Category archives: Snaking

I spent far too long today playing with two different networking systems.  The first was RabbitMQ and py-amqplib.  This seems pretty nice, you can send hundreds of messages in a fraction of a second... though it then seems to take *forever* to process them.  Appears to force in-order delivery, including an explicit ack from the ...

 Began work on simplifying the PyQNet API.  Got rid of blocking/non-blocking versions (everything is non-blocking now, though there's a "wait" operation to block until incoming messages are received).  Also simplified the callback-based (server) interface.  Added (optional) zlib compression to the packages and added support for arbitrarily sized messages.

Probably next up would be getting the ...

Behdad is going to be presenting how to use PyCairo.  PyCairo is a immediate-mode 2D rendering library.  It can target all sorts of back-ends including OpenGL, X windows, PDF, etceteras.

[Update] We'll still be on Wednesday, but turns out Behdad is unavailable due to the turmoil in Iran.

I've just released the Python 2.6 compatible version of SimpleParse.  The only changes of note were the 2.6 fixes and a renaming of the simpleparse.xml module to simpleparse.xmlparser, as under Python 2.6 import semantics the "xml" module caused an import conflict.

I've released only the 2.5 win32 egg, as I'm using my Vista machine to ...

Just about time to do a 3.0.1 release, with the accelerator modules and bug-fixes.  Still have a bug-report about Linux GLUT crashing in glGetError, will have to try to track down and fix that before a release.  Other than that it's just testing, building and testing again...

The book "Don't Make Me Think" has a simple mechanism for doing user testing "on the cheap", we used it to some good purpose and someone asked me about it at TorCHI, so here's a summary:

• do user testing approximately once per month or once every two weeks
• recruit users as closely as possible to ...

We had a lively discussion last night about programmer liability.  Consensus (such as there was) seemed to be that perfectly reliable software is extremely expensive and likely futile as a goal given complexity restrictions, basically if every app must meet milspec the industry as we know it is toast, as costs would go through the ...

PyOpenGL 3.0.1 is pretty much finished AFAICS. The biggest visible change is support for the OpenGL_accelerate module (written in Cython) which provides a noticeable speedup for my applications.  However, the fact that the code is C (once generated) means that bugs are going to be introduced (including possible segfaults).

There are also a number of ...

So, you ask; "how do you generate the coordinates necessary to render a (unit) sphere" (you do ask the strangest questions)?  Well, since you insist, here's a quick rundown of one way to go about it.  We'll assume that we're going to use a pair of vertex/index VBOs to render the geometry.  We won't try ...

For those who didn't see the presentation at PyCon:

• do not use the profile module with python 2.x
• use the cProfile module (or hotshot if you're on < 2.4)

the profile module has extremely high overhead and will produce results that would have you doing the wrong thing if you were to believe them.  See ...