Cilyan Olowen
Hi there!
I’m Cilyan, a former coder, developper and open-source enthusiast.
I used to have a blog of mine mainly about my findings and thoughts in the world of coding, hacking and managing computer systems and I mostly talked about Linux 🐧, Python 🐍, C 💻 and embedded platforms 🚗.
With my new activities, I stopped writing long ago and shut the website down. I asked that old articles that are still relevant are hosted here so they may be useful to those who find them.
Think & Code
SWIG is a wrapper generator that is able to connect compiled libraries to a bunch of scripting languages. The process is mostly automatic, but to tackle some corner cases, you have to help the generator do the right thing. In my library, all functions would return an integer, which is an error code. A special function, following the same behavior as strerror_r, can be used to retrieve the meaning of a special error code. This is a pretty usual mechanism for C code. But that’s not the way scripting languages work. In their world, functions are rather supposed to raise exceptions.
Last week, I was preparing a data analysis report using Jupyter, Pandas and Matplotlib (to only quote a few bricks of this wonderful framework). One of the figures had two subplots, the second being an enlargement of a region of the first. To make it obvious, and at the same time show the old MATLAB Fanclub how so 90 they were, I decided to put an arrow from the first to the second subplot.
“Hey, Pal! How are you? Remember that little project I had on the CubieTruck? I resumed hacking on it. But it’s a pity, I lost my root password… I have to start all over again. Any chance you remember what silly password we choose together?”