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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 2008-03-16=
=Laptop News 2008-03-22=


1. Deployment: Walter Bender visited the technology support team for the NYC public schools to discuss issues of connectivity and security in regard to a pending pilot. John Watlington and Martin Langhoff will make a follow-up visit this coming week. Walter also had a follow-up meeting with Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, the MIT student who has been helping us in Mongolia: Enky is spending the next ten days in Mongolia--his spring break--and will visit the two pilot schools, engage the local universities, and touch base with the Mongolian MoE. A newly minted [[Deployment Guide]] is now posted publicly on the wiki, where it continues to be refined. Much of the remainder of the week was spent working closely with the Tech Team on preparing a candidate Update.1 release build (and process) for Peru and Mexico.
Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan announced the launching of an OLPC pilot project at the Atlas Public School, located in the slums between Rawalpind and Islamabad. (Many thanks to our Afghan volunteers, Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, who discovered the school and will be mentoring students and their teacher. The area is economically poor and lacks security measures and basic facilities. There are about 100 children (Grades 1–6), mostly Afghan refugees—many of them work during the first part of the day to support their families and attend school in the afternoon. We distributed 39 XO localized in Dari and Pashto, official languages of Afghanistan.


2. Haiti: David Cavallo and Claudia Urrea met with Guy Serge Pompilus, coordinator for the laptop initiative in Haiti, and the InterAmerican Development in Washington to continue planning for the initial roll-out schools and to build the team in Haiti to support the project. The bank has contracted a group to perform assessment and we were able gain alignment on how to broaden the framework beyond the school walls. Edith Ackermann, Tony Earls, and Maya Carlson are developing additional assessment instruments.
1. UA Birmingham: Walter Bender met with the dean of the school of education at the University of Alabama. He and his colleagues are enthusiastic about the laptop program in the Birmingham schools and plan to engage at every level: teacher preparation, accessibility, curriculum development, support, and evaluation.


3. Presentation: On Thursday Andriani Ferti presented at the TRUST seminar (the Team for Research in Ubiquitous and Secure Technology) at the Department of Computer Science at UC Berkeley about One Laptop Per Child. The presentation was titled "One Laptop per Child: Bringing to the children of the world an innovative and secure educational tool," and focused, more generally, on the mission of OLPC and the technology that is being used in and for the XO laptops. It further included a brief description of the security platform of OLPC, given the subject of the TRUST seminar, which is mostly concerned about security technology issues.
2. Learning Workshop: David Cavallo and the Learning Team ran a Learning workshop this week. Attendees included delegations from Thailand, Haiti, and Illinois.


4. Human Resources: Christopher Niland has joined the staff of the Chairman's office. Chris has seven years experience in meeting planning and administrative support. Martin Langhoff, New Zealand resident and OLPC School Server Architect, made his in-office debut this week. Martin will be here for the next two weeks and finds New England a bit colder than he is used to. After 18 months at OLPC Ivan Krstić is moving on to other opportunities. We'd like to thank Ivan for his energy and contributions to the project. He contributed to almost every aspect of the project, most recently helping with our deployments in Uruguay and Peru. His innovative work on the Bitfrost security platform was widely recognized and earned him a Technology Review 35 Award in 2007.
3. Laptop activation: Scott Ananian finished documenting the process for activation key generation. This is a critical issue for deployment as it enables the in-country teams to distribute the activation process to a more manageable level of granularity. “Trusted” individuals now have the ability to generate activation keys through a simple web interface by simply uploading a list of XO laptop serial numbers.


5. Summer of Code: SoC is accepting Mentor applications now. If you are interested in becoming a Mentor (See http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mentor_step1.html). Students can apply beginning Monday, 3/24.
4. Deployment Guide: With input from the Tech Team, the Learning Team, Brightstar, and the Deployment Team, we now have a Deployment Guide. The guide covers planning, execution, and support, along with some tips based upon our experience in trial deployments around the world; a sample deployment schedule; a sample workshop schedule; a check list to guide you through the deployment process; and a glossary of OLPC terms.


6. Nepali Localization: Shankar Pokharel reports that OLPC Nepal developers organized a translation fest, "Translation Nite-out" with participation of 12 volunteers. The result: Nepali localization of all projects put in Pootle (except Etoys) is complete. Thanks to all who gave up their Friday night on behalf of the project (See http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com/2008/03/yaay-translations-over.html).
5. On display: The Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art is acquiring two XO laptops for their permanent collection. MOMA's Paul Galloway said, “We realize that social betterment is the goal of One Laptop Per Child, not the pursuit of design accolades. Nonetheless, we believe the design of the XO Laptop and the ideas it embodies belong in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.”


7. Squeak: Kathleen Harness from the Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education (MSTE) at the University of Illinois reports that www.squeakcmi.org has a Library Collection of OLPC/Etoys projects. Enjoy!
6. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we are running a new version of Pootle that is significantly faster and should make tasks such as merging of PO files against new POT files easier and less time consuming. He also introduced a patch into the Pootle server to enable translators to view translations in an intermediate language, e.g., an Aymara translator can view pre-existing Spanish translations rather than just the English-language original. We currently manage ~1600 PO files on the server and have more than 450 volunteer translators signed up. More translators are always welcome!


8. Drupal: Pablo Floresve installed Drupal in a XO laptop; he is "amazed with how fast it runs!!" There has been subsequent discussion about it being a great tool for blogging from the XO laptops (See http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-olpc and [[Drupal]]). There is also an active discussion thread around journalism tools (See [[Talk:Learning_activities/Journalism]]).
Prabhas Pokharel, Anjali Lohani and Tsering Lama Sherpa from Harvard University have joined the Nepali Language localization team. Now the team of 10 contributors is doing lots of progress in Nepali localization.


9. Bay Area Learning Workshops?: Kassie Petrick has inquired as to whether there are plans for Learning Workshops scheduled for the West Coast? She received a laptop that she has been using in her 7th grade classroom but would like to do a lot more with it. She is interested to be "part of a community of people (especially teachers) who want to talk up the XO." She'd also "love to have some kids participate."
7. Support: Adam Holt reports that Yianni Galanis explained the latest wireless mesh testing results at last Sunday's support meeting. The Support Team has responded to an increasing number of support emails as final Give1Get1 shipments are now underway. Adam has been discussing plans for repair centers with various volunteer groups and the OLPC partners. He is also recruiting to fill a Support Specialist Position.
10. Bishwamitra/Bashuki Journals: Bryan Berry et al. have been documenting their Nepali deployments (See
[[Bishwamitra Journal]] and [[Bashuki Journal]]). Ram Singh is designing a power distribution rack for the XO's using locally available materials. Mahabir Pun and Dev Mohanty are using inexpensive point-to-point radios to connect the two remote schools to
each other and to the Internet. They have posted their equipment specifications, network diagrams, and configurations in the wiki. You can read Sulochan Acharya's blog post "Nepal: ICT in Education and OLPC" http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/182 for an overview.


11. Wireless Testing: Giannis Galanis, Kim Quirk and number of volunteers set up a collaboration and networking testbed in an RF-quiet area, the town of Peabody, near Boston. We intend on using this testbed to measure performance of the system under a variety of networking conditions (Watch [[Collaboration_Network_Testbed]]).
8. Firmware: Richard Smith and Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D14 for inclusion into Update.1. The key change is in regard to the boot process when there is a firmware update available: Currently, the laptop will not boot unless there is external power connected; with Q2D14, the laptop will boot regardless of the availability of external power, deferring the firmware upgrade to the next time that external power is present.


Ricardo Carrano released two testing tools that ease testing of the networking stack. The Lab Rat is a small collection of python scripts that aid a tester to send "instructions" to all nodes participating in a mesh cloud. Instructions can be:
9. School Server: John Watlington reports that a new School Server build (160) is now available. It provides:
* Commands to be executed
* an improved ejabberd server, which might improve reliability under load;
* Files to be written or replaced
* web caching (not enabled by default);
* Tests to be performed (future releases)
* the configuration of server domain name has been automated, making setup much easier;
* automatic installation is now supported by the default ISO image; and
* miscellaneous bug fixes.
Release notes and installation instruction are available (See [[XS Installing Software#OLPC XS 160]]). Martin Langhoff will be starting to work on the School Server beginning next week.


