Bramz’ warehouse

pyvtuneapi is a very simple extension that binds the VTune API to Python. If you have VTune, and you’re using it to profile a Python driven application, you can use pyvtuneapi to pause and resume the analyzer.

As you could read in my previous post, my devenv.exe stopped working since last Patch Tuesday updates. Since rebooting and even reinstalling the entire VS2005 suite didn’t resolve the problem, I’ve tried the only other approach I could think of apart from reformating my laptop: reverting the windows updates. I made an extra [...]

Today, after a mandatory reboot because of a patch Tuesday windows update, devenv.exe of Visual Studio 2005 no longer wants to start. Well, it tries to start, and sometimes it gives a flash of its main window, but then it dies without a cry.
The first thing one tries to resolve the problem is to [...]

From my previous post, you might know about my recent interest in minidumps to debug remote applications. Since then, I’ve been trying to implement an automatic and unattended crash dump facilitiy in Lass. On the Win32 platform, the key functions are SetUnhandledExceptionFilter in kernel32.lib and MiniDumpWriteDump in dbghelp.lib. The former lets you [...]

Yesterday, I had some fun playing around with remote debugging and examining crash dumps. In the lab, we’re currently running a lot of noise map simulations for a project we’re involved in. These simulations are distributed over all available computers in the lab, a mixture of old and new, often actively used by [...]

pycpuid is a very simple Python extension. It reads the information available from the CPUID assembly instruction, and makes it available to any Python program. I needed it to decide on some codepath based on whether the box supported SSE2. I didn’t found anything alike, so I coded it myself.

Here’s a quick roundup on how to build Python extensions using the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition compiler. This is meant for people who need to build Python extension from source using the accompanying setup.py script.
There’s no rocket science or magic involved. Just five easy click-through steps. Well, the last one [...]

Yesterday, while I was visiting the VirtualDub website, I bumped into an interesting post about Frame Pointer Omission (FPO) optimization and why it renders perfect stack walking impossible when combined with callee-pops parameter passing.
Recalling my issues with stack walking in a profiling tool of Max McGuire (I couldn’t get credible call graphs out of [...]

The last couple of weeks I’ve mostly been coding on pyshapelib, that’s a small Python wrapper around shapelib, a C++ library to read ESRI shapefiles. It is originally written by Bernhard Herzog and is now maintained as part of Thuban, an open source interactive geographic data viewer. My contribution to pyshapelib is rewriting [...]

Yesterday, I’ve attended FOSDEM 2007, the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting in Brussels, Belgium. It’s a two days event, but I only managed to go there on Saturday.
Actually, I didn’t know about the existence of this event until last Friday. It was Bernhard Reiter of Intevation GmbH who announced on [...]