Author archives: Mike

Human beings are playful creatures.  If we are to understand human design and intention we must understand the process of play.  The professional designer is in some way paid to retain the plasticity and playfulness of the childlike mind, to be able to play with ideas and forms in ways that most adults have long ...

Have TED talks running in the background (I'm beginning to see TED as more useful these days, it's not about new information, it's about getting a feel for how people are communicating the issues).  Interestingly, in Gates' presentation (the one where he releases the mosquitoes) he describes briefly the idea of the video-recording and migration ...

I got about 4 hours of writing in today.  You'd think that would be a huge amount of material, yet it's just a few paragraphs here and there and some editing.  I've been going through the original outline looking for "lost points" that need to be covered.  Quite a few of them even in just ...

Section on Associations and Identification has now landed in Of Design.  It doesn't yet include all of the material from the original thesis, but it's most of the stand-alone material from there.

So I sat down this evening and did what I was supposed to do on Monday, namely look at my thesis and work out how to finish it in a reasonable period of time.  Very exciting.  It's been a long time since I worked on the ideas, and as I read through the work so ...

My point-form outline for my 1997 thesis was 30 pages of single-spaced 10pt text.  It's somewhat daunting going through it and picking out which pieces need to be in a document for first-year students.  For tonight I dropped in the "Play in Design" section as a fairly quick rough draft.  I figure it eventually deserves ...

So, you ask; "how do you generate the coordinates necessary to render a (unit) sphere" (you do ask the strangest questions)?  Well, since you insist, here's a quick rundown of one way to go about it.  We'll assume that we're going to use a pair of vertex/index VBOs to render the geometry.  We won't try ...

For those who didn't see the presentation at PyCon:

• do not use the profile module with python 2.x
• use the cProfile module (or hotshot if you're on < 2.4)

the profile module has extremely high overhead and will produce results that would have you doing the wrong thing if you were to believe them.  See ...

There's always going to be lots more work to get done, but I think I'm pretty much okay with where OpenGL_accelerate is for now.  There's now a C-level API for format handlers, so that Cython modules can be written that pretty much do a cast and a dereference to get values, rather than doing lots ...

So with a fairly extensive set of Cython wrappers, running a fairly large, heavy VRML world with transparencies and all the rest, I see a noticeable, but modest, speedup.

The world I'm testing on goes from ~12.8fps (avg) to 15.5fps (avg), that's a nice 20% speedup.  On average OpenGLContext now spends around 20% of rendering ...