MAE is a small collection of python scripts that mimics traffic from an XO activity. With MAE you can select:
10. Multi-battery charger: Richard is happy with the way that the new PCB is performing; Bitworks is building several fully loaded PCBs so that we can test all 15 channels at once. Lilian Walter has stated the adaption of the laptop NiMH charging code so that it can be used in the multi-battery charger. Richard will fold Lillian's modifications in to a test version of EC code and verify that the charging still works correctly.
* A packet size
* An interval between the packets
* An optional random standard deviation to make the interval more user-like
* The number of packets each participating node will send


Analysis of packet traces captures during congestion testing confirmed that we can reduce retransmisions by increasing the contention window. Marvell will incorporate automatic adaptation of the CW parameters in an upcoming release of the firmware.
11. Wireless: Ricardo Carrano's testing uncovered some problems in the wireless driver. Mesh forwarding doesn't always start and ethtool reports back bogus statistics. Ricardo wrote a python tool that reads a list of XOs from the presence service, initiates pings to them (in random order) and keeps track of the communication statistics—very useful for stressing path discovery. He also started to test the tuning of the contention window parameters in the WLAN radio. Marvell released wireless firmware 5.110.22.p6. It adds control of probe responses (including disabling them completely) and fixes warm reboot and host wakeup bugs.


12. Read Testing: Chris Ball and Michael Stone worked on debugging Read activity sharing. They managed to catch a sharing failure with full debugging logs turned on; analysis is forthcoming.
12. Active Antennae: 2000 Active Antennae are en route from GoldPeak to OLPC. Marvell has released stand-alone firmware that allows operation on any channel that the user selects. We don't have the necessary patches for programming/controlling the antennae in our wireless driver yet.


By reviewing Read's source code, they noticed two bugs:
13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso continues to work on the Sugar redesign. The only task left to reach the “no regressions” point is implementation of activity-launch feedback. Tomeu helped Eben Eliason to set up sugar-jhbuild and his personal sugar trees. Eben has already sent several useful patches (See [https://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/eben/sugar;a=summary]). Tomeu is doing more work on speeding up activity startup—the only remaining functional issue was solved. We now need to find a way to integrate it inside the Rainbow security model (thanks Michael Stone, Chris Ball, Robert McQueen, and John Palmieri).
* When someone joins a shared Read activity, they choose a peer to download the shared file from at random, rather than always choosing the person who originally started the sharing. The person they choose this way might not yet have finished downloading the PDF themselves (Ticket #6736).
* Read does not save files it opens to the Journal at all; this decision was made to avoid saving many copies of the same PDF. This breaks the idea of a teacher sharing a PDF (permanently) with their class, so the design decision should be revisited (Ticket #6729).


The good news is that chat and write work well. In simple laptop to laptop mesh mode, ten laptops can collaborate to write a report, and twenty one laptops can chat. The bad news is that the DHCP problems we are experiencing appear due to a driver/firmware problem.
Simon Schampijer continues to work on the graphical user interface for the Sugar control panel. The basic design is done (See
[[Sugar Control Panel#GUI for the command line tool]]). Code of the work in progress can be checked out from git (See [http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/erikos/sugar;a=summary]).


John Watlington has verified that fixes to a couple of telepathy-salut problems (Tickets #6299 and #6728) do indeed work as expected. (Telepathy-salut is our collaboration middleware when using a simple laptop-to-laptop mesh.)
Dennis Gilmore is working to make Sugar work as a desktop option; he has also started on a set of Fedora packaging guidelines for Sugar activities. For Fedora 9, we should have available the option to do a “yum groupinstall sugar-desktop” you will then be able to select Sugar from gdm/kdm with a set of activities that work. Sugar is currently available in Fedora 8 and Rawhide, although the packaging still needs some work and does not yet setup gdm/kdm.


