Author archives: Mike

So, after another extended day, went to the UU meeting to see Bryan and pick up the laptop. It's an IBM X31 ThinkPad with a busted screen, so I have to connect it to my monitor, making it entirely non-portable. Luckily, Steve Holden gave me a switch and cables for sharing a monitor at PyCon, ...

Since I couldn't sleep, decided to build a wrapper to create an OpenGL context for testing the new ctypes-based code. Simple enough with PyGame, just import, init and set the mode and we're off to the races. Found a few small bugs when the code started running, and enhanced the error reporting a little, but ...

So, for the second day, I work 9+ straight hours w/out a break other than to grab more coffee and cookies. Sitting here at the end of that, with my hands chutneyed, and my eyes blurring from fatigue I suddenly think "why?"

It's nice that the test suite is running again. It's nice that the ...

Spent the bulk of the day on two projects. The first was eliminating stalls in the scanning process where the scanner is processing huge numbers of modems. Previously I was using a batching mechanism (actually, multiple batching mechanisms) that was (were) rather fragile and required lots of testing for each mechanism.

Started off looking for ...

The audio recording for my PyCon 2005 talk is available now. The pre-slides-coming-back stuff wasn't as bad as I'd feared, in fact, I prefer it to the stuff after the slides appearing, especially as there's a lot of dead air where I'm wrestling with the computer rather than talking to the audience.

There's nothing recorded ...

So, after everyone left I went back to work on the ctypes version of PyOpenGL. Finished the pointer-setting functions, mostly just a matter of generalising the code so that it creates all of the various permutations for the Pythonic wrappers.

Then I started in on making the API look like the original, so importing everything ...

Had a lunch meeting with a potential partner/client/employee this afternoon. We had Vietnamese at a little hole-in-the-wall up around Keele and Wilson. I would probably never have chosen anything with "soft tendon" in the title, had he not recommended it. It was a surprisingly good, large, bowl of extremely hearty soup.

Took a bit of ...

So, it turns out that Twisted has some serious problems related to starting and stopping the reactor multiple times during a run, which is, of course, what we do all the time when doing test-driven development in the "normal" (twisted.trial-like) style.

Have just spent more than 2 hours trying to build something that would let ...

Began work on creating wrappers for ctypes that work approximately the same as the ones planned for the 3.0 release (though written in Python, rather than C). Basically each function that needs array processing gets a number of annotations with callable objects. Those callable objects will eventually be written in C (for the performance critical ...

What I'd like to do this evening is sit around chatting with Natasha, Shane, Alexei, Shademan, Lara, Simon, Eric, Dan, Diana, Kim, Nadia, Lisa, Christine, Dave, Mark, Brendan, or any of a dozen other people with whom I don't get enough chance to talk. But they're all either busy people who will already have plans ...