Working with vendor code in C can get very tricky, especially when you except breaking changes to occur. Especially when you have multiple binaries depending on that vendor code, updating at different times, necessitating different live versions. Let’s explore.

Introduction

Assume you’re working with an external vendor, who is providing you with code for a wonderful function getFoo:

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// foo.h version 1.2.3

int getFoo();

// foo.c version 1.2.3

int getFoo() {
  sleep(1000); // TODO improve performance
  return 42
}

You use this function in many of your products - for example, in your best-selling barApp application:

Vacations are a great time for doing that problematic category of things every management course teaches you about: important, but not urgent. For some people, it’s housework or schoolwork which gets drowned out by day-to-day life. For others it’s keeping up with friends and family. Myself, I also like to read and write.

Writing, for me, is usually about practical stuff. Sometimes it’s simply code (most of those projects were written on vacations). Other times, it’s writing to this blog (in one of its incarnations) - which usually has to do with technical tinkering of some sort or other. It’s not that I don’t do enough writing in my day job; but there does tend to be an accumulation of things to write: “I should blog about that”, “I should write that code”, “I should try and get my router to do that”, and so forth. When a few days off come by, and I feel that I have enough time to get more urgent stuff done - it’s quite satisfying to be able to dig into that write-queue.

As part of my M.Sc. studies, I’ve recently completed a small laboratory project in natural language processing. I’ve learned quite a bit from it, and had a chance to use a few of my favorite technologies.

The project was coded in Python, which is not my favorite programming language - Ruby is. However, since Python is more popular at my workplace, and seems to have a richer ecosystem around it (sometimes, at any rate), I’ve grown to love it almost as much over the years. It’s quick, easy, and has fantastic libraries; specifically, for this project, we made heavy use of the Natural Language Toolkit. We used Git for source control and Github for hosting, Travis for continuous integration, and ReadTheDocs for documentation. All of these culminate in the project being handed in as a single link: http://github.com/lutzky/translationese.

I’ve already mentioned my show downloading stack on this blog. It’s changed a bit since - I now use Transmission rather than rtorrent, as it has the excellent transmission-daemon package which has it acting exactly the way I like (without using screen). Also, it now E-mails me when a torrent is done downloading. So while this may be how TV works for you:

1. Notice that a new episode is out
2. Torrent it
3. Wait for the download to finish
4. Watch it

…this is how TV works for me now: