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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].


=Laptop News 2008-02-24=
=Laptop News 2008-03-01=


1. Learning learning: Darah Tappitake and David Cavallo are preparing for March Learning Workshop with confirmed participations from Thailand, Mali, and the Committee for Democracy in Information Technology.
1. Solar power: Richard Smith’s reaching out to the community has had very good results. OLPC now has several options available to them for solar test sites. It turns out that Rob Savoye (“Mr. Gnash”) is a big supporter of alternative energy and already runs his house “off grid” using a mix of solar and wind power. Rob is interested in working with OLPC and is already providing valuable “from the trenches” info.


2. Lima: The Peru deployment continues to progress. 40K laptops arrived in Lima this week and are being sorted by distribution district and school in anticipation of delivery and activation. Ivan Krstić and Scott Ananain have been working with Hernán Pachas Magallanes on a mechanism to map CSV files into activation leases that will be useful across all of our deployments.
2. School Server: We are still unable to generate new school server builds. (Dennis Gilmore has been looking into this.) John Watlington spent the last week looking at the operation of the laptop without a school server.
Tomeu Vizoso has contributed a patch to Abiword that will fix Write crashing shortly after entering in a collaboration session.


The first tranch of training in Peru begins on Monday. The 143 representatives from the regional distribution centers (UGELs) and 20 ministry of education personnel will attend a 5-day workshop on all aspects of the XO laptop, school server, and the learning models. John Watlington and Walter Bender are heading to Lima to help with final preparations over the weekend. In the following weeks, teachers and university students will also be attending workshops throughout the country.
3. Activities: Dan Bricklin has blogged about the latest milestone reached in the SocialCalc (spreadsheet) activity; 109 functions—the “small group”—have now been implemented in the activity (For details, please see http://danbricklin.com/log/2007_12_05.htm#milestone).


3. Assessment: David Cavallo, Edith Ackermann of the learning team, and Tony Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health are developing a new framework for assessment that goes beyond typical school approaches to enable accurate sensing of the overall mission of OLPC. In particular, the framework will enable a more scientific evaluation of the whole child and the community. The framework will also permit a more contextualized view as conditions and goals will vary from site to site (e.g. from Haiti to Uruguay to rural Peru to Afghanistan). Haiti will serve as the first instance for applying the framework.
Luke Closs has been able to change the gecko security settings to allow a local HTML file access to XPCOM. Subject to Rainbow review, this means we can now communicate messages between Python and JavaScript. Todd Whiteman from ActiveState, who works on the “Komodo” application has suggested the use nslObserver interface as the method of passing messages back and forth between Python and JavaScript.


4. Ceibal: Plans are moving forward for an OLPC/Ceibal children's festival in Uruguay in March. The festival will not only provide an environment for children to explore construction and collaboration on the laptop, but also a means for team development in Uruguay. We expect many guests from other countries to visit for both the festival and to visit the initial school in Vila Cardal.
A simple Moon phase viewer that includes lunar-eclipse information has been written for the XO laptop. (See [[Moon]]).


5. Sugar: The Sugar team has posted some new designs for the Home view, Journal, and Frame (See [[Design]]). The gist of the proposed changes is to swap the roles of the Frame and Home view in regard to activities: they'll be launched from the Home view and active activities will be carried from view to view on the Frame. The intention is to make it easier to issue invitation and notifications and manage the growing number of activities in our builds (Peru will have more than 30 activities loaded on the laptop by default).
Simon Schampijer updated the Browse activity documentation (Please see [[Browse]]). He also updated the Browse test plan (See [[Tests/Browse]]).


6. Wikireaders: A dozen different development projects related to wikireaders are now signed up to our new wikireader@lists mailing list, to work out how to coordinate Google Gears, pyxpcom, and existing python and php codebases to generate and browse readers. An old "static content" project on Wikipedia is being revived around the same themes.
Chris Ball worked with Richard Boulanger ahead of his release of Csound samples—Pippy is now able to list and play CSound *.csd compositions.


7. Phil Carrizzi, a professor at the Kendall College of Art in Grand Rapids has created an XO viewfinder on his FDM machine (See [http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/2225021496/in/set-72157603547309133/]).
Guillaume Desmottes debugged and provided a patch for a problem with Read sharing with Salut (Ticket #6483).


8. Help wanted: There have been several requests for "typing tutor" software on the XO coming from the various pilots. If anyone is interested in breathing some life into the Typing Tutor Activity, please contact the devel list.
Simon added a 'Set multicast rate' option to the Sugar control panel (Ticket #6461).
9. Support: Adam Holt reports that discussions are under way regarding setting up repair centers with Moraine Valley Community College (we gave them 12 broken XO laptops towards prototyping a repair center) and IMSA.edu.


