Author archives: Mike

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 ...

Won't spend much time on this, since others are covering it far better than I.  Suffice it to say that if you are Canadian and don't want to let the government sneak in a major trojan horse to take away your freedoms you probably want to look into the new bill that has been introduced. ...

After work we went to the distillery district to see Uncle Vanya. It was enjoyable, though I found the motivations post-intermission were hard to empathize with... pre-intermission I was really identifying with the characters, they seemed human, dreaming of a better world, but trapped in the mire of the day-to-day.

We want to make the ...

Spent the day mostly on PyOpenGL.  Released a new beta3 of 3.0.0, mostly just a bug-fix release.  Also hacked up a test/demo of a vertex-buffer-object data-storage mechanism that seems to work quite elegantly.

I was intending to build a Celestial Jukebox... then I actually sat down and described it to Dave at the caffe.  He's ...