Archives October 2008

The deadline for PyCon proposals is fast approaching.  Here's my current thinking for proposals:

• Graphics Workshop, sub-track (in open-space likely), informal presentations and workshops from the various graphics/game environments, maybe a few demonstrations and panels, hang out with gurus, write new games, produce new visualizations, polish old ones; keep the whole thing informal, maybe have ...

A few days ago one of my colleagues mentioned a scholarly article he'd read the night before.  Researchers were attempting to show a genetic link for thrill-seeking (novelty-seeking) behaviour with some success.  That is, for their definition of "novelty-seeking" they seemed to have discovered a relationship between (IIRC a particular gene) and the behaviour in ...

How would you merge large quantities of Python-accessible information into a pre-existing set of XML documents.  This approach combined lxml.etree (ElementTree) with Kid templates (based on ElementTree) to efficiently annotate a large tree of documents.  We'll look at how to use ElementTree (and how to use the query mechanism in lxml's implementation to search your ...

Definitely seems to have been a setuptools bug that karked my setup last week when trying to get TurboGears running with Twisted + Athena.  By downgrading to a previous version of SetupTools I was able to get TurboGears to run properly again.  Also ran into a weird bug where setuptools was causing a single character ...

Some thoughts on the Canadian elections under way:

    o C's response to job losses in Ontario and Quebec
          o "Last place to invest"
          o We'll create jobs elsewhere (read: Alberta)
          o Encourage low-value export of raw materials because that makes money today

          o We've created more jobs than we've lost (read: service jobs (low-pay) and ...

Spent much of the afternoon working on PyOpenGL.  Spent some quality time with kcachegrind and got something like a 1% speed up on a (rather dumb) benchmark I've been using (dumb because it does everything wrong, mostly).  In doing so I cut down on the amount of code in the "wrapper" module noticeably, which was ...

Working on PyOpenGL today.  Few little fixes, a few wrapper operations to make things more Pythonic.  Nothing huge.  At some point, though, I discovered that pkg_resources was complaining that it couldn't find the PyOpenGL distribution (I eliminated pkg_resources from PyOpenGL, but OpenGLContext is, for now, using it).  Okay, so run setuptools and register PyOpenGL...

But ...

At my one client we use the Ext javascript library, which is somewhat of an all-singing-all-dancing javascript library with dozens of compound widgets, particularly these huge, heavily abstracted searchable, sortable, selectable grid widgets.  Ext doesn't float my boat.  I wouldn't pick it up to use it on a personal project.  The API just seems so ...