problems using the measure activity.

[david at lang.hm]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, david at lang.hm wrote:

> 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.)

I just tried it again with my two machines and it worked for about 60 
seconds (at which time the one running on battery did a suspend and the 
activity stopped)

>> *: 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.

what does it take to be considered a hostile RF environment?

David Lang