User:GeorgeHunt
Current Enthusiasms
2011 -- Went twice to Haiti to help with batteries, inverters, and school servers. Adam Holt and Tony Anderson were my guide and mentors.
I want to develop an Python Debugger Activity which will help me, and hopefully others, develop and perfect other Activities. I got interested in this direction when I started trying to learn why a Video Editing application would run on the XO from the command line, but wouldn't come up as an Activity from the desktop. I learned that ipython, PDB, and the Komodo ActiveState tools were available, but not really very convenient. Viewing debugging output on with the log viewer is slow and cumbersome.
OBJECTIVE
I would like to work together with other contributors to develop tools that facilitate Activity learning and Activity development. I suspect that that most activities are developed on desktop machines using sugar emulation modes. I think it would wonderful if third world students could use the XO itself for development and debugging. It would be nice if there was enough documentation and help so that a continuous internet connection was not essential.
History
I started teaching myself Python soon after receiving a G1G1 XO late in 2007. It's been a long uphill battle. Living in New York City, I thought it would be possible to hook up with other programming enthusiasts. I contacted, and then somehow became the organizer of a NYCXO New York City XO user's group. But I was unable to bring enough enthusiasm and purpose to the group and it folded after about a year. There were many beginners who wanted help learning Linux, or meshing. But there were no other programmers to share the learning with.
I became involved with the OLPC Support Gang after the NYCXO meetup group folded in May 2009. I attended a week long writing marathon in Washington DC in September 2009 which had as its objective the collecting and summarizing of some of the many success stories that are coming back from deployments around the world.
I am currently, in 2009, 68 years old. I started out teaching high school for 11 years. Then I went back to Berkeley and got a Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degree. I was fortunate to be on the leading edge of the microcomputer revolution. I helped Hewlett-packard transition from Terminals to Personal Computers for 10 years.
After an early retirement, at age 47, I started volunteering in the area of Information Technology and Networking. I spent 5 years installing and supporting the East Palo Alto Police Department, and gained a lot of practical experience.
After my kids were off to college, I decided that I wanted to explore a more cooperative lifestyle. I became involved, and helped developed a CoHousing community. See http://directory.ic.org/20714/Greenwave More recently, I've been living and contributing technical support to an 80 member urban commune at Staten Island NY. See http://www.ganas.org/
