OLPC:News: Difference between revisions

From OLPC
Jump to navigation Jump to search
(→‎Press Releases: '''Removed Press Release section!''' All 4 of its links were broken. When content is available, roll back to previous version and edit that.)
(OLPC News 2007 05 12)
Line 3: Line 3:
[[Category:General Public]]
[[Category:General Public]]


=Laptop News 2007-05-05=
=Laptop News 2007-05-12=
1. Ceibal, Uruguay: President Vasquez inaugurated the first laptop school on Thursday. Ceibal is a small community with only one school of 150 children, so it is truly 1:1. As you might imagine there was tremendous excitement: the children and their families were ecstatic.
1. Green laptop: By concentrating on low-cost, low-power, long-life, and field repair, we have achieved what many assume costs extra (and many corporations would ordinarily charge more for): XO is the most environmentally friendly laptop ever made. At one point we had heard from very knowledgeable manufacturers that it would cost us at least US $20 extra just to meet the EU environmental requirements. This was not true. In fact, if every laptop and desktop user in the world switched to an XO right now, about 85 terawatt-hours of energy could be saved. The energy-bill savings alone could fund the outright purchase of 50-million XO laptops. In addition, 50M barrels of oil could saved, which is an additional US $500M in carbon-offset dollars, yearly.


Despite the fact that none of the teachers have had experience with computing, they diagnosed a bug in the software: a few of the machines were hanging—nothing could get them to boot fully. The teachers discovered that this was only happening to children with a tilde or ñ in their names. An impressive example of teachers learning to learn! (The bug has been fixed.)
2. Vatican City: Antonio Battro participated in the XIII Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which was dedicated to “charity and justice in the relations among peoples and nations.” He presented the OLPC program at the round-table on the Millennium Goals on education.


2. Alan Kay, Kim Rose, and the Etoys team (Bert Freudenberg, Ian Piumarta, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace, Kazuhiro Abe, and Maic Masuch) came together for a week-long mini Squeakfest at the OLPC office. It was week of a remarkable progress; highlights include: Burt and Yoshiki's integration of the Sugar presence service into eToys—eToys now supports collaboration over the mesh for sharing eToy objects and scripts, a shared workspace, VOIP, chat, etc; an update on Ian's “dynamically reconfigurable virtual machine”; and Kazuhiro's World Stethoscope project—an eToys extension that takes advantage of the XO's microphone jack to import data into projects (See http://squeakland.jp/abee/tmp/WSN-3A_QuickReference.pdf). Squeakfest07 will be held August 1–3 in Chicago (See http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/index.php).
3. Brasilia hosted a conference on digital inclusion on Thursday. Prof. Lea Fagundes stole the show with an impassioned talk about olpc, showing the work and sharing the words of the children involved.


3. The XO is one of the featured designs at the “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. “Ninety-five percent of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10 percent of the world’s customers,” said Dr. Paul Polak, president of International Development Enterprises and a member of the exhibition’s advisory council. “Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90 percent,” he added.
4. OLPC is very pleased to announce the hiring of Kim Quirk as Project Manager. Kim comes to OLPC with over 20 years experience managing projects in industries ranging from network products to e-commerce to educational software.


4. B3 build: Quanta, Mary Lou Jepsen and David Woodhouse arrived in Shanghai (this morning) and have started in on the B3 build. Five B3 laptops are sitting in front of them at the moment, all working. David is working on a debug of suspend/resume. Mary Lou is focusing on the mechanical issues, safety and certification issues. OLPC will get 70 B3 machines for developers.
5. Mesh: Michail Bletsas evaluated three sets of rubber rabbit ears (WiFi antennae); one is much better than the others. Quanta will use these ears for all the B4 units. Look for the WiFi range on your XO to increase by at least 50%.


