Archives August 2007

Been doing a lot of refactoring for a client project these last few weeks. Basically just moving away from some poorly-chosen architectures that proved hard to test toward something that's easier to build unit-tests for. Of course, being choices made within the first month of the project, they had worked themselves deep into the grain. ...

Unable to sleep tonight because of an issue that arose this evening that I just couldn't stop thinking about...

I was working on the Developer's page on the wiki and was putting in links for the various technologies in use. One of those being D-BUS. All fine and dandy, except that the D-BUS page had ...

Been looking at how to handle the logical step from turtle-graphics to interactive programming (event handling and the like). Looks like something like GooCanvas would be a good stepping-stone there. We can fairly readily define a mapping from turtle-style drawing into GooCanvas primitives.

That is, as the turtle draws, it creates new GooCanvas Polylines for ...

Was just intending to spend a few minutes on the emulation stuff today, but what with documenting the requirements, realizing they were rather involved and then trying to automate them, didn't get around to the client work I had on the todo list today.

Anyway, worked out a quick hack that lets me automatically download ...

Latest build as of 2007.08.25.19.47 works under VirtualBox with both sound (as seen in EToys) and Networking. This is seen on an AMD64 box with alsa sound driver. TamTam's sound (CSound) is producing clicking sounds as soon as you open the application, but that seems to be common issue at this point.

Networking works in ...

Two requests for presentations today. One is for an academic conference on education, one for a DemoCamp night (local hip-tech crowd). Should wind up with two very different presentations. I'm hoping to be able to set up a video camera to be able to record the presentations for redistribution. Maybe just record practice runs?

I ...

I use an old Wacom Graphire instead of a mouse on my workstation. I've done this for years, and I find it really helps my wrists. It's worked fine as an absolute-mode mouse while in Linux, but it's always been lacking the pressure-sensitivity controls.

Last night I upgraded the machine to the 2.6.22 kernel, and ...

Looks like the kernel drivers for the virtualbox/vmware virtual devices have been added to the devel builds. Couldn't get past activation with the images from today, however, so haven't been able to confirm that they work. Still, yay.

Didn't figure I could get to sleep this evening, so did some playing with the Cairo-backed turtle graphics. Got quite a few little nits worked out, but the big performance bottleneck still remains, namely we still have to render the whole of the drawing on every frame of the animation. All of my attempts to ...

Regular PyGTA meeting is tonight @ Linux Caffe. Topic is ctypes. Speaker is Peter Hansen (one of the original founders of PyGTA).