Author archives: Mike

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 ...

Doing a bit of bit-rot fighting in OpenGLContext this evening.  Got the visual shell running again, so that you can load up a world in one window and type commands into another to modify the running world.  Mostly was just updating to use wx 2.8 and the new loader structure.

Also took the time to ...

Have been working on PyOpenGL and OpenGLContext all day.  Have redone the OpenGLContext loader module and ported the OBJ loader from pyglet over.  The OBJ loader seems to work fine, but I didn't find any OBJ files that include material information to test that.  I'm going to have to fix the face-culling, seems that the ...

Have a rather nice older machine here, P4 with a reasonable video card and memory. Should be a kick-arse Linux machine for our niece and nephew. Except that Ubuntu can't seem to see the disks. It's nothing special, Asus P4P800 SE motherboard with an Intel IDE controller. Should be dirt-simple, but the disk is just ...