Author archives: Mike

PyGTA on Tuesday should be fun.  The question is:

If you had a million dollars (CDN) to spend on a Python project, what would you spend it on?

Sure, money doesn't solve all problems, but if you had it available and earmarked for "something python", what would you do with it?  We'll assume a project ...

Great fun at PyGTA this evening.  We had an overly complex voting scheme, basically you could vote from 0 to 5 (5 being the highest) for each project, total count wins.  We had quite a few proposals, and laughed rather a lot during the process.

My take-aways:

• Concurrency matters in multi-core systems, Python needs ...

I've been checking out various attempts to install Ubuntu on the Thinkpad W500 series...  The system can't switch on-the-fly between the two graphics chips, but it can use the 3D card, which is what I need for OpenGL work.  Thinking I'd go for 2.53GHz and as much RAM as she'll hold, with the higher-resolution screen. ...

I've been thinking in the back of my mind that it's probably time to move to Ubuntu (specifically Kubuntu) on the workstation at home.  While I prefer Gentoo for the control it gives me, I have to admit that I really don't have the time to muck about with keeping everything up to date.  So, ...

I hadn't intended to work on PyOpenGL today, wanted to spend some time looking at what to do for the broader world... oops.  Anyway, using Cython I've sped up the PyOpenGL stuff to the point where the PyOpenGL stuff has dropped off the list of hotspots for OpenGLContext rendering.  Not saying there aren't hotspots left, ...

Doing some optimization of the OpenGLContext scenegraph.  Just using display-lists on the material objects takes the material rendering overhead from ~5% of runtime to <1% of runtime.  There's a diminishing set of low-hanging optimizations available at this point.  The wrapper object is obviously a major time-sink.  I took a look at re-writing that in C ...

Soni and I got an invitation to the opening party for HackLab in Toronto,but I was out of town at a client site that night.  However, the club has an open house on Tuesday nights, so I decided to drop in this evening to check them out.  Spent much of the time talking with ...

Been thinking a lot lately about how to direct my energies into socially beneficial channels.  I'm still reasonably convinced that we need to focus on education, without that you're pretty much doomed to fall back into chaos with every blow.  I'm also reasonably convinced that some of the things that need to be taught are ...

Going to do the popular "topical discussion" format at PyGTA this month.  We'll discuss what you would do if you had $1,000,000 CDN to spend on a Python-related project.  Discussion starts at 7pm, Tuesday the 18th at Linux Caffe.

I finally sat down this evening to get SimpleParse updated to use the Py_ssize_t type instead of ints for tracking offsets, lengths and the like.  Was lots and lots of trivial updates, rather than anything particularly difficult... exactly the kind of thing I hate spending time on.

Anyway, don't yet have a Python2.6 compilation setup ...