Author archives: Mike

Have just been testing the new Cython accelerator module for PyOpenGL 3.x on my workstation.  As seen on the laptop, the PyOpenGL-specific stuff just sort of drops out of the hotspot-set.  There's a few little spots with a percent or two showing up, but pretty much everything else is OpenGLContext scenegraph management stuff.  Those tend ...

Just wrote my first Ruby script (I've only read about it before this).  I'm not falling in love yet... can't say I'm really even finding it beautiful.  All those "ends" scattered around, scoping with line-noise.  I see the niceness of the block abstraction, but I haven't yet come to need them.  Ah well, suppose I ...

I chose 1 million dollars as a small number that should be possible to raise if we have a good enough proposal.  The top three voted projects focus on, one way or another, performance and applicability.  The winning project essentially was to improve Python's concurrency storing markedly.  Basically spend the money on hiring people to ...

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 ...