Archives 2008
GIT is a PITA (Stupid, stupid, stupid source code control...)
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Young Coders.
ARGH! Spent the whole day working on OLPCGames. Tracked down/fixed the two major bugs that needed ASAP attention... and now I can't check them in. At some point I tried to revert a trivial change on my working directory (and of course GIT decides to include a command called revert that doesn't do a revert ...
Gutsy Packages for Sugar Work Nicely (Don't install sugar-jhbuild at the same time, though...)
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Young Coders.
Been using the Ubuntu Gutsy packages for Sugar while working on various OLPCGames and tutorial development. So far I'm very impressed, installed perfectly, and once I blew away my sugar-jhbuild (that seemed to confuse it), I got a very functional environment for development.
At the moment this is by far the easiest path to a ...
Note to Hertz (Nickle-and-diming department...)
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Vindaloo.
When your counter staff says you "can" return a car to any location in Toronto and suggests one as being particularly convenient, they should either tell you that there is a charge associated with using that location, or there should be no such charge.
Well, at least they lost a customer out of it.
Going to have to find a Maintainer for OLPCGames (Can't keep doing it in my spare time...)
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Young Coders.
My "spare" time is rather thin on the ground these days. I'll have to see if I can find someone who can commit to maintain OLPCGames. It just takes way too much time, and since it's not considered part of my official work for the OLPC I'm having to slot it in among the dozens ...
Giving up on GNUCash (Delegating accounting/bookkeeping)
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Knight Errant.
I've been tracking my corporate books using GNUCash for about 21 months now. At the start it was quite rough (a number of nasty glitches that have since been fixed), but it's served me reasonably well.
In the end the problem isn't the software, it's that the accountants charge the same to read/review the books ...
Long Day's Wrestling with OLPCGames (Good day, though...)
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Young Coders.
Spent the whole day testing and cleaning up tutorial code for PyCon. Ran smack into a big bug in OLPCGames; a thread encapsulation issue that would cause core dumps every once in a while as DBUS tried to run in the Pygame thread. Basically a network (DBUS) operation was being called synchronously... you can't do ...
Big Ideas on Conflict in the Brain (Interesting "areas of the brain" lecture...)
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Design Theory.
Interesting lecture, touches briefly on the idea of designers (intenders) attempting to set up a conflict in the mind in order to have the user consider the ideas they have not yet been exposed to. General points here and there of interest as well. (Yes, I listen to these lectures as I work).
Bit of time on Productive gameplay (Seem to have a bug in the network setup code...)
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Young Coders.
Spent a few hours this afternoon on trying to make Productive more fun to play. Biggest change was making the "takeover" process much faster (factor of 8), so that you have to react to a takeover attempt within 10s to avoid losing your units. Also implemented a resource cap on each unit so that you ...
OLPC at PyCon 2008 (For those looking for something meaningful...)
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Young Coders.
As those who have signed up for PyCon may already know, I'll be presenting a tutorial on developing Activities for the Sugar platform on the tutorial day before the conference.
There are also a number of OLPC talks scheduled, by Dr. Brown, Charles and Kirby. I believe we're also going to have a ...
Would be nice to have a compile farm (Qemu overlays or the like...)
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Young Coders.
Given that gcc can be a bit heavy, it would be neat if we had a compile farm somewhere made out of Qemu images with overlays that people working on XOs could shell into in order to compile various software. I use this approach on my workstation when I want to do something that's messy ...
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Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.