Darah Tappitake discussed the long-term challenges of volunteerism at last Sunday's support volunteers meeting.
Arjun Sarwal continues to work on the Measure activity. He has explored various built-in peripheral devices/sensors of the XO, including:
* a camera mode within Measure calculates the average values over all pixels of each frame and displays it in real time (See [[:Image:Camera_in_measure_1.jpg]]);
* extracting the wireless signal strength and wireless noise power from iwconfig;
* getting the values from the built-in temperature sensors.


Adam worked with Sandy Culver and Brightstar on shipping out outstanding RMA machines and Fedex "undeliverables"; and he worked with Alan Claver who's resolving dozens of escalated support tickets daily.
Arjun continues to work on an improved UI for Measure and he has corrected a bug in Turtle Art with Sensors that was giving the sensor values of the previous rather than current sensor block when queried. Arjun discussed details with Barry Vercoe and also Richard Boulanger about sensor support in CSound. It emerges that getting sensor data would result in the form of a modified “in” opcode sampling at control rate and he discussed in detail with Dale Joachim about the various options for undertaking environmental studies using the XO and sensors in the proposed pilot/deployment in Haiti.


10. Meshing: This week we held a tech meeting in Cambridge to work on issues of scaling our collaboration technology. In attendance were OLPC staff, Dave Woodhouse and Marco Presenti-Gritti of Red Hat, Dafydd Harries and Guillaume Desmottes of Collabora, and Javier Cardona of Cozybit. Several new bugs were identified and characterized; some short-term fixes were adopted; testing of the fixes was started. The longer-term strategy for achieving more scaling was discussed extensively. The actual characterization of the result awaits testing in a quieter network environment—there are over 100 access points that can be detected from the OLPC office, one ofthe most severe network environments anyone has ssen.
4. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Turkish, Romanian and Creyole (kreyòl). Also, the Scratch developers exploring the use of Pootle for translations. (Scratch is developed externally and does not use any public version control system.) If this works out properly, we can use it as a model for supporting other non dev.laptop.org git hosted projects relevant to the OLPC.


11. Custom builds: Scott Anaian and Michael Stone worked with Daniel Grajales Santana of Telmex and Hernán of the Ministry of Education in Peru on developing a customization key (See [[Customization_key]]) to create builds for Mexico and Peru.
Edgar Ceballos has translated the “Getting Started” pages in to Spanish (See http://laptop.org/es/gettingstarted and [[PO-laptop.org-gettingstarted-es]]).


12. FOSDEM: Simon Schampijer, Tomeu Vizoso, Benjamin Berg, and Bernardo Innocenti attended FOSDEM, a European meeting for Free and Open Source Software Developers, in Brussels over the weekend (See [http://www.codewiz.org/wiki/FosdemOlpcGroupTagged.jpg]). They improvised a booth at the GNOME stand to answer questions and offer their machines for people to try out. Besides questions about hardware specifications and the current status of the project the visitors were mostly interested in where to buy the laptop. Thanks to the GNOME people for sharing their facilities and helping answering questions.
[[Usman mansour]] reports that an XO laptop user manual in the Pashto and Dari language has been completed.


FOSDEM was as well place for OLPC-Europe's (See [[OLPC_Europe]]) kickoff meeting where the idea behind this initiative was outlined. The different grassroots projects and European OLPC communities (Greece, Netherlands, Bulgaria and Germany) gave an overview about their work and goals and described the efforts already made.
5. Testing: Chris Ball has prepared a test plan for next week's mesh scaling work (See [[Mesh_Testing]]). Chris wrote a tool that automates key-presses for the Write activity, so that we can perform automated tests that keep track of how many keypresses fail to get through to as we add more laptops to a collaboration.


13. Sugar: Tomeu, Benjamin and Simon stayed in Brussels for a few days where they worked together on the XO laptop. Tomeu started work on the infrastructure needed for adding keyboard bindings (accelerators) to activities; he discussed with Simon about the best way to implement the UI for the control panel.
6. Bundles: Michael Stone wrote a first draft of software for “bundle-distribution” over USB keys. These keys, when used to boot an XO, will unpack a collection of activity and content bundles (contained in $USB/bundles) into appropriate locations on the NAND. The rapid completion of this prototype built on and would not have been possible without access to the excellent previous work of Scott (olpcrd) and the Debian-Installer team. Michael documented the first part of the process used for writing similar software (See [[Building_initramfsen]]).


