Author archives: Mike

Just implemented the Journal API for OLPCGames. A serious mess in there, it's a synchronous call where the filename passed will be deleted, so handling it in the asynchronous Pygame environment means I'm having to block the GTK event loop until the Pygame event loop retires the event. Which meant I needed to introduce the ...

Waiting for a database dump/restore, doing a bit of tinkering on Productive. Finally created an SVG icon for it (well, a second one, the OLPCGames default icon was originally created for Productive and just turned into the default icon because it was handy and "in progress" looking).

You can see the new icon in the ...

PyGTA is tonight, at Linux Caffe, on using Python and Povray to animate the Lorenz attractor.

Thinking about perceiving (cognitive) machines. It seems that a hybrid model should be applicable for most prosaic tasks. The key benefit of an AI would be a compact, effective structure for learning and abstraction (modelling), it would not necessarily be a good way to code low-level real-world operations. Though it might have advantages, the processing ...

Got my flight booked for PyCon. I'll arrive on the afternoon of the 12th and leave reasonably late in the evening on the 20th. Have 1/2 of a room available. Need to get a new passport for the trip, will have to head down and get that done tomorrow morning (can take a while).

No more posts today about things that suck.

I'm married to a wonderful woman. I have a whole new world of exciting opportunities opening out in front of me. I have a family full of good people. Every once in a while I get to pat a puppy or two. I get to hang out ...

Dang comment spammers keep pounding the blog here with their auto-generated garbage. Looks like they just have a series of scripts that are creating garbage web-sites on free hosting services then comment spamming blogs to drive up the page rank of the free pages. Would be nice to add the spam-checks on the submit page ...

Finishing the tutorial handout draft (only 17 pages at the moment)... or at least, I would be if I weren't obsessing about the wasted effort of documenting the current Telepathy API access. Fact is, it's just plain broken under current OLPCGames. It's just way too fragile to have new devs having to know which thread ...

Told Gentoo on the server/workstation to update itself last night, got a shiny new KDE out of it (latest stable 3.x), but it also upgraded Dovecot (the imap server I use). Last little message from the upgrade's set of messages was to the effect of "Dovecot's configuration has completely changed, we encourage you to start ...

Last month I was asked by someone (can't even remember who now) whether I thought Aurora Cable would be bought by Rogers... told him that as long as the CRTC was keeping the area's license exclusive to Aurora I couldn't see why they'd sell.

Apparently the CRTC decided to allow them in around the same ...