Reading some posts about embedding languages/runtimes in applications on Planet GNOME reminded me I still had to announce some really quick and incomplete code blob I created some days after last GUADEC edition (which was insanely cool, thanks guys).

It takes WebKit’s JavaScriptCore and allows you to embed it in some Python program, so you, as a Python developer, can allow consumers to write plugins using JavaScript. Don’t ask me whether it’s useful, maybe it’s not, but anyway.

There’s one catch: currently there is no support to expose custom Python objects to the JavaScript runtime: you’re able to use JavaScript objects and functions etc. from within Python, but not the other way around. I started working on this, but the JSCore API lacked some stuff to be able to implement this cleanly (or I missed a part of it, that’s possible as well), maybe it has changed by now… There is transparent translation of JavaScript base types: unicode strings, booleans, null (which becomes None in Python), undefined (which becomes jscore.UNDEFINED) and floats.

I did not work on the code for quite a long time because of too much real-job-work, maybe it no longer compiles, sorry… Anyway, it’s available in git here, patches welcome etc. I guess this is the best sample code around. It’s using Cython for compilation (never tried with Pyrex, although this might work as well). If anyone can use it, great, if not, too bad, I did learn Cython doing this

I was feeling kind of nostalgic today, after the house poking around, and I always enjoyed driving Wisconsin Highway 33 (which has terminus points in La Crosse and Port Washington!). In fact, I think taking that 4 – 5 hour drive from one end to the other was my favorite part of living in La Crosse, to the point that I had often gone out of my way to start my drive at one end, so I could say that I drove the entirety of 33.

Anyway, nostalgia. I “drove” 33 again today by turning on satellite view on Google Maps, zooming in as close as I could for each location, and scrolling from La Crosse to Port Washington. Fun times.

Now that I’m looking for a house, I’m kind of regretting that large payment I made towards my student loan a month ago because “the money was just sitting there.” Doh!

Picked up, among others, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. Have only paged through it, but it’s pretty interesting so far. Unapologetically changed the physical landscape, dropped a lot of deities, killed off Mystra, dropped the Weave, so on and so on. Am I going to run it? Dunno. But it’s tempting me, in that “ooh, it’s the Realms” way, changes or not.

Need to read more (also reading GURPS stuff). Maybe I’ll dust off the Undermountain campaign…

Static methods and variables are shared by all instances of the class. Static variables are initialized when a class is loaded whereas instance variables are initialized when an instance of the class is created. Static methods belong to a class, therefore, it can only access static members of the class and it can be called before instantiating the class.

class StaticCase {
	static int staticCounter = 0;
	int nonStaticCounter = 0;
	
	StaticCase() {
		staticCounter++; //class level
		nonStaticCounter++; //instance level
	}
}
	
class StaticCaseImpl {
	
        //static method, entry point
	public static void main(String... args) {
                //StaticCase.nonStaticCounter, error, not a static variable
	
		StaticCase sc1 = new StaticCase();
		StaticCase sc2 = new StaticCase();
	
		System.out.println("staticCounter sc1: " + sc1.staticCounter);
		//output is staticCounter sc1: 2
                //or in static context, StaticCase.staticCounter
		System.out.println("nonStaticCounter sc1: " + sc1.nonStaticCounter);
		//output is nonStaticCounter sc1: 1
	
		System.out.println("staticCounter sc2: " + sc2.staticCounter);
		//output is staticCounter sc2: 2
                //or in static context, StaticCase.staticCounter
		system.out.println("nonStaticCounter sc2: " + sc2.nonStaticCounter);
		//output is nonStaticCounter sc2: 1
	}
}

I got this from Amerei. Here is my color.

Take the Magic: The Gathering ‘What Color Are You?’ Quiz.