Category archives: Snaking
Discussions of programming, particularly of programming Python
Since it came up this weekend (If people are in the market for contract programmers...)
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Yes, we (VexTech/The Cain Gang) are available for hire for programming projects. Feel free to contact us if you want to discuss a project.
We, incidentally, includes D'Arcy (maintainer of PyGreSQL, and a developer on PostgreSQL and NetBSD), Tim (the creator of the Vaults of Parnasus, primary sysadmin of Vex, and our ...
Morning meetings and evening hacking (With a nap in the middle to handle the first and prepare for the second...)
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We've started having our management meetings during the daytime (as D'Arcy is no longer working primarily at the one client's offices). Can't say I love the hour's commute, or getting up at unreasonable hours, but I got a lift back, and it's nice to pat the kitty-cats (they have 11) as we work.
After the ...
PyDispatcher as a source of inspiration... (Now we just need to make it a component people want to use.)
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Philip J. Eby has an interesting little article. First because he mentions PyDispatcher, second because he points to a Christopher Alexander article. The Alexander article isn't world-changing, but I always find it interesting when software developers quote architectural theoreticians (and yes, I know it's common with Alexander in particular).
Changing strings to tuples has far-reaching effects (PySNMP optimisation might constitute a fork?)
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Today I spent almost exclusively on getting the tuple-based OID code worked through PySNMP, TwistedSNMP and Cinemon. The changes were far more extensive than I was hoping. They are mostly integrated, but it's going to take a few more hours to track down all of the string-assumptive code.
Anyway, the OID class now seems fairly ...
Patches suck time (Greedy little performance enhancing vermin that they are...)
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So, other than spending... I don't even want to think about how much time... working with D'Arcy this morning, I worked on getting the patch for PySNMP put together (SourceForge's CVS being back online). That was going to be a 20 minute task before I started the real work on fixing the OID object mechanism... ...
Presentation paper work... (Only about 1.5 months left)
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D'Arcy decided to go to PyCon, so we're going to drive down together. Did some rewriting for the PyCon paper, mostly just expanding the section describing the rationalisation of various object-interactions during the 2.2 type-class unification work. That made the section longer, but didn't actually move me further through the outline. I need ...
If the box isn't up the program won't run (I'm a software guy... not even an OS guy, really...)
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After my visit to grams (she won 3:2), came home and got an email pointing out that both Cinemon instances were down. The boxes are still off the network, so there's nothing I can do about it at the moment, but it's somewhat frustrating to have the project sitting offline for this long.
Since I ...
I still seem to be working on it (Even though I thought I was stopping after that last post...)
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Got distracted from going to bed by the desire to have 4-point coplanar contours properly tessellate. Wound up having to write a new utility function to determine whether a cloud of points is coplanar.
Not a particularly involved function, just note that for all sets > 3 points, you create a vector from A to B, ...
How quickly one forgets (Basic algebra and geometry...)
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Spent the rest of the evening working on tessellation code, but never did get around to fixing the problem with the Jelle-project tessellation. Instead I realised that I had no test cases for a "combining" tessellation. To understand what that is, consider this shape...
When we render this shape, we want it to look something ...
Clockwise versus counter-clockwise geometry strikes again (Shadow code is sensitive to the problem as well...)
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Sat down to figure out why the shadow-rendering context in OpenGLContext has such problems with the tessellations of Jelle's project. First thing I wound up doing was backing out earlier changes to try to get the VBO extension working, then had to back-port the Python 2.3 PyInt_AsUnsignedLongMask function so that the typemaps for long integers ...
Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.