Author archives: Mike

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Documenting again (PyDoc not processing the modules, though)


More time spent on documenting Sugar's core today. Nothing earth-shattering, just going through and seeing what the various pieces do and adding doc-strings.

Received a presentation in email from Bryan of the OLPC Nepal project. Good shots of rural and urban classrooms to give developers an idea of what range of conditions they are coding ...

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A day of spelunking and documenting (Figuring out how Sugar works...)


Spent the whole day spelunking through the guts of Sugar, particularly the mechanism it uses when launching an activity. The point being both to document the operations it requires and to see how to go about making it possible to run raw X applications without mucking up the joint. Good news is that it looks ...

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Day one should be fun (Working code in under an hour as a goal...)


Ian asked me about resources for presentations and sprints and that got me thinking about what to do for sprints. I want to make it possible for a relatively competent Python programmer to sit down with something and have a working application within a couple of hours, and some positive reinforcement within one hour.

I ...

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Presentations and talking and developer relations (Oh my!)


Arranging a couple of talks at the University of Toronto over the next month (thanks Greg). Also trying to arrange one for the University of Tirana (Albania) for our visit there this month. Still need to contact the University of Waterloo and some of the other local computer science (and related) schools (particularly ones that ...

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Maybe a bit too clever in the Postgresql usage ("In case I want to do what I never want to do" bites me...)


Fighting a bug in a billing process most of the afternoon. Basically two errors, one a memory error and one a database buffer exhaustion error. The first I haven't tracked down, but I did work around it. The second appears to be a side effect of a never-used set of features in PyTable that allow ...

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Bare-bones example of PyGTK2 + Twisted (Because simple is what you need to start...)


This is a minimalist version of integrating Twisted and PyGTK2, all it does is create a single PyGTK window, create a Twisted reactor that supports PyGTK and then run the application, closing when you close the PyGTK window. It doesn't actually do anything with the window or the network, it just shows how to initiate ...

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Mutechs don't write themselves (Starting...)


Been playing with mutech designs this evening. I blocked a little when I tried to solve both the network and the graphics issues simultaneously, so I decided to just focus on the network side. Mostly just requirements now. Trying to keep the set as small as possible so that it's relatively easy to write.

Need a good shared object model (Or something like it...)


Spent the afternoon sitting down to write a little application for the OLPC. In particular, wanted to create a multi-player Reversi game. Just a simple little program that would let 2 people connect and play the game.

By way of reference, it took a couple of hours to code this up in VRML and Javascript ...

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More disks is the answer (maybe) (One for portage and one for sugar...)


I can be a bit dense sometimes. Splitting out the portage directories onto a separate disk allows users to skip downloading them if they don't want them. Splitting off the Sugar directories would allow the developer to update to a new Sugar "release" with just a few tens of megabytes more. That would let developers ...

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More disks is the answer (maybe) (One for portage and one for sugar...)


I can be a bit dense sometimes. Splitting out the portage directories onto a separate disk allows users to skip downloading them if they don't want them. Splitting off the Sugar directories would allow the developer to update to a new Sugar "release" with just a few tens of megabytes more. That would let developers ...

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