Demystifying Python's del, __del__ and garbage collection

People are often confused about Python's del keyword and __del__() method. Most people think that applying del on an object causes the object's __del__() method to be called. But this is not true. del keyword merely decrements the objects reference count and de-scopes the variable on its application. But it doesn't necessarily invoke the object's __del__() method. __del__ method will be called only when the garbage ...

UNIX Series: System Calls - Part I

System programmers must know about system calls and for for those who are not system programmers, it is still good getting to know about how things work under the hood. My idea here is to do a series of blog posts on UNIX/Linux system internals for the upcoming weeks. I'm doing this as a part of my learnings from CodeSchool and reading Linux System Programming. Let's get ...

IDEs vs. Text Editors: What should developers use?

The answer to this question may vary from developers to developers. I truly believe that it also depends on the kind of programming language they use for developing applications. For example, I have heard many times from my fellow Java programmers that they couldn't live without the Eclipse IDE, that they will not be able to write a working Java program with the help of a simple text editor ...

RegexMate - A visual Regular Expression testing toolkit

I have been doing a lot of regular expression parsing at work. Writing regular expressions are hard, and testing it is even harder. Regexpal and Debuggex are some of the popular web based Regular expression testing tools available. Inspired by the idea behind these tools, I wrote a simple cross-platform regular expression tester, RegexMate in PyQt. Initial version of RegexMate can highlight matches, groups and supports some regex flags as ...

Org2OPML - Make awesome mindmaps using Emacs Org mode and Mindnode

Whoever using Emacs as their primary text-editor would have liked the Org mode. As the Org website puts it:-

Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system.

Org mode allows you to create documents with a simple syntax. Different headers/sections in the document can be represented by a * symbol. A single * corresponds to an <h1> block ...