Pyalot

Complex data query requirements.

2008-04-24T03:13:00.000-07:00

I have recently participated in a discussion about complex data query requirements. Jonathan Holland who wrote a about the suitability of relational databases, asked me to write a blog entry about the topic, and in particular in relation to a shop I wrote. So here goes:Architecture OutlineThe shop is written in python and javascript. it is a multi-tier MVC architecture, from the bottom up it

Rene talks about multithreading and multiple cpu's

2007-07-10T01:06:00.000-07:00

Rene's talk is about how to use python with multiple cpu's. He has written a paper about it. The core libraries you use for game programming are already threaded. He has written a library to manage threads in games. The core idiom is "map", which in the context of threads becomes tmap.

py.test

2007-07-09T06:09:00.000-07:00

I was a little late into this talk (took a nap in the break). An alternative to unittest, py.test, but it seams specifically geared to the needs of pypy.

ThenCad

2007-07-09T02:04:00.000-07:00

I'm intriqued that somebody went and developed a whole CAD and released it as GPL, in pure python.The gust of why ThanCad is better, is that it has some fancy features basically all other CAD apps lack, because it was easy for the guy who implemented them because, he built it open from the ground up. It's the lesson of simplicity really. It makes sense, because for instance in autocad, when you

KSS, javascript with style

2007-07-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

KSS is a client framework, so there's no intrinistic server side requirement. It looks interesting, it sort of encapsulates event handling and view changes into a domain specific language. I woner if it works outside a sandbox/wiki environment, with requirements on interaction.It is an interesting thing, and it certainly is worth trying out.

Pylons

2007-07-09T01:22:00.000-07:00

The pylons talk is pretty much what you can find out about pylons yourself. On an interesting note, supervisor2 received some praise in this talk, as a tool that can restart died apps, seems nice. The talk was about the development .

Pythonic interfaces?

2007-07-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

This talk is about (the java understanding of) interfaces. The argument is that if you work with many many people on large scale projects, you basically need interfaces. I tend to agree, but I think large teams are a bad idea :)So, the speaker also mentions that the other solutions out there (zope interfaces, py-protocols etc) are overly complex. Yes I agree, let's see...Ah-ha, he uses decorators

mxTextTools

2007-07-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

At the core mxTextTools is a state machine (tagging engine), written in C. The reason for introducing it was that in order to write a parser, you need a matcher (on a tokenizer and parser level). Writing matchers usually involves re, which is a pain in the butt. I like that it has a JIT compiler for the tagging commands. This seems to be a pretty powerfull replacment for the usual lexers/

easy extend

2007-07-08T23:03:00.000-07:00

Easy extend seems to be about creating DSLs in python. It allows parsing from an ebnf grammar and can extend the python grammar for the language. You can download EasyExtend.It compiles these defined languages to the python parse tree, this is then compiled to python bytecode by python. It can run multiple different languages within one python run, by a concept called fibres.I don't know if it's

gearing up for europython

2007-07-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

I've arrived at the hotel reva in vilnius, had some good nights sleep and I'm headed down for breakfast and registration. The hotel is nice, Thomas Waldmann (with whom I share a room) doesn't snore (sight of of relief).so long, __doc__

Linux and Mac users may be in the minority, but they are vocal

2007-02-09T01:40:00.000-08:00

I found the phrase "Linux and Mac users may be in the minority, but they are vocal" in this article about java and ajax. It struck me as odd to even remark upon it, but then I figured that maybe it's an ignored phenomenon.Beeing an early adopter is a way of living, not some marketing category. Either you do it in most aspects of your living, or you don't. In order for you to take up Linux or Mac,

More thoughts on DRM

2007-02-08T00:38:00.000-08:00

Because a DRM requires a secret that may not be revealed, but the place where the secret is kept/produced/defined is in the hands of an untrusted party, it cannot be “secure”. Thus obscurity is important to “secure” a DRM scheme, and in this FairPlay is not alone. Other companies can proudly claim to have the most obscure DRM, for whatever it's worth.DRM advocates may cry foul now, after all they

