Archives week 32 of 2007

Picked up a VoIP router for my sister today. Chap at Canada Computers assured me it was an unlocked router, despite the "Earthlink" branding. Got home, installed it, and it's locked. Now I need to trek all the way back down there to return it. Bah.

Here's an idea for Linksys: have a way to ...

Ported one of the samples from TurtleArt over to the Cairo-based test. OMG it is slow. TurtleArt is bitmap-based, so once it's drawn something it's just blitting up the bitmap next time and then continuing to render. The Cairo renderer is doing the whole rendering process every frame. Some of these samples are rendering radial ...

Looking at what to recommend for developers wanting to get started this evening.

Xen doesn't seem like a readily deployed solution: manually rework your whole boot system, build multiple kernels, edit configuration files, hope it works. Fine for sysadmins building computers every day, but not a programmer's favourite way to deal with their primary development ...

Have pushed updates that let the turtle's graphics get animated via the GUI. Code doing that is still pretty simple, but it seems to work reasonably well in terms of animating what was done to draw the graphics. Uses the whole command-set (at least, what's been drawn to date) to determine scale/transform, so that the ...

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 ...