Re: anti-cheating
On Jan 11, 2009, at 11:06 PM, Jeffrey Kesselman wrote: On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Carlos Nazareno object...@gmail.com wrote: Since when is more equipment then a pencil and a sheet of paper necessary for a school quiz?? When they are not available. Im confused if the basic necessities like paper and a pencil arent available, what is any responsible government doing spending even $200 a child on computers?? Not to mention the infrastructure to support them? Sorry, it just seems really really ass-backward to me. A laptop can be written on for a child's entire school career. A single piece of paper only works once and then must be discarded (maybe composted at best). --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: administrative security
On Jan 11, 2009, at 11:28 PM, Carlos Nazareno wrote: On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:00 PM, qu...@laptop.org wrote: Physical access to the system gives full access, especially once the developer key is obtained, to install applications that their teachers or government had not considered. The system considers the user to be the authorisation authority. so does that mean that XO OS ships with all the kids having admin accounts? If specific applications are not welcome in a deployment, they should be checked for. how about after deployment? like setting user permissions to prevent kids from installing unauthorized apps? You use the term authorized without defining it. What constitutes an authorized application? OLPC itself has steered clear of this job, since it is a political minefield. Governments are certainly an option, but this also makes censorship a major concern. The teachers at an individual school are probably less likely to engage in mass censorship, but also lack a lot of the technical knowledge and time to deal with these kinds of issues. The children themselves are probably the best place to determine this, but they also (moreso at first) will lack much of the technical sophistication to really know what is malware and what isn't. Bitfrost was always supposed to provide at least some form of a barrier, but I think it hasn't really fulfilled its original design in a lot of ways. So we are left with the status quo; users have final say, but the default policy for most things is accept. --Noah PS: Questions like this are probably better suited to the security list. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: for those recently laid off...
On Jan 7, 2009, at 11:05 PM, Albert Cahalan wrote: In case any low-level hackers are included in the layoffs, note that my employer can hire a good number of them. (if US citizen) In case you know somebody appropriate who no longer reads devel, please let him know. People might unsubscribe when laid off, or might have been subscribed via a now-dead laptop.org address. My employer is also hiring if anyone wants to come out to CA and make kick-ass games :-) http://www.crypticstudios.com/index.php?option=com_contenttask=sectionallid=9Itemid=46 --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: File bugs, don't fix 'em.
On Jan 7, 2009, at 2:48 AM, John Gilmore wrote: genesee wrote: before the mesh search cycle is done, the 'looking for a mesh' keeps blinking forever while my wifi is solid. If I let the mesh search run it's course, (while I'm doing something else ...it takes a few minutes), then there's just my solid wifi circle in my frame. That sounds like a bug (the perpetual blinking). Manual intervention must be preventing some signal from getting through; we should definitely fix that so the states of both devices are consistent. File a ticket? :) Thanks. - Eben Why would anyone bother to file a ticket about this? One was filed *15 months* ago, reported fixed when it wasn't actually, reopened three months ago, and is still not fixed. See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4074 . You yourself didn't look for an existing ticket before suggesting that this user, who was nice enough to help you debug your product, file yet another one. The same bug has likely been reported in #5459 (13 months ago), #6872 (6 months ago), #6944 (8 months ago), and almost certainly more often (I got tired of wasting my time looking). None of these bugs has been altered in any way in the last *THREE MONTHS*. It's common knowledge among users that there's a bogus mesh icon that blinks sometimes. Everyone has learned to ignore it, including those responsible for fixing it. It seems to take special chivvying to get almost any bug report looked at by a developer. (I've filed a lot of bugs and chivvied a lot of developers.) It seems to me that in programmer culture, when there's nobody measuring progress by bugs actually fixed over the last week or month, generally bugs don't get fixed. This was as true at Cygnus as at OLPC (the difference is that significant Cygnus revenue came from top-notch bug support, so mgmt paid a lot more attention to it; we wrote the first free software bug tracker, PRMS, for example). Here's *everything* that happened in TRAC since before the New Year: http://dev.laptop.org/timeline?from=01%2F07%2F09daysback=8ticket=onmilestone=onwiki=onupdate=Update Funny, I don't see your name on there either. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Cannot edit Trac tickets
On Oct 24, 2008, at 8:25 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote: Am 24.10.2008 um 17:06 schrieb Chris Ball: Hi Bert, ... because it displays Milestone, Component, Version, and Keywords entry fields twice: and then reports a Trac Error: Multi-values fields not supported yet Which browser are you using, and do you have Javascript turned on? Safari, and yes. Can't reproduce on 3.1.2/Leopard. Please make sure to clear your web cache if you have one, the JS file that does the monkeying might have been cached while it was still b0rked yesterday. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: Cannot edit Trac tickets
Can someone send me a copy of dev.laptop.org/condfields/new.js from a machine that is grumpy? --Noah -Original Message- From: Chris Ball [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 12:11 PM To: Noah Kantrowitz Cc: Bert Freudenberg; OLPC Devel Subject: Re: Cannot edit Trac tickets Hi Noah, Can't reproduce on 3.1.2/Leopard. Please make sure to clear your web cache if you have one, the JS file that does the monkeying might have been cached while it was still b0rked yesterday. Hm, we just saw this on Firefox at the office -- clearing web cache and restarting Firefox doesn't help, and milestone/version fields are duplicated on http://dev.laptop.org/newticket . Still can't reproduce on my own machine for some reason.. Thanks, - Chris. -- Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: trac question: search with AND?
