Category archives: Young Coders

There's a presentation at Linux Caffe this evening on the Koolu people's work. They are selling a small AMD Geode PC with broadband wireless, projector-as-screen and other interesting features. It's going to be at Linux Caffe's new Linux solutions shop (around the corner from the current location). There will be a few of the boxes ...

Miles and Seneca have been playing with the laptop all day. They're finding lots of bugs here and there. Mostly pretty small bugs, though they managed to crash the X server once and managed to disable wireless at one point. Their attempts to use a stick as a stylus were not that successful.

It's kind ...

The OLPC Laptop prototype arrived today. Cute as I remembered it. Spent the bulk of the afternoon updating then testing the software. Ran into a few hardware issues (discolouration when touched by Soni, one button sticky), have to submit bugs on those tomorrow.

The Library is beginning to show up on the builds. Haven't yet ...

More time spent on documenting Sugar's core today. Nothing earth-shattering, just going through and seeing what the various pieces do and adding doc-strings.

Received a presentation in email from Bryan of the OLPC Nepal project. Good shots of rural and urban classrooms to give developers an idea of what range of conditions they are coding ...

Spent the whole day spelunking through the guts of Sugar, particularly the mechanism it uses when launching an activity. The point being both to document the operations it requires and to see how to go about making it possible to run raw X applications without mucking up the joint. Good news is that it looks ...

Ian asked me about resources for presentations and sprints and that got me thinking about what to do for sprints. I want to make it possible for a relatively competent Python programmer to sit down with something and have a working application within a couple of hours, and some positive reinforcement within one hour.

I ...

Arranging a couple of talks at the University of Toronto over the next month (thanks Greg). Also trying to arrange one for the University of Tirana (Albania) for our visit there this month. Still need to contact the University of Waterloo and some of the other local computer science (and related) schools (particularly ones that ...

Been playing with mutech designs this evening. I blocked a little when I tried to solve both the network and the graphics issues simultaneously, so I decided to just focus on the network side. Mostly just requirements now. Trying to keep the set as small as possible so that it's relatively easy to write.

Spent the afternoon sitting down to write a little application for the OLPC. In particular, wanted to create a multi-player Reversi game. Just a simple little program that would let 2 people connect and play the game.

By way of reference, it took a couple of hours to code this up in VRML and Javascript ...

I can be a bit dense sometimes. Splitting out the portage directories onto a separate disk allows users to skip downloading them if they don't want them. Splitting off the Sugar directories would allow the developer to update to a new Sugar "release" with just a few tens of megabytes more. That would let developers ...