Category archives: Young Coders
Projects related to young people and computers, including young people learning to code and the One Laptop Per Child project.
Journal Integration for OLPCGames (inotify (save) and a command line argument (open)?)
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Young Coders.
Just implemented the Journal API for OLPCGames. A serious mess in there, it's a synchronous call where the filename passed will be deleted, so handling it in the asynchronous Pygame environment means I'm having to block the GTK event loop until the Pygame event loop retires the event. Which meant I needed to introduce the ...
New Icon for Productive (Blocked on deployment project...)
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Young Coders.
Waiting for a database dump/restore, doing a bit of tinkering on Productive. Finally created an SVG icon for it (well, a second one, the OLPCGames default icon was originally created for Productive and just turned into the default icon because it was handy and "in progress" looking).
You can see the new icon in the ...
Documenting Broken things Sucks (You know it's going away...)
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Young Coders.
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 ...
Tutorial on the Cusp (One more registrant to go forward...)
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Young Coders.
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 ...
Adding more to the Tutorial (Deadline next Friday)
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Young Coders.
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 ...
GIT is a PITA (Stupid, stupid, stupid source code control...)
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Young Coders.
ARGH! Spent the whole day working on OLPCGames. Tracked down/fixed the two major bugs that needed ASAP attention... and now I can't check them in. At some point I tried to revert a trivial change on my working directory (and of course GIT decides to include a command called revert that doesn't do a revert ...
Gutsy Packages for Sugar Work Nicely (Don't install sugar-jhbuild at the same time, though...)
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Young Coders.
Been using the Ubuntu Gutsy packages for Sugar while working on various OLPCGames and tutorial development. So far I'm very impressed, installed perfectly, and once I blew away my sugar-jhbuild (that seemed to confuse it), I got a very functional environment for development.
At the moment this is by far the easiest path to a ...
Going to have to find a Maintainer for OLPCGames (Can't keep doing it in my spare time...)
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Young Coders.
My "spare" time is rather thin on the ground these days. I'll have to see if I can find someone who can commit to maintain OLPCGames. It just takes way too much time, and since it's not considered part of my official work for the OLPC I'm having to slot it in among the dozens ...
Long Day's Wrestling with OLPCGames (Good day, though...)
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Young Coders.
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 ...
Bit of time on Productive gameplay (Seem to have a bug in the network setup code...)
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Young Coders.
Spent a few hours this afternoon on trying to make Productive more fun to play. Biggest change was making the "takeover" process much faster (factor of 8), so that you have to react to a takeover attempt within 10s to avoid losing your units. Also implemented a resource cap on each unit so that you ...
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.