Unique 0.25 : the froodiest version yet

When I added the 'search for selected pattern' feature to unique's browser, I realized that hidden in the core library was a full search engine. So I thought that it would be fun to add a google-like interface to this engine.

Unlike traditional search engines, this one works on pattern matching. Giving it a few random keywords won't work. So... how could one use it? By feeding it sample code. Give it a few lines of code, a sentence or an algorithm and it will search for something similar.

Here is a scenario where it could shine. Suppose that littered through the code base you have used the same idiom/pattern/copy-pasted code. One day you find a bug in the pattern. Searching for all the instances of the pattern could be difficult with a regex, for many reasons. Variable or function names could be different from module to module, some instances could have changed slightly over time by different maintainers, etc. Unique should be pretty good at finding all those occurrences. Simply feed it one instance of the idiom and launch the search.

What's next? Not quite sure. Emacs integration is on the list. Better performance that would allow the indexing of very large code bases : that's also on the radar. If you think unique could be useful to you, tell me how - I can help.

Get your copy here : https://sourceforge.net/projects/unique/

3D scanning in Montreal

VLAM is now offering a 3D scanning service!
http://www.3d-body-scanner.com/

twitter on n900

Is there a twitter client that will integrate in the conversations of a Nokia n900 phone and actually work?

How to properly tag python source files

Situation : emacs + ctags + python source

Problem : import statements are tagged just like definitions, which means that find-tag never jumps to the location I am interested in.

Solution : add "--python-kinds=-i" to the ~/.ctags file. On Windows that would be c:\users\[username]\.ctags

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/exuberant-ctags/+bug/618979

Voilà.

unique 0.19 is out

Unique 0.19 is finally out! The new feature is in the browser. You can now select any text in the right pane and search for code similar to your selection. It adds to unique some kind of search engine... maybe I should add a search bar to make it more obvious.

Anyways... enjoy!

Considering unity

Does anybody here have experience with the unity game engine?
We could use it for one of our projects but we don't know how stable and extensible it is. If you can share horror or love stories, they would be most welcome.

Thanks!

swig bindings of VTK : a call to arms

I don't know how common our situation is... We use VTK through it's Python interface but we also need to develop some algorithms in C++ and make them accessible to the Python runtime. The problem is that, as far as I know, the VTK bindings are not inter-operable with swig. The result is that we can allocate VTK data structures from Python but we can't give them to our C++ algorithm.

There are multiple solutions to this problem. The one we chose is to use swig to wrap our algorithm *and* VTK, in two different but inter-operable modules.

We will start by wrapping and testing the parts of VTK that we need right now, but if other people out there have a similar need perhaps we could collaborate and come up with better bindings.

So... is there anyone interested in participating in this not-yet-born open source project?