Author archives: Mike

I've just pushed the 5th beta of RSR 2.0.1 to PyPI.  It fixes a few bugs on the Win32 platform.  This should be the last beta of 2.0.1 if no show-stoppers crop up.

I upgraded my main laptop to Kubuntu Natty this afternoon.  Honestly I can't tell the difference so far.  Firefox 4 is slightly different looking.  Nothing else of note seems to have changed.  I had to uninstall and re-install the Gtalk plugin, but other than that, no hiccups on the install.

On one hand, whew, nice ...

Updated the PyOpenGL code-base so that it can at least load the 4.x ARB extensions... thing is, I can't actually test anything because my now-rather-old laptop doesn't support any of the new extensions :) .

There is a thread on Python-list about removing the "cmp" parameter to Python's sort. One little tidbit I had missed was the introduction of a stable sort guarantee with Python 2.2. I've got lots of older code that uses cmp, so I figured I'll just start rewriting those as I come across them... later that ...

As I've been listening to PyCon lectures in the background as I work, I'm struck by the number of times people discussing PyOpenGL refer to the OpenGL.array.vbo module positively.  It's actually one of those pieces of the API where I have broken one of my rules for the project; "Don't extend the API".

Over the ...

Add a SquareMap-style visualization to accounting software, instant visualization of your entire company's expenses, revenue, budget, etceteras.  Perfect for including in reports to CEOs, Shareholders and the like.  For bonus marks, make it explorable, with a web-based tool to which I upload simple tree-structured data-sets.

Unscheduled day off work today... which means... RunSnakeRun (and SquareMap) got quite a few performance improvements when handling Meliae dumps.  It still takes 3-4 minutes to load a 16MB capture (that is, an dump that captured 16MB of objects) but once loaded it is reasonably close to interactive.  I haven't got time to work on ...

I've just released the latest version of RunSnakeRun.  Only real change is to better handle meliae dumps in the sense of giving more reasonable data.  The views are now reasonably useful, but they are extremely slow for any real-world application.

I've released (on PyPI) versions of RunSnakeRun and SquareMap that support Meliae dumps... but I'm not really satisfied with the functionality.  Basically the dumps seem to have 2-3MB of un-accounted-for objects in them.  In my trivial test that's about 10x more memory than can be reached from module references.  This small dump of ~13,000 objects ...

Got Meliae exploration working in RunSnakeRun this evening.  A few enhancements to the SquareMap control as well.  The data-sets are a bit too large on real-world memory-captures so performance becomes a serious issue... will have to do some profiling :) .  Oh well, something for another day.