Monday, 2 December 2002
I've been incredibly busy recently, and my workload shows no signs of lessening until after my medical genetics final on the 15th. Thanksgiving break was wonderful, though too short as usual.
In the last few weeks I've been porting my instrumentation overhead analysis code from C++ to Python and MetaKit. The Carbon ports of Tk/Tkinter and especially GNU Emacs have improved to the point of usability, so in the last week I've moved my primary working environment from one of our group's Linux clusters to my PowerBook and desktop G4. I still need to use Linux for testing, but being able to do development in a Mac environment without needing X11 is great.
MetaKit, with its Python binding Mk4py, is a flexible, simple and easy to use embedded database. There's even a SQL implementation implemented on top of it. The other database I considered was SQLite, which is a lot more featureful, but I dismissed it because it stores numbers as strings. The one problem I've run into with MetaKit has been its lack of support for Unicode strings—which I luckily don't need but which the xml.dom.minidom parser loves to return.
From a mailing list post today I discovered pyrepl, which provides some very useful enhancements to command-line editing in the Python interpreter.
11:24 AM
