Arrival Haikou, Got Payment!

First, I have arrival Haikou tonight, and then have eaten some delicious. :)

Secondly, the GSoC payment has sent to my store value card right now! Hopefully every GSoCers have got it. :)

Back!

Well, finally I have came back to the earth!

After a super busy month, many things get done - the exams, TOEFL, GSoC midterm evaluation, rent room in Singapore, ... Another good news is my GSoC project still on track! Though, well, I have a little trouble of implementing the Python buffer support - I havn't a clear plan about what I am going to do...

Tonight I will go to Haikou, and then contiune my summer in this hot beatiful city. :)

Happy Dragon Boat Festival!

Today is Dragon boot festival in China! Everyone have eaten Zongzi today. :)

However, a lot of course projects and exams in the following days for me.
Just work out a list here:

• Jun 12: Final exam of English-Chinese Translation (12:10~13:20, Room 3208)
  
• Jun 16: Software Engineering project presentation
• Jun 16: Final exam of Theory of Computation (Room 4303)
  
• Jun 16: Deadline of Data Mining project
• Jun 21: CET-6 exam (15:00, Room HGX309)
• (And 2 exams date TBD.)

Oh.. an awful list..

Got my card yet!

After waiting and waiting, finally I got my card from Google! Yoohoo!

Thank you Google for the Childern's Day gift! :p

BTW, an ad: help Firefox 3 to Set a Guinness World Record!

Hello, Planet Python/SoC!

I'm so glad to see that my blog has been added to Planet Python/SoC! Thanks Titus Brown for doing so.

Just saying a hello to everybody, and happy coding! :)

Debugging Python Extension Module

There's some useful technique for debugging Python extension module, gathered during these days work.

• Clewn is a way to combine VIM and GDB.
  
• Set break on PyErr_Format or PyErr_SetString so you can trace a Python exception raised from the extension module
• Use 'make EXTEA_CFLAGS="-ggdb3 -O0"' to compile Python so you can have debugging symbol in the compiled executable. (Thanks my mentor Richard told me that.)
  
• There is a Misc/gdbinit in Python's code base. It defined many useful macro for GDB. Put the file in your working directory and rename it to .gdbinit to use it. The most useful macro is "pyo", which prints many useful information of a PyObject.
• Valgrind is also a good debugging tool. (Btw, it has won the Trolltech Open Source Development Award recently.) There's a Misc/valgrind-python.supp for it.
• [Python-Dev] disappearing exceptions explained some odd behavior I've ever encountered. Seems even the print() statement also swallow exception. (At least in Python 3.0)

Anyway, happy hacking!

Submitted my first issue to python.org, and some good news

You can see it here: http://bugs.python.org/issue2899

It is about a problem in SWIG's test cases. It used string.find(s, 'abc') to test whether 'abc' is contained in s. However, I don't know what it has been written in this way. Maybe for compatibility with older Python like 2.2, 2.3?

And a good news, after these day's working, nearly all test cases passed! Currently only 2 cases related to PyFile and 2 cases related to exception are still failed. I'll continue to work on them.

Another good news is I have received my book from Google yesterday. A really beautiful book! :)