14. Power management: Chris Ball released a version of OHM that asks NetworkManager to rescan and reconnect when coming out of sleep—amongst other things, this should make sure that we don't continue to use the link-local mesh after the laptops arrive at school in the morning.
7. Presence service: Morgan Collett started looking at handling chat with normal Jabber clients better and started looking into ways to promote community Jabber servers. (Morgan had found several references on the wiki to people who tried to set up a Jabber server with the required patches and modules, and just
couldn't get it to work and gave up.)


Andres Salomon worked more work on framebuffer code, testing, and debugging a lid close bug with Jordan Crouse of AMD and Richard Smith.
8. Production: The final batch of laptops for the G1G1 program are finishing up in production and making their way to Chicago. They will start shipping out to consumers as early as Monday. We expect to ship them all before the end of March.


15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have a new Pootle project for Khmer—volunteers are welcome. Sayamindu is also testing out an experimental system to generate language packs for the languages that are in Pootle. (Current packs are in http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/langpacks/). Users simply need to run them in an XO (emulated or real) laptop and the latest translations will automagically get installed. The primary focus now is to enable translators to test out their translations more easily.
9. Support: With the help of a couple of volunteers, Kim Quirk and Adam Holt opened all the returns currently at the Brightstar warehouse to sort the boxes into three categories: no problem found, will not boot, or other problem (keyboard, battery, screen, or touchpad). One goal of the evaluation of the returns is to create volunteer repair centers from the parts of broken laptops.


There has been much discussion about how to localize Turtle Art, which is currently in English and Spanish only. The issue is that Turtle Art is rendered using GIF files. Alexander Todorov is exploring using ImageMagic to generate the GIFs from Pootle. Something similar could be done using the Scheme extensions for The Gimp. Tomeu has suggested that we design icons for the program blocks and use rollovers for the text. (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3585 for details.)
A strong grassroots community is coming together in Peru in support of the project there: over 50 people came to the first gathering, and about half that number have written into voluntario@laptop.org asking to help out.


We've finalized the keyboard design for Kreyòl thanks to the efforts of Guy Serge Pompi, Michel DeGraff, Arjun Sarwal, Dale Joachim, and David Cavallo. Bernie helped to finalize Italian as well. Both keyboard layouts have been sent to Quanta for mass production.
10. ICDL: Tim Browne and Ben Bederson of the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) have optimized their outstanding online Mongolian children's book collection (www.read.ma) for the XO laptop. ICDL and OLPC were featured at a World Bank event in Ulaanbaatar last week following the launch of the XO laptop in two schools in Mongolia. Tim and Ben also announced that the ICDL’s improved readability updates for the OLPC have been implemented. The exemplary books from their collection, now totally more than 2,600 children's books from around the world, are dramatically easier to read on XO. Next up for ICDL and OLPC: translations and “pop-out” text.


Thanks to the efforts of e have Mike Dawson, Dr. Habib Khan, Waqas Toor, Salman Minhas, Ebtihaj Obaidi, and Usman Mansour Ansari, we have almost finalized a new layout for Afghanistan that is compatible with both Pashto and Dari. (See http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/b5/Pashto-v2.png for details.)
11. OLPC health: Dr Lia Meisinger has joined the health efforts and she would be curating content on Maternal Health, Childbirth and related issues (See [[Health_meetings]]). XO laptops are being used at a rural medical clinic in San Blas, Mexico (See http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdorfman/2262339766/).


We have been making similar advances in Khmer. Chea Sok Hour and Noy Shoung have provided invaluable guidance (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/images/c/c2/Khmer-v2.png).
12. Science and Maths: Arjun helped Jayawant Patki from “Aptara – The Content Transformation Company” from India to get their content running on the XO. They have extensive Science and Maths content for primary school children that would be accessible using the Browse Activity.


16. Jams: Fred Benenson of NY free culture held a jam at the Google Complex, with ~30 attendees. They are planning for a larger jam at the end of the month hosted at UNICEF, and introducing a wider group to the XO laptops (http://wiki.freeculture.org/NYU_OLPC_Jam_Session).
13. In the community: Sebastian Silva has a team of people working actively together on his new Spanish-language community site (http://meta.fuentelibre.org/trac). OLPC Austria is sending a delegation to CeBIT. Many people, including Mel Chua and Ian Bicking, will be at PyCon to help man an OLPC booth.


