Mat's blog

I was curious about which words I say the most when talking on msn so I decided to write a quick python script to find out:

import re,os,string
logdir = "/home/mat/.purple/logs/msn/[my email]"
regex = re.compile("\(\d\d:\d\d:\d\d\) Mat: (.*)")
info = {}

def compareVal(a,b):
	"""Compare a list of tuples using their 2nd value"""
	return b[1]-a[1]

def removePunc(word):
	"""Couldn't find an existing function for this, strip only removes characters from the ends  """
	return "".join([i for i in word if i not in string.punctuation])

#go through all files in the subdirectories
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(logdir, topdown=True):
	for f in files:
		fullPath = os.path.join(root,f)
		text = open(fullPath)
		for line in text:
			m = regex.match(line)
			if m: #only look at stuff I've said
				words = m.group(1).split()
				words = [removePunc(i) for i in words] #remove punctuation
				words = [i for i in words if len(i)>3] #filter out short words
				for word in words: #increment the frequency for this word
					if word in info: info[word] += 1
					else: info[word] = 1

li = info.items()
li.sort(compareVal) #sort by frequency (highest first)
for i in li:
	print "%s: %d" % i

(It ignores anything with 3 letters or less)

The results were kind of boring. Here’s the top 10:
yeah: 1984
that: 1956
have: 1565
what: 1321
like: 1148
just: 993
dont: 937
think: 870
well: 832
with: 722

Last week I took part in pyweek, a week long programming contest where you have to write a game in python that fits a theme.

The theme this time was “the length of a piece of string” and my entry can be found here. (You’ll need to have python and pygame installed to run it)

I haven’t played through all the other entries yet, but so far my favourite is Kite Story (has a windows .exe as well as the python source) which involves wrapping things up in the string of your kite. It’s really well made, has lovely graphics and music and more importantly, it’s fun. I’m impressed.