Author archives: Mike

Behdad is going to be presenting how to use PyCairo.  PyCairo is a immediate-mode 2D rendering library.  It can target all sorts of back-ends including OpenGL, X windows, PDF, etceteras.

[Update] We'll still be on Wednesday, but turns out Behdad is unavailable due to the turmoil in Iran.

I've just released the Python 2.6 compatible version of SimpleParse.  The only changes of note were the 2.6 fixes and a renaming of the simpleparse.xml module to simpleparse.xmlparser, as under Python 2.6 import semantics the "xml" module caused an import conflict.

I've released only the 2.5 win32 egg, as I'm using my Vista machine to ...

Headed out to the "Net Change Week" event this evening.  Got to ranting to Alfonso before the presentations about a few of my pet theories and wound up with this chain:

• we've got a maximum of maybe 50 years before any rogue nation or disgruntled group can acquire the knowledge required to create nuclear weapons ...

Since updating the Kubuntu Jaunty on my main laptop (Lenovo w500) I've lost my hard-won suspend/resume support that I had with Hardy.  If I have nothing running, happy days, suspend/resume works perfectly through multiple cycles.  Certain apps running, no problem suspending/resuming, but Thunderbird and Firefox, I get a dead black screen on an otherwise fully ...

Just about time to do a 3.0.1 release, with the accelerator modules and bug-fixes.  Still have a bug-report about Linux GLUT crashing in glGetError, will have to try to track down and fix that before a release.  Other than that it's just testing, building and testing again...

The book "Don't Make Me Think" has a simple mechanism for doing user testing "on the cheap", we used it to some good purpose and someone asked me about it at TorCHI, so here's a summary:

• do user testing approximately once per month or once every two weeks
• recruit users as closely as possible to ...

We had a lively discussion last night about programmer liability.  Consensus (such as there was) seemed to be that perfectly reliable software is extremely expensive and likely futile as a goal given complexity restrictions, basically if every app must meet milspec the industry as we know it is toast, as costs would go through the ...

I'm going to have to find myself someone to act as reader for the thesis rewrite.  Jacinta helped enormously when I was writing the original, as she constantly demanded that I explain the details I was assuming other people understood.  Should try to find some Architecture students to review and challenge me on it.  Maybe ...

Working some of the outline points on critique into the thesis.

I've been playing idly with how to get back into academia.  Dumb thoughts that keep coming up:

• convince some design school to use my (assumed finished) thesis as an introduction for first-year students, point at that and see if some school would let ...

PyOpenGL 3.0.1 is pretty much finished AFAICS. The biggest visible change is support for the OpenGL_accelerate module (written in Cython) which provides a noticeable speedup for my applications.  However, the fact that the code is C (once generated) means that bugs are going to be introduced (including possible segfaults).

There are also a number of ...