I started today by extracting more MAC addresses from my email. We had about 4-5 this morning, to a total of 14 right now. There seems to be an incompatibility between the lighting types in Alice 2.0 and 2.2. For some reason, when I loaded my Alice 2.0 World (which had a Spotlight) into Alice 2.2, the spotlight did not shine. My morning was extremely unproductive, seeing as Alice, both 2.2 and 2.0, crashed approximately every 10 minutes for no particular reason. I've giving up on Alice for the time being. I'm reading more stuff for CS Unplugged. I'm assembling a list of materials, as well as discovering interesting factoids in the material that I wish I had learned at that age - such as algorithms for checksums in ISBN numbers. Also, I think I would comfortable leading these activities - they don't seem particularly onerous, and some may even by fun =P. Going back to my Alice world, I again ran into the problem of being unable to control the event "Let arrow keys control object." This time, my character kept running off the edge of the world. Deborah suggest a brilliant solution of turning him 180 degrees whenever he approached the edge of the world. As I continued working on this world, I discovered another bug in Alice that was partially fixed in 2.2. Certain method calls, triggered by keyboard events, seem to auto-recurse 4-5 times in 2.0, and 1-2 times in 2.2. When I finish this world, I will break it down into different tutorials, since it is better-organized than my buffalo hunting game, although the concept is similar.
Our MAC address count is now at 16. As I continue to work on the tutorial I started yesterday, it seems that Alice 2.2 has a number of other bugs that were not present in Alice 2.0, such as the repetition of object-level variables in drop-down menus. Also, there is this annoying tendency to crash without warning, particularly when it is not even the active Window. I talked with the rest of the team, and they don't seem to have had the same issue I did with 2.0 (auto-recursing method calls), so I'm assuming that was a problem in 2.0 generated by 2.2. Also, it appears that 2.2 has still not actually been officially released yet. In the afternoon, the five of us went to LSRC and tested the machines in the cart. It appears that only Storytelling Alice fails to function on all of them, and the rest of the program work on all of them. Towardsthe end of the day, I was trying to finish the last (optional) part of my tutorial, and I discovered what "copying" an object really means. I tried to copy 3D text, and it seems that their actual text is bound together. The tutorial, in its current state, is available online, linked from my own Compilation page.
Alice 2.2 Crash Count for the Day: II
I started the day today by checking my email and collecting more MAC addresses to send in the xls file. Then, we went over to LSRC and I had a chat with Jeff about the various installs of Alice on the different sets of machines, and then we tested a couple of them together. Then, I moved most of my tutorials over to the main site, and organized them into a more reasonable order with Deborah's help. When I got back from lunch I first netreg-ed the Mac, and then downloaded Alice. Both Alice 2.0 and 2.2 seem to be functional on the Apple, although I did NOT spend enough time using them on the Apple to see if they were stable. The remainder of the day, I played with getting Alice and STA to work on the Dell laptops. I stayed until about 7 today trying to make Alice and STA work, and I succeeded on one laptop by eradicating all Java and installing a new version fresh. This did not work on the other laptop, so I am going to bring a flash drive tomorrow to port the exact version of Alice onto the non-working computer. In doing this, I'm also trying to figure out whether 2.2 causes interference, since the computer that did work did not have 2.2.
I spent a good deal of the morning in Jeff's office trying to put together an image that would at least have both 2.0 and Storytelling Alice functional on the Dells. I also fetched a Toshiba to play with, and from my tests, I think we should just avoid 2.2. STA and 2.0 seem to work fine on the Toshibas though. Right now, Jeff is pushing a functional image with Alice 2.0 and Storytelling Alice. Since 2.2 still causes issues if it is run, and it's still too buggy to use anyways, we've ommitted it in this image, although it would be easy to dump it onto them in the future. I started working on the changes you specified to the Drag-and-Drop tutorial. The main time-consuming part is retaking the screenshots (so that they don't have parameters) - I'm starting with rewriting the text. When I received your second email, I worked to fix the Powerpoints and the font issue. I learned that it is not just the fonts that cause an issue, but the layout generated by Powerpoint 2007. I think the Powerpoints and the PDF's (which are currently up) should all be correct now, although I will check over all of them again to make sure. I also helped Jenna upload another of her worlds. I did a search for setting umask on a specific directory, and the only solution appears to be to use ACL's to override the ordinary permissions. The syntax is different for different machines though, so I think it might be something we could ask Dan about. I will continue fixing up my Drag-and-Drop tutorial on the weekend or on Monday.