Mel Chua and Christopher Fabian are helping organize a story-telling jam March 28-30. Building on the Journalism Jam from last fall and our experience to date with Our Stories, but also telling the stories of people of all ages interested in storytelling and in OLPC. They expect ~150 people (See [[Story_Jam_New_York]]).
14. Library and creation: Mako Hill and SJ Klein are finalizing a specification for internationalizing content bundles to share for discussion early next week. The library core will be fully localized next week using this structure, as an example.


17. Collections: Erik Zachte has tools for making compact Tomeraider collections that deal intelligently with images.
A number of Spanish literary materials, written and spoken, were identified over the weekend as part of an open texts push, including the Spanish versions of the primary science guides and resources developed in France by LAMAP. One of the LAMAP directors is currently in Lima and plans to meet with the ministry of education next week. Bundled collections are being developed from these, and the first should be available next week.


18. Health: Chris Leonard, a local microbiologist, is organizing material related to animals and agriculture. He and his wife are both editors and writers, and he has been working with a few people on an index for an animal health collection (See [[User:Cjl/ideas]]).
Lauren Klein has been working with Pablo Flores on a publishing channel for stories from his schools. She is also writing about ways to use Omeka and Moodle for teachers to share their works and maintain collections.


19. Music: Our music collections are growing : this week the full 9GB of sound samples from the "Boulanger" collection can be found on dev.laptop.org. Andriani Ferti is working with Charlotte Landrum, director of the Gardner Museum podcast series, which will be contributing their concerts in some form for use by our schools.
Wade Brainerd reports a “sugarized” 3D Pong is almost ready. The Jordan brothers, at the Game Developers Conference this week (on the passes they won at last summer's Olin Game Jam), are working on the next version of SprayPlay.


20. Pakistan: Habib reports that the first formal contact with the Government of Pakistan was successfully established this week through the delivering of a presentation to a group of 80 mid-level managers, who gathered for the purpose at the Academy of Educational Planning and Management in Islamabad from across Pakistan. Habib made a three-hour detailed presentation on all facets of OLPC with a key focus on the educational aspects, implications for policy makers and budget.He also dedicated ninety minutes for special hands-on training/familiarization on 20 XO laptops that he carries with him for that purpose. The event left a magical impact on all present.
15. OLPC Memo series: Marvin Minsky has begun a memo series on learning. Read his essay: What makes mathematics hard to learn? (See [[Marvin Minsky]]).
21. XOctoPlug: Resulting from extensive school implementation experience Carla Gomez Monroy presented the idea for an 8 in 1 power supply to maximize safety, convenience and battery life. Carla named it the XOctoPlug (See [[Peripherals/XOctoPlug]]). The first prototypes arrived at OLPC this week. The design comes from close collaboration between Carla and Joshua Seal of Belkin. It is anticipated the final design will incorporate magnetic quick release connectors to prevent tripping and be fully sealed to maximize robustness.

22. Waveplace: Timothy Falconer and William Stelzer report on St John and Haiti Pilots ([http://waveplace.com/news/newsletter/web.jsp?id=4]).

23. The OLPC Learning Club-DC met in the Capitol Hill offices of Nortel Networks last Saturday. Attendees of every generation got technical help with developer's keys, meshed with a school server and shared ideas on software projects. Host Michael Connet staged a teleconference with Nortel staffers in Ottawa. Student videographers captured footage for a future installment of LearnIT. (See http://www.olpclearningclub.org and http://www.nortellearnit.org for details.)

24. Yesterday, 29 February, was Seymour Papert's 20th birthday!!


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 21:58, 1 March 2008

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 113887]  +/-  

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-03-01

1. Learning learning: Darah Tappitake and David Cavallo are preparing for March Learning Workshop with confirmed participations from Thailand, Mali, and the Committee for Democracy in Information Technology.

2. Lima: The Peru deployment continues to progress. 40K laptops arrived in Lima this week and are being sorted by distribution district and school in anticipation of delivery and activation. Ivan Krstić and Scott Ananain have been working with Hernán Pachas Magallanes on a mechanism to map CSV files into activation leases that will be useful across all of our deployments.

The first tranch of training in Peru begins on Monday. The 143 representatives from the regional distribution centers (UGELs) and 20 ministry of education personnel will attend a 5-day workshop on all aspects of the XO laptop, school server, and the learning models. John Watlington and Walter Bender are heading to Lima to help with final preparations over the weekend. In the following weeks, teachers and university students will also be attending workshops throughout the country.

