Older blog entries for etrepum (starting at number 18)

Archit: I assume you meant this:

k = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]; k = [e for e in k if e < 2]

Because your syntax wasn't correct. Also, Python list comprehensions can nest, try this:

k = [(i, j) for i in range(10) for j in range(10)[::-1]]

nymia: OS X comes with Developer Tools on the fourth CD (called Xcode now), but IIRC they are not pre-installed when you buy the computer. If they were installed, you'd see them in /Developer on the boot volume.

mwh: OS X configuration files are a subset of XML called a Property List (plist). These are XMLified NeXT property lists, which were much cleaner looking and still easy to parse. In any case, there's not a whole lot you can do in a plist (DTD), so that's why Apple can write a tool like defaults(1) that is able to reliably manipulate arbitrary keys in an arbitrary plist file. It is also how they can offer simple APIs (i.e. NSDefaults) that basically just serialize/deserialize objects from the programming language you're using directly to these plist files, either by coercing to/from one of the simple types, or just encoding as base64. Strangely enough, I've even seen Apple use plists inside of plists disguised with base64.

markonen: IIRC, some of that leaky abstraction is plugged in PostgreSQL 7.3 (at least wrt dropping implicit sequences with tables). Besides, any time you ever created a SERIAL column it should've said "NOTICE: CREATE TABLE will create implicit sequence 'tablename_columnname_seq' for SERIAL column 'tablename.columnname'", so you were warned.

amars: Fast user switching makes sense for any kind of shared computer.. families, classrooms, etc.

MisterP: If you own Jaguar (10.2), it's very highly likely that Panther (10.3) will be a free upgrade. I believe that Apple has officially announced that odd point versions (10.1, 10.3) are free upgrades for users of the previous even point version (10.0, 10.2).

gabe: Python is a perfectly good language for writing any kind of application. Python has a faster development cycle than ObjC, and has a larger library of built-in functionality as well as more open source libraries and extensions. Also, anything you can do in ObjC you can do in Python with PyObjC, especially Cocoa application development.

IIS shall now be known as Intermittent Information Server

RickMuller: The problem you're seeing is because you're linking to an X11 GLUT and a Cocoa GLUT. You only want one. Are you compiling gopenmol for X11, or for Cocoa? Feel free to continue this via email (bobatredividotcom), it'd surely be a lot faster and less frustrating for you :)

RickMuller: Don't be afraid to change configure.in and automake again! The link options you want are going to be something like: -framework OpenGL -framework GLUT -framework Tcl -framework Tk -ljpeg. You're going to have to put a lot of #ifdef's in any source that includes GL/* and replace it with either OpenGL/* or GLUT/* depending. Other than that, the stuff looks pretty much platform/endian agnostic and shouldn't be too hard to deal with other than the dynamic module loading.