Author archives: Mike

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 ...

Had a surreal experience this afternoon. Soni and Rose were late meeting me at Rose's new place to help them move the furniture (a cat Rose is house-sitting for was sick). So, I sat out on the wall outside, drinking in the sky (it was gorgeous and hot), thinking about IDEs and how to make ...

Came into the caffe intending to "install" the little laptop and then get a few hours of billable work in so that I can pay the rent and buy some cookies. Instead it turns out that I mistakenly allowed Gentoo to upgrade the qt/PyQt version on this laptop when doing a system update.

I could ...

Amber and co threw a big party last night down at No Regrets, crowd of about 50 techies and television peoples. Spent the whole time demoing and discussing the project (. Given how noisy it was I wound up with a pretty raspy voice by the end of it.

A few interested developers, including one ...

Afraid I let the ball drop on this one. What with Red Hat producing developer-focused LiveCD's, and Toquito planning to produce them, I considered the question of a 5-minutes-to-a-development environment issue to have been solved.

But it seems we haven't had an updated developer's LiveCD in about 4 months... and the LiveCD wasn't great as ...

Spent the day on customer work. Stupid little set of bugs cropped up in some seldom-used code. Sigh. Test coverage could be better. Spent a few hours on further refactoring as well, including adding lots of tests. Kind of stalled on one test where the test fails, but the code works perfectly well on the ...

Today I started work on making an IDE and/or rewriting Turtle graphics. I started with a few spike tests. The first was to see how to go about using the rsvg library to render SVG graphics. So far I'm disappointed (or, rather my disappointment is renewed), it does seem you can't get at the DOM ...

We're almost done moving. Soni, Georgia and Rose are off taking the last small load of items up to Rose's place. I've just finished getting the server/workstation set up. We're going to try to use the VoIP router as the front-end router for the network. So far it's not going well, it's showing the same ...