Author archives: Mike

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Need Patch and Pygame for Tutorial (Xubuntu LiveCD doesn't have them...)


Will need to have users do an "apt-get install pygame patch" to be able to run on a LiveCD. Similarly on an XO you'll need to su and then "yum install patch". Got Productive's packing script updated so that you can play on an XO from a download.

OLPC meetup was exactly what I needed ...

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Centre of Attention Moving (PyCon in the focus...)


Have been doing a lot of PyCon preparations lately (mostly on the tutorial), working around the paying stuff. But some time this morning I switched to "PyCon Mode", with the work at home falling into secondary position. Got the Airline ticket printed, got the hotel information updated for my roomie, copied out the Hotel information ...

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State of the Games (Tutorial research...)


Have been working on the introductory presentation for the Tutorial most of the weekend. Decided against a "normal" presentation; after all, everyone there has already committed enough to pay for the tutorial, they are going to be more interested in the current project status, how the philosophical approach has emerged in practical code, and what ...

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Speed up PySNMP for Free? (Upgrade to Python 2.6, apparently...)


Apparently there *is* going to be some performance changes in CPython (though it's from the PyPy folks, so I suppose the "most of the recent performance-oriented work happens in PyPy" analysis stands). There's a patch that adds an __mro__ function cache. This is a pretty straightforward operation that caches the function-object lookup on types via ...

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PyOpenGL is Offline (DMCA takedown notice...)


For those asking, yes, PyOpenGL has disappeared from SourceForge. Gentleman sent a DMCA notice thinking that gle32.dll was his, it is actually just a compiled version of the (BSD licensed) GLE library for Win32. I've sent in a DMCA Notification Response, and the gentleman who issued the initial request has asked for them to rescind ...

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Unexpected 'free' day (More of an "I want to do something else" day...)


I got up this morning fully intending to work on billing/provisioning stuff for ACI all day... I only wound up doing 2 hours total work for them (well, so far), exhausted the stuff that can be done during the day (most of the changes need to be done after-close-of-business) and decided to brush up on ...

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Handout Finished (1 day early :))


Finished the handout for the Tutorial at PyCon. 20 pages, but don't panic, they're mostly for people who learn best by reading. You won't have to read it all while you're in the class, we'll be mostly looking at the code changes as diffs and resulting code so that you can see what we're doing ...

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Formatting and Review for Tutorial Handout (Oh, and some paying work...)


Spent the bulk of yesterday on paying work, solid day of billables down at the Caffe. Nothing all that interesting, just some refactoring of a view, scripting a maintenance task, that kind of thing.

Then started working on the tutorial handout (due end of this week). Got about 1/3 through editing when Paul came in. ...

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Telepathy Wrapper Lands in OLPCGames (Network asynchronously from your Pygame-side code...)


Have just completed a working implementation of a DBUS Proxy object for OLPCGames that allows you to define networking "servers" as ExportedGObjects then call/subscribe to them from within your Pygame event loop (without threading-related crashes).

The proxy avoids having client callbacks happen in the GObject mainloop, which could cause segfaults/cores in your Activity when you ...

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Distribute Newspapers to Commuters via Avahi (EBook readers as opportunistic downloaders on local-link...)


We've got E-book readers showing up now, Kindle, OLPC-XO (G1G1), and the like. We've also got fairly widespread laptops, sub-notebooks, iPhones and N800s. Most of them are going to have local-network (wifi) connectivity free. People are manually downloading media on these machines to consume it on the subway/bus as they commute to work. At the ...

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