| tags: programming, ideas, links, enabling technology
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.
| tags: mac, programming
I'm writing this down because I don't see complete working (for me at least) directions anywhere else.
| tags: mac, programming, enabling technology
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.
| tags: programming
I downloaded a book from netlibrary.com via our campus library. When I tried to play it Windows Media Player (on VMware) would complain that it couldn't play it with the only explanation being C00D11B1 (real useful). The error apparently means something went wrong. I tried several fixes none of which helped. I finally found the suggestion to delete the content of the DRM folder (c:\Document and Settings\All Users\DRM). I had to use regedit to find it. After deleting the content of that folder, opening the book produced the login response I expected and now the file plays fine. It is incredible to me that WMP was broken in this way. I created this VM and installed Windows XP SP2 fresh on it recently. This was the very first occasion that WMP has ever been used on this machine!
| tags: motor impaired, programming, ideas, links, enabling technology
Wow! Pete sent me this pointer to Opengazer . I've wondered if this was possible but never found a student to work on it. Thanks to Piotr Zieliński for developing it and making it open source. We'll have great fun with this in accessible applications for people with impaired movement.
| tags: programming, enabling technology, links
I saw a story on slashdot about the simon speech recognition system available on SourceForge.net.
| tags: programming, enabling technology, wiimote
UPDATE: Tim Swast has updated this code to work with the new wiiuse API. I recommend his version which you can find here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/wiiuse/0.12
Several of my project teams this semester will (I hope) use PyGame and the Wiimote in their projects. I had it working fine on Ubuntu but struggled to find an interface that works with Python on Windows XP. Luke pointed me to wiiuse so I wrote a very simple wrapper with ctypes and then wrapped that in a module for PyGame. You can find the code in CVS at SourceForge in pywiiuse. I also uploaded a source release . You'll need wiiuse.dll on Windows or wiiuse.so on Ubuntu.
| tags: programming, enabling technology
We want to give away software for fun and learning and we want it to run on as many machines as possible. I think these are my minimum requirements.
| tags: enabling technology, programming, ideas, ubuntu
Our games and tools for kids with disabilities should run on whatever computer they have at the school (typically an old PC running some version of Windows or a Mac). One alternative to cross-platform testing might be a LiveCD that boots some OS (say Linux) and runs our software. Then our development environment is fixed and we're relying on the OS to cover over hardware differences. Pete and I spent a bit of time this last weekend trying our various LiveCDs to see how little memory they could be made to use.
| tags: programming, enabling technology, links
Daniel Gump has released an open source SDK for application development in the Opera Browser on the Wii . He provides access to the Wii remote functions, complete source and documentation. Thank you Daniel for contributing your effort. I'm looking forward to the great ET applications we can develop for the Wii.