Category archives: Young Coders

As those who have signed up for PyCon may already know, I'll be presenting a tutorial on developing Activities for the Sugar platform on the tutorial day before the conference.

There are also a number of OLPC talks scheduled, by Dr. Brown, Charles and Kirby. I believe we're also going to have a ...

Given that gcc can be a bit heavy, it would be neat if we had a compile farm somewhere made out of Qemu images with overlays that people working on XOs could shell into in order to compile various software. I use this approach on my workstation when I want to do something that's messy ...

Got the AStar implementation working again. Was a couple of stupid little bugs in the code that creates the topology from the map. AStar is a graph-based implementation (which is nice, because Productive uses a graph-based world definition so that at some point we can have very complex map types), which traces through the connections ...

Since Productive is not considered an official task, it's been stalled for a while. Took a few hours today to try to un-stall it. Mostly trying to optimize the AStar algorithm. Sped it up to the point where a moderately sized world (96x96) takes about .6s to compute an AStar path. That's still way too ...

Jim suggested having an OLPC stream at TOJam, would have to work out the logistics, make sure people have development environments available, that kind of thing. It would have to be off-clock, so I couldn't put all that much time into it, but it might pull in a dozen or so new developers.

Spoke down at the IGDA Toronto chapter meeting today. A number of folks interested in working on the project, particularly two gentlemen who have a lot of sound effects they might be able to release to meet our needs and audio/video encoding experience. A number of independent game developers, and web-content providers also indicating interest.

Spent the day on OLPCGames today. I'm trying to clean up the code so that the various pieces can be used independently to let people code for the OLPC without giving up portability (and I was hoping, to get GTK totally out of the picture for people not using the GTK-based features, so that you ...

One of the ideas that was discussed during the Developer Community meeting today was, of course, documentation. One of the things that people would really like to see is lots more example-based documentation, particularly for our OLPC-specific code-base.

So, if you have, or know of any code that demonstrates the use of a particular OLPC-specific ...

We're looking for someone with experience customising and running Remora (the engine that Mozilla.org uses for plug-ins) to manage Activities for the OLPC. If you are such a person, or know such a person, let me know and I'll pass you on to the proper peoples.

[Update] Fixed the name for the project, thanks ...

As of this evening, the process of creating the VMWare/VirtualBox images for the OLPC should be entirely automatic. I've cronned the process up to run every 6 hours, so it should catch most new releases (it only downloads the latest release (and only if it hasn't done it before)), a couple may slip through, but ...