Archives 2012

So I've been playing with cutting down OpenGLContext into something like a modern scenegraph engine.  The first step there is to eliminate the old tree-traversal rendering mechanism, as the "flat" rendering engine is both simpler and much more easily optimized.  No big problem, really.  A lot of OpenGLContext's demos/tests just ran with only minimal changes, ...

We have lots of MathML from the DocBook manuals for PyOpenGL.  The latest versions of the manuals are now using MathJax to provide rendering of the matrices, equations, etceteras (see, for example, the glRotate manual page).  We've previously had to tell people to update/replace their browser or install a MathML-specific plugin.  This solution will (hopefully) ...

Just ran into the little wonder that is "pip install PIL", which results in a useless PIL (i.e. one without JPEG, PNG or TrueType support, but which imports, so doesn't trigger the "I don't have PIL code paths").  There's other cases with e.g. PostgreSQL drivers, or complex GUI libraries, where if you don't happen to ...

I'm hoping to have a few weeks to work on my own projects before I dive into working on other people's projects again (that might not pan out, but I'm hoping), so, here's a brain-dump of what I'm considering playing with:

• write a simple, generic shader-based legacy-free scenegraph engine (basically transplant the modern parts from ...

I've pretty much finished replacing Kid with Genshi for directdocs (the project that generates the PyOpenGL documentation by combining the upstream docbook files with the pydoc-like introspection of PyOpenGL, as well as generating the OpenGLContext tutorial files).  Was pretty much painless. Caught for a bit on ${ [ do(x) for x in y] } operation ...

TTFQuery has been updated to feel a tiny bit more modern.  It's still pretty old-school, but it now has some actual documentation, and should be more friendly for pip installation.

Found the bug that has been holding up my testing on PyOpenGL/OpenGLContext.  The shadow demos had been broken, which I considered a blocker.  Turns out ...

Just ran into a South migration issue.  Basically we had a field that looked like this (simplified):

class MyModel( models.Model ):
    hostname = models.CharField(
        default = random_unique_hostname,
    )

where random_unique_hostname() was written like so (again, simplified):

def random_unique_hostname():
    test = generate_random()
    try:
        MyModel.objects.get( hostname = test )
    except MyModel.DoesNotExist, err:
        return test
    else:
        return random_unique_hostname() ...

Ran FakeLion over our current project.  It's actually pretty cool just as a design tool.  The text is backward and in a weird "font", so you aren't distracted by what is says, you just see the site's layout with text-where-text-will-be.  With this being the third time we've used it on the project, there really wasn't ...

We use globalsub and MockProc extensively in our test-suite at work.  Today I wanted to look up the name of the argument in MockProc (we use globalsub in almost every test case, so I don't need to look that up).  So, look up the docs... wow, whoever wrote this library really sucks, there's just some ...

I've just done a bit of hacking to make the (Py)OpenGL.raw hierarchy a little more "normal" looking when you read the auto-generated code.  There are now functions declared, the functions are then annotated with decorators to make them into wrappers (which actually replaces the original functions).  Doesn't really affect how the code works, it just ...