3. Assessment: David Cavallo, Edith Ackermann of the learning team, and Tony Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health are developing a new framework for assessment that goes beyond typical school approaches to enable accurate sensing of the overall mission of OLPC. In particular, the framework will enable a more scientific evaluation of the whole child and the community. The framework will also permit a more contextualized view as conditions and goals will vary from site to site (e.g. from Haiti to Uruguay to rural Peru to Afghanistan). Haiti will serve as the first instance for applying the framework.

4. Ceibal: Plans are moving forward for an OLPC/Ceibal children's festival in Uruguay in March. The festival will not only provide an environment for children to explore construction and collaboration on the laptop, but also a means for team development in Uruguay. We expect many guests from other countries to visit for both the festival and to visit the initial school in Vila Cardal.

5. Sugar: The Sugar team has posted some new designs for the Home view, Journal, and Frame (See Design). The gist of the proposed changes is to swap the roles of the Frame and Home view in regard to activities: they'll be launched from the Home view and active activities will be carried from view to view on the Frame. The intention is to make it easier to issue invitation and notifications and manage the growing number of activities in our builds (Peru will have more than 30 activities loaded on the laptop by default).

6. Wikireaders: A dozen different development projects related to wikireaders are now signed up to our new wikireader@lists mailing list, to work out how to coordinate Google Gears, pyxpcom, and existing python and php codebases to generate and browse readers. An old "static content" project on Wikipedia is being revived around the same themes.

7. Phil Carrizzi, a professor at the Kendall College of Art in Grand Rapids has created an XO viewfinder on his FDM machine (See [1]).

8. Help wanted: There have been several requests for "typing tutor" software on the XO coming from the various pilots. If anyone is interested in breathing some life into the Typing Tutor Activity, please contact the devel list.

9. Support: Adam Holt reports that discussions are under way regarding setting up repair centers with Moraine Valley Community College (we gave them 12 broken XO laptops towards prototyping a repair center) and IMSA.edu.

Darah Tappitake discussed the long-term challenges of volunteerism at last Sunday's support volunteers meeting.

Adam worked with Sandy Culver and Brightstar on shipping out outstanding RMA machines and Fedex "undeliverables"; and he worked with Alan Claver who's resolving dozens of escalated support tickets daily.

10. Meshing: This week we held a tech meeting in Cambridge to work on issues of scaling our collaboration technology. In attendance were OLPC staff, Dave Woodhouse and Marco Presenti-Gritti of Red Hat, Dafydd Harries and Guillaume Desmottes of Collabora, and Javier Cardona of Cozybit. Several new bugs were identified and characterized; some short-term fixes were adopted; testing of the fixes was started. The longer-term strategy for achieving more scaling was discussed extensively. The actual characterization of the result awaits testing in a quieter network environment—there are over 100 access points that can be detected from the OLPC office, one ofthe most severe network environments anyone has ssen.

11. Custom builds: Scott Anaian and Michael Stone worked with Daniel Grajales Santana of Telmex and Hernán of the Ministry of Education in Peru on developing a customization key (See Customization_key) to create builds for Mexico and Peru.

12. FOSDEM: Simon Schampijer, Tomeu Vizoso, Benjamin Berg, and Bernardo Innocenti attended FOSDEM, a European meeting for Free and Open Source Software Developers, in Brussels over the weekend (See [2]). They improvised a booth at the GNOME stand to answer questions and offer their machines for people to try out. Besides questions about hardware specifications and the current status of the project the visitors were mostly interested in where to buy the laptop. Thanks to the GNOME people for sharing their facilities and helping answering questions.

FOSDEM was as well place for OLPC-Europe's (See OLPC_Europe) kickoff meeting where the idea behind this initiative was outlined. The different grassroots projects and European OLPC communities (Greece, Netherlands, Bulgaria and Germany) gave an overview about their work and goals and described the efforts already made.

13. Sugar: Tomeu, Benjamin and Simon stayed in Brussels for a few days where they worked together on the XO laptop. Tomeu started work on the infrastructure needed for adding keyboard bindings (accelerators) to activities; he discussed with Simon about the best way to implement the UI for the control panel.

14. Power management: Chris Ball released a version of OHM that asks NetworkManager to rescan and reconnect when coming out of sleep—amongst other things, this should make sure that we don't continue to use the link-local mesh after the laptops arrive at school in the morning.

Andres Salomon worked more work on framebuffer code, testing, and debugging a lid close bug with Jordan Crouse of AMD and Richard Smith.

15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have a new Pootle project for Khmer—volunteers are welcome. Sayamindu is also testing out an experimental system to generate language packs for the languages that are in Pootle. (Current packs are in http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/langpacks/). Users simply need to run them in an XO (emulated or real) laptop and the latest translations will automagically get installed. The primary focus now is to enable translators to test out their translations more easily.