13. Translation/I18N: Sayamindu reports that a project for translating the OLPC website (http://laptop.org) is now in Pootle (https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/website/). (Previously, the PO files were stored in the wiki, where they were accessible, but not as easy to manage.
14. Activities: Chris Ball wrote and released a new activity, “Words”, a translating dictionary with speech synthesis in English/French/German/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish. Morgan Collett has started on a post-Update.1 Chat.


14. School Server: Martin Langhoff arrived in Cambridge on Tuesday, and immediately started planning the work to be done to bring the school server to maturity, spending much of the week in discussion with John, Jim, Michael, Scott, Henry, and Kim. Over the next week we hope to revamp the school server wiki pages to reflect the new vision.
Erik Blankinship reports that the MediaMods team has built a map activity—it allows children to add images and videos to maps. Erik envisions children will use it for storytelling, history, and science projects. Some features include: saving and annotating map locations; grabbing screen shots of map locations so they can be embedded into other activities; visualizing how many media are clustered in a certain area; and filtering which media are displayed on the map by searching their tags (as set in the journal or in record). Download [http://mediamods.com/public-svn/map-activity/tags/xo/map-1.xo] to give it a try.


In the meantime, there is a quick bug fix release for the school server software, Build 161. The main reason for this is the availability of new firmware (22.p6) for the Active Antennas which allows them to survive a reboot.
15. Builds: Chris wrote a script to automatically create customization keys. It can pull down the latest version of activities for a Peru, Mexico or G1G1 build, or can include every activity it knows about. We used the script to pull together the Mexico customization key. Scott and Dennis continue to shepherd Update.1.


15. Power: Afghanistan, among other deployments, needs an off grid solution for powering the laptops. Richard Smith looked into using 10W panels as a solution. Afghanistan turns out to be one of the best places on earth to do solar: they have an average of 315 sunny days per year.
16. Kernel: Andres Salomon worked with Jordan Krause to find and fix some xorg amd driver bugs. He wrote patches for #6015, #6670 and reworked some framebuffer patches; and, of course, he argued with upstream.


Schedules on the Multi-Battery Charger has been delayed by three weeks due to problems in tooling at the manufacturer. Richard received a fully populated 15 -channel multi-battery charger board(s) with the new charging circuit.
17. Presence: Morgan implemented an alternative patch for Ticket #6572 to reduce the key size in Avahi TXT records, by replacing the public key file (which isn't used at this stage) with a shorter record. This doesn't break “friending” as did the previous patch, as the whole stack uses a consistent value for the key, for calculating the JID, etc. Morgan is awaiting testing with salut to see the impact on scalability. Morgan discovered that sync_friends wasn't working; he provided a patch (Ticket #6690). This adds friends to the Jabber-server roster, which will be used by the server-side component, Gadget. Guillaume Desmottes worked on the Avahi abstraction in Salut (Ticket #6658) and tested Read sharing with wake-on-multicast activated (Ticket #6537).


16: Presence Service: Sjoerd Simons analysed and fixed a bug in salut where chat stopped working in both directions after a short period of time (Ticket #6575).
18. Rainbow: Michael Stone prototyped a network isolation primitive described by Daniel Bernstein ([http://cr.yp.to/unix/disablenetwork.html]), demoed an activity in which a web browser and an HTTP server work together to examine the filesystem.


Guillaume Desmottes is doing a refactoring to abstract Avahi bits in salut; he has decided to refactor the activity management as well with the goal to make it easier to maintain. He also investigated sharing problems with Record (Ticket #6716) and released telepathy-salut 0.2.3 (Ticket #6728).
19. Squeak: Robert Krahn reports that there is a new Squeak project, BlockAttack, available for download ([http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/projects/olpc/]).


Morgan Collette provided some assistance to community ejabberd operators: we now have four working community servers with more to come (See [[Community_Jabber_Servers]]). He also ported Chat to use show_object_in_journal to send URLs to Browse instead of copying them to the clipboard; he refactored the messiest bit of telepathy boilerplate out of Chat so it can go into sugar.presence post Update.1.
20. OLPC Health: Dr Walter H. Curioso joins us as an adviser in our efforts. Dr Curioso is a research professor in Epidemiology, STD/HIV, and Health Informatics at the School of Public Health and Administration at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru. His research focus is on how to use technology to promote global health in developing countries and his latest projects involve using cell phones to collect and transmit adverse events, and using personal digital assistants to assess sexual risk and antiretroviral medication adherence among HIV patients in Lima.