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:devel-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Martin Langhoff
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 3:00 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org
Subject: Re: trac question: search with AND?
On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 4:52 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
this thread ended in the trac tickets, so to be sure no one
was misled by my claims: it turns out i was completely mistaken
(apparently from misreading some specific search results)
about trac's search behavior. multiple search terms are indeed
AND'ed together in the search, as one would expect they should
be.
Well, I sometimes do wish I could OR them. Many tasks/bugs on the XO
side have a 'schoolserver' keyword, used to indicate that they related
to interop with the XS. So the XS tasklist is
component=schoolserver OR keyword contains schoolserver
I haven't found a way to do this on trac... other than running 2
queries :-/
SELECT ... FROM ticket WHERE component='schoolserver' OR
position('schoolserver' in keywords) != 0;
--Noah
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RE: trac question: search with AND?
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:devel-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Martin Langhoff
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 3:35 PM
To: Noah Kantrowitz
Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org
Subject: Re: trac question: search with AND?
On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 10:10 AM, Noah Kantrowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
I haven't found a way to do this on trac... other than running 2
queries :-/
SELECT ... FROM ticket WHERE component='schoolserver' OR
position('schoolserver' in keywords) != 0;
Hah, sure, just tell me which parameter allows unfettered sql
injection and I'll use it. :-)
Just like I said before, write a report .
See the TracReports wiki page.
--Noah
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Re: trac question: search with AND?
On Sep 20, 2008, at 5:25 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: can i search for (the equivalent of) power AND external in trac? if not, can we change trac to _always_ do that, instead of an OR search? i can't remember the last time i actually wanted an OR search, whereas i almost always want an AND search. This would require a report to be made. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Tribute To Randy Pausch
Ton van Overbeek wrote: Eben Eliason wrote: I had the opportunity to study under Randy during his last year at the Entertainment Technology Center, before Jesse (formerly of Disney Imagineering) took over. His Building Virtual Worlds course was the most time consuming yet most rewarding educational experience I've ever had. He was an amazing teacher, as well as a fun-loving and charismatic person. He will surely be missed. I haven't personally experimented with Alice, but I have seen it in action and it looks like a pretty valuable tool for those just learning to think like a programmer, without the need to overcome the syntax hurdle. However, it's also a fairly dense UI (lots of stuff on screen), so there may be some issues making everything legible on our smaller screens. I'm also not sure how well the XO will handle the real-time 3D rendering, but some experimentation with this would be welcome. - Eben On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 9:31 AM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, I'd like to take a moment to respectfully mark the passing of Randy Pausch. I wasn't aware of him before he died but it looks like his work (http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/oldRandyPage.html) was very relevant for our project. It seems like he was one of us (not that I'm of the same caliber). Has anyone used Alice: http://www.alice.org/ and is it something we should consider for the XO? I like his focus on entertainment and fun in the educational process. I think the XO would benefit from more excitement and pizazz in our activities. Thanks, Greg S I did not know about Alice until I read Greg's announcement. Poked a little bit around on the Alice site. The whole thing is implemented in java with some JNI (Java Native Interface) for rendering using hardware accelerated 3D (requires GL). It seems to me the XO-1 hardware is not powerful enough for Alice. It would need a complete rewrite of the lower levels to bring it down to what the XO can handle. But I sure would like to see Alice on the XO ... Something for the next Google Summer of Code ? I'm pretty sure Squeak, which eToys is based on, has Alice support built-in. --Noah signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Security for launching from URL
