Archives February 2012

Matt Davis and I are going to teach the Software Carpentry session on Python tomorrow at University of Toronto.  Pretty happy with how the collaboration worked so far.  We loaded a bzr repository into Dropbox then both branched the (local) repository, pushing, rebasing etc on our file:/// urls.  We got pretty-much instance notices when things ...

Sitting down and playing with "what needs to be in the box" for OpenGLContext 3.0 (the most boring working title I can come up with). Time constraints suggest I'll have to do a migration rather than a re-implementation, so the name is probably apt.  The GUI-library integration is fine, the scenegraph engine, node-paths, matrix calculation, ...

(Read that in Robin Williams' Genie Voice) A project I used to work on has been informed by certain rabbit-mq types that they should not send messages > 15KB on a RabbitMQ server because it would "chew up all the subscription threads and limit throughput"... which... wow, dropped off a robustness/scalability/credibility cliff there.

One of the things I'd like to have for a revised OpenGLContext/scenegraph API is a nice, efficient, friendly, mechanism for processing buffer data.  I currently tend to follow VRML97's OpenGL 1.1-style array model, which is very dated these days. Each component of a vertex is separated out into position, normal, and textureCoordinate arrays and the ...

So I've been playing with cutting down OpenGLContext into something like a modern scenegraph engine.  The first step there is to eliminate the old tree-traversal rendering mechanism, as the "flat" rendering engine is both simpler and much more easily optimized.  No big problem, really.  A lot of OpenGLContext's demos/tests just ran with only minimal changes, ...

We have lots of MathML from the DocBook manuals for PyOpenGL.  The latest versions of the manuals are now using MathJax to provide rendering of the matrices, equations, etceteras (see, for example, the glRotate manual page).  We've previously had to tell people to update/replace their browser or install a MathML-specific plugin.  This solution will (hopefully) ...

Just ran into the little wonder that is "pip install PIL", which results in a useless PIL (i.e. one without JPEG, PNG or TrueType support, but which imports, so doesn't trigger the "I don't have PIL code paths").  There's other cases with e.g. PostgreSQL drivers, or complex GUI libraries, where if you don't happen to ...

I'm hoping to have a few weeks to work on my own projects before I dive into working on other people's projects again (that might not pan out, but I'm hoping), so, here's a brain-dump of what I'm considering playing with:

• write a simple, generic shader-based legacy-free scenegraph engine (basically transplant the modern parts from ...

I've pretty much finished replacing Kid with Genshi for directdocs (the project that generates the PyOpenGL documentation by combining the upstream docbook files with the pydoc-like introspection of PyOpenGL, as well as generating the OpenGLContext tutorial files).  Was pretty much painless. Caught for a bit on ${ [ do(x) for x in y] } operation ...

TTFQuery has been updated to feel a tiny bit more modern.  It's still pretty old-school, but it now has some actual documentation, and should be more friendly for pip installation.

Found the bug that has been holding up my testing on PyOpenGL/OpenGLContext.  The shadow demos had been broken, which I considered a blocker.  Turns out ...