OLPC Rochester, NY/Event history/26February2009
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- RIT Professor Jeff Sonstein
spoke on the potential use of the XO in disaster-recovery efforts.
- He described his involvement with Sahana, a free and open source disaster management system that was conceived and developed in response to the 26 December 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami (Wikipedia history).
- His team reports their work on the Center for the Handheld Web blog page.
- Jeff described the ReSTful (Representational State Transfer) software architecture, and his plans to migrate Sahana to this architecture.
- He then plans to port the software to the XO because of its ability to self organize a network. This will be extremely valuable in a disaster when the Internet is disrupted.
- After the meeting I learned that the OLPC Project will be sending 4 XOs to the Hastily-Formed Network Research Group at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California for testing and trial integration into their disaster Fly Away Kits.
- Fred Grose demonstrated the Etoys environment on the XO using a VirtualBox virtualization of the Sugar on a Stick distribution of XO software environment.
- Sugar on a Stick or virtualization is a convenient way to project a running Sugar system on a conference room screen.
- Fred suggests you explore Etoys by steping through the short tutorials available by clicking the '?' icon in the Etoys toolbar.
- Bill Hickok gave a presentation on getting started with Python.
- He reviewed the history of the language and some of its advantageous features.
- Karlie Robinson handed out some Fedor Sugar Spin LiveCDs for PC and Macs.
- These are the same image as used in the Sugar on a Stick distribution and can boot on a machine without installing to its disc.
- The group agreed to support Professor Stephen Jacobs' Honors Seminar on Developing for the OLPC XO (see the Projects section).
