Archives 2008

I've been thinking in the back of my mind that it's probably time to move to Ubuntu (specifically Kubuntu) on the workstation at home.  While I prefer Gentoo for the control it gives me, I have to admit that I really don't have the time to muck about with keeping everything up to date.  So, ...

I hadn't intended to work on PyOpenGL today, wanted to spend some time looking at what to do for the broader world... oops.  Anyway, using Cython I've sped up the PyOpenGL stuff to the point where the PyOpenGL stuff has dropped off the list of hotspots for OpenGLContext rendering.  Not saying there aren't hotspots left, ...

Doing some optimization of the OpenGLContext scenegraph.  Just using display-lists on the material objects takes the material rendering overhead from ~5% of runtime to <1% of runtime.  There's a diminishing set of low-hanging optimizations available at this point.  The wrapper object is obviously a major time-sink.  I took a look at re-writing that in C ...

Soni and I got an invitation to the opening party for HackLab in Toronto,but I was out of town at a client site that night.  However, the club has an open house on Tuesday nights, so I decided to drop in this evening to check them out.  Spent much of the time talking with ...

Been thinking a lot lately about how to direct my energies into socially beneficial channels.  I'm still reasonably convinced that we need to focus on education, without that you're pretty much doomed to fall back into chaos with every blow.  I'm also reasonably convinced that some of the things that need to be taught are ...

Going to do the popular "topical discussion" format at PyGTA this month.  We'll discuss what you would do if you had $1,000,000 CDN to spend on a Python-related project.  Discussion starts at 7pm, Tuesday the 18th at Linux Caffe.

I finally sat down this evening to get SimpleParse updated to use the Py_ssize_t type instead of ints for tracking offsets, lengths and the like.  Was lots and lots of trivial updates, rather than anything particularly difficult... exactly the kind of thing I hate spending time on.

Anyway, don't yet have a Python2.6 compilation setup ...

Spent some quality time this evening with PyOpenGL, OpenGLContext and KCacheGrind.  Quite a few tiny improvements in the code-base.  I'm still just picking out little bits of fluff that are "wrong" as they show up in the profiling.  There was ~4% of total run-time on this machine spent in Python's warnings.warn() function because there was ...

Profiling OpenGLContext on a relatively large VRML97 world.  Interesting stats (in OpenGL, ignoring OpenGLContext slow-points):

• 3% of total runtime is in a function which just does numpyarray.ctypes.data; it seems the ctypes array sub-object is a Python instance that has multiple operations in its initializer and is recreated on each access (with many accesses per array ...

Seems Nvidia has released OpenGL 3.0 drivers for Linux (yay!) but they don't support my GeForce 7600GS (sigh).  I'm thinking maybe I should buy a kick-posterior gaming laptop with an uber-3D chip so I'm not always tied to my workstation at home if I want to do OpenGL 2.0 or above work.

Anyway, tried to ...