Author archives: Mike

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...