5. B3 housing: The B3 housing arrived in Cambridge this week. The most prominent new feature is the brightly colored XO on the back cover of the laptop. Other changes include a clean line on the battery housing and thinned out plastic on the front bezel for “glowing” camera and microphone “in-use” indicators. Improvements for robustness include: a steel plate in the keyboard area; a smaller battery cavity; rubber “bunny ears”, thicker bumpers and ribbing made out of pure polycarbonate, a longer keyboard cable, and a water resistance in touch-pad area. Improvements for usage include: increased display tilt; improved keyboard feel and responsiveness; improved touch-pad responsiveness; a gray bezel around the display; improved fit and finish of the buttons; X and O indicators on the touch-pad buttons; and the 400 unique XO color combinations (for IDing laptops in a crowded classroom).
6. B3 build will start on May 11 in Shanghai. B3 is essentially the mass- production laptop (without texture on the plastic surfaces).


6. Power measurement: Steve Smith and Chris Ball have a B3 XO connected to the tinderbox and have instrumented the power rails. Readings are obtained through a Python program.
7. Richard Smith and John Watlington wired up a pre-B3 to the voltmeter, allowing detailed measurements of power consumption, broken down component by component (LCD, CPU/Southbridge, EC, WLAN, etc.) This work will continue next week as more components are gradually added.


7. Power management: This week we merged suspend/resume support in master. So far, it only works on the GX; LX resume is still not working in Linux (it works correctly in firmware testing). Andres Salomon is working on it.
8. Work on the School Server hardware design continued this week. It
was decided to attempt a sealed case design for areas of high humidity and salt exposure, but we are still exploring the thermal issues. Processor selection will be completed by the middle of next week. The industrial and mechanical design have begun.


8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley figured out how to access the new EC commands reliably, and documented it. Mitch also improved the audio self-test and used it to measure the speaker performance. Mitch is still working on B3 NAND FLASH issues. Lilian Walter added functionality to play PCM .wav files (in addition to IMA ADPCM .wav files) and is researching IPv6.
9. The Collabora team continues work on a video-chat application and have found (what we hope are) the remaining bugs in the video stack. They are working with John Palmieri to get the code packaged up and into our builds.


9. Presence service: This week was dominated by the run up to get sharing over the mesh working. Lots of bug fixes are in place and the first connect activities are in place and working. Thanks to the Collabora team, Dan Williams, John Palmieri and Marco Gritti. (The video-call activity also made a lot of progress this week.)
10. J.M. Maurer made progress on a syntax-highlighting plugin for Abiword. This will be useful for children (and adults) who want to develop software on the laptop. Right now it supports syntax highlighting for both Python and C++.


10. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso, Marco, and Ben Sadder also made a lot of progress on the data store and Sugar integration. The write and web activity now use the Journal and the data store. Most of the integration work on the Journal-side is largely complete. Marco also spent a lot of time working on the GTK theme that we're going to use with the new images since we're going down that path. Lots of progress has been made here as well.
11. Data store and journal work continues. Tomeu Vizoso has hooked the browser history into the journal and Ben Saller continues working on various parts of the data store. Ben is currently working on getting the data store properly exposed through DBus.


11. In the community: Marc Maurer is making use of the presence service from a C/C++ application, Abiword. He has spent time working on the Abiword collaboration code and added functions to the XO write activity: the ability to set colors and font attributes, implemented more table support, and simple zooming functions. He also cleaned up a lot of the icons in the activity.
12. Dan Williams and Jordan Crouse fixed some problems in the X server on the GX and the video stack. Dan also demonstrated a version of the Read activity that can show itself in the mesh view: you can click on it and a PDF is downloaded between two machines—suddenly two kids are reading it.


At the MIT Media Lab, students of MAS.964 (One Laptop Per Child) have been working since the winter on projects relating to the XO. They will be holding a poster and live demonstration session on Tuesday, May 15, from 2–4 PM at the Media Lab, lower-level atrium (http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=E15).
13. Mitch Bradley released candidate firmware for the B3 SMT build, with:
* enhance diagnostics suitable for manufacturing burn-in tests;
* fast-boot using game keys to force interaction;
* more secure EC command access; and
* a larger frame buffer to prevent pixmap starvation.


Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos set up a mesh demo where each laptop takes a picture at random times and tries to send it over to all other nodes in the mesh network. He has a web page where the aggregate data are displayed, based upon the number of hops between nodes. You can click on the pictures and see what the respective direct neighbors and nodes further than one hop are for the next node (See http://lyme.media.mit.edu/mesh.php). He also measures the rate at which presence information arrives at each node from every other node in the mesh, without doing a single broadcast, but only send frames from neighbor to neighbor. He can thus predict with fairly good accuracy if a node is still present in the mesh.
14. Andres Salomon spent this week on pre-B3/LX debugging. A NAND
chip-select fix (to enable doubling the size of NAND on B3), audio and camera fixes, etc. were committed to the stable kernel. (The image quality of the camera is much improved as a result.)


Junia Anacleto, a visiting scientist at MIT from the Federal University of San Carlos, Brazil, has been working with a small group of Portuguese-speaking students at the King School in Cambridge. The children took to the laptops immediately; they have blogged their experiences (See http://lia.dc.ufscar.br/olpcod), making extensive use of videos they have posted to youtube.
15. Chris Ball compiled a collector bug of issues to fix before the B3 build (See
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1403).

16. Jim Gettys worked on a system-software (primarily power-management-related) specification (See [[Power_Management]]).


Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].
Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].

Revision as of 16:08, 12 May 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 37682]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-05-12

1. Ceibal, Uruguay: President Vasquez inaugurated the first laptop school on Thursday. Ceibal is a small community with only one school of 150 children, so it is truly 1:1. As you might imagine there was tremendous excitement: the children and their families were ecstatic.

Despite the fact that none of the teachers have had experience with computing, they diagnosed a bug in the software: a few of the machines were hanging—nothing could get them to boot fully. The teachers discovered that this was only happening to children with a tilde or ñ in their names. An impressive example of teachers learning to learn! (The bug has been fixed.)

2. Alan Kay, Kim Rose, and the Etoys team (Bert Freudenberg, Ian Piumarta, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace, Kazuhiro Abe, and Maic Masuch) came together for a week-long mini Squeakfest at the OLPC office. It was week of a remarkable progress; highlights include: Burt and Yoshiki's integration of the Sugar presence service into eToys—eToys now supports collaboration over the mesh for sharing eToy objects and scripts, a shared workspace, VOIP, chat, etc; an update on Ian's “dynamically reconfigurable virtual machine”; and Kazuhiro's World Stethoscope project—an eToys extension that takes advantage of the XO's microphone jack to import data into projects (See http://squeakland.jp/abee/tmp/WSN-3A_QuickReference.pdf). Squeakfest07 will be held August 1–3 in Chicago (See http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/index.php).

3. The XO is one of the featured designs at the “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. “Ninety-five percent of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10 percent of the world’s customers,” said Dr. Paul Polak, president of International Development Enterprises and a member of the exhibition’s advisory council. “Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90 percent,” he added.

4. B3 build: Quanta, Mary Lou Jepsen and David Woodhouse arrived in Shanghai (this morning) and have started in on the B3 build. Five B3 laptops are sitting in front of them at the moment, all working. David is working on a debug of suspend/resume. Mary Lou is focusing on the mechanical issues, safety and certification issues. OLPC will get 70 B3 machines for developers.

5. B3 housing: The B3 housing arrived in Cambridge this week. The most prominent new feature is the brightly colored XO on the back cover of the laptop. Other changes include a clean line on the battery housing and thinned out plastic on the front bezel for “glowing” camera and microphone “in-use” indicators. Improvements for robustness include: a steel plate in the keyboard area; a smaller battery cavity; rubber “bunny ears”, thicker bumpers and ribbing made out of pure polycarbonate, a longer keyboard cable, and a water resistance in touch-pad area. Improvements for usage include: increased display tilt; improved keyboard feel and responsiveness; improved touch-pad responsiveness; a gray bezel around the display; improved fit and finish of the buttons; X and O indicators on the touch-pad buttons; and the 400 unique XO color combinations (for IDing laptops in a crowded classroom).

