Archives 2008

Sys-adminning in the morning...

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, ...

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Unexpected Optimizations

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, ...

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Display-listing Materials Speeds Rendering

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 ...

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Channeling...

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 ...

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Finally got SimpleParse updated to use Py_ssize_t

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 ...

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Quality Time with PyOpenGL

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 ...

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Profiling OpenGLContext fun...

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 ...

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Seems I need to update the video card again

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 ...

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