17. Sugar: Eben Eliason worked with interested parties on the mailing lists to complete the first revision of the sugar-iconify script for converting SVGs to the format sugar expects, with all necessary entities (See [[Sugar-iconify]]), and compiled a comprehensive overview of the icon creation process (See [[Making_Sugar_Icons]]).
The next conference call is scheduled for Sunday, 16 March. See the Health Meetings page ([[Health_meetings|Health meetings]]) for details.

Eben continued his foray into sugar-jhbuild, making several commits to improve the visual appearance and interactions within the Sugar redesign. Among them, he hid the "invite to <activity>" option on buddy palettes when the buddy is already in the activity, and when our current activity is the Journal, since the action doesn't make sense in these contexts. He also ensured that oneself is always represented in the people edge of the Frame. Finally, he made several minor visual and layout changes to match the designs, including improved grouping of buddies in the Neighborhood and a simple sinusoidal pulsing algorithm for launching activities.

Tomeu Visozo continued working on the shell redesign, implementing new shell notifications (See [[Designs/Frame#12]]). He has also done some quick measuring of memory usage when using a launcher process and thus reusing the python interpreter. Preliminary results suggest that we could save around 3.5MB per activity, but only for activities written in python (most of them). This memory saving would allow us to use the composite X extension, that in turn will make the UI much more responsive.

Simon Schampijer reviewed the Sugar redesign patches submitted by Tomeu, did some more work on the control panel, and released a new version of memorize. (Memorize did not play sound when using with another locale than English. This was the same issue TamTam had described in #3165. Thanks to Victor Lazzarini for all the effort to spot this hard to find bug.)

18. Schedules/Releases: Update.1-699 has been tested this week and a short list of the blocking bugs is being managed by Michael Stone to get to the final Update.1 release candidate. It should be out next week. Scott Ananian has agree to call for proposals and ideas for the upcoming "State of the Update.2" mini-conference, which is where we will be planning Update.2--targeting development finish in 1 - 1.5 months, release in 3 months. Please send your proposals to cscott at laptop.org (and copy devel at laptop.org).

19. Support: Adam Holt reports working with relentlessly unstoppable support volunteers Alan Claver and Sandy Culver on dozens of missing shipping/payment orders, broken hardware dilemmas where the donor has no escalation path, and 656/Update.1 "what's going on" tickets; he began more serious repair center discussions on 12-person conference call, with an increasing number of serious worldwide plans emerging (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Repair_center_locations). Adam ran small Sunday support meeting, due to invitation failing to go out as a result of a mailing-list hiccup last weekend.

20. Other: Michail had a conference call with Michael Connet of Nortel's LearnIT and his team of high school students (which includes the famous "ffm" ;-) to discuss further advancing their work on XO tutorial animations (See http://nortellearnit.org/One_Laptop_Per_Child/OLPC_Networking_Tutorials/).

Belkin has donated some USB-ethernet dongles and USB memory sticks. Thanks to Josh Seal!

Bernie Innocenti reports that he presented the laptop at the ACP-EU joint parliamentary assembly in Ljubljana, Slovenia; he demoed the laptop to the President of the European Union Danilo Türk and distributed over 60 laptops to the delegates of African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. He is working with Giulia d'Amico and Walter De Brouwer on the foundation of OLPC Europe.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 21:36, 22 March 2008

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Laptop News 2008-03-22

1. Deployment: Walter Bender visited the technology support team for the NYC public schools to discuss issues of connectivity and security in regard to a pending pilot. John Watlington and Martin Langhoff will make a follow-up visit this coming week. Walter also had a follow-up meeting with Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, the MIT student who has been helping us in Mongolia: Enky is spending the next ten days in Mongolia--his spring break--and will visit the two pilot schools, engage the local universities, and touch base with the Mongolian MoE. A newly minted Deployment Guide is now posted publicly on the wiki, where it continues to be refined. Much of the remainder of the week was spent working closely with the Tech Team on preparing a candidate Update.1 release build (and process) for Peru and Mexico.

