Wow! Pete sent me this pointer to Opengazer . I've wondered if this was possible but never found a student to work on it. Thanks to Piotr Zieliński for developing it and making it open source. We'll have great fun with this in accessible applications for people with impaired movement.

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I saw a story on slashdot about the simon speech recognition system available on SourceForge.net.

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UPDATE: Tim Swast has updated this code to work with the new wiiuse API. I recommend his version which you can find here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/wiiuse/0.12

Several of my project teams this semester will (I hope) use PyGame and the Wiimote in their projects. I had it working fine on Ubuntu but struggled to find an interface that works with Python on Windows XP. Luke pointed me to wiiuse so I wrote a very simple wrapper with ctypes and then wrapped that in a module for PyGame. You can find the code in CVS at SourceForge in pywiiuse. I also uploaded a source release . You'll need wiiuse.dll on Windows or wiiuse.so on Ubuntu.

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We want to give away software for fun and learning and we want it to run on as many machines as possible. I think these are my minimum requirements.

• One full-screen window, with 2D graphics and text.
• Stereo sound with panning control at least.
• Text to speech.
• USB game controllers like DDR pads, joysticks, etc.
• Access to new devices like the Wiimote

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Our games and tools for kids with disabilities should run on whatever computer they have at the school (typically an old PC running some version of Windows or a Mac). One alternative to cross-platform testing might be a LiveCD that boots some OS (say Linux) and runs our software. Then our development environment is fixed and we're relying on the OS to cover over hardware differences. Pete and I spent a bit of time this last weekend trying our various LiveCDs to see how little memory they could be made to use.

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Daniel Gump has released an open source SDK for application development in the Opera Browser on the Wii . He provides access to the Wii remote functions, complete source and documentation. Thank you Daniel for contributing your effort. I'm looking forward to the great ET applications we can develop for the Wii.

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Over at xkcd .

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I wanted my print output to show up on pygame display. This python code implements a simple file-like object that handles multiple lines and wrapping.

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I needed to send key events from one python program to another. Using SendKeys on Windows worked fine in my tests but when I tried to send key events to a pygame program it completely ignored them. Some searching revealed that DirectInput ignores events generated with SendKeys. I learned that I needed to use SendInput. I found lots of partial examples but nothing that quite did the job. Here is some code (scraped together from multiple web pages) that works for me:

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Tom sent me to a pointer to AxsJAX , an AJAX variant designed to be accessible a framework designed to make AJAX accessible.

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