Basic inalienable digital rights

2007-02-07T14:42:00.000-08:00

I was reading a piece about the RIAA and their convoluted understanding of Steve Jobs open letter when I stumbled upon the term "Basic inallienable digitial rights".There a question occured to me. Do I want to fund the society our children are going to live in, on the basis of the DMCA, patent law, copyright and a RIAA/MPAA mafia?Every society traces it's funding back to documents laying out

postgres mindset

2007-01-10T00:11:00.000-08:00

Interesting, today I poked my head into #postgres on freenode, and told the guys that there is no bugtracker for pgadmin (because I had a bug). There was some civilized back and fro which amounted to:stfu if you don't want to setup the bugtracker yourself.apologize for suggesting a butracker or be kicked, you're insulting us.A-hum. Yes, that was a productive conversation. I was kicked by David

PJE the immature pest

2007-01-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

PJE wrote a post praising zope in a fashion (well it's the foreword for a zope book). Inevitably he attracted some flak, and by the followup post you can see that he clearly couldn't deal with it.I expected the article to be a bit controversial, but I was surpised to find that it was even more controversial than my series of articles about women in IT. The amount of flaming hatred, profanity, and

Billboard on music piracy: "The Crack Connection" by Tamara Conniff : really?

2006-12-11T04:08:00.000-08:00

So I was having lunch when a friend of mine pointed out an article in Billboard titled "The Crack Connection". It was about music piracy. I took it, expecting the usual FUD straight out of RIAAs and MPAAs throat.But this article was a jewel in it's own right. Tamara Conniff is the Executive Editor and Associate Publisher of Billboard is the one responsible for polluting the writescape with it.In

Gamemodes

2005-06-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the producer of Battlefield2 answered some questions in a chat. I particularly took notice of the following. *Importfan85* how many different game types will there be?[EA]ScottyRotten: Battlefield 2 is conquest only. We've been asked before why that is and the question is basically user interest. We measured the number of people playing the other game modes (Deathmatch, etc.) in BF1942

Shit infestation

2005-06-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

Warning, if you think ATL and MFC are enjoyable API expiriences, you should not read this.I'm working in a project making a product that needs to cross-compile against both Solars and Windows. For this you obviously need unified interfaces for containers.Trough some history I'm glad not to have been involved, the choice fell on the Microsoft flavor of containers and API's, coming from ATL and

Battlefield 2 Modding

2005-06-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

I'm toying with modding Battlefield 2, and for that purpose I'm putting up a reference page of it.It's a lot of work specially documenting the stuff that isn't there as source. I also noticed that there's rather an abundance of API's the engine exposes, that aren't used at ally by any python.I also came by some classes that seem to be created dynamically by C++ code, or be plugged together by

Battlefield 2

2005-06-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

This post is going to be about three things: Battlefield 2, my new hardware to play it and the python embedding they do.Battlefield 2This is simply an awesome game. A demo has just come out, and it is in many many aspects so much more and better then the previous battlefield. There are some issues I have, which would namely be the ingame browser and a bit of the loading slowness spread everywhere

Full text indexer

2005-06-10T05:45:00.000-07:00

It took me 15 minutes today to write a simple full-text indexer for source code, using shlex and zodb. It accesses a 20Mb database below a notable delay. It will save me endless hours of using find/grep on the ~3600 header files I find myself searching pretty often.Implementation time: 15 minutes. Retriever 15 lines of code. Indexer 37 lines of code. Time not spend using find/grep, priceless.

Negative reinforcement works!

