Author archives: Mike

As mentioned a while ago, I switched my desktop from Ubuntu to Kubuntu because Unity was just too half-baked to be used in my setup. That went relatively well, modulo the need to restart 3 times to get the desktop to come up (KDE just hung on login). However, one truly annoying casualty is that ...

As mentioned last week, the ARB draw_instanced extension allows you to draw large numbers of the same basic geometric shape with a single rendering call. However, to be useful, you need to pass in per-instance parameters which are used to customize the rendering. With the ARB uniform_buffer_object extension, you can get up to ~200-300 objects ...

Have been doing quite a bit of work combining jQuery Mobile with Django for certain (internal) projects.  You can set up the JQM stuff with a few lines in your template, then mostly "forget" about it while developing a regular Django form-based site (though you'll want to use HTML5 widget types).  The only major things ...

Hit a bug in my ARB buffer texture test-case this morning and decided to try out GLSLDevil to see what's going on in the shader (basically I seem to be getting out the wrong values from my texelFetch() calls).  Long story short, while I can do a bit of hackery to get past some initial ...

Have been spending the afternoon doing a bit of cleanup in the later extensions and versions for OpenGL in PyOpenGL.  Many of the later OpenGL versions do most of their work by importing entry points and constants from ARB extensions.  That's now reflected in PyOpenGL so that the core GL namespace includes those extension entry ...

RunSnakeRun 2.0.1, a cross-platform profile viewer for Python, is now up.  Mostly just changes for OS-X 32-bit loading since the last beta.  Meliae (memory dump) loading is the major new feature since the 2.0.0 series.

Have been growing (even more) annoyed with Unity on the machine at work.  Just too many times every hour where I have to stop, work around Unity (normally just an extra seek-and-click, but it adds up when you have to wait for the failure, think about why it's failing, then re-acquire a target, then click, ...

I finally tracked down why the second "shadow" demo had regressed for OpenGLContext on AMD cards.  Turns out that the order in which you bind/unbind textures and Frame Buffer Objects is very important.  If you have a texture bound as the current TEXTURE_2D at the same time as it is attached to an FBO attachment ...

My machine at work runs Ubuntu (instead of Kubuntu), as that was what someone installed for me before I got there, so when I updated to Maverick I got a chance to work with Unity.  I don't hate it, but I find it annoying in a number of small ways:

• I can't see all my ...

Working on integrating a patch that lets parts of PyOpenGL work on PyPy 1.5 and Python 3.2 (thanks to Renaud).  Tried creating a little wrapper that abstracts away the various changes.  One of these is a function that can take a string, a unicode string, or an arbitrary object and wants to get a friendly ...