Archives 2011

I've just released the latest version of RunSnakeRun.  Only real change is to better handle meliae dumps in the sense of giving more reasonable data.  The views are now reasonably useful, but they are extremely slow for any real-world application.

I've released (on PyPI) versions of RunSnakeRun and SquareMap that support Meliae dumps... but I'm not really satisfied with the functionality.  Basically the dumps seem to have 2-3MB of un-accounted-for objects in them.  In my trivial test that's about 10x more memory than can be reached from module references.  This small dump of ~13,000 objects ...

Got Meliae exploration working in RunSnakeRun this evening.  A few enhancements to the SquareMap control as well.  The data-sets are a bit too large on real-world memory-captures so performance becomes a serious issue... will have to do some profiling :) .  Oh well, something for another day.

Dave Malcolm's talk at PyCon 2011 mentioned Meliae, which is a memory-crawler that stores out a description of all of the objects in RAM when triggered.  It's Python-level, so not something you can use with Dave's gdb stuff, but it still sounds pretty useful.

Anway, while the summary stuff it produces is okay, but ...

Want to see the output of your nosetests run in a format that you can hand to someone non-technical (who doesn't mind it being ugly)?  Here's a little script to convert the result of nosetests --with-xunit to an ugly, but functional HTML file.  I can't say I really see this as a long-term solution, as ...

Another day playing with PyPy. First up was a pleasant surprise in that the 2x slowdown reduced with the currently nightly build[1], bringing performance up from 40,000cps to ~60,000cps.

After that, applied a micro-optimization that got me about a 6% speedup; I eliminated the use of a state "struct object" (object that just used regular ...

I spent much of Tuesday working on getting PyPy running SimpleParse.  I have to be honest, I was kinda hoping I'd install PyPy and "pow" I'd have a 20x faster parser engine.  It didn't quite work out that way, it was actually 2x slower, with no real explanation of why.  My poor laptop hasn't been ...

At this point I have almost all of SimpleParse converted to pure-python operation. It is still using the Python call-stack for its state storage, just for convenience in coding. That makes it approximately equivalent to the version using "stock" mxTextTools wrt blowing up on recursive grammars (the TextTools fork SimpleParse bundles doesn't blow up on ...

Paul Bukhovko has translated the Python 3D Software page into Bellorussian, so if you're a 3D Pythonista who prefers your summaries in Bellorussian, head on over.

Those who have spoken with me on the topic will recall that I'm rather enthused about PyPy's potential. But every time I've sat down to play with it I've run into a bit of a "small steps" issue... i.e. what small project do I have where I don't need Numpy (which excludes most of my ...