Archives October 2008

Procrastination is Bad

The deadline for PyCon proposals is fast approaching.  Here's my current thinking for proposals:

  • Graphics Workshop, sub-track (in open-space likely), informal presentations and workshops from the various graphics/game environments, maybe a few demonstrations and panels, hang out with gurus, write new games, produce new visualizations, polish old ones; keep the whole thing informal, maybe have ...

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Is "Boredom" Instinctual?

A few days ago one of my colleagues mentioned a scholarly article he'd read the night before.  Researchers were attempting to show a genetic link for thrill-seeking (novelty-seeking) behaviour with some success.  That is, for their definition of "novelty-seeking" they seemed to have discovered a relationship between (IIRC a particular gene) and the behaviour in ...

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PyGTA Tonight: You got Python in my XML!

How would you merge large quantities of Python-accessible information into a pre-existing set of XML documents.  This approach combined lxml.etree (ElementTree) with Kid templates (based on ElementTree) to efficiently annotate a large tree of documents.  We'll look at how to use ElementTree (and how to use the query mechanism in lxml's implementation to search your ...

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Stripped pkg_resources out of OpenGLContext and PyVRML97

Definitely seems to have been a setuptools bug that karked my setup last week when trying to get TurboGears running with Twisted + Athena.  By downgrading to a previous version of SetupTools I was able to get TurboGears to run properly again.  Also ran into a weird bug where setuptools was causing a single character ...

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Something that was dropped in the debate...


Some thoughts on the Canadian elections under way:

    o C's response to job losses in Ontario and Quebec
          o "Last place to invest"
          o We'll create jobs elsewhere (read: Alberta)
          o Encourage low-value export of raw materials because that makes money today

          o We've created more jobs than we've lost (read: service jobs (low-pay) and ...

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Bit of PyOpenGL on the weekend

Spent much of the afternoon working on PyOpenGL.  Spent some quality time with kcachegrind and got something like a 1% speed up on a (rather dumb) benchmark I've been using (dumb because it does everything wrong, mostly).  In doing so I cut down on the amount of code in the "wrapper" module noticeably, which was ...

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Where did *that* dependency come from?

Working on PyOpenGL today.  Few little fixes, a few wrapper operations to make things more Pythonic.  Nothing huge.  At some point, though, I discovered that pkg_resources was complaining that it couldn't find the PyOpenGL distribution (I eliminated pkg_resources from PyOpenGL, but OpenGLContext is, for now, using it).  Okay, so run setuptools and register PyOpenGL...

But ...

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I rather enjoyed Mochikit

At my one client we use the Ext javascript library, which is somewhat of an all-singing-all-dancing javascript library with dozens of compound widgets, particularly these huge, heavily abstracted searchable, sortable, selectable grid widgets.  Ext doesn't float my boat.  I wouldn't pick it up to use it on a personal project.  The API just seems so ...

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