2005-06-09T01:34:00.000-07:00

Yet again I work in a C++ project. The deadline looms closer. We've no working system, a lack of specification, people working on their modules in autism mode and general confusion about what we're doing anyway.Personally I've been struggling with an impossibly retarded build-system for the past three weeks, I tried to get the "big picture" to compile so I can work against something that runs. I

Darwin Award

2005-06-08T00:48:00.000-07:00

My todays nominees would be the people who try to fly in the wheel well of an airplane.Obviously there's multiple dangers awaiting the eager well-traveler there.-You can get crushed by the wheels-You can get crushed by the doors closing/opening-You can freeze do death-Die of oxygen deprivation in airy hights-You can fall do death-Slide to death ( in case you fell out at a couple of hundreds of

ElementTree

2005-05-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

I've said this before, and I still think it holds true. ElementTree is very nice.There was a recent discussion about it on comp.text.xml, which got the attention of Fredrik LundthI do much apreciate ElementTree. Of course using a non-DOM API to process xml conviniently is heresy, and will call the gods crushing down on us.I find the proponents to a strict and true die hard one Document Model API

PyPy 0.6 out

2005-05-23T09:30:00.000-07:00

Alright, now this one gets me quite excited. Just 5 minutes ago I argued with a friend of mine, that PyPy is in fact going forward, and he argued that they'll not have a release anytime < 10 years.However, there is a release 0.6 now. From the tutorials and explanations, there's plenty a mention that this is higly experimental. I can spot type inference there, as well as translation to machine

RPC and protocol bloat.

2005-05-23T05:46:00.000-07:00

While implementing rpc stuff, I noticed that the protocol bloats. Here's an example.remote.text( 's' ) becomes ('text', 0, ('s',)) which becomes some 40 or so bytes once marshalled. A byte id and a single byte for the letter would be 2 bytes in contrast.The problem about ('text', 0, ('s',)) is that it has more information. It carries the method to be invoked remotely, what type of command it is (

RPC, Nodes'n stuff

2005-05-20T00:43:00.000-07:00

I've been hacking away at an rpc mechanism. Fully knowing that I ignored proper asynchronous dispatching, just a very thin layer over messaging. However, during the process I noticed that it would be rather intersting to leave the client/server pattern, and instead provide a generic object that is a node which can both accept and build connections. I'm not really sure how a node will find out in

Networking

2005-05-19T01:55:00.000-07:00

I've been on it again. I don't know why precisely I torture myself with network programming. There's a pleathora of toolkits for precisely that readily avaiable.Generally I do scratch-writes of existing libraries only 1/4 until I grasp the concept fully and convert to an existing library.The things I've had direct exposure to where asyncore, medusa, twisted, xmlrpc, tcpserver and of course socket

Scheduling

2005-05-17T03:48:00.000-07:00

It was monday afternoon. A friend of mine aproached me with a seemingly simple problem. The problem is as follows:-There's a number of tasks, that have to be repetetly called each second. The amount of each task's repetition is fixed, and has to be met.-Some tasks have a dependency, and thus execution order for those matters.-One task may be used as a fill-up, when there's time left, or to drop

Patching

2005-05-13T15:03:00.000-07:00

Once in a while a pc-game hits the market that needs patching badly from the get go. In the best of cases the patches come fast, eventually they come before the game is released. The producers of such games tend to fall short in favor of critical customers, while the press joins the chorus. I'm not sure if this is the right kind of bad publicity that's as good as good one.On any account, I'm

Make Wrong Code Not Compile/Inteprete

2005-05-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

I like Joels latest article about making Wrong code look wrong. The whole shebang about making relationships as visible as possible and stuff.I still do not like Hungarian notation and I do not agree with his assertion of the best solution.The first reason is that it is dependent on a reader to tell an error. Everbody likes errors, and I like them best when they do not interprete/compile.Which

Firewall admins, Corporate Logic

2005-05-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

Dear reader ( if any ) I am forced to post this comment in IExploder, and do the rest of my surfing using this godawfull insecure browser. Why you might ask? The oh-so-wise(tm) firewall admins at our company obviously decided that two critical security holes in Firefox are enough to filter out any traffic going on using the UserAgent: Mozilla*.Ahyes, this makes sense(tm) to me too, whatever

MetaGer - Does software move forwards?