On Jul 7, 2008, at 12:52 PM, Eben Eliason wrote: On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That said, the URI handler approach should be used sparingly. It's one thing to allow starting an audio player by clicking an MP3 link in the browser, and another to arbitrarily execute code (e.g. through an execution environment such as Pippy or eToys) from a web page with a single click. While Bitfrost is designed to mitigate the side effects of arbitrary code execution, it's very unwise to make it trivial for the user to trigger such execution unknowingly. I really don't see anything wrong with injecting a modal alert, displayed by Sugar, into this process if we must. Clicking on an mp3 in Browse would reveal this alert, and ask for confirmation that the user wishes to open it. It would, of course, offer a list of activities which support its mime-type (assuming there are more than one). It could potentially include a way to set the default handler as well, such that the next time it is revealed for the same mime-type a different default is chosen. I recognize that we try at all costs to eliminate this form of dialog, but I also recognize that we might not want to allow an activity to arbitrarily launch other activities without the user's consent. Repetitive modal dialogs are useless bordering on harmful when was the last time you read an IE dialog carefully. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Ticket cloning
I have enabled ticket cloning support on dev.laptop.org. Just use the new Clone button on the ticket form. Enjoy. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: Trac: release management
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:devel- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Wade Brainerd Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 11:38 AM To: Garrett Goebel Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org Subject: Re: Trac: release management Hello, I agree wholeheartedly that ticket triage and statistical analysis is a worthwhile effort, so I think I support what Garrett is talking about. At my employer we have teams of producers constantly watching individual and per-component bug counts, transfering bugs from overworked team members, ensuring progress is being made according to priority levels, and tracking the rate of change of the blocking ticket count compared with previous projects to estimate our completion date, among other things. Without that kind of attention, there is no way we would ship anything on time. I don't care how the open source world usually does it, releases don't happen unless you're on top of your tickets. I know there is a Git plugin for Trac, anyone know why it isn't installed? I would love to see commits on the Trac Timeline RSS feed, and the Trac source browser is pretty nice too. People requested we stay with gitweb as everyone was familiar with it. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Trac: release management
Chris Ball wrote: Hi, Would anyone be opposed to having both installed? The Browse Sources link would use Trac, but there could be a prominent link to gitweb on the main wiki page. That sounds fine; last I knew, the GIT plugin wasn't very complete. If it's ready for use, and someone's willing to volunteer to do the install, I don't see a reason not to go for it. I am busy for the next several weeks between crunch-time at work before shipping our alpha, and then teaching for two weeks. Ask again in about a month and I will be happy to look at it. We would need to move to the multi-repo branch, and the git plugin will need to be enhanced a bit to support the new API I think. --Noah signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Trac jiggery pokery
I did some minor updates to Trac so we can actually remove spam. If you see anything explode, please notify the proper authorities. On a related note, we now have to ability to force users to validate their email address before touching tickets. This is currently disabled, but do you guys want this on? --Noah signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: OLPC: Open Organized Transparent
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:devel-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Garrett Goebel
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 11:51 AM
To: C. Scott Ananian
Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org
Subject: Re: OLPC: Open Organized Transparent
[snip]
Please don't point me at: http://dev.laptop.org/report/6
{6} All Tickets By Milestone (Including closed)
[...]
Report execution failed: column modified does not exist LINE 16:
(CASE status WHEN 'closed'
THEN modified ELSE (-1)*p... ^
...There, opened a ticket on it.
And I fixed it in 15 minutes. Just gotta say when there are problems.
How do I create a report? http://dev.laptop.org/wiki/TracReports tells
you about reports, but not how to create one...
Unfortunately we cannot allow non-admins to create reports because they are
unrestricted queries against the Trac database.
How do I view the query underlying a report?
Look at the Other formats links at the bottom of the page.
How is it that #6454 is assigned, but doesn't show up under the
owner's active tickets report?
Which report do you mean? That ticket is open, but not in the accepted
state. Some people like to use the open vs. accepted states to show what
they are actively working on right now, others just ignore it and go right
from open - closed.
[snip]
Will anyone volunteer to mentor me (hold my hand) on this? Should I
contact the ticket's owner directly? How do you figure out the email
address by owner name?
For privacy reasons, you cannot get a users email address from their Trac
username. If someone wants to create a table on the wiki somewhere mapping
names to people, those that wish to be known can add themselves. If you
leave a comment on a ticket, it will be emailed to the owner though.
--Noah
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RE: Trac: reports and queries and schema... oh my!
