Archives 2008

Developed a product a few years ago using Twisted, which got left on a shelf due to unavoidable complications at the business level. Client with a license to alter the code asked me to make some changes to it, so I sat down today to rebuild the development environment...

Twisted and Nevow have moved along, ...

Got the AStar implementation working again. Was a couple of stupid little bugs in the code that creates the topology from the map. AStar is a graph-based implementation (which is nice, because Productive uses a graph-based world definition so that at some point we can have very complex map types), which traces through the connections ...

Since Productive is not considered an official task, it's been stalled for a while. Took a few hours today to try to un-stall it. Mostly trying to optimize the AStar algorithm. Sped it up to the point where a moderately sized world (96x96) takes about .6s to compute an AStar path. That's still way too ...

Reading through the original outline for my thesis (that is, the one in 1997) and realizing there's lots of stuff in there that just isn't getting covered in the rewrite. So, today I worked on the "Patterns of Creation" section, this section just discusses the nature of generative and organizing patterns and their role in ...

Spent the whole day (around a nap) working through the PyOpenGL bug-tracker. A number of minor fixes here and there, a few new test cases, and a lot of stale-dated stuff. Got the vertex buffer object Demo working again along the way.

Need to test Win32 extension handling (I have a report that it's broken ...

Jim suggested having an OLPC stream at TOJam, would have to work out the logistics, make sure people have development environments available, that kind of thing. It would have to be off-clock, so I couldn't put all that much time into it, but it might pull in a dozen or so new developers.

Spoke down at the IGDA Toronto chapter meeting today. A number of folks interested in working on the project, particularly two gentlemen who have a lot of sound effects they might be able to release to meet our needs and audio/video encoding experience. A number of independent game developers, and web-content providers also indicating interest.

Since I didn't get anyone else standing up with a "deep" topic for tonight, I'm proposing that we look at the cortical algorithm put forward by Hawkins in On Intelligence, and then see if we can hash out how you'd go about creating such a thing in Python (efficiently enough to make it useful). ...

Got a little more time to work on the thesis this evening. Broke the Play section off, then started work on making the "Functionalism" section less abrupt and more descriptive. Same with the Post Modernism introduction. Only an hour or so of work on it, though, so not a whole lot of movement.

Spent a while rereading the sections on Play in the thesis. They're trying to cover far too large a topic far too quickly, so they sound trite. Need to go back and cover the months and months of conversations and ruminations on the topic, not just hit the crystallized "decisions". Shouldn't be hundreds of pages ...