Author archives: Mike
Slipping quickly toward PyCon (Doesn't seem real yet...)
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Snaking,
Young Coders.
Weird to realise I'm leaving for PyCon on Thursday morning. So many things to get done before then, but somehow the idea that I'm leaving for 10 days just doesn't seem to be sparking the urgency it should. Oh well.
I'm beginning to think about what to do for the sprints. I'd love to have ...
Though necessary, hardware is almost always problematic (At least, I only notice the hardware when there's a problem...)
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Tuxedo.
Wednesday evening one of the (5) fans in the workstation/server at home died. No big deal, you say, the machine has 4 other fans...
I cracked open the case a few hours later to see which fan to replace and the internal cages for the drives were too hot to touch. One of the other ...
New release of PyOpenGL is out (PyOpenGL-Demo too...)
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Snaking.
Took the bulk of the day off today to get the next release of PyOpenGL out the door. I've re-enabled the numarray support, using the same underlying library as for the Numeric support (i.e. no binary modules). I've also stripped out the "Demo" directory and made a separate egg for that so that projects that ...
New release of StarPy is out (Minor fixes and improvements...)
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Snaking.
Little bit of a project using StarPy this week. It's resulted in some minor improvements to StarPy. Basically a couple of bug-fixes and a minor feature enhancement (added a timeout for AMI connections).
Need to do a bit of porting (Where's the time...)
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Snaking.
Realised today that SimpleParse doesn't build on Python 2.5. Something in the test for PY_HEX_VERSION is failing so it's trying to redefine functions that have been in Python since 2.3. Sigh. Also need to look at whether it's easily possible to get .egg files into an installer for Win32 users. I also want to get ...
More time on distutils/setuptools than ctypes issues (Just a thought that struck me...)
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Snaking.
There are two major changes in PyOpenGL 3.x (and OpenGLContext). The first is the big, obvious one, the switch to using ctypes. When it comes right down to it, other than tracking down a few AMD64 issues at the start, and a few problems between the chair and the keyboard, ctypes has "just worked" most ...
A night (and morning) of relaxation (Age of Empires II retro strategy game death matches)
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Vindaloo.
Genti (he spells it that way, regardless of what Soni says) came over last night and we played AoE II all evening (until 02:40) then got up early and played a few more games before we (Soni and I) headed over to visit with Gram's friend Margaret. Sad news during the visit, Jack (another of ...
Stabilisation period after a long crunch (A few days of just tracking down anything broken)
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Knight Errant.
We've had some pretty extensive rewriting going on for the last few months in one of the big customer projects (the VoIP billing system). Spending three or four days in here stabilising the code base, tracking down all the little refactoring errors that didn't get caught with the test suite, fixing bugs that fell into ...
Got py2exe + PyOpenGL limping across the line... (Need to add the .egg files to the path)
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Blake was good enough to prod me abound getting PyOpenGL 3.x to run under py2exe'd applications. The problem is that even if you copy the .egg directory to the distribution directory the setuptools entry points don't get registered, so PyOpenGL can't find its array-handling mechanisms.
After lots of trial and error I just wound up ...
Pleasant afternoon with the family (Until I had to get to work...)
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Vindaloo.
Dropped into visit the kids (Soni's nephew and niece) this afternoon. Was hoping we'd be able to play Age of Empires II (Gent is learning it), but their dad was sleeping in the room with the computer. Discussed physics, cosmology and a few other things with them, then rounded out the visit with chocolate and ...
Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.