Archives 2007

Spent the afternoon doing a presentation at the University of Toronto. Basically an introduction and request for developers. The Networked Systems group in particular showed me a couple of already-built applications that might be useful for the project.

They pointed out that their research (which focuses on (electrical) power reduction from software optimisation of network ...

Andrew Grieg did the presentation this evening. His company (Koolu) is building relatively inexpensive, low-power boxes using the same processor as the OLPC XO (they run the official images well). They are already using the processor we'll be using in the final laptops (instead of the ones in the current BTest2 devices).

They were running ...

There's a presentation at Linux Caffe this evening on the Koolu people's work. They are selling a small AMD Geode PC with broadband wireless, projector-as-screen and other interesting features. It's going to be at Linux Caffe's new Linux solutions shop (around the corner from the current location). There will be a few of the boxes ...

Since there's just no pleasing some people with poetry I have provided what I hope will be reasonably well broken down feeds. The whole blog and each category now have full-body or excerpt-only feeds. I didn't implement combining the feeds (i.e. specifying multiple categories for a single feed), mostly because I was too rushed to ...

Miles and Seneca have been playing with the laptop all day. They're finding lots of bugs here and there. Mostly pretty small bugs, though they managed to crash the X server once and managed to disable wireless at one point. Their attempts to use a stick as a stylus were not that successful.

It's kind ...

The OLPC Laptop prototype arrived today. Cute as I remembered it. Spent the bulk of the afternoon updating then testing the software. Ran into a few hardware issues (discolouration when touched by Soni, one button sticky), have to submit bugs on those tomorrow.

The Library is beginning to show up on the builds. Haven't yet ...

It appears I really will get to try out the OLPC laptop as a primary working machine! Though I suppose that practically I will have to buy a new full-size laptop at some point (why does a new battery or power adapter cost 50% of the cost of a new laptop, btw?)

Anyway, suppose that's ...

More time spent on documenting Sugar's core today. Nothing earth-shattering, just going through and seeing what the various pieces do and adding doc-strings.

Received a presentation in email from Bryan of the OLPC Nepal project. Good shots of rural and urban classrooms to give developers an idea of what range of conditions they are coding ...

Spent the whole day spelunking through the guts of Sugar, particularly the mechanism it uses when launching an activity. The point being both to document the operations it requires and to see how to go about making it possible to run raw X applications without mucking up the joint. Good news is that it looks ...

Ian asked me about resources for presentations and sprints and that got me thinking about what to do for sprints. I want to make it possible for a relatively competent Python programmer to sit down with something and have a working application within a couple of hours, and some positive reinforcement within one hour.

I ...