6. Power measurement: Steve Smith and Chris Ball have a B3 XO connected to the tinderbox and have instrumented the power rails. Readings are obtained through a Python program.

7. Power management: This week we merged suspend/resume support in master. So far, it only works on the GX; LX resume is still not working in Linux (it works correctly in firmware testing). Andres Salomon is working on it.

8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley figured out how to access the new EC commands reliably, and documented it. Mitch also improved the audio self-test and used it to measure the speaker performance. Mitch is still working on B3 NAND FLASH issues. Lilian Walter added functionality to play PCM .wav files (in addition to IMA ADPCM .wav files) and is researching IPv6.

9. Presence service: This week was dominated by the run up to get sharing over the mesh working. Lots of bug fixes are in place and the first connect activities are in place and working. Thanks to the Collabora team, Dan Williams, John Palmieri and Marco Gritti. (The video-call activity also made a lot of progress this week.)

10. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso, Marco, and Ben Sadder also made a lot of progress on the data store and Sugar integration. The write and web activity now use the Journal and the data store. Most of the integration work on the Journal-side is largely complete. Marco also spent a lot of time working on the GTK theme that we're going to use with the new images since we're going down that path. Lots of progress has been made here as well.

11. In the community: Marc Maurer is making use of the presence service from a C/C++ application, Abiword. He has spent time working on the Abiword collaboration code and added functions to the XO write activity: the ability to set colors and font attributes, implemented more table support, and simple zooming functions. He also cleaned up a lot of the icons in the activity.

At the MIT Media Lab, students of MAS.964 (One Laptop Per Child) have been working since the winter on projects relating to the XO. They will be holding a poster and live demonstration session on Tuesday, May 15, from 2–4 PM at the Media Lab, lower-level atrium (http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=E15).

Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos set up a mesh demo where each laptop takes a picture at random times and tries to send it over to all other nodes in the mesh network. He has a web page where the aggregate data are displayed, based upon the number of hops between nodes. You can click on the pictures and see what the respective direct neighbors and nodes further than one hop are for the next node (See http://lyme.media.mit.edu/mesh.php). He also measures the rate at which presence information arrives at each node from every other node in the mesh, without doing a single broadcast, but only send frames from neighbor to neighbor. He can thus predict with fairly good accuracy if a node is still present in the mesh.

Junia Anacleto, a visiting scientist at MIT from the Federal University of San Carlos, Brazil, has been working with a small group of Portuguese-speaking students at the King School in Cambridge. The children took to the laptops immediately; they have blogged their experiences (See http://lia.dc.ufscar.br/olpcod), making extensive use of videos they have posted to youtube.

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

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.


Articles

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 37682]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-05-12

1. Ceibal, Uruguay: President Vasquez inaugurated the first laptop school on Thursday. Ceibal is a small community with only one school of 150 children, so it is truly 1:1. As you might imagine there was tremendous excitement: the children and their families were ecstatic.

Despite the fact that none of the teachers have had experience with computing, they diagnosed a bug in the software: a few of the machines were hanging—nothing could get them to boot fully. The teachers discovered that this was only happening to children with a tilde or ñ in their names. An impressive example of teachers learning to learn! (The bug has been fixed.)

2. Alan Kay, Kim Rose, and the Etoys team (Bert Freudenberg, Ian Piumarta, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace, Kazuhiro Abe, and Maic Masuch) came together for a week-long mini Squeakfest at the OLPC office. It was week of a remarkable progress; highlights include: Burt and Yoshiki's integration of the Sugar presence service into eToys—eToys now supports collaboration over the mesh for sharing eToy objects and scripts, a shared workspace, VOIP, chat, etc; an update on Ian's “dynamically reconfigurable virtual machine”; and Kazuhiro's World Stethoscope project—an eToys extension that takes advantage of the XO's microphone jack to import data into projects (See http://squeakland.jp/abee/tmp/WSN-3A_QuickReference.pdf). Squeakfest07 will be held August 1–3 in Chicago (See http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/index.php).

