass trotzdem noch etwas zu tun bleibt.

Installationsanleitung für IDLE (von PythonMac FAQ abgekupfert)

  • Tcl/Tk Aqua herunterladen und installieren
  • MacPython herunterladen und installieren (für OS X 10.3 sind das die MacPython Panther Addons)
  • Das Programm PackageManager im Ordner /Programme/MacPython-2.3 starten
  • Im PackageManager _tkinter installieren

“Neue” Division

Damit IDLE sich so benimmt wie im Buch beschrieben (vgl. Anhang D im Buch), muss noch eine Datei leicht verändert werden.

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(Deutscher Text siehe separater Artikel)

K got the book Python für Kids. To enable him to use the book on OS X, I wanted to setup the Python environment on the Mac as on the PC: Install IDLE and, to hide the differences between integer and floating point math, configure to use the new division.

Installing IDLE on OS X 10.3 is easy with MacPython. IDLE comes as bundle, ready to be launched with the mouse from the Finder. But for using the new division without the need for from __future__ import division, IDLE must be started with options. How to embed these options in the IDLE.app bundle?

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Peter Steiner

Software Developer and Opinionated Citizen

Switzerland