There has been much discussion about how to localize Turtle Art, which is currently in English and Spanish only. The issue is that Turtle Art is rendered using GIF files. Alexander Todorov is exploring using ImageMagic to generate the GIFs from Pootle. Something similar could be done using the Scheme extensions for The Gimp. Tomeu has suggested that we design icons for the program blocks and use rollovers for the text. (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3585 for details.)

We've finalized the keyboard design for Kreyòl thanks to the efforts of Guy Serge Pompi, Michel DeGraff, Arjun Sarwal, Dale Joachim, and David Cavallo. Bernie helped to finalize Italian as well. Both keyboard layouts have been sent to Quanta for mass production.

Thanks to the efforts of e have Mike Dawson, Dr. Habib Khan, Waqas Toor, Salman Minhas, Ebtihaj Obaidi, and Usman Mansour Ansari, we have almost finalized a new layout for Afghanistan that is compatible with both Pashto and Dari. (See http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/b5/Pashto-v2.png for details.)

We have been making similar advances in Khmer. Chea Sok Hour and Noy Shoung have provided invaluable guidance (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/images/c/c2/Khmer-v2.png).

16. Jams: Fred Benenson of NY free culture held a jam at the Google Complex, with ~30 attendees. They are planning for a larger jam at the end of the month hosted at UNICEF, and introducing a wider group to the XO laptops (http://wiki.freeculture.org/NYU_OLPC_Jam_Session).

Mel Chua and Christopher Fabian are helping organize a story-telling jam March 28-30. Building on the Journalism Jam from last fall and our experience to date with Our Stories, but also telling the stories of people of all ages interested in storytelling and in OLPC. They expect ~150 people (See Story_Jam_New_York).

17. Collections: Erik Zachte has tools for making compact Tomeraider collections that deal intelligently with images.

18. Health: Chris Leonard, a local microbiologist, is organizing material related to animals and agriculture. He and his wife are both editors and writers, and he has been working with a few people on an index for an animal health collection (See User:Cjl/ideas).

19. Music: Our music collections are growing : this week the full 9GB of sound samples from the "Boulanger" collection can be found on dev.laptop.org. Andriani Ferti is working with Charlotte Landrum, director of the Gardner Museum podcast series, which will be contributing their concerts in some form for use by our schools.

20. Pakistan: Habib reports that the first formal contact with the Government of Pakistan was successfully established this week through the delivering of a presentation to a group of 80 mid-level managers, who gathered for the purpose at the Academy of Educational Planning and Management in Islamabad from across Pakistan. Habib made a three-hour detailed presentation on all facets of OLPC with a key focus on the educational aspects, implications for policy makers and budget.He also dedicated ninety minutes for special hands-on training/familiarization on 20 XO laptops that he carries with him for that purpose. The event left a magical impact on all present.

21. XOctoPlug: Resulting from extensive school implementation experience Carla Gomez Monroy presented the idea for an 8 in 1 power supply to maximize safety, convenience and battery life. Carla named it the XOctoPlug (See Peripherals/XOctoPlug). The first prototypes arrived at OLPC this week. The design comes from close collaboration between Carla and Joshua Seal of Belkin. It is anticipated the final design will incorporate magnetic quick release connectors to prevent tripping and be fully sealed to maximize robustness.

22. Waveplace: Timothy Falconer and William Stelzer report on St John and Haiti Pilots ([3]).

23. The OLPC Learning Club-DC met in the Capitol Hill offices of Nortel Networks last Saturday. Attendees of every generation got technical help with developer's keys, meshed with a school server and shared ideas on software projects. Host Michael Connet staged a teleconference with Nortel staffers in Ottawa. Student videographers captured footage for a future installment of LearnIT. (See http://www.olpclearningclub.org and http://www.nortellearnit.org for details.)

24. Yesterday, 29 February, was Seymour Papert's 20th birthday!!

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 113887]  +/-  

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-03-01

1. Learning learning: Darah Tappitake and David Cavallo are preparing for March Learning Workshop with confirmed participations from Thailand, Mali, and the Committee for Democracy in Information Technology.

2. Lima: The Peru deployment continues to progress. 40K laptops arrived in Lima this week and are being sorted by distribution district and school in anticipation of delivery and activation. Ivan Krstić and Scott Ananain have been working with Hernán Pachas Magallanes on a mechanism to map CSV files into activation leases that will be useful across all of our deployments.