3. The XO is one of the featured designs at the “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. “Ninety-five percent of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10 percent of the world’s customers,” said Dr. Paul Polak, president of International Development Enterprises and a member of the exhibition’s advisory council. “Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90 percent,” he added.

4. B3 build: Quanta, Mary Lou Jepsen and David Woodhouse arrived in Shanghai (this morning) and have started in on the B3 build. Five B3 laptops are sitting in front of them at the moment, all working. David is working on a debug of suspend/resume. Mary Lou is focusing on the mechanical issues, safety and certification issues. OLPC will get 70 B3 machines for developers.

5. B3 housing: The B3 housing arrived in Cambridge this week. The most prominent new feature is the brightly colored XO on the back cover of the laptop. Other changes include a clean line on the battery housing and thinned out plastic on the front bezel for “glowing” camera and microphone “in-use” indicators. Improvements for robustness include: a steel plate in the keyboard area; a smaller battery cavity; rubber “bunny ears”, thicker bumpers and ribbing made out of pure polycarbonate, a longer keyboard cable, and a water resistance in touch-pad area. Improvements for usage include: increased display tilt; improved keyboard feel and responsiveness; improved touch-pad responsiveness; a gray bezel around the display; improved fit and finish of the buttons; X and O indicators on the touch-pad buttons; and the 400 unique XO color combinations (for IDing laptops in a crowded classroom).

6. Power measurement: Steve Smith and Chris Ball have a B3 XO connected to the tinderbox and have instrumented the power rails. Readings are obtained through a Python program.

7. Power management: This week we merged suspend/resume support in master. So far, it only works on the GX; LX resume is still not working in Linux (it works correctly in firmware testing). Andres Salomon is working on it.

8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley figured out how to access the new EC commands reliably, and documented it. Mitch also improved the audio self-test and used it to measure the speaker performance. Mitch is still working on B3 NAND FLASH issues. Lilian Walter added functionality to play PCM .wav files (in addition to IMA ADPCM .wav files) and is researching IPv6.

9. Presence service: This week was dominated by the run up to get sharing over the mesh working. Lots of bug fixes are in place and the first connect activities are in place and working. Thanks to the Collabora team, Dan Williams, John Palmieri and Marco Gritti. (The video-call activity also made a lot of progress this week.)

10. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso, Marco, and Ben Sadder also made a lot of progress on the data store and Sugar integration. The write and web activity now use the Journal and the data store. Most of the integration work on the Journal-side is largely complete. Marco also spent a lot of time working on the GTK theme that we're going to use with the new images since we're going down that path. Lots of progress has been made here as well.

11. In the community: Marc Maurer is making use of the presence service from a C/C++ application, Abiword. He has spent time working on the Abiword collaboration code and added functions to the XO write activity: the ability to set colors and font attributes, implemented more table support, and simple zooming functions. He also cleaned up a lot of the icons in the activity.

At the MIT Media Lab, students of MAS.964 (One Laptop Per Child) have been working since the winter on projects relating to the XO. They will be holding a poster and live demonstration session on Tuesday, May 15, from 2–4 PM at the Media Lab, lower-level atrium (http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=E15).

Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos set up a mesh demo where each laptop takes a picture at random times and tries to send it over to all other nodes in the mesh network. He has a web page where the aggregate data are displayed, based upon the number of hops between nodes. You can click on the pictures and see what the respective direct neighbors and nodes further than one hop are for the next node (See http://lyme.media.mit.edu/mesh.php). He also measures the rate at which presence information arrives at each node from every other node in the mesh, without doing a single broadcast, but only send frames from neighbor to neighbor. He can thus predict with fairly good accuracy if a node is still present in the mesh.

Junia Anacleto, a visiting scientist at MIT from the Federal University of San Carlos, Brazil, has been working with a small group of Portuguese-speaking students at the King School in Cambridge. The children took to the laptops immediately; they have blogged their experiences (See http://lia.dc.ufscar.br/olpcod), making extensive use of videos they have posted to youtube.

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

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.


Articles

Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OLPC:News&oldid=37682"