2. Haiti: David Cavallo and Claudia Urrea met with Guy Serge Pompilus, coordinator for the laptop initiative in Haiti, and the InterAmerican Development in Washington to continue planning for the initial roll-out schools and to build the team in Haiti to support the project. The bank has contracted a group to perform assessment and we were able gain alignment on how to broaden the framework beyond the school walls. Edith Ackermann, Tony Earls, and Maya Carlson are developing additional assessment instruments.

3. Presentation: On Thursday Andriani Ferti presented at the TRUST seminar (the Team for Research in Ubiquitous and Secure Technology) at the Department of Computer Science at UC Berkeley about One Laptop Per Child. The presentation was titled "One Laptop per Child: Bringing to the children of the world an innovative and secure educational tool," and focused, more generally, on the mission of OLPC and the technology that is being used in and for the XO laptops. It further included a brief description of the security platform of OLPC, given the subject of the TRUST seminar, which is mostly concerned about security technology issues.

4. Human Resources: Christopher Niland has joined the staff of the Chairman's office. Chris has seven years experience in meeting planning and administrative support. Martin Langhoff, New Zealand resident and OLPC School Server Architect, made his in-office debut this week. Martin will be here for the next two weeks and finds New England a bit colder than he is used to. After 18 months at OLPC Ivan Krstić is moving on to other opportunities. We'd like to thank Ivan for his energy and contributions to the project. He contributed to almost every aspect of the project, most recently helping with our deployments in Uruguay and Peru. His innovative work on the Bitfrost security platform was widely recognized and earned him a Technology Review 35 Award in 2007.

5. Summer of Code: SoC is accepting Mentor applications now. If you are interested in becoming a Mentor (See http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mentor_step1.html). Students can apply beginning Monday, 3/24.

6. Nepali Localization: Shankar Pokharel reports that OLPC Nepal developers organized a translation fest, "Translation Nite-out" with participation of 12 volunteers. The result: Nepali localization of all projects put in Pootle (except Etoys) is complete. Thanks to all who gave up their Friday night on behalf of the project (See http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com/2008/03/yaay-translations-over.html).

7. Squeak: Kathleen Harness from the Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education (MSTE) at the University of Illinois reports that www.squeakcmi.org has a Library Collection of OLPC/Etoys projects. Enjoy!

8. Drupal: Pablo Floresve installed Drupal in a XO laptop; he is "amazed with how fast it runs!!" There has been subsequent discussion about it being a great tool for blogging from the XO laptops (See http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-olpc and Drupal). There is also an active discussion thread around journalism tools (See Talk:Learning_activities/Journalism).

9. Bay Area Learning Workshops?: Kassie Petrick has inquired as to whether there are plans for Learning Workshops scheduled for the West Coast? She received a laptop that she has been using in her 7th grade classroom but would like to do a lot more with it. She is interested to be "part of a community of people (especially teachers) who want to talk up the XO." She'd also "love to have some kids participate."

10. Bishwamitra/Bashuki Journals: Bryan Berry et al. have been documenting their Nepali deployments (See Bishwamitra Journal and Bashuki Journal). Ram Singh is designing a power distribution rack for the XO's using locally available materials. Mahabir Pun and Dev Mohanty are using inexpensive point-to-point radios to connect the two remote schools to each other and to the Internet. They have posted their equipment specifications, network diagrams, and configurations in the wiki. You can read Sulochan Acharya's blog post "Nepal: ICT in Education and OLPC" http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/182 for an overview.

11. Wireless Testing: Giannis Galanis, Kim Quirk and number of volunteers set up a collaboration and networking testbed in an RF-quiet area, the town of Peabody, near Boston. We intend on using this testbed to measure performance of the system under a variety of networking conditions (Watch Collaboration_Network_Testbed).

