Author archives: Mike
Documenting Broken things Sucks (You know it's going away...)
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Young Coders.
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 ...
Don't upgrade Dovecot when you're busy (Server configuration completely changed...)
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Tuxedo.
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 to Know, Apparently (End of an era...)
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Knight Errant.
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 ...
SNMP Engine for 250,000+ Device Networks (Scaling up...)
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Knight Errant.
Wanting to scale up Cinemon's SNMP performance. We're currently in the 10-20,000 device range, which is okay, but I'd like to increase that by a factor of 5 or 10 to address some performance issues. We've got plenty of memory for that scale (though we'll need to work on the long-term storage system a bit). ...
Tutorial on the Cusp (One more registrant to go forward...)
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Young Coders.
As of right now, we need one more registrant to get the space at PyCon for the tutorial. This is going to be a pretty intense session, primarily for people who haven't developed for Sugar before, but who do know the basics of Python. We're going to create a reasonably complete Activity using both the ...
Adding more to the Tutorial (Deadline next Friday)
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Young Coders.
Have less than one week for the initial slide-set for the tutorial. I've just finished restructuring the activity we'll be creating so that it looks a lot more like Productive's underlying structure. It's got a properly separated model and graphics layer now, with the "AI" in a separate class.
I'd run them in together as ...
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 ...
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.