Python script help

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 4:57 PM,  <cool1574 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I understand I did not ask the question correctly, but is there any chance you can help me put together this code? I know that you all do this for fun and enjoy it and that is why I asked you guys instead of asking some one who will charge me for a very simple line of code.
> I would appreciate it, Thank you.

There are a million and one projects out there that I could do for
fun. Why should I do yours rather than one of theirs? The key is to
make your problem look more fun, or more useful, than the others. At
the moment, it looks fairly un-fun (just recreating wget with less
features), and not particularly useful (you could just use wget). So
at the moment, I don't feel inclined to put in several hours of unpaid
work for you.

I'll give you a few examples of things I *have* put hours of unpaid
work into, over the past few weeks:

* The Savoynet Performing Group production of The Yeomen of the Guard.
It's fun because the music's great and I'm working with awesome
people. (Also because the director has come up with an interpretation
of the finale that works better than any I've yet seen.) The lead
soprano is very close to going insane, the tragic comic sends a shiver
up my spine with the way he says "Elsie", and we have chocolate at
rehearsal (which I provide at my own expense). Fun and useful.

* The professional company performing Pirates of Penzance and Iolanthe
needs help moving costumes in and out. Again, useful, and working with
the best people. When the organizers of an international festival say
you're invaluable, that's pretty high praise.

* The Gilbert & Sullivan Society back home needs someone to manage its
domain, web hosting, internal Mailman list, etc, etc, etc. Most of it
is fairly mundane and unexciting, but it's useful.

* Gypsum is my designated successor to my somewhat popular MUD client
RosMud, achieving many of the things that I can't do with RosMud. As a
gamer, I like my game clients. Very fun and very useful.

* Related to the above, digging through the uncharted waters of mixed
metaphors and the Pike programming language, discovering language bugs
that probably nobody had ever run into before; and then submitting
patches and, again, seeing the approval and appreciation from people I
respect highly.

* Reading Alice in Wonderland to my eleven-year-old sister who'd never
heard it before. (Also to the rest of the family, who frequently 'just
happened' to hang around as I was reading.)

* Telling people about the Alice: Otherlands Kickstarter campaign [1],
which I'd really like to see succeed (if it reaches $250,000 within
the next few hours, the original voices of Alice and the Cheshire Cat
will be brought in!).

These are all projects that tie in with one of my interests or hobbies
(Gilbert and Sullivan, MUDding, and Alice in Wonderland). That gives
them a huge head-start in the "fun" and "interesting" categories.
You're trying to get me to donate my time and effort to your project;
to do that, you have to make your project look as interesting as one
of those. Okay, maybe not quite; each of the above has had MANY dev
hours donated to it, and you're just looking for maybe 1-2 hours. But
still, that's worth maybe a hundred dollars, so think of your request
as soliciting a donation of that amount. How are you going to pitch
that?

By the way, I am right now donating time towards a meta-cause: your
ability to handle yourself on an internet mailing list. I consider
that cause to be *extremely* useful, because it empowers the world and
you in ways that will make life easier for everyone, most notably
people on this list who I respect quite highly. So I'm happy to donate
ten or fifteen minutes to explaining exactly what it takes to get
something done, because - unless I've completely misread you - you,
and the whole world, will benefit that many times over.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spicyhorse/alice-otherlands

ChrisA