The first tranch of training in Peru begins on Monday. The 143 representatives from the regional distribution centers (UGELs) and 20 ministry of education personnel will attend a 5-day workshop on all aspects of the XO laptop, school server, and the learning models. John Watlington and Walter Bender are heading to Lima to help with final preparations over the weekend. In the following weeks, teachers and university students will also be attending workshops throughout the country.

3. Assessment: David Cavallo, Edith Ackermann of the learning team, and Tony Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health are developing a new framework for assessment that goes beyond typical school approaches to enable accurate sensing of the overall mission of OLPC. In particular, the framework will enable a more scientific evaluation of the whole child and the community. The framework will also permit a more contextualized view as conditions and goals will vary from site to site (e.g. from Haiti to Uruguay to rural Peru to Afghanistan). Haiti will serve as the first instance for applying the framework.

4. Ceibal: Plans are moving forward for an OLPC/Ceibal children's festival in Uruguay in March. The festival will not only provide an environment for children to explore construction and collaboration on the laptop, but also a means for team development in Uruguay. We expect many guests from other countries to visit for both the festival and to visit the initial school in Vila Cardal.

5. Sugar: The Sugar team has posted some new designs for the Home view, Journal, and Frame (See Design). The gist of the proposed changes is to swap the roles of the Frame and Home view in regard to activities: they'll be launched from the Home view and active activities will be carried from view to view on the Frame. The intention is to make it easier to issue invitation and notifications and manage the growing number of activities in our builds (Peru will have more than 30 activities loaded on the laptop by default).

6. Wikireaders: A dozen different development projects related to wikireaders are now signed up to our new wikireader@lists mailing list, to work out how to coordinate Google Gears, pyxpcom, and existing python and php codebases to generate and browse readers. An old "static content" project on Wikipedia is being revived around the same themes.

7. Phil Carrizzi, a professor at the Kendall College of Art in Grand Rapids has created an XO viewfinder on his FDM machine (See [4]).

8. Help wanted: There have been several requests for "typing tutor" software on the XO coming from the various pilots. If anyone is interested in breathing some life into the Typing Tutor Activity, please contact the devel list.

9. Support: Adam Holt reports that discussions are under way regarding setting up repair centers with Moraine Valley Community College (we gave them 12 broken XO laptops towards prototyping a repair center) and IMSA.edu.

Darah Tappitake discussed the long-term challenges of volunteerism at last Sunday's support volunteers meeting.

Adam worked with Sandy Culver and Brightstar on shipping out outstanding RMA machines and Fedex "undeliverables"; and he worked with Alan Claver who's resolving dozens of escalated support tickets daily.

10. Meshing: This week we held a tech meeting in Cambridge to work on issues of scaling our collaboration technology. In attendance were OLPC staff, Dave Woodhouse and Marco Presenti-Gritti of Red Hat, Dafydd Harries and Guillaume Desmottes of Collabora, and Javier Cardona of Cozybit. Several new bugs were identified and characterized; some short-term fixes were adopted; testing of the fixes was started. The longer-term strategy for achieving more scaling was discussed extensively. The actual characterization of the result awaits testing in a quieter network environment—there are over 100 access points that can be detected from the OLPC office, one ofthe most severe network environments anyone has ssen.

11. Custom builds: Scott Anaian and Michael Stone worked with Daniel Grajales Santana of Telmex and Hernán of the Ministry of Education in Peru on developing a customization key (See Customization_key) to create builds for Mexico and Peru.

12. FOSDEM: Simon Schampijer, Tomeu Vizoso, Benjamin Berg, and Bernardo Innocenti attended FOSDEM, a European meeting for Free and Open Source Software Developers, in Brussels over the weekend (See [5]). They improvised a booth at the GNOME stand to answer questions and offer their machines for people to try out. Besides questions about hardware specifications and the current status of the project the visitors were mostly interested in where to buy the laptop. Thanks to the GNOME people for sharing their facilities and helping answering questions.

FOSDEM was as well place for OLPC-Europe's (See OLPC_Europe) kickoff meeting where the idea behind this initiative was outlined. The different grassroots projects and European OLPC communities (Greece, Netherlands, Bulgaria and Germany) gave an overview about their work and goals and described the efforts already made.

13. Sugar: Tomeu, Benjamin and Simon stayed in Brussels for a few days where they worked together on the XO laptop. Tomeu started work on the infrastructure needed for adding keyboard bindings (accelerators) to activities; he discussed with Simon about the best way to implement the UI for the control panel.

