Spent the whole day testing and cleaning up tutorial code for PyCon. Ran smack into a big bug in OLPCGames; a thread encapsulation issue that would cause core dumps every once in a while as DBUS tried to run in the Pygame thread. Basically a network (DBUS) operation was being called synchronously... you can't do that in the Pygame thread.

I'm disliking GIT even more now. It really does seem like it's purposely trying to be as unfamiliar, opaque and awkward as possible. I had to blow away my entire working checkout of games-misc and re-download it to be able to continue working at one point. For some reason it wanted to revert the whole project to the state from a few weeks ago. The fact that the games-misc project now requires 200MB to download is also annoying me more than a little (someone checked in 37MB movies into one of the game projects)... though that's just a project setup issue, not actually GIT's fault.

At the end of the day, though, the second tutorial step (which shows you how to track all of the people in your room and display their nicknames as columns of names along the side of the screen) is now working properly, and the mechanism for organizing the tutorial seems to be holding up pretty well. I'm writing shell scripts for each step of the tutorial, from downloading OLPCGames to each edit operation (described as patch files). That lets me update OLPCGames while I'm in the middle of working on the project and test with the updated version with the new code.

OLPCGames 1.5 isn't quite ready for release yet. I was not intending to spend any of this time working on it... I just keep stumbling across things that need to be fixed to let me finish the tutorial. Upside is that you can now retrieve the "buddy" information and there's a simple Pango-based text sprite available.