Archives December 2008

Back when I was doing the next-generation (now many generations old) Multi-User Technology (MUTech) for Holodesk I thought it was really cool that there was no "server", it was all just peers where any given object could be hosted on any machine, and the system would let you set up (potentially one-way) proxies on any ...

Here are my rough notes from PyGTA's programming mantra's discussion this evening:

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
   Have a vision before you start coding.
   Know your task.
   Know your client.
   Ignore the impossibility behind the curtain.
Your clients don't know what they want.
   Charge by the hour.
   Play around with ...

Ran into this problem on Friday at a client site and just couldn't find a Python library that did everything I needed wrt providing login to TurboGears and properly uploading a file to a controller in the TurboGears application.  Bothered me that there was no easy way to do this (seems like it should be ...

Was looking into mitigating some of the slowdown from the recent fix, mainly be rewriting this little function:

@classmethod
def from_param( cls, instance, typeCode=None ):
    try:
        pointer = cls.dataPointer( instance )
    except TypeError, err:
        array = cls.asArray( instance, typeCode )
        pp = ctypes.c_void_p( cls.dataPointer( array ) )
        pp._temporary_array_ = (array,)
        return pp
    else:
        return ctypes.c_void_p( ...

Having to work with svn again at a client site... I miss bzr.  Even bzr-rebase is turning up fondly in my memories.  It's really just the merging... merging with svn seems to always be an "Oh good Lord! We have to MERGE!" event, filled with conflicts and crashes halfway through switching that leave 1/2 of ...

Installed kvm on the laptop.  Was a bit annoyed to discover I had to reboot (to alter the BIOS in order to enable the virtualization support in the processors), but other than that was extremely easy to install (just aptitude install kvm (I already had QEMU)).

Compared to vanilla QEMU on the same box the ...

When you code, do you consciously think about the principles in the Zen of Python? Do you find yourself following them automatically without thought? Do you find they are pointless/irrelevant to your coding? Do you ever defend your decisions (to yourself or others) by reference? What about other programming "rules" (formal patterns, XP principles)? Do ...

Just discovered an annoying regression in the converters for lists/tuples, namely they will core when you have the accelerator module installed.  They don't core without the accelerator, but that seems to just be dumb luck.  Basically when you pass in a list-of-whatevers to PyOpenGL we have to convert it to something C-friendly, so we want ...

There have been so many changes to try to improve performance and packaging that we're going to have to have another beta for PyOpenGL.  Beta 8 is up on SourceForge.  It includes Win32 installers for both the Python code and the (optional) Cython accelerator modules (for Python 2.5).  Probably should split out the accelerator modules ...

The new laptop is doing well so far, though I haven't used it for more than writing notes just yet.  However, I'm finding that the placement of the home, end, pgup and pgdown buttons makes it very hard to code on.  For some reason I can't fathom someone put keys that only work for web-browser ...