Author archives: Mike

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 ...

Definitely seems to have been a setuptools bug that karked my setup last week when trying to get TurboGears running with Twisted + Athena.  By downgrading to a previous version of SetupTools I was able to get TurboGears to run properly again.  Also ran into a weird bug where setuptools was causing a single character ...

Some thoughts on the Canadian elections under way:

    o C's response to job losses in Ontario and Quebec
          o "Last place to invest"
          o We'll create jobs elsewhere (read: Alberta)
          o Encourage low-value export of raw materials because that makes money today

          o We've created more jobs than we've lost (read: service jobs (low-pay) and ...

Spent much of the afternoon working on PyOpenGL.  Spent some quality time with kcachegrind and got something like a 1% speed up on a (rather dumb) benchmark I've been using (dumb because it does everything wrong, mostly).  In doing so I cut down on the amount of code in the "wrapper" module noticeably, which was ...