Blog
WordPress, nginx, Linode, oh my!
December 18, 2013
I recently switched from HostNine to Linode for my web-hosting needs. Nothing against HostNine, they’re a great company with superb support and excellent shared hosting. It’s just that I needed more. Linode offers great pricing on VPS service, and it’s extremely fast. It’s also completely root, so I feel at home with complete SSH/SFTP filesystem […]
You Think This is a PyGame?
December 18, 2013
For the past 9 or so weeks, a team of RIT students, myself included, have been creating a math game in Python. The game is designed to run on the XO-PC from the One Laptop Per Child project. The XO has meager specs, including a minute amount of RAM and slow CPU. Therefore, software development […]
The Most Adorable Feedback
December 12, 2013
When developing any type of software, particularly a game, it’s imperative that you get user feedback. Your target audience telling you whether or not your product stinks can have a huge impact on its future success. It’s sort of like debugging, but you’re debugging the human interaction, not the underlying code. For most games, play-testing […]
O’Really?
November 19, 2013
Who Evengy Morozov What The Meme Hustler Where http://hfoss-fossrit.rhcloud.com/static/books/evgenymorozov-thememehustler.html When 2013 The Gist Morozov exposes the great many facades created by Tim O’Reilly’s marketing skills. Specifically, the harmful effects his buzzwords and treatment of software solely as an economy cause humanity. The Good The author makes a very convincing case (with damning evidence) that O’Reilly […]
A Simple State Machine with Python
November 13, 2013
Developing Fractionauts for the XO is quickly becoming one of my favorite things. Git(hub) makes it ridiculously easy for our team of 6 to all contribute and minimize destruction of each-others’ work. We’ve come quite far in the past month, rising from a paper concept to a working executable with a menu system. Like almost […]
The Best Part About Python
November 11, 2013
…is that you must write pretty code. No exceptions. In creating a game for the XO-PC using PyGame, my team collaborates using Git, the industry standard for version control. Github’s ticketing system allows us to easily assess the progress of the project and see who contributes what. Python is awesome because its sparse syntax (specifically, the […]
RocPy Part Deux
October 23, 2013
Field trips are fun! I never thought I’d take them in college. The HFOSS class has become a regular attendee of RocPy. The consensus from last time was that a lot of the Python concepts being discussed were too advanced for us college beginners. This time around, we all made presentations about our XOPC projects. […]
XOPC Smoke Test
October 17, 2013
People are obsessed with testing. Testing everything. People, animals, food, cars. Everything is subject to immense testing. Computers being no exception, my team ran a battery of tests on the lovely XO-PC for which we are creating an educational game. The tests went well…mostly. The XOPC, being designed for emerging markets, wasn’t created with Wifi […]
XOPC Team Proposal
October 9, 2013
Team Proposal List your other team members below Name email Lance Laughlin truncated Chris Knepper truncated Valerie Magri truncated John Savage truncated Mike Nolan truncated Brendan George truncated Which project did your team choose? We have decided to start a new project. We have a large-enough team that we should be able to create an […]
4th Graders Have to Count to 1 Million
October 7, 2013
The 4th Grade Math Curriculum for Massachusetts and New York are long, boring documents. They could probably represent the same information in a 1.5-page bulleted list. It seems that the 8-and-9-year-olds of MA and NY are tasked with an array of tasks that most American adults would find daunting, which, among other things, includes: Counting […]