Python backup/snapshot script with compression (BZ2, 7zip)

While writing my master thesis with LaTeX, I often change source code files, graphics etc. It is important for me to keep track of the major changes as well as I have to prevent losing the whole work due to some data loss issue. To solve these two problems, I wrote a convenient Python backup script.
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Just for fun: binary to ascii in Python

0110100001110100011101000111000000111010001011110010111101111000011010110110001101100100001011100110001101101111011011010010111100110101001100010011100000101111

Seriously, you really want to know what’s behind this!
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Convert all PDF files in a directory to PNG images

I just needed to convert several PDF graphics to PNG raster graphics. The cleanest way to do this is via Ghostscript (example: gs -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=tiger.png tiger.pdf). For convenience I made a Python script that converts all PDF files in the working directory to PNG files via Ghostscript. I use it under Windows, but this works for “all” operating systems. Let me share it with you.
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Google Summer of Code end: code upload and acknowledgement

The Google Summer of Code 2009 final evaluation deadline is today; 19 UTC. I don’t have time to summarize my summer here now, but there are two things I want to say to the world. First, I want to thank many people for enriching my summer. Second, I would like to announce the Clobi project on Google Code.
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new system successfully tested: “Distribution of High Performance Computing Jobs among Multiple Computing Clouds”

Hello you out there!

I just started running the first serious test of the system I’ve developed during this year’s Google Summer of Code. If I wanted to put it in sensational words, the test could be called “Distribution of Particle Physics High Performance Computing Jobs among Multiple Computing Clouds”; just to get some readers :-) . During the test, there will be some time I just sit around and watch my monitor, so I decided to share my experience about the new system with you and keep record of the test progress within this blog post.
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Counting stuff in Python and assembling a histogram: analyze thread communication via os.pipe()

These days I built up an inter-thread communication via os.pipe(). While one thread is only writing to the “write end” of the pipe, the other thread is only reading from the “read end”.
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