Archives 2008

Thinking about perceiving (cognitive) machines. It seems that a hybrid model should be applicable for most prosaic tasks. The key benefit of an AI would be a compact, effective structure for learning and abstraction (modelling), it would not necessarily be a good way to code low-level real-world operations. Though it might have advantages, the processing ...

Got my flight booked for PyCon. I'll arrive on the afternoon of the 12th and leave reasonably late in the evening on the 20th. Have 1/2 of a room available. Need to get a new passport for the trip, will have to head down and get that done tomorrow morning (can take a while).

No more posts today about things that suck.

I'm married to a wonderful woman. I have a whole new world of exciting opportunities opening out in front of me. I have a family full of good people. Every once in a while I get to pat a puppy or two. I get to hang out ...

Dang comment spammers keep pounding the blog here with their auto-generated garbage. Looks like they just have a series of scripts that are creating garbage web-sites on free hosting services then comment spamming blogs to drive up the page rank of the free pages. Would be nice to add the spam-checks on the submit page ...

Finishing the tutorial handout draft (only 17 pages at the moment)... or at least, I would be if I weren't obsessing about the wasted effort of documenting the current Telepathy API access. Fact is, it's just plain broken under current OLPCGames. It's just way too fragile to have new devs having to know which thread ...

Told Gentoo on the server/workstation to update itself last night, got a shiny new KDE out of it (latest stable 3.x), but it also upgraded Dovecot (the imap server I use). Last little message from the upgrade's set of messages was to the effect of "Dovecot's configuration has completely changed, we encourage you to start ...

Last month I was asked by someone (can't even remember who now) whether I thought Aurora Cable would be bought by Rogers... told him that as long as the CRTC was keeping the area's license exclusive to Aurora I couldn't see why they'd sell.

Apparently the CRTC decided to allow them in around the same ...

Wanting to scale up Cinemon's SNMP performance. We're currently in the 10-20,000 device range, which is okay, but I'd like to increase that by a factor of 5 or 10 to address some performance issues. We've got plenty of memory for that scale (though we'll need to work on the long-term storage system a bit). ...

As of right now, we need one more registrant to get the space at PyCon for the tutorial. This is going to be a pretty intense session, primarily for people who haven't developed for Sugar before, but who do know the basics of Python. We're going to create a reasonably complete Activity using both the ...

Have less than one week for the initial slide-set for the tutorial. I've just finished restructuring the activity we'll be creating so that it looks a lot more like Productive's underlying structure. It's got a properly separated model and graphics layer now, with the "AI" in a separate class.

I'd run them in together as ...