Bramz’ warehouse

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 actually is [...]

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 it to [...]

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 the [...]