Ricardo Carrano released two testing tools that ease testing of the networking stack. The Lab Rat is a small collection of python scripts that aid a tester to send "instructions" to all nodes participating in a mesh cloud. Instructions can be:

  • Commands to be executed
  • Files to be written or replaced
  • Tests to be performed (future releases)

MAE is a small collection of python scripts that mimics traffic from an XO activity. With MAE you can select:

  • A packet size
  • An interval between the packets
  • An optional random standard deviation to make the interval more user-like
  • The number of packets each participating node will send

Analysis of packet traces captures during congestion testing confirmed that we can reduce retransmisions by increasing the contention window. Marvell will incorporate automatic adaptation of the CW parameters in an upcoming release of the firmware.

12. Read Testing: Chris Ball and Michael Stone worked on debugging Read activity sharing. They managed to catch a sharing failure with full debugging logs turned on; analysis is forthcoming.

By reviewing Read's source code, they noticed two bugs:

  • When someone joins a shared Read activity, they choose a peer to download the shared file from at random, rather than always choosing the person who originally started the sharing. The person they choose this way might not yet have finished downloading the PDF themselves (Ticket #6736).
  • Read does not save files it opens to the Journal at all; this decision was made to avoid saving many copies of the same PDF. This breaks the idea of a teacher sharing a PDF (permanently) with their class, so the design decision should be revisited (Ticket #6729).

The good news is that chat and write work well. In simple laptop to laptop mesh mode, ten laptops can collaborate to write a report, and twenty one laptops can chat. The bad news is that the DHCP problems we are experiencing appear due to a driver/firmware problem.

John Watlington has verified that fixes to a couple of telepathy-salut problems (Tickets #6299 and #6728) do indeed work as expected. (Telepathy-salut is our collaboration middleware when using a simple laptop-to-laptop mesh.)

13. Translation/I18N: Sayamindu reports that a project for translating the OLPC website (http://laptop.org) is now in Pootle (https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/website/). (Previously, the PO files were stored in the wiki, where they were accessible, but not as easy to manage.

14. School Server: Martin Langhoff arrived in Cambridge on Tuesday, and immediately started planning the work to be done to bring the school server to maturity, spending much of the week in discussion with John, Jim, Michael, Scott, Henry, and Kim. Over the next week we hope to revamp the school server wiki pages to reflect the new vision.

In the meantime, there is a quick bug fix release for the school server software, Build 161. The main reason for this is the availability of new firmware (22.p6) for the Active Antennas which allows them to survive a reboot.

15. Power: Afghanistan, among other deployments, needs an off grid solution for powering the laptops. Richard Smith looked into using 10W panels as a solution. Afghanistan turns out to be one of the best places on earth to do solar: they have an average of 315 sunny days per year.

Schedules on the Multi-Battery Charger has been delayed by three weeks due to problems in tooling at the manufacturer. Richard received a fully populated 15 -channel multi-battery charger board(s) with the new charging circuit.

16: Presence Service: Sjoerd Simons analysed and fixed a bug in salut where chat stopped working in both directions after a short period of time (Ticket #6575).

Guillaume Desmottes is doing a refactoring to abstract Avahi bits in salut; he has decided to refactor the activity management as well with the goal to make it easier to maintain. He also investigated sharing problems with Record (Ticket #6716) and released telepathy-salut 0.2.3 (Ticket #6728).

Morgan Collette provided some assistance to community ejabberd operators: we now have four working community servers with more to come (See Community_Jabber_Servers). He also ported Chat to use show_object_in_journal to send URLs to Browse instead of copying them to the clipboard; he refactored the messiest bit of telepathy boilerplate out of Chat so it can go into sugar.presence post Update.1.

17. Sugar: Eben Eliason worked with interested parties on the mailing lists to complete the first revision of the sugar-iconify script for converting SVGs to the format sugar expects, with all necessary entities (See Sugar-iconify), and compiled a comprehensive overview of the icon creation process (See Making_Sugar_Icons).