-Original Message- From: Garrett Goebel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 1:17 PM To: Noah Kantrowitz Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org Subject: Trac: reports and queries and schema... oh my! On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 3:03 PM, Noah Kantrowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How do I create a report? http://dev.laptop.org/wiki/TracReports tells you about reports, but not how to create one... Unfortunately we cannot allow non-admins to create reports because they are unrestricted queries against the Trac database. Ok. I understand the security and performance concerns there. If I wanted to create a report, who should I contact? One of the Trac admins? Who are the Trac admins? Where is an up-to-date list of Trac admins kept? I think [EMAIL PROTECTED] is the One True Email for such things, but AFAIK the people with admin access are myself, cjb, hhardy, and jg. Is the underlying schema for the Trac database documented anywhere? And the modifications from the vanilla install? We are running stock Trac from 0.11dev (the revision is shown in the lower-left corner). We do have some plugins, but nothing that would alter schemas like that. I think the only one related to tickets is MasterTickets, which adds ticket dependencies. How do I view the query underlying a report? Look at the Other formats links at the bottom of the page. Thanks! Now I can have some hope of figuring out why the resultset isn't what I expected. How is it that #6454 is assigned, but doesn't show up under the owner's active tickets report? Which report do you mean? That ticket is open, but not in the accepted state. Some people like to use the open vs. accepted states to show what they are actively working on right now, others just ignore it and go right from open - closed. http://dev.laptop.org/report/4 http://dev.laptop.org/report/5 Where is this open but not accepted state designated? Status? Accepted isn't an option for filtering the Status column. Status doesn't appear to be displayed on the ticket details page. How do I tell if the state is open or accepted? The status of a ticket is shown next to its title/summary in (). If it is in status==closed, the resolution will also be shown. Look at http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracWorkflow to get an idea of the basic ticket workflow (we use the original workflow). I would like to move d.l.o to a custom-built workflow that better matches how the organization works, but haven't had time. Ticket 6454 is currently in state reopened, and so will not show up as assigned. To move to the assigned state, the assignee would use the accept action at the bottom of their ticket. As I said, the semantics of this are left open. So what recourse do I have when I enter a ticket and nothing happens for 3-4 months? Who do we bump and how do be bump them to find out what is up with an apparently abandoned ticket? If you add a comment, the email will be sent. As Michael said, you can try to directly contact people on IRC/mailing lists if you really think a ticket has been abandoned. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: trac stopped sending email to the bugs mailing list ( [laptop.org #8969] )
Nope, I don't have access to the mail server, so my testing stops at trac. --Noah On Apr 9, 2008, at 12:00 AM, Korakurider wrote: On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Noah Kantrowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Trac thinks it is sending messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Beyond that I can't actually check. Then could you please nail down? + Is the ML is working actually? I tried to ping the ML from my gmail account but my message was rejected (ofcourse! :-). + Was message sent from trac actually delivered to list server? /Korakurider p.s. As you could see in the subject line, this case has been escalated to olpc-internal trac. Please include the string: [laptop.org #8969] in the subject line if you have updates about this issue. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Develop Activity: what to do with Trac bugs?
Paul Swartz wrote: A couple of us have started in with a rewrite of the Develop activity http://wiki.laptop.org/Develop based on a fork of Pippy. However, there are some bugs in Trac which apply to the old abandoned version. What's the right thing to do with those bugs. Also, should we use Trac to manage bugs in the rewrite, or do something different? -p I can do some SQL magic if you want to move all old bugs to a new component. develop-old? --Noah signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
[Fwd: [PyCON-Organizers] OLPC Booth]
Anyone know the status on this? ---BeginMessage--- Hello, We are holding open an OLPC booth, as someone had mentioned that they wanted one. Can anyone confirm this? Thanks, Van ___ Pycon-organizers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-organizers ---End Message--- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #2448 NORM Future : Xbook needs djvu-libre support
Zarro Boogs per Child wrote: #2448: Xbook needs djvu-libre support +--- Reporter: sj | Owner: rwh Type: enhancement| Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Future Release Component: read-activity | Version: Resolution: |Keywords: Verified: 0 |Blocking: Blockedby: | +--- Changes (by marco): * cc: coderanger (added) Comment: Here is the spec, trac does not let me attach it: http://dev.laptop.org/~marco/djvulibre.spec An error message or screenshot would help. Attaching worked fine for me. --Noah signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Misuse of Trac
Bert Freudenberg wrote: On Jan 22, 2008, at 3:32 , Zarro Boogs per Child wrote: #6137: Better browsers - +-- Reporter: clash| Owner: clash Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: high | Milestone: Opportunity Component: distro | Version: Development build as of this date Keywords: |Verified: 0 Blocking: | Blockedby: - +-- can you download a better browser like firefox? -- Ticket URL: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6137 One Laptop Per Child http://dev.laptop.org OLPC bug tracking system We already tried to educate clash about what Trac is for: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6114 Does he need more education or should the account be blocked? Minor point, Trac has no system for blocking users. I could add something to block the IP, but in a DHCP world that rarely does anything. The user could certainly just register another account under a different name/email. I'm not really sure how you would go about blocking contributions on a system designed from the ground up to be as open to contributions as possible. --Noah signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Violent games on the OLPC Activities page
On Jan 18, 2008, at 4:58 AM, Antoine van Gelder wrote: With a result, that I can guarantee you that if ANY parent at my kid's school were to start arguing that the school should install Doom on the media center's computers that I would oppose them in any way I can. No one is coming even remotely close to saying that these kind of potentially offensive or harmful activities/content should be there by default, what is being said is we shouldn't pretend it doesn't exist. If someone wants it, it will be right there in the list, with a nice little description that makes no false projections as to what is contained. It comes down to what OLPC's job in this is. Are we simply chronicling what content is out there, or are we actively pushing certain content and curtailing others. I think both have a place, and a wiki page with links to a small collection of high-quality educational content would be a great addition to the wiki. However a page called Activities should contain all activities, or needs to be renamed. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Choosing a correct working-dir for upgrade-server
