Author archives: Mike

We're looking for someone with experience customising and running Remora (the engine that Mozilla.org uses for plug-ins) to manage Activities for the OLPC. If you are such a person, or know such a person, let me know and I'll pass you on to the proper peoples.

[Update] Fixed the name for the project, thanks ...

As of this evening, the process of creating the VMWare/VirtualBox images for the OLPC should be entirely automatic. I've cronned the process up to run every 6 hours, so it should catch most new releases (it only downloads the latest release (and only if it hasn't done it before)), a couple may slip through, but ...

I was intending to just sit down with PyOpenGL and do a release... but apparently I was right in the middle of something when I last worked on it. Nurbs was broken. Win32 just wouldn't work. Lots of little things.

Anyway, long story short, spent 12 hours or so on it, but it's just not ...

Only got about 8 hours in on OLPC today, mostly on developer documentation. Last night I got a test written for using the camera and gstreamer to display video on a pygame display surface. I'll have to come up with a nice control mechanism that makes what's really a child X window look like a ...

Spent the day organising and rewriting the Developer's Manual and Emulation manual for the OLPC. Still have lots of work to do pulling information in from the wild corners of the wiki, taming the emulation stuff so that it's readable and coherent, and then filling in the missing bits. At least part of that will ...

Whole day spent on OLPCGames today. Updated the documentation on the wiki considerably. Cleaned up the skeleton-activity builder so that you can create a basic Pygame activity with a few commands, and looked into a bug report from Story Builder.

Story Builder is very different from Productive. It's got lots and lots of text entry ...

Spent all of yesterday evening and all the time so far today getting the little details put together. We now have a file-format for Productive (just a zip-file with some specially-named sub-files) and the original world definition can be shared with the clients to provide topology information (and eventually map size, layout, resources, etceteras). The ...

I think I've got most of the rendering-speed improvements I'm going to get without activity-level changes. Here's how it breaks down:

* 26% of the total time is spent in display.flip now (likely only possible to optimise that by reducing window size or something changing in SDL/Pygame, either is possible, but I'd prefer to give ...

Long day of non-OLPC work today. Spent the evening with a profiler going through productive and whittling down some of the slow spots. It really goes to show that the things you don't think are going to be problems are always the ones to bite you (hence the advice to optimise late in the development ...

Since the trip to Taiwan I've been working full-time-plus on OLPC stuff. Originally the plan was that I was to spend 1 day/week on it, with the other 4 days available for my other clients... but OLPC really needs someone working full-time on making things easier for developers. Getting OLPCGames whipped into shape, making sample ...