2005-05-10T03:45:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting articleRecap:Pupil found paper of head of a research facility, about the next generation search engine. At the time of the writing it was not feasible mainly due to network bandwith constraints. Pupil cleverly implemented the idea salvaging his existing broadband account, and now everybody's abuzz.What struck me about this is that said pupil not only implemented the whole

Texture Packing

2005-05-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

I toyed a round a bit with texture-packing. The idea is to pack multiple arbitary sized textures on a bigger one. In the context of a sprite engine, this makes sense. Today when you write games, whatever you do, you use the exisitng 3d hardware, even for 2d stuff. The thing you want to avoid when rendering with super-fast hardware is shuffling data around between card and ram. Thus it's a

dictionary speed

2005-04-28T03:43:00.000-07:00

This entry got me thinking.Here's my 5 cents. In all cases the constructif key in dictionary: value = dictionary[key]else: value = defaultperformed best.update: I increased the amount of data to reduce the amount of white-noise in the test results, though things haven't changed. An explanation to the output. The programm compares nine data-sets against four test functions. The nine data

Live communications Server

2005-04-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

The task was simple, "install a live-communications server". Me beeing a Microsoft-avoider I found out most things the hard way.To install live communications server, you gotta have a windows 2004 and up server. Had to install one.Do not try out live-communications server 2003, as it either fails, or lacks much of the configuration ease that 2005 offers.If you want live communications server, you

Video Capture, weee!

2005-04-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

vidcap + PIL + pygame =import pygame, vidcap, Imagescreen = pygame.display.set_mode( (320,240) )dev = vidcap.new_Dev( 0, False )while not pygame.event.get( pygame.QUIT ): buf, width, height = dev.getbuffer() img_buf = Image.frombuffer( 'RGB', (width,height), buf ) vid_surface = pygame.image.fromstring( img_buf.tostring( 'raw', 'BGR' ), (width,height), 'RGB' ) screen.blit( vid_surface, (

Bad movies

2005-04-09T19:13:00.000-07:00

Today I had a lenghty talk about bad movies on IRC. I think this sequence of comments is worth remembering as the bottom of the pit of cynism we managed to find ourselfes in.__doc__: I fear lucas will post-morten torture me with gruelsome badly done starwars licensed crap when I'm well in my fourties.linkmastersab: The original star wars nerds will be dead by the time 9 comes outlinkmastersab:

Roll-Off

2005-04-08T23:01:00.000-07:00

This means leaving one project and beeing on the bench for the next.Yesterday was my roll-off in a project in Vienna. I wrote some scripts and small applications there in python, for the purpose of reporting. Usually at the end of a project you'll get a feedback. Then there are some good points and some bad ones.Some of the good points for me whereFlorian has excelent analysis skills and

Lotus Notes aka ( /dev/null )

2005-04-07T01:06:00.000-07:00

Today morning. Clicking on the update records field in a Lotus Notes database. I got the error message popup "B-Tree structure Invalid". That's that, as a user am I Supposed to cheer now for the helpful error message?Image to this later this week.Pyalot out

Vienna flak tower

2005-03-20T03:14:00.000-08:00

I'm quite impressed. Standing in a former flak-tower ( scroll down a bit ), that has been converted to a big vivarium/aquarium. I can blog from here, it has a free internet access. I could watch one of my favorite animals, pythons of various kinds. And they closely bring together humans and a ton of birds and small apes. Quite interesting, I recommend "Haus des Meeres" in the old flak tower in

The Holy Grail

2005-03-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

The holy Grail, or so I guess. If you look at the list of developers, it's quite prominent.Guido van RossumBarry WarsawFred DrakeJeremy HyltonRoger MasseKen ManheimerTed StrolloGrail, what a great and promising name. Quite some time seems to have been put into it. I admire the bold endeavour, and I would so wish it to be succesful. I tried running it on 2.4, and was pleased that much of it works

Nice things are better then ugly and long ones

2005-03-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was at a very delightful task. I rewrote a Java program to python. I'm rather pleased with the outcome. I replaced 977 lines of Java with 116 of Python. The Python version is more Robust and it runs about twenty times as fast.On a sidenote, I wrote the python programm faster then the guys at software-installation-department could install a JDK on my machine.Update:Trough the new

.Net, Grimes and VB.

