Category archives: Snaking

Discussions of programming, particularly of programming Python

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Happy that the taxes are simpler? (Or depressed that my investment income totalled less than $100 for a year!)


Took a quick trip up to the bank between helping D'Arcy and starting Cinemon work today. Taxes are due tomorrow evening in Canada, and I'd not been able to find any T5 (investment income) slips from the banks with which I do business.

So, I trundled over and asked them to print out some T5s ...

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Ctypes experiments start well (Characterising the problems...)


Today began work in earnest on creating a PyOpenGL implementation with ctypes. This is basically a matter of figuring out how to make the API look like the old SWIG API without introducing too much overhead, either in run-time processing, or development effort.

So far it's going well. There are only about 5 or 6 ...

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Garn that was a long day (Booting into Windows seemed to make it so...)


Had to test a fix from while I was in ZZZ on Windows. Booted up and installed both a Firefox + SVG build and Adobe SVG, then started testing. Rather more silly little bugs had crept in than I was expecting. Especially poor results with the Firefox + SVG build... it really doesn't look likely ...

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Day of learning (Nevow live pages...)


Spent the greatest bulk of the day familiarising myself with the "liveevil" technology from Nevow. It's a javascript + xmlrpc engine allowing one to code a single page application. Going to be trying to use it in Cinemon to produce a number of desirable effects wrt automatically-updating visualisations.

Workin' in the free world (Documentation I suppose...)


I'm in ZZZ for a week. So far going fairly well socially, but didn't get any billables done yesterday (though I did catch up on business email and reading), as I spent what time I had trying to get Eric (the Python IDE) installed. It's way too cold to sit outside working, so the puppy ...

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At least it's not *my* code (Oh, wait, that would be easier...)


So, armed with my newfound gdb, I tackled the Cinemon crashes that necessitated writing the "zombiewatcher" script. Took about 20 seconds to have the gdb trace... hours and hours to finally decide that it appears to be a FreeBSD+Threading+PyOpenSSL bug. No responses yet from Python list as to whether there's a fix or workaround, ...

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Unfamiliarity makes things look harder than they are... (Debugging Python extensions on Linux easier than Win32)


I sat down intending to do an hour or so of playing with ctypes for OpenGL... 5 hours ago. I can't really begrudge the time, though, because beyond finding a number of minor problems with ctypes on amd64, I learned something I've been avoiding for a while now; learning how to debug C extensions on ...

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Distracted from the quest for pretty pictures (Delivery mechanism issues sop up an entire night w/ naught to show)


So, having got OpenGLContext 2.0.0c1 out the door, I went casting about for what to do for a demo for it. First thing I struck on was making an xscreensaver plugin that would allow you to run an OpenGLContext world. Probably is that xscreensaver doesn't seem to have much developer documentation.

AFAICS, there's a couple ...

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Git yer red-hot OpenGLContext (Sweet, juicy release candidate goodness...)


I've just packed up OpenGLContext 2.0.0c1 (release candidate 1), for Win32 and Gentoo Linux (with source for other platforms). Get it from the usual place.

I need to stop tinkering with 2.0.0 and move on to 2.0.1, I've been trying to release the final 2.0.0 version for... far, far too long... has it really ...

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Konsole is the source of the OpenGLContext flicker??? (Or at least, it only occurs when the OpenGL window is sitting over the Konsole window)


Okay, that was a little unexpected. The old code doesn't show the effect, but the new code produces the wrong-buffer-rendering effect only if the OpenGL window is sitting over the Konsole window (and only when the Konsole window is changing (such as printing out debugging text to try and figure out why it's flickering)).

So, ...

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