On Jan 18, 2008, at 6:49 PM, Michael Stone wrote: When inetd runs upgrade-server/upserv.py, it does so with in the working dir /. Since the upgrade-server's python modules are not installed in PYTHONPATH, this choice of working-dir interferes with the module loading that occurs when re-running python inside fakeroot. Hardcoding the correct choice of working-dir fixes the observed failure of the upgrade-server's 'on-demand build download' feature; however, it's probably worth fixing this for real by either: a) packaging upgrade-server so that it properly installs its modules in PYTHONPATH or b) calculating an appropriate working dir at run time based on a command-line argument, environment variable, or based on the location of the python script being executed. c) Use 2.5 new relative import stuffs. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: pyGame fonts
On Jan 17, 2008, at 10:26 AM, Wade Brainerd wrote: Hi Ken, PyGame provides a font module which can render text onto a surface. ... The _() around the text indicates that the string is to be localized, it will be extracted and placed in a database by the gettext utility. The PyGame font system uses SDL_ttf, which can't handle much beyond simple Latin-1 characters. Lincoln wrote a wrapper for pango (olpcgames.pangofont) which uses more or less the same API as pygame's font system, but will handle almost any text you throw at it. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Violent games on the OLPC Activities page
On Jan 17, 2008, at 10:46 AM, Bryan Berry wrote: I feel very strongly that violent games should not be associated with OLPC. Albert Cahalan points out that games like Doom can teach geometry and other skills. There are ways to teach those skills w/out involving violence. I work in Nepal, a country recovering from an 11-year civil war. Exposure to more violence, real or virtual, is the last thing most Nepali communities want. I understand your point, however this is the case, the government in Nepal should simply decide not to include the offending material on their software image. OLPC is not in the business of censorship or content classification, and you have no right to try and remove thing from the wiki just because you dislike them. If you are worried children will find distasteful things on the internet, perhaps you shouldn't give them a laptop. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC-Games] Violent games on the OLPC Activities page
On Jan 17, 2008, at 5:26 PM, Bryan Berry wrote: My only objection is that Doom be on the same page as Squeak, Library, Speak, etc. I have no problem with it being on a page that explains that activities w/ violence are not endorsed by OLPC. Who picks what is endorsed and what isn't? My suggestion would be to implement something similar to ESRB ratings. I have no problem saying Doom is a game for mature audiences, nor do I think the authors would say differently. This is a very different approach to walling off some activities as unsuitable or otherwise shunned. It is also worth noting that ESRB ratings are a voluntary thing, game makers allow themselves to be rated because they think it is the right thing to do (increased market availability notwithstanding). While I understand violence is a dicey subject in many parts of the world, would you also propose to endorse an activity containing a library of artwork with nude figures? Its a cliche, but this is a very slippery slope. I think drawing lines in the sand between some activities is counter-productive and far too error-prone for OLPC to get in to. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Voting in Trac
I have enabled a voting plugin on dev.laptop.org for tickets. To use it just login and click the up or down arrows in the top-right of your favorite/hated tickets. You do not need to click submit on the ticket or anything else. A summary of all open tickets sorted by votes is available at http://dev.laptop.org/report/10. Enjoy. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Violent games on the OLPC Activities page
On Jan 17, 2008, at 5:49 PM, Antoine van Gelder wrote: Bennett Todd wrote: Let's get a concrete definition of violence and I think the disagreement will fade right out. If I did it to you and you would go *ouch* as a result then it is violent. This rules out Minesweeper, Mario, Sim^WMicropolis, etc etc. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Violent games on the OLPC Activities page
On Jan 17, 2008, at 7:36 PM, Arnd Bergmann wrote: On Friday 18 January 2008, Edward Cherlin wrote: I see no point in OLPC arguing with either governments or families about their rights in these matters. Others may wish to, but that is no part of the question before us. I think this is exactly the point. Distributing violent games to minors is a violation of the law in many countries, so you just can't do it unless you start adding filters by IP-address or similar. Like I said before, if you (where you can mean any body up to and including a government) do not want your children to find (violence| porn|etc) do not let them anywhere near a computer. It just won't work, kids are remarkably good at finding ways to do exactly what their elders tell them not to. I would never try to claim that we should force things like Doom or sex ed books into the standard software image, legal or not. What we are talking about is the closest thing we have to an official aggregation point for 3rd party software. I don't see why breaking this up by tags (some of which can be things like PG13) isn't a good enough solution. We all know kids will seek this stuff out no matter what, lets at least do it in a controlled way. Another things worth mentioning is that while OLPC is an education project, games and play can be a big part of that. Doom is still talked about today precisely because of how enjoyable a game experience it is. I won't try to argue the violence-in-games-leads-to- violence-in-real-life case either way, but suffice to say that the jury is very far out. --Noah ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Reducing pygame cpu-load to 4 %
Unfortunately this is not possible in most games, as doing them purely vector-based is infeasible. A lot of the artwork made for games will be standard raster graphics, and will need to be designed for a specific screen. If there are changes in the future, they can always be redrawn. --Noah Bernardo Innocenti wrote: On 12/09/07 18:35, Roberto Fagá wrote: Another good option to optimize games in PyGame on XO is to reduce the depth of the colors on: window = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 225), 16) Isn't 16bpp the default? The X display runs at 16bpp, so using any other depth causes useless and very expensive runtime conversions. Application and game developers should avoid assuming a particular screen resolution and depth. These apparently fixed properties are in fact subject to change in future generations of the XO, and may already be different in emulated environments. Moreover, people are already porting Sugar to different hardware than the XO, including regular Linux distributions. It is therefore wise to *always* query screen properties at run-time and load/render graphics in the correct format. Cairo makes it extremely easy. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Reducing pygame cpu-load to 4 %
The surf.convert() and .convert_alpha() will do this. It is advised to
always run one of these (depending on if you need per-pixel alphas) on
any image loaded from disk.
