Lazarus 1.0 release available for download. Great, the Pascal IDE is now available in version 1.0. And also for OSX. I've always played around with the pre-releases and it's really impressive what's all included. Nevertheless, I ended up with RealBasic, but I still have Lazarus and FreePascal installed and play around with them from time to time.
Archive August 2012
Cameron Lairds personal notes on varieties of Python implementation. And if by now there are too many Python variants to keep track of: someone has already done that, keeping track. And yes, there is a whole bunch of different distributions and implementations.
Numba vs Cython - Pythonic Perambulations. Another alternative to Cython and PyPy, with which you can marry LLVM and Python for performance gains. Here, real Python code is accelerated without modification via decorators, which is an extension to normal Python, so all libraries remain available and only the performance-critical routines are post-processed with LLVM.
Another rescue package. That's why I probably won't link to media anymore in the future. Newspapers and such nonsense. And to be quite honest? I even hope that Google removes German publishers from the index. Completely. Then let the screaming and later complaining begin, as in Belgium. At least the entertainment value would finally be there again.
KDE Necessitas project - Welcome to KDE Necessitas project. Hmm, it has received a new homepage, but more importantly, a new Alpha4 which will soon become Beta1. And from Beta1, ABI compatibility is guaranteed and then it will be a real alternative for Android development. Ok, C++ is not really much better than Java for me - quite the opposite. But it has the advantage that you can write apps with QT and C++ that can be made available as desktop applications with little effort. So just take a look when I find the time.
rawson.js - a camera raw previewer in javascript. Jupp. A RAW module for JavaScript. It's crazy what can be built with JavaScript. Although, after the PC emulator running in the browser that boots Linux, nothing should surprise me anymore.
commonsguy/cwac-anddown. Another Markdown implementation - this one uses sundown internally and JNI and the NDK to have a fast implementation of Markdown on Android. Worked flawlessly for me with the Nexus.
LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy. A handy little tool that cleans up various inconsistencies in text encodings after something has gone wrong. This is of course no substitute for correct use of encodings in Python, but sometimes you get your input from external sources (or have legacy data from old programs from times when the whole Unicode stuff was not yet so well developed) and have no influence on how the data looks - in that case, this is a very practical little tool.
kmike/marisa-trie. Very practical - there are quite a few things done in Python with Dicts that actually belong in other structures. Especially the prefix search and the search for existing prefixes is practical. And all of this with a C extension also quite fast.
Arduino - MacOSX. What fascinates me about Arduino: the simple interface of the IDE (which is just an enhanced Processing) and the pile of crazy projects around it, such as Digispark, a mini-board that can do less but is tiny and runs directly from the USB port. You can really think about things like water level sensors for plant irrigation or similar. With the prices for the mini-board, this becomes directly realistic.
myabc/markdownj I should check out, because JMD is somehow still a bit buggy and the developer is no longer doing anything with it. This is a port of the original Perl sources, so it heavily uses Regular Expressions, but that shouldn't really cause big problems with my UniversalBrain program structure, since I cache the HTML output. Maybe it behaves better than JMD. Although, of course, the question is whether it can be properly integrated as a library.
mitotic/otrace. Interesting alternative Python debugger designed for debugging and tracing multithreading applications. It's less about stepping sequentially through the Python code and more about analyzing an environment that dynamically changes through threads (the normal Python debugger is a bit cumbersome here).
Nizhny Tagil in August
Who has wondered where I have been - we were on vacation in the Ural Mountains. Here is a stack of pictures. Yes, vacation and family photography. I'm going to be so bourgeois!
Cletus/jmd. Since PegDown doesn't run on Android because the underlying parser wants to generate a dynamic parser class, which is not allowed there, take a look at this. It should also be quite comprehensive and is based on the Markdown# project for C#.
mitmel/SimpleContentProvider. Looks like a simple ORM that automatically generates an Android Content Provider. This makes the creation much slimmer in code.