Author archives: Mike

Sat down to collect my contribution for tomorrow's PyGTA. I've cut the set down to 8, maybe tomorrow after work I can narrow it down further. At the moment everything is my own code, save for Tim Peter's toposort from way back when. There's a number of very different views of what makes good code ...

Hope you're all wracking your brains and your source code control systems looking for that perfect piece of code that shows (some) programming has beauty and wonder.  Or maybe you're putting together a piece that shows programming really is just a kludge to get the job done.

PyGTA is tomorrow at Linux Caffe, 7:00pm.

RunSnakeRun is one of my older projects.  It's a small utility which loads HotShot profiler data into a sortable GUI table.  It now also supports cProfile/profile module profile runs.  I've also updated it to work with modern wxPython and numpy instead of Numeric (it uses numpy to speed up loading of very large HotShot profiles). ...

Here's the plan for the PyGTA meeting this Tuesday (the 15th).

Bring a piece of code that you love. Something that's elegant, beautiful, efficient, useful, perfectly formatted, meaningful, warped or wonderful in some way. We'll take 5 minutes each and present our chosen piece of code. Then we'll have people ask questions about the code ...

John has started a Toronto Plone group.  Meeting is this evening @360 Adelaide St. W. (near Spadina).  6pm to 8pm, apparently a variety of speakers.  Be there.[1]

[1] With the assumption that you're interested in Zope/Plone and are in Toronto...

Continuing to follow up on what's going on in post-modern theory these days.  Particularly reading Jenck's "The New Paradigm in Architecture", which is basically a review of the bulk of the work in the post-modern movement.

Biggest take-away so far is that I've studied most or all of these people already.  I just wasn't thinking ...

Working on the IndexedFaceSet support this afternoon and evening (with a birthday party for a friend in the middle).  IndexedFaceSet's are very generic ways of defining face geometry, which makes it easy to hand-edit VRML files with them.  Unfortunately, that generality means they are also rather involved to prepare for rendering, you basically have to ...

Finally got around to implementing smooth movement for OpenGLContext.  Instead of just "jumping" a given distance on each press of the key, the default movement manager will now smoothly interpolate to the position (same for orientations).  Code is pretty straightforward, the only tricky thing was getting holding down the key to make the motion faster. ...

Playing with the OBJ file loader for OpenGLContext this evening (briefly).  Forgot to check in a number of fixes on Friday (oops).  Anyway, as of now CVS OpenGLContext with CVS PyOpenGL can load OBJs from the internet via the (now somewhat inappropriately named) bin/vrml_view.py script.  Still haven't found any samples where there's .MTL files (and/or ...

We picked up a book a year ago that I've been intending to read but never seemed to get the time; "Architectural Theory from the Renaissance to the Present" (Taschen, 2006). Today I wound up with some dead time sitting in offices and got a chance to read through part of the chapter on the ...