Entries from February 2008

Jonah sent a pointer to AudioSurf, a new game that lets you “ride your music”.

Audiosurf is a music-adapting puzzle racer where you use your own music to create your own experience. The shape, the speed, and the mood of each ride is determined by the song you choose. You earn points for clustering together blocks of the same color on the highway, and compete with others on the internet for the high score on your favorite songs.

It reminds me a bit of our, much simpler, SonicZoom. I think people will really go for the hook of basing the track on the music.

How should an accessible version of this game work?

I just noticed that the clock on my guest Windows XP system was running way too fast on my host Ubuntu Gutsy system. I had also noticed that double clicking seemed really difficult and there were a few anomalies with sound.

A bit of Googling turned up this tip from the VMware knowledge base. So to fix things I added these lines to the bottom of /etc/vmware/config.

host.cpukHz = 3060000
host.noTSC = TRUE
ptsc.noTSC = TRUE

Now the clock and lots of other things are better.

What I tried, so I can reconstruct it later.

Install cygwin. Change the Devel category from Default to Install in their setup tool.

Download libsndfile, extract, configure, make make install.
Download libsamplerate, extract, configure, make, make install.

Download aubio and extract it.
cd into its folder

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
./configure --disable-shared
make
make install

The Koolu Works Everywhere Appliance and the fit-PC could make nice platforms for delivering ET applications as appliances (or toys) rather than scary computer programs.

Other machines in the same category include:

• TU-40 for $99
• MicroClient JrSX for $85
• eBox4300 for $231

And lots of others.

Engadget has an article on Swinxs, a new game platform introduced at Toy Fair 2008. Its the size of a small drink cooler and comes with RFID bracelets the kids wear. It apparently has some lights and audio output. The included games encourage running around and include stories as well. The part that intrigues me is the promise of an SDK and the ability to develop and share games. Perhaps we could develop some accessible games for kids with various disabilities.

Meg pointed out the Raw Input API for Windows. This would allow us to distinguish among multiple mice and keyboards. It might be interesting to use multiple numeric keyboards as specialized input devices, or multiple mice to provide 2 or 3 switches per hand.

Minh-Tri Pham wrote with info on his PyCV package. This could be very useful for locating kid’s faces for games and therapy for kids who are motor impaired. His demo works fine on my Ubuntu system.

I was excited about potential for the XO as a delivery vehicle for assistive technology. The laptop looks great online so I ordered one through the buy one get one program. I figured we’d get to develop a demonstration on it for Maze Day. Boy am I disappointed…

I made my donation on 14 November expecting the laptop by Christmas.

I got a thank you note from Nicholas on 16 November.

I got an email on 22 December promising delivery by 15 January.

I got email on 19 January saying their shipment system could not ship to my address. We get shipments here on campus every day from every shipper. I responded that their shipment system is broken and they should drop it in US Mail. Their email included a 24 hour dedicated 800 number for speaking to an agent.

I got email on 21 January apologizing for the email of the 19th, saying ignore the request for updated shipping information.

I got email on 25 January saying it had been sent to the warehouse for shipping.

I got email on 6 February telling my how grateful they were for the overwhelming response.

On 14 February I called the 800 number. The lady who answered the phone “hello?” didn’t appear to know anything about the OLPC. I figured I had the wrong number so I apologized, hung up, and dialed again. Same lady, except this time after much silence she gave me another 800 number to call.

I called it, got a menu, chose to speak to a person, and was informed that my XO would ship “at the end of March”.

Yow. These guys are going to change the world? My confidence is waning.

I’m writing this down because I don’t see complete working (for me at least) directions anywhere else.

1. Install xcode from the Mac OS X install CD
2. MacPorts (everyone calls it DarwinPorts)
3. Get and unpack the opencv source tarball
4. cd opencv; mkdir build; cd build
5. ../configure CPPFLAGS=”-I/opt/local/include” LDFLAGS=”-L/opt/local/lib” –without-python
6. make
7. sudo make install

I also needed the macam webcam driver to use my Logitech webcam. I believe the notebooks have a camera built in so you should be good to go on one of those.

I’m getting tons of error messages like these as my app is running and I’m only getting about 5 frames per second. What’s up with that?

2008-02-14 09:00:23.983 Python[85901:6d37] *** Break on _NSLockError() to debug.
2008-02-14 09:00:24.179 Python[85901:880f] *** -[NSLock unlock]: lock ( '(null)') unlocked from thread which did not lock it

Also, I note that video doesn’t start until I move the mouse. Are these macam bugs?

I regularly get requests from teachers at schools that are Mac based for versions of our software that will work for them. I want every kid to have access to our stuff so I bought a Mac mini for development. I’d rather be running OS X in a virtual machine but Apple won’t let me do that. So I’ve got the mini sitting here with its video out connected to one of the inputs on my right projector and I hacked a python wrapper for synergy server to switch the projector source when I move the mouse off my Ubuntu desktop onto the mini. It works great. Combine that with MacFusion for file sharing and routing the mini’s audio output into the line-in on my Ubuntu machine and it is just about as good as a VM would be.

Pygame seems to work fine on the mini so most of what I need is there. Good deal.

But it sure is frustrating to try to get anything else going. First there is hardly any information online. What I find is often out of date and useless because so much seems to change from release to release. Then when something doesn’t work I don’t know who to ask. In contrast on Windows or Ubuntu there are huge and active communities of hackers like me who 1) figure stuff out and 2) write it down where Google can find it. The problem is usually culling through millions of results. On queries related to OS X the problem is I get 5 hits, 3 of which are asking the same question with no answer. The documentation at Apple is horrible and either not indexed by Google or not indexed well. I seriously don’t know why software developers put up with it. I guess they like being pioneers. I just want to get the job done…