Recent Reading

Title	Author	Finished
Neverwhere	Neil Gaiman	June 15, 2007
Persuasion	Jane Austen	June 5, 2007
The Ethics of What We Eat	Peter Singer and Jim Mason	May 31, 2007
The Wild Trees	Richard Preston	May 20, 2007
The Best and the Brightest	David Halberstam	May 14, 2007
The Amber Spyglass	Philip Pullman	April 20, 2007
The Subtle Knife	Philip Pullman	April 14, 2007
The Golden Compass	Philip Pullman	April 1, 2007
Against the Day	Thomas Pynchon	March 2007	It took a long time, but I enjoyed it.
Greek Religion	Walter Burkert	Sept. 2006
Arthur and George	Julian Barnes	Oct. 2006
The Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol 1 The Oresteia, Prometheus Unbound	Aeschylus	Oct. 2006
The Library of Greek Mythology	Apollodorus, trans. Robin Hard	Mid Oct. 2006
City of Glass	Paul Auster	Oct. 30, 2006
The Inheritance of Loss	Kiran Desai	Nov. 2, 2006
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay	Michael Chabon	Nov. 14, 2006

Python search engine

Google launched custom search engines today. You can customize the search engine in a variety of ways, but the primary control is selecting which sites to include in the search engine. I've been working on a Python search engine that has technical and community sites for Python programmers. If search for socket, the top results is Andrew Kuchling's Socket Programming HOWTO, which is result five on a regular Google search.

Please give it a try. If you find it helpful, you can volunteer to help maintain it.

PyPy paper available

Armin Rigo and Samuele Pedroni have written a paper for the Dynamic Languages Symposium at OOPSLA this month. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to a self-contained summary of their work. See PyPy's approach to virtual machine construction.

SWIG and Overloaded Constructor

I have a class that has three constructors

class Foo {
Foo(const vector<const char *>* files, bool flag);
Foo(const char* file, bool flag);
Foo();
// ...
};

I am using typemap that maps between a list of strings and a const vector of const char*s. The typemap works fine for a function, but has trouble with the overloading. SWIG generates a wrapper function new_Foo() that dispatches based on the number and type of the arguments. The dispatch function checks for the exactly matching vector pointer using SWIG_ConvertPtr(). This check fails for the list of strings, so new_Foo() reports there is no matching constructor. The function that new_Foo() failed to call has the typemap code that converts the list of strings to the appropriate type.

What am I doing wrong?

Firefox parentlock

What do you do if Firefox refuses to start? The error dialog says "Firefox is already running but not responding." I've run into this problem a few times recently. There is no Firefox process running, but it won't start.

Solution: Delete the .parentlock file in one of the subdirectories of the .mozilla directory.

Apparently this fix is described in the Mozilla 1.5 troubleshooting guide, but a search with the text of the error message didn't produce any useful results.

Barry would take it the hardest

When I heard the news, I knew Barry would take it the hardest. I can always recognize his code by the <> comparisons and the ^Ls between classes.

Future Python parsing strategy?

ANTLR 3.0 generates code for plain old C and someone has already written a Python grammar. I should learn enough about ANTLR to figure out if it could generate an AST for Python directly. It's certainly a richer toolkit.