Category archives: Young Coders

Projects related to young people and computers, including young people learning to code and the One Laptop Per Child project.

RSS feed of Young Coders

Multi-application communications channels (Where does Jack fit into Bitfrost?)


We had a presentation down at Linux Caffe on the weekend regarding a number of Jack-based collaborative applications. Basically you can have 2 or more applications communicating audio across the Jack bus. This allows for some very elegant loose coupling of applications.

Where would we put those applications in a Bitfrost system? Would we allow ...

Continue reading

One Beowolf Cluster per Child (Auto-sharing activities and scripting...)


Thinking of a mechanism whereby the kids could donate processor time to their friends (similar to donating memory to temporary storage, and normally linked with it). Use cases here are basically any processor-intensive easily parallellisable task; POVRay rendering, Video encoding, advanced simulations, etceteras.

Design can be fairly simple, a shared temporary storage directory and a ...

Continue reading

Need to understand the dbus security model (Kind of a key requirement to analyse security when everything uses it...)


I haven't had much luck finding documentation on the dbus security model. In particular, how does one prevent one application from spoofing another application's "identity". That is, if I created an application that watched for new launches and managed to guess the activity ID of the launched application, registering a DBUS service for that activity ...

Continue reading

UI Issue: Need a "launch this environment with" button (Eliminate the close, launch, open Journal, choose-last session path...)


The HIG mentions that we'll want a view in the Journal that allows you to launch a given Journal entry (project environment) with a different application than the one that last edited it. I'm thinking we're going to want a way to do the same without needing a close-launch cycle.

For instance, you're working with ...

Continue reading

External storage mechanisms in BitFrost (More use cases to integrate...)


Something that's been rattling around in my mind for the past week is the need to integrate removable storage into the Bitfrost and Journal systems. Obviously we don't want to automatically include anything ever plugged into the system into the backup/Journal system, but if I share a file off my USB key or USB hard-drive ...

Continue reading

No Joy in Fedora-ville (Networking and keyboard issues)


Spent a few hours trying to get Fedora 7 working under vmware last night. I'm guessing the problem is simple, but on Fedora I'm just stumbling around blind to some extent. I can modprobe the pcnet32 driver, but hotplug/coldplug doesn't seem to pick up the new device. Freaky thing is that the system has an ...

Continue reading

Shared storage mechanism (Temporary GBs of ganged storage)


As I was walking home I was considering the question of large-media "special events", such as wanting to watch a multi-GB movie off the network at school. If the class wants to record an event (school play) at high enough resolution to do a good job of editing where would the children store the gigabytes ...

Continue reading

Persistent storage in chroot-protected systems (Issue that needs to be dealt with...)


One of the issues still pending in the overlay filesystem approach is how to handle persistent information for a given application in a general way. Some examples of persistent information use-cases:

Most document-editing applications include a "most recently used" list of the documents edited within them that can be selected and edited with a single ...

Continue reading

I want an auto-journalling overlay file-system (With a searching, sorting, querying journal interface...)


I think I'm to the point of wanting the overlay security mechanism and journal I've been describing on my own machine. That is, if we can implement everything it would allow me to work on my own machine (and I have rather demanding requirements from a computer) while still providing extensive protections and a number ...

Continue reading