OLPC:News/2008/Week 25

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the week in review: Week 25, 2008* feel free to comment and update with footnotes and links to the talk page.

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^ Overview

Weekly updates : our new crop of summer interns have been filing weekly project updates, and GSoC interns are discussing their work on the gsoc mailing list. Take a look below and leave them personal feedback on their talk pages.

Calendar : Mark the date --

• This Sunday, Jun 22, in Manhattan : OLPC Hack Day, a NYC Resistor event for hacking the XO.
• July 19, at 10am : OLPC Grasscon, an online conference sponsored by OLPC@Duke.

x Connections

opportunities, people, engagements

Reports from the field:

• SJ, Seth and Alex Levenson each attended parts of a technology and training conference held in Norfolk, VA. It was largely a trade show, but useful connections were made with people from Ericsson, ALION, CSC; the two town-sized floating hospitals maintained by the US Sealift Command; and technologists from Chile, Romania, and Brasil. Attendees generally expressed their support for "targeting the root of the problems facing poor countries, not their symptoms".

From around 1CC:

• Most of the development team has been in Cambridge since the middle of last week, and are staying through this coming Friday. We held a few days of presentations about basic technology for the new interns and staff, with videos being posted to the presentations page.
• We are having our weekly support meeting Sunday at 4pm, as per usual.

Video: Dailymotion is moving forward with their OLPC portal. We are trying to schedule a call between them an Seth, who is pulling together OLPC photo and video streams.

Localization: Sayamindu and SJ are working on setting up localized versions of the olpcwiki for each language.

· Artefacts

projects, events, news, materials

• A number of OLPCers attended FUDCon 2008 here in Boston, notably mstone and Martin Langhoff.

From Sugarlabs:

• A Sugarlabs planet has been set up. A separate server is being prepared over the next two weeks for hosting other tools.

Grassroots updates:

• OLPC Grasscon, an online conference starting at 10am on July 19, organized by OLPC@Duke and Alex Keybl.
• Following up on the Grassroots bootcamp, we are preparing for an end-of-summer gathering to show off work that has been done by our interns and other projects. This is tentatively scheduled for three days starting August 20; stay tuned for details.

From Pilots:

• Two of the three Papua New Guinea pilot schools now have laptops. The third is scheduled for some time this week.

Media:

• A flickr account for OLPC has been created[1]
• Photos from the Papua New Guinea schools have been reposted[2][3] and digg'ed
• ChristophD and Mike Lee took some High quality photos of the XO for stock imagery, posters, graphic design, etc and are available on flickr as well [4]
• If you would like to contribute; edit, upload, manage or promote the photos on the Flickr stream, go to Flickr/account for details

= Fundament

status, deadlines, assumptions, processes

Weekly updates

• Interns @ 1Cc :

  Daniel Drake

  Alex Levenson

  Bobby Powers

  Brian Jordan has been rocking out all week.

  Seth Woodworth and Femslade have been travelling this past week

  Tarun Pondicherry - developing a blog framework

• GSoC efforts :

  Hemant goyal - first text-to-speech integration

  Assim Deodia - command-line talkntype working with WordNet data

  Nirav Patel - publishing code regularly; in need of more mentor assistance to revise milestones

• Other mentored summer projects/internships :

  Rajan Vaish

  Prakhar Agarwal

  Shikhar Bushan - update on tinymail project needed

Process suggestions

• ChristophD writes "We still wanted to rework the Tech internships entry as it's currently only showing the profiles, catered to a different use-case. Any suggestions? Maybe something such as mentors?

Offers of help

• ChristophD is interested in being a mentor for documentation.
• Golla of Finland has offered to make carrying bags for the XO. (but will they look like the Hansel and Gretel bag?) This hinges on our getting some Approved Vendor boilerplate squared away.

Help wanted

• Lucia Lovison is organizing some geography bundles, and wants to work with someone who is teaching about historical geography, and will be looking for help tomorrow in the office.
• We need a booth kit for roadshow presenters, with print and swag components. Suggestions welcome. (some discussion was had with R. Bullington-McGuire).

+ Priorities

milestones, sequences, first and next

Software milestones There is active discussion about what should be prioritized for Update 8.1.1/2 and for 8.2 testing, which is to start in the near future. All who are interested are encouraged to browse the open tickets and our roadmap, and to review or comment on individual bugs.

Basic interfaces

Bookreader : Sayamindu is interested in taking over maintenance of Read after August.

Video : Rob Ochshorn, Roberto Fagá, and Erik Garrison have all been talking about video playback and gstreamer in recent months. Alex L just got [[Video#Elephant's Dream|]] playing flawlessly on an XO at full screen and framerate; and is trying to get bidirectional videoconf working over something like Skype (currently: one direction works, two doesn't).

Demonstrations

Demo build : Alex L continued work on a demonstration build that can show off various codecs, dual boot Ubuntu, and the like.

o Reflection

review, updates, analysis, feedback

Regular technical and software reviews: a short series of in-house presentations were widely appreciated last week by devs and others in Cambridge. Groups in other regions may want to do something similar, if less time-consuming -- feel free to use any of our video footage, and let us know how it works out.

Exhibit gear and handouts: Last week's presentation by OLPC in an exhibit hall would have been smoother with a booth kit for presentations, including press, printed material, swag, and a set of gear packed for checking on a plane.