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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 2008-02-16=
=Laptop News 2008-02-24=


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.
1. Lima: Ivan Krstić, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos spent much of the week working closely with Oscar Becerra Tresierra’s team within the Peruvian ministry of education on the details of the Peru deployment.


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.
2. The Inter-American Development Bank announced that it will finance a pilot project to test whether one-to-one computing can improve teaching and learning in schools in Haiti (the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere). The IDB will make a $3-million grant for the pilot project, which will distribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools. The OLPC Foundation will contribute XO laptops to the project through the Give One Get One program.
Tomeu Vizoso has contributed a patch to Abiword that will fix Write crashing shortly after entering in a collaboration session.


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. Laptop hardware: We have approved an engineering change to a lower-cost stainless steel for the metal components of the laptop. This was done in response to a sharp rise in cost of the particular alloy we had been using. Drop tests and corrosion tests run by Quanta show no change from the current material.


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. Power: Richard Smith has been investigating what it is going to take to provide an off-grid solar system that will be able to run a school server for eight hours a day (the Peru challenge). With SJ Klein's help, he has engaged the community, where he is finding great interest this problem; we will leverage this interest by working with some community testing sites on the long-term testing of a solar-power systems. Specifically, the OLPC chapter at the Illinois Math and Science Academy is talking to Richard about testing solar panels and other materials through a green- energy project they have underway. The same project is already collaborating with a research group at Fermilab studying new energy sources.


A simple Moon phase viewer that includes lunar-eclipse information has been written for the XO laptop. (See [[Moon]]).
5. Embedded controller (EC): Exercising the EC charging system with “spiky” input power has uncovered a bug: the EC seems to get confused. Although it turns on the charge light, the charging circuit is not enabled. Richard is investigating the root cause.


Simon Schampijer updated the Browse activity documentation (Please see [[Browse]]). He also updated the Browse test plan (See [[Tests/Browse]]).
6. Multi-battery charger: Lillian Walter has made excellent progress on the firmware: it now detects battery insert and removal; it enables or disables the charging channels; and it is upgradeable via the USB and serial port. When the prototype hardware is ready, the firmware will be in good shape for testing. Bitworks received the first round of plastic parts off of the tooling and some of the smaller sheet metal parts. These parts are on their way to Gecko for inspection and approval. The new PCB with the design changes for a cooler-running charger is finished and sent out for fabrication. Unless the parts have serious fit problems, the end of February still looks good for the first complete mechanical assembly using these test parts.


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. School server: John Watlington doesn’t have a new build to announce this week; however, he does reports that the build environment seems stabilized (Look for an announcement on server-devel@laptop.org soon). There are three new groups using the server software in anticipation of deployments in Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa; thanks for all of their help testing and improving the software. We are planning for a week-long network test and debug session in Cambridge starting on 25 February. The goal is to recreate some of the scenarios we are seeing in the field in order to prioritize the bug fixes that will make the biggest (positive) difference for our deployments.


Guillaume Desmottes debugged and provided a patch for a problem with Read sharing with Salut (Ticket #6483).
8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a change to the secure-startup process so that it will continue booting even if there is insufficient power to reflash the firmware. This is in response to reports from the field as OLPC begins mass deployments; upgrades were leaving some machines “stuck”—they would not boot without upgrading the firmware, but did not have the redundant power sources (both battery and line power) required for upgrading the flash.


Simon added a 'Set multicast rate' option to the Sugar control panel (Ticket #6461).
9. Schedules/releases: Release Candidate (RC) 2, Build 691 went through testing this week. We are already working on RC 3 as there were some important bugs found with mesh sharing, translations that are ready to go, and activity updates that need to get in. Build 693 is available this weekend for developer-only testing—it is not signed yet. At the same time we are trying to wrap up Update 1, we have already started collecting requirements for Update 1.1 based on feedback from our first deployments (Uruguay, Mongolia and Peru).


Arjun Sarwal continues to work on the Measure activity. He has explored various built-in peripheral devices/sensors of the XO, including:
We are looking for some help from the community for testing builds as the become available—especially as we get close to the final Update 1 release candidate. Please visit the test wiki pages ([[Test_issues]]) to get started.
* 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.


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. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta spent the first part of the week testing the PO files of all languages for errors. The testing was followed up by a massive push of all translations to the master Git repository at dev.laptop.org in order to ensure that they are included in Update 1. This also required the involvement of the module maintainers, as they had to release new versions of the module or activity they maintain.


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.
Localization is becoming a larger part of our efforts and synchronization of localization slows the release process. We need a strategy that will allow for retroactive localization so that we do not have to do software releases in order to pick up additional language support.


