Wednesday, June 9, 2010

POSSE Worcester, Day 3

It's frustration day. I should have known that things were going too well when I got up this morning. :-D The day was dedicated to hacking on the Measure activity. I was still using Debian on my netbook and had a hard time following Walter's advice of using the special sugar-jhbuild system to setup a working version of the Sugar emulator. So I checked the Debian packages, and sure enough they offered Sugar! I installed it and all it's dependencies only to find my system completely hosed on the next reboot. So that's awkward dear Debian maintainers. :-(

Seeing as I was in a room full of Fedora machines and Redhat people (well, maybe not so many Redhat people :-D), I begged Mel to make me a Fedora 13 install USB stick. I spent all my time before lunch reinstalling from scratch (and losing my ssh-keys in the process since the encrypted file system I was using under Debian couldn't be recovered properly). And guess what Debian? Under Fedora 13 my sound works just fine, even the microphone; I wonder what I'll find when I try out wireless networking later...

Over lunch Walter mentioned looking into making the display for Measure scrolling. So once we got back from eating I looked at the code for this. I actually got scroll bars wrapped around the display just fine, but then it occurred to me that data was coming in way to fast for the scrolling to be very useful without further additions. So I scrapped that and decided to simply look for Python code to refactor so I would achieve something (anything!) at all. That's still pending, but I did a first pass through most of the code and cleaned up indentation problems as well as unused imports and stuff. But it certainly wasn't a very satisfying day.

Until maddog showed up that is. :-D Jon gave a wonderful pitch for FOSS to our audience of teachers. And even though some of his jokes backfired a little, overall I was very happy to be there and hear him talk. I think we'll have beers in a few, so I look forward to that just like every evening, but especially today since I want to ask Jon a few more things, for example about the "proper" ownership model for basic infrastructure like phone lines. :-D

No comments:

Post a Comment