--Noah
Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
On 12/09/07 19:08, Noah Kantrowitz wrote:
Unfortunately this is not possible in most games, as doing them purely
vector-based is infeasible. A lot of the artwork made for games will be
standard raster graphics, and will need to be designed for a specific
screen. If there are changes in the future, they can always be redrawn.
The conversion to the screen format can happen at load
time, rather than each time the bitmap is being redrawn
on screen.
Doing it systematically is very easy:
Surface *load_image(const char *filename)
{
Surface *s = NULL, tmp;
if ((tmp = IMG_Load(filename))
{
s = SDL_DisplayFormat(tmp);
SDL_FreeSurface(tmp);
}
return s;
}
Some libraries, notably SDL, make blitting graphics between
different pixel formats a little bit too transparent.
As a result, developers don't even notice and huge performance
bugs like this slip through.
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Re: Reducing pygame cpu-load to 4 %
The Python way is explicit over implicit. pygame.image.load() will return a surface of the form you actually saved, you must explicitly convert it to another format if you saved it in a format different than what you want for blitting. --Noah Bernardo Innocenti wrote: On 12/09/07 19:51, Roberto Fagá wrote: I think for now pygame is doing with 16bits at default yet, and I wrote wrong, the second parameter from set_mode are the flags, depth is the third parameter. I also used 12bits too to test, for games when colors don't matter so much can be a good choice. Even a lower depth, like 12bpp, is going to result in a slowdown with the Geode GPU. The best depth is the same of the screen. Was 16bits the default depth since the first pygame for XO? I remembered that it was creating 32bits for me by default, but with older versions of Sugar... It's the default of the X server. It would be nice if pygame would create surfaces in the screen depth by default, so that application developers wouldn't have to care. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [PyCON-Organizers] OLPCs not considerate wireless users
We can always lock the mesh interface to a single channel, and keep the normal APs on the two others. Also turning down the Tx power will reduce interference with normal 802.11b/g. As an absolute fall-back, there is a snippet of commands on the wiki to disable the wireless interface (Airplane mode or similar IIRC). --Noah Laura Creighton wrote: I am at a conference. there are many OLPCs here. They are interfering with the wireless here. They apparantly do this even when not officially trying to be connected to the network, just being powered on is enough. When we get a report from the people who brought our own network and are running it about what the heck is wrong with the fool things we can decide whether to ban them from PyCON or if we have a technical fix for them which we can require OLPC users to run. or have a technical fix for our network. Otherwise, 10 of the things eats a network which was designed to comfortably hold several thousand simultaneous uesrs, or 200 people like us who use streaming video a lot. Laura cannot go back and fix errors or make nice sentence structure given the state of the wireless. posting this now before I forget. ___ Pycon-organizers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-organizers signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: SDL FAQ, XO Frame Buffer and SVGALIB
You may want to look at the games-misc stuff in git. In there are some Sugar/SDL bridge systems we use to run Pygame apps in Sugar (Pygame is SDL-based as well). --Noah big one wrote: No dependency between SDL and SVGALIB Perhaps during compile time of SDL library, the svgalib is not detected or --with-svgalib option is not used during ./configure process. Is it possible to use SDL with Frame buffer inside XO laptops without svgalib? (ie: fbcon, directfb) http://www.libsdl.org/faq.php?action=listentriescategory=9 From SDL FAQ: You can set the environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER to the name of the driver you want to use. The drivers available depend on the platform and SDL compile-time options. Here is a partial list for some platforms: Linux: x11 - (default) Use the X11 windowing system dga - Use XFree86 DGA 2.0 for fullscreen hardware acceleration fbcon - Use the framebuffer console directfb - Use the DirectFB API svgalib - Use the SVGAlib API ggi - Use the General Graphics Interface API aalib - Use the Ascii Art library _ = You want FREE web-based email ? = You want your own @qon.lao.net address?? = Then you want LaoNet's WebMail ! = Get it at http://webmail.lao.net !! ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Project Hosting Application
Danny, don't bother making a git tree for them. I was going to set them
up with a Subversion account on olpc.coderanger.net. Their team is
largely windows based so git will just be a headache (no that that isn't
normal ;-).
--Noah
Jason J. Kong wrote:
1. Project name : OnLine Processing of Content
2. Existing website, if any :
3. One-line description : A online content processing and
management system for OLPC.
