PitaTranslate continues to grow

My little android translator, PitaTranslate, continues to grow and evolve. What started out as an exploratory project to learn android has turned into a program that I (and others, from what I gather) use every day. Some of the features planned for the near future include: Preferences dialog for changing some settings Access to translation […]

Two methods for python method access from C++

Lately I’ve been exploring ways to improve the performance of some areas of code where embedded python calls are made from C++. A common and obvious (and often effective) approach for increasing performance in these areas is to forgo python and rewrite performance-critical areas in C/C++. However, I got curious about other, less invasive ideas, […]

Foreshadowing

Has this ever happened to you? You’re coding something new and exciting, and you can see that you’re getting close to a big goal. You don’t want to be distracted from reaching your perceived milestone, and you leave a trail of TODOs, FIXMEs, and other notes to yourself to take care of “minor details” after […]

Euler 71

I finished Euler 71. It was a relatively painless problem which, for my approach at least, involved reducing a search space through a little analysis to get a performant solution. I haven’t read the discussion yet, so there may well be better approaches than mine, but I’m solving it in a few seconds. One noteworthy […]

Tricky bugs and release libs

I’m wrapping up a bug right now that has to do with translating python exceptions into C++ exceptions. The translation occurrs as follows: Catch boost::python::error_already_set Import python modules which contain the exception types that I want to compare against Compare the thrown exception with the imported types using PyErr_ExceptionMatches Take appropriate actions (e.g. throw a […]

Euler 70

I finished problem 70 from Project Euler. My submission was based on a largely brute-force approach, but one which was guaranteed to find the answer. After submitting, I read through the problem discussion, and the fast solutions all seemed to rely on really educated guesswork. This bothers me a bit. The guesswork for the fast […]

rst2wordpress

One technology that seems to be getting some traction lately, and one that I really like, is reStructuredText, a part of the Docutils project. I use it extensively for both code documentation and "normal"documents, and I’ve reached a point where I really feel productive in it. Because I like restructured text, because I’d rather write […]

Getting started with oprofile

I recently needed to do some profiling of a largish C++ program, something I hadn’t done in a while, so I did a little research into the available free options. My first stop, of course, was the old standby gprof which I quickly (though not after recompiling everything with -pg) abandoned because it still, after […]

Performance gains from transactions in sqlite

Anyone who does work with databases has probably had it drilled into their head that transactions can be used to increase performance in many cases. I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with sqlite recently, and got curious about just how much transactions could help in a particular case of mine. The answer: tremendously. […]