OLPC Rochester, NY/Event history/26February2009

1. 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.

2. 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.
3. Bill Hickok gave a presentation on getting started with Python.
   • He reviewed the history of the language and some of its advantageous features.
4. 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.
5. The group agreed to support Professor Stephen Jacobs' Honors Seminar on Developing for the OLPC XO (see the Projects section).