4. Longer description : OnLine Processing of Content (codename:
sara) is
a content management system that accepts and catalogs media and makes it
accessible to users of the OLPC Project laptops in an organized
manner. The
system will be simple and easy to use, store relationship information
between
content, and be language-portable. Content submitters can log in using
OpenID
to submit a wide variety of media such as images, videos, audio clips,
articles,
or translated versions of existing content, which will then be made
available
to users. All content is tagged to make it easy for users to browse
related
items, or find the same item in an alternate language.
5. URLs of similar projects :
6. Committer list
Please list the maintainer (lead developer) as the first entry. Only
list
developers who need to be given accounts so that they can commit to
your
project's code repository, or push their own. There is no need to list
non-committer developers.
Username Full name SSH2 key URL
E-mail
-
--
#1 debsj John Debsdebsj-publickey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
#2hurlop Paul Hurlock-Dickhurlop-publickey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
#3kongj Jason Kongkongj-publickey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
#4zandem Michael Zanderzandem-publickey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
If any developers don't have their SSH2 keys on the web, please
attach them
to the application e-mail.
7. Preferred development model
[X] Central tree. Every developer can push his changes directly to the
project's git tree. This is the standard model that will be
familiar to
CVS and Subversion users, and that tends to work well for most
projects.
[ ] Maintainer-owned tree. Every developer creates his own git tree, or
multiple git trees. He periodically asks the maintainer to look
at one
or more of these trees, and merge changes into the
maintainer-owned,
main tree. This is the model used by the Linux kernel, and is
well-suited to projects wishing to maintain a tighter control on
code
entering the main tree.
If you choose the maintainer-owned tree model, but wish to set up some
shared trees where all of your project's committers can commit
directly,
as might be the case with a discussion tree, or a tree for an
individual
feature, you may send us such a request by e-mail, and we will set
up the
tree for you.
8. Set up a project mailing list:
[X] Yes, named after our project name
[ ] Yes, named __
[ ] No
When your project is just getting off the ground, we suggest you eschew
a separate mailing list and instead keep discussion about your project
on the main OLPC development list. This will give you more input and
potentially attract more developers to your project; when the volume of
messages related to your project reaches some critical mass, we can
trivially create a separate mailing list for you.
If you need multiple lists, let us know. We discourage having many
mailing lists for smaller projects, as this tends to
stunt the growth of your project community. You can always add more
lists
later.
9. Commit notifications
[ ] Notification of commits to the main tree should be e-mailed to
the list
we chose to create above
[ ] A separate mailing list, projectname-git, should be created
for commit
notifications
[X] No commit notifications, please
10. Shell accounts
As a general rule, we don't provide shell accounts to developers unless
there's a demonstrated need. If you have one, please explain here, and
list the usernames of the committers above needing shell access.
11. Notes/comments:
The project is been working on with the help of Noah Kantrowitz.
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Re: [sugar] emergency server maintenance: 8/31
Its being worked on, should be fixed by Friday. --Noah On Sep 4, 2007, at 8:33 PM, Takashi Yamamiya wrote: Hello, Now I can login the trac. But maybe CC: form in a ticket doesn't work? Thank you, - Takashi 2007/8/31, Philip Macpherson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Thanks for bringing it back so quickly. One question, where is the login box as I can't login to reply to anything. ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Does sugar web browser support extensions?
If you mean normal Firefox add-ons. It does not. We use a simpler core called XULRunner. It does support extensions of a sort using PyXPCom, though I don't (yet) know much about those. --Noah On Aug 14, 2007, at 3:00 PM, Kleber Infante wrote: Hi all, I saw in a post that Sugar web browser does not support extensions. Is that true? If it´s true, what can be done? I would like to know how to install an extension in XO browser. I wanna try to port an Firefox extension to sugar browser. thanks ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Usable builds in the 5xx series on B2s?
I've got 539/Q2C18 on a B2 staring at me right now. It helps to throw a swapfile at it (mine is on a USB stick). --Noah On Aug 1, 2007, at 10:37 PM, Martin Langhoff wrote: Aside from the memory-hogging notes -- are recent 5xx builds booting for people with B2s? I've updated to the latest firmware and tested with 539 and 540 (ext3) and they both hung during the boot process. Not sure if it's some subtle PEBKAC at my end, or if they are just not booting on B2s. Anyone with a B2 working with recent builds can say? cheers,. m ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Audio sample bank on the XO.
