Category archives: Young Coders

Have pushed a copy of my bzr repository up for the spike-test of Cairo rendering Turtle graphics. You can get it by installing bzr and then doing:

bzr branch http://www.vrplumber.com/bzr/hare-graphics

Not much has changed since last night, I've just been working on figuring out bzr and doing a bit of clean-up to make the code ...

I got a simple spike test done for PyCairo usage. Mostly this is just me figuring out how PyCairo works and how it and PyGTK interact. No big deal right now, it takes turtle commands from the turtle object's queue (produced by Python source running in a background thread) and translates them into simple Cairo ...

Was asked in the interview how many laptops we have in children's hands. IIRC we should have already shipped the latest trial laptops, which were supposed to be something like a few thousand. There had to have been a considerable number in the first trial schools (~800 or so (100/school or so))... which is something ...

Amber's doing a show on technical topics tomorrow (HomePage), invited me along to discuss the project. Don't know what the precise topic is yet. Depending on the audience level we may interest a few developers, otherwise we're just looking at the "mom" effect to prod developers into volunteering ("I saw this wonderful project to build ...

As mentioned, I've "installed" my BTest2 XO at the Linux Caffe in downtown Toronto so that developers can use it to test out their software. While I do not expect people to go down to use the hardware for normal development (you'll probably want to use an emulator), testing on the actual hardware is very ...

Amber and co threw a big party last night down at No Regrets, crowd of about 50 techies and television peoples. Spent the whole time demoing and discussing the project (. Given how noisy it was I wound up with a pretty raspy voice by the end of it.

A few interested developers, including one ...

Afraid I let the ball drop on this one. What with Red Hat producing developer-focused LiveCD's, and Toquito planning to produce them, I considered the question of a 5-minutes-to-a-development environment issue to have been solved.

But it seems we haven't had an updated developer's LiveCD in about 4 months... and the LiveCD wasn't great as ...

Today I started work on making an IDE and/or rewriting Turtle graphics. I started with a few spike tests. The first was to see how to go about using the rsvg library to render SVG graphics. So far I'm disappointed (or, rather my disappointment is renewed), it does seem you can't get at the DOM ...

To make a GUI/text IDE work similarly to the Logo-style animated execution you'd need to make the Python code work more slowly than normal. You could probably hook up a sys.settrace that stops when you finish a given operation and waits on a message from the GUI that it's drawn the results (and waited for ...

A couple of things over the last couple of days have focused my mind on the question of IDEs.

The first is moving to Eric4 from Eric3. The change isn't really all that much, in fact, in the pieces I use there is no particular advantage to the new version (other than that it builds ...