Perl Meeting

Here's a report I wrote on the latest Israeli Perl Mongers, that took place on Thursday. My father drove me to the meeting, and at first I bought some Burekas in the nearby bakery. Then was the meeting. After the meeting Ronen Kfir drove me and Kfir Lavy home. Kfir and I chatted for a long time and ate supper at McDonalds. We discussed Linux and touched on many topics, including my projects.

Python Bindings

I've been toying up with the idea of integrating Freecell Solver into PySol. Since Freecell Solver is written in C, and PySol is a Python program, I had to create bindings for it. At first I started using SWIG. This created very C'ish APIs without much trace of a native language behaviour. Then I realized it does not handle arrays well. So I set out to write Python in the native bindings language. I consulted the Python tutorial, the Python extensions writing manual, and the people at the #python channel on FreeNode and eventually got things to work nicely enough.

I'm still a bit worried about memory leaks, but I suppose that Valgrind will help me detect if they exist.

Subversion Issue #1473

To further test my Repos->WC file copy code, I wrote a test that set up the svn:keywords property on the source file and then copied it. The result was nothing less than a segfault. So I filed an issue about it. The problem is that the translation is done without an entry existing in the .svn/entries file.

Ben Collins-Sussman and I discussed the best way to resolve it on IRC. Our conclusion was that we should probably create another post-process routine that will do the translation after the entry is created (which is already the case, just that the translation is done beforehand). However, Ben thought it was inelegant and so he wanted to consult the list.

Reading

I made some progress with "The Art of UNIX Programming". I also took the book "Apache : The Definitive Guide" from the Perl Mongers book pool and started reading it. I reached the beginning of the chapter on authentication.

Biking

Two days ago, when I biked, I noticed 1/3 of the way that a lot of air went out from the back wheel. So, I returned. I don't know what causes it, but I'll have to investigate, because I can't bike otherwise.