Category archives: Snaking

Discussions of programming, particularly of programming Python

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Why does accounting software lead to mental gridlock? (When money is involved with poorly-defined operations things go all to heck...)


Having one of those headache-inducing days. Adding "unlisted number" features to the VoIP billing system. It's a common situation in accounting software; an event occurs at some unknown time (exporting the values for the telephone book), at some other (known) time, the user may change whether they want the feature or not for "a month", ...

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New features a springing (But I managed to break an older one...)


I've now implemented a fairly nice feature (read it costs you $10,000 as a stand-alone product from other companies) for Cinemon, namely being able to see the last 14 days of graphed upstream channel signal-quality and transfer history (about 10,000 data-points per channel per property with 5 properties). We've had limited (one or two day) ...

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Beginnings of work on the Win32 port for OpenGL-ctypes (Unfortunately, can't check the changes into SourceForge)


Did some more work on profiling. Tried specialising each version of the wrapper call method. It's ever so slightly faster, but it's still ~60% overhead above the calls it makes.

Then borrowed Rosey's laptop to work on the Win32 port. A few of the functions are working, but basically anything that uses an array is ...

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Categorising OpenGL-ctypes performance (Category: pretty good)


Have been playing with profiles (using RunSnakeRun) of some OpenGLContext VRML viewer runs on real-world-ish worlds. There are a few big hotspots in the OpenGL-ctypes layer:

* wrapper.Wrapper.__call__ — as expected, this is very heavy, as it's doing basically the same work as SWIG does statically at run time. May try choosing specialised versions ...

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Tweaks to the laptop configuration (And the glories of graph layout)


This was one of those days where I get to the end of the day and wonder where all the time went. There was an hour or two that disappeared in a meeting, and some little bits of billable time here and there, but mostly I spent the day testing and checking and correcting things ...

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Of TimeZones and other silliness (There really should be a standard...)


My eyes were just way too sore to stare at a computer this afternoon, so I napped for a few hours, then headed out to chat with Simon for a few hours more. I drank green tea the whole time, so I got home somewhat wired for sound.

I found and fixed a bug I'd ...

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Finally get around to installing the Toolkit compiler (Yes, yes, I know, why support a proprietary platform...)


In order to get a binary release of SimpleParse 2.1 for Win32 systems I need to be able to compile Python extensions on the platform. Luckily, I sort of wrote the book on it... unluckily, it's been a very long time since I've done it. The reports that using the .Net 2.0 Framework SDK is ...

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TwistedSNMP 0.3.12 released (Latency improvements, first public release of the PySNMP-v4 compatability code)


I've just released version 0.3.12 of TwistedSNMP, I didn't call it 0.4 mostly because the PySNMP-v4 code isn't yet usable (the PySNMP-v4 engine is just too slow to be useful in our applications). The changes to the version that uses v3.5+ are those mentioned earlier this week that reduce the latency during integration of ...

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Mmm latency reduction... (Trading raw performance for scalability and responsiveness)


I've been working on extending the latency improvements from a few days ago throughout Cinemon. Some of the latency improvements are going into TwistedSNMP. I'm considering adding the parallel.py module to TwistedSNMP as well. The newest incarnation is very useful when you want to break up operations in a Twisted application which, though not "blocking" ...

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Passable talk (Should have prepared more...)


PyGTA went well, not a huge crowd, but 16 or 17 I suppose. Took far longer than I'd hoped to get through the background material (some people had never heard of Asterisk before). I also forgot (stupidly) that the call-duration-callback demo only works locally. Oops.

I'll upload the final version of the slides next time ...

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