2005-03-07T08:21:00.000-08:00

There was a host of interesting posts today about the topic. Mr. Grimes is ranting about .Net and VB. Usually I enjoy M$ bashing, specially if it comes with some weight.I read through it, and I also read the reaction and another reaction.About the whole quarreling I have nothing to say really, save one thing. I'm sadened by the fact that people bang their heads over things so broken from the

Java sucks because...

2005-03-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

I base the resoning on the observation that in a Corporate world you mostly work on foobared windoze machines. Based on that I Observe the following.The download size:Why does it matter? Simply because sometimes you have to work on machines that are locked down, and only connected to extremely slow proxies to the internet.Python d/l: ~10mbJ2SE ( not the fancy J2EE stuff ): ~50mbInstallation

Duh!?

2005-01-25T08:11:00.000-08:00

The very promising project I was in just failed today. It kicked off two months ago, and it hurts a little because I poured some heartblood into it and it grew a little to my heart. It failed because it was doomed to fail from the start. Head honcho for our project on the client side had orders to make project with us, when in fact he'd have prefered making project with a competitor. Turns out

Interesting

2004-11-17T01:03:00.000-08:00

xmlpickle dump : 4.391 xmlpickle load : 3.375 xmlpickle dump psyco: 2.844 xmlpickle load psyco: 3.546 pickle dump : 0.266 pickle load : 0.297 pickle dump psyco: 0.109 pickle load psyco: 0.172 cPickle dump : 0.031 cPickle load : 0.063 marshal dump : 0.015 marshal

argh!

2004-11-16T03:52:00.000-08:00

Getting up, programming a bit. 0 sfr Trodding into town to pc-joy. Buying Half-Life 2 Standard. 89 sfr Trodding home. 0 sfr Installing Half-Life 2 Subscription pending Your subscription to Half-Life 2 Retail Standard has not been completed, because Steam servers are currently unable to process the transaction. You won't be able to play Half-Life 2 Retail Standard until the

IML

2004-08-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

I've always thought that xml is a sort of unatural way to describe hirarchical data, at least when it should be human readable. I've obviously also always thought that python's use of indent is a great case of connecting the good with the useful. Of I hacked, and out came "Indent Markup Languag". It may be a bit unripe ( only the second iteration so far ) but this will show once I put it to some

pyscan and game thoughts

2004-08-04T23:47:00.000-07:00

Pyscan A little script offering a gui'ed tcp/ip portscanner, comes in handy and was fun to write. Game thougts I've played Aces High demo again yesterday. This was after I stopped playing Battlefield Vietnam for this evening because the spawncampers and bad teammates got on my nerves. I'm sort of a flying-nature in these games. Also I've seen a trailer of sorts for Call of duty united offensive.

livehelp

2004-08-04T01:56:00.000-07:00

You think help is a good tool, but it's a bit 'non interactive'? Well I had a little bit of playaround-time and the result is livehelp. It's a sort of help that works like a browser. It's pretty raw at the moment, and there are some gui elements that are just decoration, but I like it none the less. In fact I know of someone who's already putting it to good use by inspecting the runtime-state of

Python 2.4 Decorators

2004-08-03T14:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, here's a controversial issue. There's a few changes in python 2.4 that are somewhat hotly discussed. Most of the features are rather okish I think, what I have a strong opinion about are the following. Buildin Set Objects This is a feature I'll love. I think sets are a quite usefull addition to the containers, in facto so usefull that it's legit so I don't have to write "from sets import

Dom-View

2004-08-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

I've had a look at pyxml, and Liked it, despite the rather clumsy interface to the dom-tree. It inspired me to write something usefull along the lines of purple, up to now I call it Dom-view ( it's a little more then that ). dom-view Have Fun

Python stuff

2004-07-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

Howdy, nice you came along, I'll blog python stuff here.