2008-05-14

To hell with climate change, time to speak up for the fish!

Most media are writing about the polar ice melting, polar bears being exterminated.. like anyone's going to notice that they're gone. At the same time, something much worse is happening, and it should deserve at least as much media coverage as climate change: unsustainable overfishing in the seas. This article is a very awakening and scary read. Spread the word and make politicians do something! I've never seen a polar bear, nor do I have a particular desier to see it, but i like very much to eat fish.

[PS. I think that disappearance of any species is regrettable, but I certainly prioritize a food source over some exotic animal. It's regrettable that media don't have same opinion.]

2008-05-11

Sudoku solvers and cairo graphics

I have decided to play a bit with constraint programming, so I'm rewriting my logic game solvers as constraint programs. For that I'm using the minion constraint solver to which I interface through python; I wrote a simple parser of minion's textual output. I wanted some pretty-printing, and doing it in purely textual mode has shown to be rather tedious to code. So I turned to the excellent cairo graphics library for drawing solutions. The library is surprisingly simple to use, and also comes with python bindings. Now I'm working on another puzzle, and after cleaning up the code a bit, I'll upload the new package.