This can and should be handled by the bundle unification system on activity installation. For now just continue with the data files in your bundle, the changeover to shared resources should be mostly automatic. --Noah Jean Piché wrote: Hello all, After trial-2 madness has passed, we have to make a serious audio decision: we really need a system-wide audio sample library. I suspect many activities that use sounds (including our own) will be blocked if a decision is not made. Here are some reasons: • Presently, activities wanting to share audio resources cannot do so through a shared directory. Containerizing activities may actually agravate that situation but I am presuming this can and will be fixed regardless. I will enter this on trac. An activity supplying a resource for its own private use when the resource is of general use leads to the wasteful duplication of data. • We need a sample bank to play Standad MIDI Files off the internet. I have a few misgivings about the quality of the music available for download in this format, but the SMF is a very compact and useful music storage technology. I am certain all will agree it should be supported on the machine. • Last and not least: this resource needs to live locally, not on a remote server. In the vast majority of cases, kids will use the resources that are immediately available and that do not require installation. There is no reason an appropriate system-wide resource cannot be put together for the XO. Here is a proposal: A default library: There are compelling reasons to make the XO audio sample bank conform to the General MIDI spec ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ General_Midi ). The specification contains 127 sounds plus a number of drum/percussion sounds for a total of roughly 180 individual sounds, many of them quite short. GM is biased towards western instruments but it provides everything to correctly play midifiles off the internet. A GM sample bank could be put together for the XO in a relatively modest space leaving room for a number of other sounds needed by individual activities such as TamTam, eToys or other Csound-based activities. Allocation on disk A figure of 25MB was discussed at OLPC headquarters last year as a disk allotment for sound file resources. I am assuming this is still the case. The standard GM1 set can take a lot, not so much or really little disk space depending on how it is planned. I propose that the set be given 10Mb of the availbale space. The rest can be made available to activities needing special sounds. TamTam, for instance, would use many sounds from the GM1 set and many custom sounds. Location and priviledges: The audio sample bank should be located in the system tree (/usr/ share/sounds ?) where it is readily readable by any activity. A policy is needed for write-access but activities would need the possibility of copying audio resources in this location at install time up to a limit of 25MB. To take the example of TamTam again, any special sounds needed by TamTam wouls be copied into the designated location at install time. The location would not be writable by individual users. If kids wish to use their own sounds, these would go into their home directory and activities would have to provide ways of integrating those sounds. Sampling rate and format: Sampling rate has a major impact on quantity of storage required and audio quality. There is also an impact on performance. A faster sampling rate has a huge impact on performance. Here is a comparison of sr vs length for 25MB storage of 16bit linear PCM monophonic audio files: srduration 32kHz = 390 seconds 22.05kHz = 566 seconds 16kHz = 781 seconds Consider that the small speakers on the XO are not capable of rendering anything above a 22kHz sr. On the other hand, earpods may be available giving a vastly improved bandwidth. We shoudl also consider the possibility of connecting the audio output of the XO to external sound systems. Barry suggested that a 32kHz sr is desirable to cover higher audio quality applications and I would agree with that. Even at 32k, we have enough space for a good set of sounds in addition to the GM1 set. It is also easy to pull down from 32k to re- sample at 16k and 8k, so activities can compensate for performance loss at higher sr. The proposed format for individual sounds is: 16bit linear PCM single channel @ 32KHz. Keep in mind that this concerns audio samples only, not audio soundfiles in general. Playing mp3 and wave files is an entirely different problem which is not concerned with sampling rate issues. Sound names: The GM1 sample set proposes standard names for sounds along with their MIDI Program Change number from 0 to 127:
Re: XO in-field upgrades
C. Scott Ananian wrote:
On 6/25/07, Christopher Blizzard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
That's going to be interesting, yeah. You would need to teach the
wireless firmware about it? How about just checking on wakeup? Some
kind of wake-on-lan signal?
Binding upgrade notifications to a multicast address as I previously
proposed fixes this problem without any kind of firmware hacking.
Can you explain how they are odd? It sure would help everyone.
Caveat: I'm not an expert here. I haven't read the code, just the
documentation. So we can all follow along, start here:
http://linux-vserver.org/Paper#Unification
http://linux-vserver.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_is_vhashify.3F
Basically, copy-on-write works by running a tool ('vhashify') which
looks for identical files in the different containers and hard links
them together, then marks them immutable. The copy-on-write mechanism
works by intercepting writes to immutable files and cloning the file
before making it writable by the container.
It is worth noting we are not using vhashify or any of the other util
scripts. The rainbow daemon sets up the chroot for each activity itself.
We are a bit non-standard in that we are doing process-level
containerization, instead of a more guest-OS system like many vserver
users (most?).
--Noah
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Re: Google Gears included?
Martin Langhoff wrote: I know it's way too early to ask about GG on OLPC :-) But -- speaking from the POV of a web-based tool dev (such as moodle) it'd be _great_ to have GG or something similar embedded in the Sugarised webbrowser, whether it is Gecko or Webkit based. SJ and I were actually chatting about this earlier tonight (yesterday?). Gears is a nice idea, but really doesn't fit with the model that Sugar is going for. For example, you wouldn't be able to get to the store or journal from within JS. Making something similar but targeted more towads the various OLPC-specific technologies is one option, but probably would be very non-trivial to do. Chances are if you need persistence, you should really start thinking about making a real, local activity. --Noah signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
