From barbieri at gmail.com  Mon Apr  3 14:52:45 2006
From: barbieri at gmail.com (Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri)
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 09:52:45 -0300
Subject: [PythonCAD] Port to Maemo/Nokia 770
In-Reply-To: <20060331185602.GH12502@artsapartment.org>
References: <9ef20ef30603301203v35f69051y6484c518270bab2e@mail.gmail.com>
	<20060331185602.GH12502@artsapartment.org>
Message-ID: <9ef20ef30604030552p1f8c31c8ub1829853eb31f121@mail.gmail.com>

On 3/31/06, Art Haas <ahaas at airmail.net> wrote:
> > I'm not a CAD user, but I follow PythonCAD development because it's an
> > interesting project and I have some friends from closed-source world
> > that want to move to open alternatives.
> >
> > Why PythonCAD? My company, http://www.indt.org.br, is porting Python
> > to maemo platform and I think that PythonCAD would be a great test
> > program to it. It would also help engineers to have their drawings at
> > hand while on field analysis.
> >
> > Limitations:
> >  - 770 is really low on performance and memory, it doesn't have a FPU
> > and have low RAM available.
> >  - 770 has a great screen, 800x480, but it's high DPI, which make
> > drawing on the device not a great thing.
> >
> > So I plan to disable most "edit" features, like undo steps and
> > optimize to "view".
>
> Elimination of undo/redo will help somewhat in reducing memory, and I'm
> certain that a number of other memory saving opportunities exist in the
> program.

Ok, I'll do further research after I do the initial hildon-ization of
the main shell... it's easy, but my company job is taking much time
and I still don't have network access at home... moving home sucks,
you know it :-)


> > Any feedback is welcome, but mainly on these areas:
> >  - How to improve startup times? I did put PythonCAD dir in a zipfile
> > and used zipimport, it helps a bit, but need to make it faster... I
> > want to know if some imports could be lazy imports.
>
> My initial thoughts are that some sort of lazy 'import' calls will not
> work. If I had some patches that demonstrated how it could be done I
> would happily admit I was wrong.

I still need to research further... I'm also working with PyMaemo guys
to make "import pygtk" faster... it takes almost 3 seconds on my 770.

But the idea of lazy import is something like this: you know module X
is only used in the subsystem A, so you have:

X = None

def usage_of_subsystem_A():
    global X
    if X is None: X = __import__( 'X' )

this is the draft idea, you can also make X a callable that would load
the module itself on X, eliminating the explicit check.

But to make this work, I would need to know which modules were not
need at start up time, since adding these checks can slow things down,
there must be a reasonable number of modules to be imported later.



> >  - How to improve viewing/zoom?
>
> The current implementations are not great but they do work. I've wanted
> to improve viewing/zooming operations by replacing the 'GTKImage' class
> currently used for drawing display to other classes in the 'gtkshell.py'
> file. Last summer I'd started working towards this goal but I have not
> completed the coding unfortunately.

This is a branch or something like it?

Also, PythonCAD could use Cairo to let it handle vectors... but
unfortunately 770 still have no cairo. Anyway, it will have some day
and then it will make sense :-)


> >  - How to improve memory usage, the lower the better
>
> Reducing memory will be difficult as PythonCAD is built on top of both
> Python, the PyGTK bindings, and GTK+. I don't have any immediate ideas
> other than working to ensure the code does not keep unnecessary
> references around on entities it no longer needs. Accomplishing this
> goal requires more eyes scanning through the code, or perhaps some
> clever Python coding that will flush out stray references.
>
> Let me know what I can do to help you make your porting easier.

I think memory issue will be easier after I disable undo/redo. Maybe a
view-only mode that after things are drawn, you release the elements.
But this would need a canvas with vector support, because zoom still
needs to work.

--
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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From ahaas at airmail.net  Thu Apr 13 17:35:11 2006
From: ahaas at airmail.net (Art Haas)
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 10:35:11 -0500
Subject: [PythonCAD] Sorry about lack of updates lately ...
Message-ID: <20060413153511.GA27366@artsapartment.org>

Hi.

Since the last release I've accomplished next to nothing on PythonCAD
due to the difficulties in finding a new place to live. I need to be out
of my current address by the end of the month so something is going to
happen shortly but I don't yet know what. Once the move is completed
there will be some time needed to get the new place set up, so I don't
see any new work appearing in PythonCAD over the next few weeks.

Art
-- 
Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities
the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.

-Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822

From scratchcomputing at gmail.com  Tue Apr 25 09:50:33 2006
From: scratchcomputing at gmail.com (Eric Wilhelm)
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 00:50:33 -0700
Subject: [PythonCAD] s/UberConverter/VectorSection/
Message-ID: <200604250050.33507.ewilhelm@cpan.org>

Hi all,

"The UberConverter" is finally moving out of the "working title" stage.  
The new name is VectorSection, which may or may not be referred to as 
VectorX, VeX, or vx.

  http://scratchcomputing.com/projects/vectorsection/

Also a few updates to the page and a link to the install instructions.  
More to come.

--Eric
-- 
So malloc calls a timeout and starts rummaging around the free chain,
sorting things out, and merging adjacent small free blocks into larger
blocks. This takes 3 1/2 days.
--Joel Spolsky
---------------------------------------------------
    http://scratchcomputing.com
---------------------------------------------------

From ahaas at airmail.net  Sat Apr 29 23:49:56 2006
From: ahaas at airmail.net (Art Haas)
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2006 16:49:56 -0500
Subject: [PythonCAD] Back online, and various updates available at repo
Message-ID: <20060429214956.GC6626@artsapartment.org>

Hi.

The move to the new place is over, and after a week's delay the internet
connection is back again. Yay!

While not having an internet connection made some things difficult, I
did use the time to get some work done on PythonCAD. I started working
on updating the entity splitting routines, and while working on that
found and fixed a couple of bugs in various entity methods, and then
that work led to correcting some "FIXME" comments in the code. I've sent
my changes up to the public repo, so the new code is available for those
of you using Subversion - just 'svn update' and you'll be set.

I'll tentatively guess the next release will appear at the end of May. I
hope to have the revised splitting code completed, plus a few other
things that will appear over the next couple of weeks.

Art
-- 
Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities
the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.

-Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822