Many Jewish people have heard of Step It Up, a Dance Dance Revolution clone that is pre-packaged with Jewish music. Fewer are aware that it is a rebranded version of StepMania, which is freely available—and they even release the source code. As such, if you already own the included songs, you can create the simfiles (the files used for each song in StepMania) yourself with DancingGorilla and buy dance pads from Ebay for roughly $15 each.

This was originally published on the OSIRIS blog Note: This is all written for Python 2.7.3. These details might be different in other versions of Python - especially 3+! Attempting to escape a sandbox is always a fun challenge. Python sandboxes are no exception. In a static language, this is usually done by analyzing the code to see if certain functions are called, or wrapping the dangerous functions with code that does validation.

Like many others my age, I grew up on listening to cassette tapes. Tapes can get easily tangled and damaged, have a background hiss, and can only be listened to sequentially (you can’t jump from song to song). There’s one relatively new problem - nobody has tape players anymore. Repurchasing every tape you owned as an MP3 might not financially feasible at $15 per CD and some are simply unavailable.