andrewsund.net

today’s internet

it’s all just 0day links

haha

had a ski mountain dream again

it’s weird that a ski lodge would be my reoccurring dream. i went about once or twice a year as a little kid. details weren’t very interesting, just noting that i’ve probably had this dream more times than i’ve been skiing by now.

i’m cutting my hair off tomorrow morning

then sunday it’s off to georgia

Cookies

350 degrees fahrenheit
1 cup margarine, melted
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2.5 cups whole oats
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
.5 tsp salt
etc.

“Wired Editor Apologizes for Copying from Wikipedia in New Book”

alibosworth:

“[Chris Anderson] said that while he believed Wikipedia was a valid source for books, he and his publisher had not been able to agree on a format for citations. … He said he originally wrote the sections using the material from Wikipedia in quotations, and had hoped to cite them using footnotes.”

Instead he just left out the quote marks and footnotes altogether? What the fuck, guy. This is the editor of Wired?

Initial Post (check out images of word-for-word unattributed plagiarism)

Follow up in NYT.com

go back 2 digg alibosworth

it’s that time again

i had one of those dreams last night where i didn’t know if it actually happened or not, so i was excited about it this morning until i checked the news. it turns out that they didn’t invent a new kind of kalman filter. this is what i dream about.

coffee

i had big plans to buy a coffee grinder and a substantial french press, but not anymore. i get terrible headaches and nausea every couple weeks or so and i don’t know if it’s coffee related but i’m willing to try anything at this point. the only thing that helps is sleeping and often it’s too painful to fall asleep. i used to get headaches as a little kid, but they went away for a number of years only to return recently.

i’m adding coffee to the list of things i don’t eat or drink.

Automatically Wrapping Libraries In Python (work in progress)

Introduction
I spend a lot of my time at work writing code in Python and using external libraries. ctypes is the built in method of accessing foreign functions and it works wonderfully. I’ve even used their C datatypes to emulate integer overflow for a platform specific checksum. However, there is no built in support for consuming an API. It’s possible to do it yourself, but some libraries are pretty complicated. You’re never actually done either, because one change upstream and your definitions could be off. The only sensible solution is to generate ctypes definitions of library functions automatically. The most promising method of doing this looks to be the excellent Py++ package.

Tools
LibRaw is the raw image processing library based on dcraw that I want to use from Python. Has a C++ and C interface. I’m going with the C++ interface because it’s easier to use.

VC9 is the C++ compiler I’m using on Windows, provided free with Visual C++ Express 2008. I used MinGW and it worked OK, but most libraries and programs (LibRaw and Python included) use MSVC, so I figured I might as well.

GCC-XML simulates a compiler and writes out an XML representation of the internal code structure inside the compiler. Once installed, I needed to run the included patcher to detect and support VC9.

pygccxml exposes the functionality of GCC-XML in Python and gets a list of exported functions from the binary library.

Py++ is the code generator that will write my ctypes definitions for everything found by pygccxml. To avoid manual intervention, there is a powerful set of queries available so I can exclude extraneous functions and resolve errors and warnings before building the code. If LibRaw updates, I simply have to run the script again and I have a new ctypes interface. Looks super interesting, but I haven’t played much with it yet.