Edgar Ceballos has translated the “Getting Started” pages in to Spanish (See http://laptop.org/es/gettingstarted and [[PO-laptop.org-gettingstarted-es]]).
Sayamindu has been working on enhancing the glossary for the translators, so that they can define a standard translation for commonly used terms, and also to ensure consistency between translations done by different people on different files. This involved taking into account all terms that are repeated more than
once in the set of PO files that we have, and creating a glossary PO template (POT) file. He has initialized a discussion in the localization mailing list, so that translators can provide their inputs, and once we reach a consensus, we will start utilizing the glossary in Pootle to ensure consistent translation.


Usman Mansour reports that an XO laptop user manual in the Pashto and Dari language has been completed.
Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, our volunteers from Afghanistan, report that Update 1, XO Bundled, XO Core are complete. 3000 strings (12%) in Etoys are also complete.
As a demonstration, electronic versions of Afghan textbooks (two Dari and two Pashto) were downloaded from the ministry of education website and successfully tested on the XO laptop. Also, an electronic picture book of traffic signs in English and Dari was prepared. The team also developed a Dari weblog of the OLPC project, which is updated daily from the laptop.org website (Please see http://www.olpc.blogsky.com).


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.
An XO laptop user manual in the Pashto and Dari language has been completed 100% percent. Alas, the volunteer working on this project went to visit his family in Afghanistan and is currently stranded in a remote region due to heavy snow. We are awaiting his safe return.


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]]).
11. Presence service (PS): Dafydd Harries spent this week working on Gadget, the Jabber server extension for activity indexing. It is at the point where it can be told about activities and answer queries about which activities exist. Morgan Collett released Chat-35 for Update 1 with the updated translations and a fix for the problem with copying web links (Ticket #6066).


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
Daf and Morgan reached agreement with Brian Pepple (who does the Telepathy packaging for Fedora) to build in the F-7/F-8/Rawhide branches with minimal side effects for Fedora users.
couldn't get it to work and gave up.)


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.
Guillaume Desmottes completely removed the “registered” flag from sugar's profile (#6295) and investigated and wrote a fix for Ticket #6299: “presence service should disable salut in the presence of school servers on mesh.” He also started to design and implement a PS test framework


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.
Morgan did some preliminary testing for Guillaume's fix for #6299. It will require further testing this as soon as it is in Joyride. In a related bug (Ticket #6475), Morgan fixed a problem that was causing Pippy to crash on launch when there was no Telepathy connection.


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.
12. Kernel: Andres Salomon dealt with the local root exploit issue; he also merged 2.6.25-rc1 into master, a “painful” process. He continued the process of pushing stuff upstream: battery driver cleanups, lxfb stuff, etc. Andres realized that we still have ancient gxfb patches in our tree; he therefore got a GX sparrow box up for
testing these kernel patches.


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.
13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso fixed two issues, one in Sugar and the other in the Journal, that caused some translations to not appear in the UI. This got into an Update 1 build. Tomeu also released a new Paint activity with updated translations. And he has started implementing a redesign of the Home view and the Frame.


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/).
Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy.


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.
Dan Bricklin, Luke Closs, Manusheel Guptam, and Eben Eliason have continued to make progress on the SocialCalc project (See http://www.peapodcast.com/sgi/olpc/). Recently added features include: copy/cut/paste; basic support for CSV and tab-delimited data; merge/unmerge cells; insert/delete row/column; sort. A new multiplication table sample document has also been added. The performance of operations such as sorting is quite good, making the activity useful for maintaining lists of hundreds of rows of data. Graphing support is at an initial stage of development. They are coordinating with Edward Baafi, Luke Closs, Tomeu Vizoso, Marco Gritti, and Todd Whiteman to develop a communication channel between Python and Javascript code through PyXPCOM.


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.
The University of São Paulo LSI research team has been in discussion with Manu and Eben in regard to the Paint activity. “Smudge” and “Blur” brushes will be added soon.


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.
Arjun Sarwal reports progress on a number of sensor-related fronts:
* Arjun completed work on Measure Activity, writing its log files in CSV format in anticipation of integration with the spreadsheet activity (the plan is to have Measure generating a separate Journal entry for each log file it creates so that other activities can access these data);
* he worked with the Matplotlib packages to integrate within Measure spreadsheet-like interface and graphing interface (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs/pass1.png);
* he fixed a Rainbow-related bug that was preventing Measure from writing its log files and released an updated version, which also includes updated translations, for Update 1;
* he demonstrated TurtleArt with Sensors at the the Learning workshop (A group of attendees programmed the turtle to log sensor values at a periodic interval within a set of axes—see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure#Screen_shots);
* Edward Baafi made $2 IO/sensor board that plugs into the USB port of the XO (the board provides two 10-bit ADC inputs).


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.
14. Power management: Chris Ball worked on an API for activities to temporarily inhibit suspend, motivated by the continuous measurement mode of Distance (which does not currently inhibit suspend but should). Chris is looking at inhibiting suspend whenever the camera or microphone is in use. Chris also released a new version of OHM.


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.
15. Releases: Dennis Gilmore spent the week working on Update 1. He also spent some time working with Mako Hill on packaging. He also spent time moving whats on mock.laptop.org onto pilgrim.laptop.org.


