Monthly Archives: Dec 2007

gtkmozembed hack removed

gtkmozembed is notorious for consistently crashing in some systems. It turns out this is a problem with how the library is built; that is, a distro bug.

Exaile used to have a workaround for this, which apparently breaks in distributions (e.g. Gentoo) that already build gtkmozembed with the right magic.

As of a few hours ago, the workaround has been removed. If the actual problem is not fixed in your distribution (reportedly the development version of Ubuntu has been fixed), you can either ask the gtkmozembed package maintainer to apply the fix or ask the Exaile package maintainer to apply a workaround (note that a security problem has been identified in the old workaround).

Unicode in Python 2

… is a pain.

One of the things I like about Python is that it normally makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot (monkey patching, anyone?). The only exception that is very frustrating for me is Python 2’s Unicode support, which is ugly and difficult to get right.

Really, at this point I don’t care much about other (planned) changes in Python 3. If Unicode support can be made as transparent as in Java or .NET, I would be really happy.

PyPy

I’ve known about PyPy for some time, even tried it at one point, but I never knew it was more than just “Python in Python”.

For one, it has a translation layer that basically takes the implementation (which can also be for languages other than Python) written in RPython and turns it into code for various platforms (native, CLI, JVM, etc.).

It’s also home to some interesting experiments in Python; watch the new development blog to get a taste. For example, the post about the rope data structure is really cool if you’re into that sort of stuff.

The fact that the developer of Psyco is working on it is also promising. (Have a look at Psyco’s shootout page if you don’t know what it’s all about.)

In general, a project worth monitoring.