1 May 2000 bernhard   » (Master)

Hacking

After a few last minute bug fixes and changes, I put the last finishing touches on Sketch 0.6.6 today and released it. I had some problems with the web-page update because SourceForge wouldn't let me log in. A few hours later it worked again, though.

A couple of days ago, Martin Weber contacted me about adding color support to the output filters for the next release of AutoTrace, so modified the svg, sk and eps/ai filters accordingly. It took just a few lines.

He also asked me to look for memory leaks and as it turns out the situation is awful. On one particular image, autotrace makes 1 452 546 mallocs, but only 290 458 frees. Most of the leaks are hard to find because of inconsistent use of malloced vs. automatic variables and strange data-structures, e.g. there's an array of structs that also seems to be a linked list.

This isn't Martin's fault, however, because these leaks are already present in limn, a part of the GNU fontutils on which autotrace is based. I gave him the advice to reimplement the algorithm from scratch. That seems to be the sanest solution.

Maschinen-Menschen Mensch-Maschinen
(Machine-Humans Human-Machines)

That's the title of an article in the current issue of c't. It contains reports from Intel's Computing Continuum Conference and Hofstadter's Spiritual Robots Symposium. I had read about Hofstadter's April 1st event on Slashdot, but the Intel one was new to me.

Especially noteworthy for me as a python-fan is that among such luminaries as Bill Joy and Hans Moravec it also mentions Guido van Rossum and his Computer Programming for Everybody.

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