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.
16. Security: Michael Stone provided software for fixes to several bugs and changes of policy related to root shells: “become_root is broken” (Ticket #6316); “use sudo to get root; limit root to olpc” (Ticket #5537). He also fixed a problem with installing Adobe Flash (Ticket #6411). He analyzed the challenge of USB-based content autoinstallation (Tickets #6425 and #6430). He pushed Marcus Leech’s “olpc-audit” into Joyride and ran it as a means of being proactive in regard to “some dirs in /usr are not readable by the user olpc” (Ticket #5985). Michael also discussed syscalls for isolated “prototype processes” with Andres and made some small updates to the build-system wiki documentation.


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]]).
17. OLPC Health: Many thanks to all the participants who made last week's conference call a success. The call covered discussions on a number of aspects ranging from the alignment of the Health initiative with OLPC's vision, to detailed discussions on the organization of content and health peripherals. The minutes and notes are posted on the Health Meetings page in the wiki (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health_meetings).

18. OLPC Pakistan: The Pakistan team has undertaken two Quranic studies activities: Quran Read activity and Qiraat activity (recitation of the Quran). Quran Read was created by modifying the Read activity. Waqas Toor has developed prototype of Qiraat Activity. The package is created using Helix media library and Evince library for PDF files.

Dr. Habib Khan reports that the Pakistan Software Export Board has sponsors two interns: we welcome Ms. Sheerehman, a graduate student of IT Management in IIU, and Mr. Asif Rehman a fresh BS from Kohat University, NWFP, Pakistan. They will be helping us in development and testing of OLPC activities over the next three months. Many thanks to PSEP for honoring our request of sponsoring these interns; we look forward for their continued support in the future.

19. Google Gears: SJ spoke to Othman Laraki and Ben Lisbakken of the Google Gears project and with Zvi Boshernitzan of Kiva, who are all working on making Gears a tool for offline mediawiki browsing. They offered help getting Gears integrated into the Browse activity and noted that a patch to make Gears work with FF3-minus-extensions has already been submitted (for use on a mobile platform) so most of the work has been done. Ben will follow up with people working on Browse, and will offer a userspace demo for Wikipedia users, as prelude to getting offline-reader hooks into MediaWiki proper.

20. In the community: Iain Davidson has started a Zine on the wiki (See [[Weekly_zine/0]]).

Jonathan Blocksom and Mike Lee have been helping organize the local DC meet-up groups.

Olin College is hosting its second OLPC jam this weekend, focusing more on local student involvement, coding, and curation for the CC LiveContent DVD (see below). Nikki Lee and the 20-person Olin chapter are organizing the event.

With help from Jamil Moledina, Executive Director Game Developers Conference, we're hoping to help connect XO groups with game developers at next week’s conference in San Francisco.

The XO laptop and Sugar interface will be featured in exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art and a Saatchi and Saatchi event in NYC this week.

Christoph Derndorfer reports that OLPC Austria will have a presence at CeBIT 2008, which takes place in Hannover during the first week in March.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 13:43, 24 February 2008

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 111598]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-02-24

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. 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.

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).

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.

A simple Moon phase viewer that includes lunar-eclipse information has been written for the XO laptop. (See Moon).

Simon Schampijer updated the Browse activity documentation (Please see Browse). He also updated the Browse test plan (See Tests/Browse).

Chris Ball worked with Richard Boulanger ahead of his release of Csound samples—Pippy is now able to list and play CSound *.csd compositions.

Guillaume Desmottes debugged and provided a patch for a problem with Read sharing with Salut (Ticket #6483).

Simon added a 'Set multicast rate' option to the Sugar control panel (Ticket #6461).

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.

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.

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.

Edgar Ceballos has translated the “Getting Started” pages in to Spanish (See http://laptop.org/es/gettingstarted and PO-laptop.org-gettingstarted-es).

Usman Mansour reports that an XO laptop user manual in the Pashto and Dari language has been completed.

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.

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).

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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# 111598]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-02-24

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. 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.

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).

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.

A simple Moon phase viewer that includes lunar-eclipse information has been written for the XO laptop. (See Moon).

Simon Schampijer updated the Browse activity documentation (Please see Browse). He also updated the Browse test plan (See Tests/Browse).

Chris Ball worked with Richard Boulanger ahead of his release of Csound samples—Pippy is now able to list and play CSound *.csd compositions.

Guillaume Desmottes debugged and provided a patch for a problem with Read sharing with Salut (Ticket #6483).

Simon added a 'Set multicast rate' option to the Sugar control panel (Ticket #6461).

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.

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.

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.

Edgar Ceballos has translated the “Getting Started” pages in to Spanish (See http://laptop.org/es/gettingstarted and PO-laptop.org-gettingstarted-es).

Usman Mansour reports that an XO laptop user manual in the Pashto and Dari language has been completed.

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.

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).

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

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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. 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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