User:PIOLPCIntern-1/Blog

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Intern Blog

Here I'll be tracking what I do from day to day while interning at Pathfinder.

Week 3

July 30, 2007

11am - 3pm

Took a poke at a much simpler and shorter Squeak tutorial that's part of Squeak by Example. It gave me a better feel of how creating classes and how code is organized than the other one simply because it didn't throw quite as much at me at once. Also spent some time looking at how/if it's possible to run a mesh network without XO laptops with vague success; according to OLPC australia it's possible.

PIOLPCIntern-1 15:10, 30 July 2007 (EDT)

Week 2

July 26, 2007

11am - 5pm

Forgot to blog this day. Oops.

PIOLPCIntern-1 15:11, 30 July 2007 (EDT)

July 25, 2007

11am - 5pm

Fiddling with OlPC Etoys all day so far (2:40pm). I'm slowly figuring out how it works better and better, but the interface seems like it's lacking some things to me; maybe I just can't find them? I can't figure out how to switch between projects so if I open a new/different project I can't get to another one that's open. Sometimes I 'lose' my scripts or drawings, and have no way to find them, like a list of all the things that have been created in the project. I've been trying to 'reverse engineer' how to use the joystick and animation, looking at existent projects scripts, and trying to duplicate and tweak them to work in a new project. But I've been screwing up little things and having to start over because of my problems with the interface. It'll come with time I guess.

PIOLPCIntern-1 14:40, 25 July 2007 (EDT)

Made a car that I could drive with the joystick. Then made a sweet jump and made the car get bigger when it went off the jump. Made exhaust appear at the back of the car, animated the exhaust, but when the car turned the exhaust stayed at the same position relative to the car. Fun to play with I'm kinda getting it. There's definitely a lot of possibilities.

PIOLPCIntern-1 15:28, 25 July 2007 (EDT)

Made a wall for the car to crash into.

Blew up the car.

PIOLPCIntern-1 16:00, 25 July 2007 (EDT)

July 24, 2007

11am - 5pm

Did some Squeakland stuff, to start off somewhere simple and get more of a feel for Squeak. Did the tutorial on squeakland where you make a car and drive it to get more of a feel for what is a system that still feels really weird to me. It was kinda fun driving my little poorly drawn Ferrari around though.

Read up on Gnash and PyGame a bit later in the day, and poked around looking at how the XO Mesh network works. I have a pretty limited understanding of these kinds of things however, so I don't really know if it'd be possible to simulate the mesh network without some kind of additional hardware or not. I know that the mesh is based on IEEE 802.11s, and I know that you need specific hardware for b/g/etc, so I assume that something new would be needed.

In using the browser version of Squeak/Etoys at Squeakland.com, I noticed that it just generally works better than the emulated ISO of Etoys that I've been running on Ubuntu. I thought it would be the opposite, but I tend to have all sorts of trouble with flaps not closing/moving correctly with the non-plugin version. At this point, I'm not really sure what I'm going to be dealing with in the future, so I guess I'll keep working at getting comfortable in Squeak, as it tends to agree with this system better than EToys.

PIOLPCIntern-1 16:42, 24 July 2007 (EDT)

July 23, 2007

11am - 5pm

Finished typing up a little 'report' on the overlap (in terms of geographic activity) on OLPC and Pathfinder, read a bunch more stuff about various OLPC related news and information. I also started doing a tutorial on programming with Squeak to get more familiar with syntax and how it works in general. So far it's a pretty confusing program, to me at least. The way the menus work and just the UI isn't very intuitive to me, so I spend a lot of time opening, closing, and trying to find things. It's taking some getting used to, but eventually I should get it.

Week 1

July 20, 2007

11am - 3pm

I'm driving down to Connecticut today, so I left a little early to beat traffic.

Spent the day doing research on OLPC/COMPASS/Pathfinder in Nigeria. I had pretty limited success with this, and ended up spending a lot of time reading about Intels recent interest and competition with OLPC, as well as just browsing OLPCNews, and watching the 60 minutes report with Nicholas Negroponte. There seems to be a lot more drama surrounding the project than I ever thought there would be, although it seems to me like OLPCNews is a little over the top with it.

Basically, I spent 4 hours researching the current state of the project and looking at the current deployment.

PIOLPCIntern-1 15:09, 20 July 2007 (EDT)

July 19, 2007

11am - 5pm

Something in the sugar-jhbuild screwed up (XULRunner I think) so it wasn't done when I came in, but now (2:20pm) I have Sugar installed and working. I also managed to get Squeak and EToys running, and started playing with those a bit.

PIOLPCIntern-1 14:28, 19 July 2007 (EDT)

After a little bit of playing around with Sugar and Squeak, I started doing research on the OLPC deployment in Nigeria , which led to a pretty big chunk of general OLPC research, browsing articles on OLPCNews.com for the most part. I wish I'd spent some more time playing around with Sugar; I opened the Journal activity and couldn't figure out how to close it without keyboard shortcuts, which I assume is possible. Tommorow I should be spending much more time familiarizing myself with it, and probably looking at some of the other activities that are available. For now I'm gonna keep going with reading up on the project though.

PIOLPCIntern-1 16:15, 19 July 2007 (EDT)

July 18, 2007

11pm - 5pm

Spent a little time looking at linux commands so that I would have some kind of an idea what I was doing while I installed sugar, and eventually got to actually trying to install it. It took a little bit of effort on my part (due to inexperience for the most part) to get './sugar-jhbuild build' to actually get started due to a number of missing packages/dependencies; the biggest hangup was trying to install ncurses, but eventually I figured out that all I had to do was apt-get install libncurses5-dev (I think that was it, don't remember off the top of my head).

Once it actually started building I watched for a couple minutes before realizing that it was probably going to be a fairly long wait before it was done. I assume that I screwed something up and even when this is done it won't work, but hopefully not.

Also took a look at Squeak/EToys and tried to install them both. Installing Squeak had a few problems, the main one being that the man for squeak says to run inisqueak, which doesn't exist, I don't think. While I was trying to watch an EToys tutorial I discovered that sound doesn't work on youtube/flash in firefox on this computer at the moment, tommorow I'm gonna try and get that working.

July 17, 2007

11am - 5pm

Researched OLPC development, specifically installing Sugar. Having not used Linux in several years, I also took some time to look up a good distro to use with Sugar and decided on Ubuntu 7.04. I installed Ubuntu onto the laptop that I will be using for development later on, and then got to work here on the wiki. I've never edited/created a wiki page, so there was a bit of learning there.