problems using the measure activity.

[david at lang.hm]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:

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> david at lang.hm wrote:
>> however when we attempted to demo the measure activity we just could not
>> figure out how to make it work. we got it working three times over the
>> weekend (among a dozen or more tries).
>>
>> we has laptops with the 650 build, the -rc2 build, and the signed build
>> released in Jan (one of them started with a joyride build as of
>> mid-week). no matter which combinations of builds we tried, we were not
>> able to repeat a sucess.
>
> Hmm.  It's fairly simple, and usually works just about perfectly, or not at all.
>
>> could somone explain step-by-step what is supposed to happen (and what
>> screen we need to be on when to see the result) I have a pair of boxes
>> which are now on the -rc2 build, so I can try and see if I can get this to
>> work reliably.
>
> To use Distance (formerly called Acoustic Tape Measure):
> 1. Launch the activity on XO A.
> 2. Share the activity from the toolbar
> 3. Using XO B, join the shared instance from the mesh view
> 4. Click the big button on each machine (there's only one button)
>
> That's it.  There should be a lot of whooshing, after which the enormous "0.00"
> should change to be the current distance. There's only one screen, and there's
> only one number field, and it tells you the distance.
>
> What happened instead?  Do try in Update1-rc2.  So far, it's been working
> perfectly fine for me, in either build*.

one mistake we were making was that we tried to invite the other laptop to 
join, sometimes this would result in an additional item on the toolbar, 
useually it would not.

when we did join (either through the mesh view or from the toolbar we 
frequently had both machines sitting and saying that they were waiting for 
another machine.

we did try this with -rc2 (we upgraded 4-5 machines to -rc2 over the 
wekend.)

> *: Due to mysterious telepathy/mesh bug #6061, Distance does not work in hostile
> network environments like at 1CC.  This has not been a problem anywhere else, yet...

the RF enviornment was definantly hostile on the show floor (it didn't 
seem to matter if we used mesh or infrastructure), but we had the same 
problems in the OLPC bof session where we were far enough away to not 
detect the networks from the exibit floor. many of the exibitors setup 
their own access points in addition to the ones the hotel had to start 
with and that SCALE put up to provide access.

David Lang