POSSE Worcester, Day 2

Today was all about hacking. First Walter went over the basic commands for git, then we started working on his Abacus activity. Walter suggested adding a new kind of Abacus, but I saw a piece of code that was repeated like 10 times in a row and decided to replace that with a loop instead. Yeah, I don't follow instructions well... :-D But hey, now I left my (very small) stamp on a piece of free software that others actually work on as well, not too shabby!

The lucky thing about the Abacus was that it runs fine outside of Sugar. I like Sugar in principle, but I don't want to hack inside its unusual confines: I want my actual Unix system! The activity we picked for the homework tonight, Measure, sadly doesn't run outside of Sugar. I played with Physics a bit too, but couldn't get that to work well outside of Sugar either. Also there are a few Physics forks, some of which work better in Gnome than others. Sadly mainline doesn't work well at all. :-( So I am not too sure what to work on tonight, but maybe I'll just keep working on Abacus instead. :-D

I had a great experience with IRC today: I actually got help from a complete stranger! We have a "side task" not related to code, and I picked translating some leftover strings from the Measure activity to German. But the registration for translate.sugarlabs.org was borked for a while this afternoon (has been fixed since). Luckily one of the admins was around and approved my account without the confirmation email that never got to my gmail.com inbox. Of course now that they fixed stuff, I finally got the email. :-D

I am looking forward to having dinner again tonight with the other three people who are stranded in Worcester hotels: Kristina, Mihaela, and Peter (yes, another one!). Last night we had some delicious Mexican food, and tonight I believe we're all going to "smell like meat" (to quote Mihaela) when we roll around in Brazilian BBQ. :-D

Update: Actually, we went to a place called Brew City and they had Bavarian beer: Ayinger! I don't usually drink that, but I had to have two bottles even at $8.50 a pop (wow). Very good stuff, and the food was decent too!