Author archives: Mike

Have been spending a lot of quality time with Dojo this weekend, and it's making me think about abstractions again.  The pattern seems to repeat itself again and again; you dive into a deep pool of someone else's abstractions, you spend days working out all the little undocumented assumptions and missing pieces, eventually you get ...

So, the trivial difference that I hadn't realized I'd changed: I apparently enabled "effects" for KDE, which turns on Compiz.  With that enabled the Lenovo W500 laptop would die on resume.  With it turned off, resume works with the proprietary driver and I still have the 3D acceleration for PyOpenGL hacking (when I get a ...

Used to be that I'd have a party every Solstice and Equinox.  Somehow it just slipped past this year.  Still, I did eventually remember it, so happy Solstice everybody.  Enjoy the longer days, enjoy the time with family and friends, enjoy just being.

I really do love Toronto.  I've never been anywhere else that has such a riot of cultures all flowing (relatively) smoothly along beside each other.  Faces on the subway are so varied that it seems like a United Nations meeting.  There's every type of restaurant you can imagine and quite a few you wouldn't have ...

Today was the first time I connected a projector to the new laptop.  Good news: worked reasonably well, though we couldn't find the option to tell the laptop to display different values on the projector and the screen.

Bad news: something has changed in the settings such that the laptop can no longer recover from ...

Looks like two of my talk proposals for PyCon have been accepted.  One is an intermediate/advanced talk porting your code to OpenGL 3.x, the other an introductory presentation on Profiling/optimization.  Should be fun :) .

Back when I was doing the next-generation (now many generations old) Multi-User Technology (MUTech) for Holodesk I thought it was really cool that there was no "server", it was all just peers where any given object could be hosted on any machine, and the system would let you set up (potentially one-way) proxies on any ...

Here are my rough notes from PyGTA's programming mantra's discussion this evening:

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
   Have a vision before you start coding.
   Know your task.
   Know your client.
   Ignore the impossibility behind the curtain.
Your clients don't know what they want.
   Charge by the hour.
   Play around with ...

Ran into this problem on Friday at a client site and just couldn't find a Python library that did everything I needed wrt providing login to TurboGears and properly uploading a file to a controller in the TurboGears application.  Bothered me that there was no easy way to do this (seems like it should be ...

Was looking into mitigating some of the slowdown from the recent fix, mainly be rewriting this little function:

@classmethod
def from_param( cls, instance, typeCode=None ):
    try:
        pointer = cls.dataPointer( instance )
    except TypeError, err:
        array = cls.asArray( instance, typeCode )
        pp = ctypes.c_void_p( cls.dataPointer( array ) )
        pp._temporary_array_ = (array,)
        return pp
    else:
        return ctypes.c_void_p( ...