Author archives: Mike

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 ...

Spent some quality time this evening with PyOpenGL, OpenGLContext and KCacheGrind.  Quite a few tiny improvements in the code-base.  I'm still just picking out little bits of fluff that are "wrong" as they show up in the profiling.  There was ~4% of total run-time on this machine spent in Python's warnings.warn() function because there was ...

Profiling OpenGLContext on a relatively large VRML97 world.  Interesting stats (in OpenGL, ignoring OpenGLContext slow-points):

• 3% of total runtime is in a function which just does numpyarray.ctypes.data; it seems the ctypes array sub-object is a Python instance that has multiple operations in its initializer and is recreated on each access (with many accesses per array ...

Seems Nvidia has released OpenGL 3.0 drivers for Linux (yay!) but they don't support my GeForce 7600GS (sigh).  I'm thinking maybe I should buy a kick-posterior gaming laptop with an uber-3D chip so I'm not always tied to my workstation at home if I want to do OpenGL 2.0 or above work.

Anyway, tried to ...

Finally got my talk proposals in to PyCon.  I went for 3 this time, mostly because each of them seemed like it would be interesting enough to excite people.  I doubt all three will be accepted, but hey, maybe I can do a couple of them in Open Space.  I didn't propose the "graphics and ...

The deadline for PyCon proposals is fast approaching.  Here's my current thinking for proposals:

• Graphics Workshop, sub-track (in open-space likely), informal presentations and workshops from the various graphics/game environments, maybe a few demonstrations and panels, hang out with gurus, write new games, produce new visualizations, polish old ones; keep the whole thing informal, maybe have ...

A few days ago one of my colleagues mentioned a scholarly article he'd read the night before.  Researchers were attempting to show a genetic link for thrill-seeking (novelty-seeking) behaviour with some success.  That is, for their definition of "novelty-seeking" they seemed to have discovered a relationship between (IIRC a particular gene) and the behaviour in ...

How would you merge large quantities of Python-accessible information into a pre-existing set of XML documents.  This approach combined lxml.etree (ElementTree) with Kid templates (based on ElementTree) to efficiently annotate a large tree of documents.  We'll look at how to use ElementTree (and how to use the query mechanism in lxml's implementation to search your ...