Author archives: Mike
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 ...
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).
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.