14. Power management: Chris Ball released a version of OHM that asks NetworkManager to rescan and reconnect when coming out of sleep—amongst other things, this should make sure that we don't continue to use the link-local mesh after the laptops arrive at school in the morning.

Andres Salomon worked more work on framebuffer code, testing, and debugging a lid close bug with Jordan Crouse of AMD and Richard Smith.

15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have a new Pootle project for Khmer—volunteers are welcome. Sayamindu is also testing out an experimental system to generate language packs for the languages that are in Pootle. (Current packs are in http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/langpacks/). Users simply need to run them in an XO (emulated or real) laptop and the latest translations will automagically get installed. The primary focus now is to enable translators to test out their translations more easily.

There has been much discussion about how to localize Turtle Art, which is currently in English and Spanish only. The issue is that Turtle Art is rendered using GIF files. Alexander Todorov is exploring using ImageMagic to generate the GIFs from Pootle. Something similar could be done using the Scheme extensions for The Gimp. Tomeu has suggested that we design icons for the program blocks and use rollovers for the text. (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3585 for details.)

We've finalized the keyboard design for Kreyòl thanks to the efforts of Guy Serge Pompi, Michel DeGraff, Arjun Sarwal, Dale Joachim, and David Cavallo. Bernie helped to finalize Italian as well. Both keyboard layouts have been sent to Quanta for mass production.

Thanks to the efforts of e have Mike Dawson, Dr. Habib Khan, Waqas Toor, Salman Minhas, Ebtihaj Obaidi, and Usman Mansour Ansari, we have almost finalized a new layout for Afghanistan that is compatible with both Pashto and Dari. (See http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/b5/Pashto-v2.png for details.)

We have been making similar advances in Khmer. Chea Sok Hour and Noy Shoung have provided invaluable guidance (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/images/c/c2/Khmer-v2.png).

16. Jams: Fred Benenson of NY free culture held a jam at the Google Complex, with ~30 attendees. They are planning for a larger jam at the end of the month hosted at UNICEF, and introducing a wider group to the XO laptops (http://wiki.freeculture.org/NYU_OLPC_Jam_Session).

Mel Chua and Christopher Fabian are helping organize a story-telling jam March 28-30. Building on the Journalism Jam from last fall and our experience to date with Our Stories, but also telling the stories of people of all ages interested in storytelling and in OLPC. They expect ~150 people (See Story_Jam_New_York).

17. Collections: Erik Zachte has tools for making compact Tomeraider collections that deal intelligently with images.

18. Health: Chris Leonard, a local microbiologist, is organizing material related to animals and agriculture. He and his wife are both editors and writers, and he has been working with a few people on an index for an animal health collection (See User:Cjl/ideas).

19. Music: Our music collections are growing : this week the full 9GB of sound samples from the "Boulanger" collection can be found on dev.laptop.org. Andriani Ferti is working with Charlotte Landrum, director of the Gardner Museum podcast series, which will be contributing their concerts in some form for use by our schools.

20. Pakistan: Habib reports that the first formal contact with the Government of Pakistan was successfully established this week through the delivering of a presentation to a group of 80 mid-level managers, who gathered for the purpose at the Academy of Educational Planning and Management in Islamabad from across Pakistan. Habib made a three-hour detailed presentation on all facets of OLPC with a key focus on the educational aspects, implications for policy makers and budget.He also dedicated ninety minutes for special hands-on training/familiarization on 20 XO laptops that he carries with him for that purpose. The event left a magical impact on all present.

21. XOctoPlug: Resulting from extensive school implementation experience Carla Gomez Monroy presented the idea for an 8 in 1 power supply to maximize safety, convenience and battery life. Carla named it the XOctoPlug (See Peripherals/XOctoPlug). The first prototypes arrived at OLPC this week. The design comes from close collaboration between Carla and Joshua Seal of Belkin. It is anticipated the final design will incorporate magnetic quick release connectors to prevent tripping and be fully sealed to maximize robustness.

22. Waveplace: Timothy Falconer and William Stelzer report on St John and Haiti Pilots ([6]).

23. The OLPC Learning Club-DC met in the Capitol Hill offices of Nortel Networks last Saturday. Attendees of every generation got technical help with developer's keys, meshed with a school server and shared ideas on software projects. Host Michael Connet staged a teleconference with Nortel staffers in Ottawa. Student videographers captured footage for a future installment of LearnIT. (See http://www.olpclearningclub.org and http://www.nortellearnit.org for details.)

24. Yesterday, 29 February, was Seymour Papert's 20th birthday!!

More News

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Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site. Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

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