canada

what?

Canada is a multi-purpose curses-based visualization system written in python. It displays pretty pictures in an xterm window to entertain people who may or may not be indulging in substances of questionable legality.

If you want the country, try here instead.

There is still a lot that could be done with canada. However, I am currently not working on it very much. I began work on canada for the 2006 Dabney House Drop Day party, which is over.

There is a SourceForge project page

Canada can interface with something called "the 49th Parallel," which is a control panel with lights, switches, and knobs. You can find out about it here once I get my act together and put something there.

There are some screenshots.

requirements

You need some other things to use canada:

• Python with working curses.panel module
  • This is provided in linux and cygwin, possibly also Mac OS X and other UNIX-like OSes.
• Python Imaging Library
• Psyco (not required but strongly recommended
• Figlet (required only for the text module)
• PyParallel (required only for the hardware interface)
  • Although PyParallel works on Windows, Canada uses some platform-specific features (namely the PPRDATA ioctl) that require the Linux ppdev module.

For the best speed, you need a pretty fast machine, probably with a decent graphics card. It's also pretty picky about which terminal it runs in; in my experience, only xterm is fast enough. My machine (a 2.0 GHz Celeron with an Intel 855 graphics card) is barely good enough.

downloading

To download the latest canada, use Subversion. Run the following command to download canada:

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/canada/trunk canada

Periodically, run the svn update command to update your copy of canada.

If your canada doesn't work, you could try an older revision. Run svn log to see a list of the revisions available, then use the -r option to svn update to get the older version.

running

First, download Canada and change into the canada directory.

Then run python canada.py from an xterm window. (It should be an xterm, not an xterm clone like konsole or gterm; these will probably not be fast enough.)

For keybindings, see the README file or look at canada.py.