Author archives: Mike

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 ...

Nvidia's got a GPGPU library called CUDA.  There's a Python binding.  Thinking it would be interesting to try it out if I can get some time.  It's a C++ wrapper, looks reasonably elegant and seems to integrate nicely with numpy (just going by the documentation).

Not that I actually have anything to do with ...

Felt a little under the weather after a good party (apparently I picked up some soy, which I can't digest well) I decided to learn a little bit about Frame Buffer Objects in OpenGL. These are the new system that allows you to do "off screen" rendering and "rendering to texture" behaviours. Turns out they ...

We went to the last Cafe Scientifique of the season in Toronto tonight.  Topic was a fairly generic "the future of medecine".  A bit disappointing in that the focus was all on the ultra-high-tech possibilities that might or might not show up.  That is, it was all about reactive medicine, rather than proactive.  Nothing substantive ...

Only had 1/2 day to work on PyOpenGL today (client needed work done this morning), so just played around with the Vertex Buffer Object (VBO) extension. In particular I added support for mapping data into the arrays and automatically deleting the arrays if the user forgets to do so. For those following along at home... ...

Interesting chat with one of our friends this evening. We were batting around the big problems of the day; energy crisis, resource exhaustion, pollution, that kind of thing and looking at the various solutions proposed and possible.

One thing kept coming up, namely the fact that as energy prices soar, alternatives become more affordable comparatively ...

Work with old, large systems enough and you start to get a persistent feeling of Deja Vu. Get large enough and you always seem to grow a set of features that is almost like every other large system, just implemented in a completely different way so that code sharing is simply impossible.

How many file-system ...

Finally got around to fixing my wxPython install on my workstation. Turns out you need to do an "eselect wxwidgets" operation to get the wxPython links to set up properly. With that done, updated the OpenGLContext wxPython context so that it works with wxPython 2.8.

That lets the "browser.visual" module work again. This is a ...