Author archives: Mike
Nova isn't the right model for usb to vga (Many competing little shops...)
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Vindaloo.
Checked every store at Nova. They are a collection of about 80 stalls on four levels. The prices were okay for USB keys (though if my conversions were right, no better than College Street in Toronto). There was one shop that had two flexible USB keyboards, but they didn't have a model I could test ...
Learning in the Rain (Using my B4 in Taipei...)
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Young Coders.
Wound up with an awkward couple of hours yesterday, not enough time to really document the Confucious and Daoist temples, but an hour and a bit with some travel time at both ends before the OS Taipei meeting. Grabbed a coffee and went through the olpcgames wrapper code.
Started off in the caffe, then spent ...
My Key Phrases (Should have just gone ahead and learned chinese years ago...)
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Vindaloo.
My ESL friends back in University wanted to teach me Cantonese and I always wound up stopping after a few days of learning incredibly abstract and largely "useless" stuff (though fun, we started off reading Confucius, so all I got were extremely long decompositions of a few symbols in written form, which shaded pretty heavily ...
Camera's on the Wrong Setting (Everything's blue...)
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Vindaloo.
About 50% of my shots from yesterday are garbage due to blurring (in low light you're hands need to be very stable to get good pictures out of this model). Another 45% or so are ruined by a lighting-mode-compensation setting that was set for incandescent instead of exterior lighting (the 50% also share the issue, ...
What to see... (Touring the city)
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Vindaloo.
Suggestions from Ellis:
* Lin Family Mansion, (NW of Taipei in Pan Chiao City)
* Master Ching-shui Temple (81, Kangding Rd., Wanhua Chiu)
* A traditional vernacular house
* Lung Shan Temple
* Museum of archaeology
* Dalongdong Baoan Temple
The Open Source group of Taiwan in meeting tomorrow, so tomorrow I should do ...
Presentation seems to go well (Few questions, though...)
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Young Coders.
Presentation went reasonably well today. The Asus and the XO were sitting next to each other on the podium, they really are very similar systems. I tried to make it clear that we'd like to get the software and content shared across the various systems, so that we avoid teaching "computers", and teach children how ...
Joomla, Wims, Mozilla (Webby...)
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Vindaloo.
First three sessions at the conference over. Wims appears to be a framework for writing web quizzes. It apparently has an embedding mechanism for adding those quizzes to courses using the open source course mgmt software (blanking on name right now).
Joomla 1.5 seems like it's primarily a refactor and clean up. Useful sounding for ...
Pleasant walk around a night market (Very generous hosts...)
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Vindaloo.
Our hosts took us for a walk around one of the night markets this evening (after treating us to a very well done dim sum dinner). The night market is a very large, intense and close version of the shops down in Chinatown (or Kensington Market), but without the need to close everything in, so ...
Quick walk while the process runs (At least I got out of the air conditioning...)
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Vindaloo.
Feel so stupid sitting here coding software at home. Two bugs found, one a straightforward "duh", the other a scaling issue that didn't show up in the tests, with a straightforward fix. Still, that's 4 hours of my time here gone.
Went for a walk as the final run was working. Just around the block. ...
Little things to remember (What not to do when travelling...)
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Vindaloo.
Just got into the room about 40 minutes ago. Total door-to-door travel time of 33.5 hours. Things to remember in the future:
When figuring out how much time you have left on your passport, remember to calculate based on the day you arrive in the country, not the day you leave your own country. My ...
Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.