Eben continued his foray into sugar-jhbuild, making several commits to improve the visual appearance and interactions within the Sugar redesign. Among them, he hid the "invite to <activity>" option on buddy palettes when the buddy is already in the activity, and when our current activity is the Journal, since the action doesn't make sense in these contexts. He also ensured that oneself is always represented in the people edge of the Frame. Finally, he made several minor visual and layout changes to match the designs, including improved grouping of buddies in the Neighborhood and a simple sinusoidal pulsing algorithm for launching activities.

Tomeu Visozo continued working on the shell redesign, implementing new shell notifications (See Designs/Frame#12). He has also done some quick measuring of memory usage when using a launcher process and thus reusing the python interpreter. Preliminary results suggest that we could save around 3.5MB per activity, but only for activities written in python (most of them). This memory saving would allow us to use the composite X extension, that in turn will make the UI much more responsive.

Simon Schampijer reviewed the Sugar redesign patches submitted by Tomeu, did some more work on the control panel, and released a new version of memorize. (Memorize did not play sound when using with another locale than English. This was the same issue TamTam had described in #3165. Thanks to Victor Lazzarini for all the effort to spot this hard to find bug.)

18. Schedules/Releases: Update.1-699 has been tested this week and a short list of the blocking bugs is being managed by Michael Stone to get to the final Update.1 release candidate. It should be out next week. Scott Ananian has agree to call for proposals and ideas for the upcoming "State of the Update.2" mini-conference, which is where we will be planning Update.2--targeting development finish in 1 - 1.5 months, release in 3 months. Please send your proposals to cscott at laptop.org (and copy devel at laptop.org).

19. Support: Adam Holt reports working with relentlessly unstoppable support volunteers Alan Claver and Sandy Culver on dozens of missing shipping/payment orders, broken hardware dilemmas where the donor has no escalation path, and 656/Update.1 "what's going on" tickets; he began more serious repair center discussions on 12-person conference call, with an increasing number of serious worldwide plans emerging (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Repair_center_locations). Adam ran small Sunday support meeting, due to invitation failing to go out as a result of a mailing-list hiccup last weekend.

20. Other: Michail had a conference call with Michael Connet of Nortel's LearnIT and his team of high school students (which includes the famous "ffm" ;-) to discuss further advancing their work on XO tutorial animations (See http://nortellearnit.org/One_Laptop_Per_Child/OLPC_Networking_Tutorials/).

Belkin has donated some USB-ethernet dongles and USB memory sticks. Thanks to Josh Seal!

Bernie Innocenti reports that he presented the laptop at the ACP-EU joint parliamentary assembly in Ljubljana, Slovenia; he demoed the laptop to the President of the European Union Danilo Türk and distributed over 60 laptops to the delegates of African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. He is working with Giulia d'Amico and Walter De Brouwer on the foundation of OLPC Europe.

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.

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

Laptop News 2008-03-22

1. Deployment: Walter Bender visited the technology support team for the NYC public schools to discuss issues of connectivity and security in regard to a pending pilot. John Watlington and Martin Langhoff will make a follow-up visit this coming week. Walter also had a follow-up meeting with Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, the MIT student who has been helping us in Mongolia: Enky is spending the next ten days in Mongolia--his spring break--and will visit the two pilot schools, engage the local universities, and touch base with the Mongolian MoE. A newly minted Deployment Guide is now posted publicly on the wiki, where it continues to be refined. Much of the remainder of the week was spent working closely with the Tech Team on preparing a candidate Update.1 release build (and process) for Peru and Mexico.

2. Haiti: David Cavallo and Claudia Urrea met with Guy Serge Pompilus, coordinator for the laptop initiative in Haiti, and the InterAmerican Development in Washington to continue planning for the initial roll-out schools and to build the team in Haiti to support the project. The bank has contracted a group to perform assessment and we were able gain alignment on how to broaden the framework beyond the school walls. Edith Ackermann, Tony Earls, and Maya Carlson are developing additional assessment instruments.

3. Presentation: On Thursday Andriani Ferti presented at the TRUST seminar (the Team for Research in Ubiquitous and Secure Technology) at the Department of Computer Science at UC Berkeley about One Laptop Per Child. The presentation was titled "One Laptop per Child: Bringing to the children of the world an innovative and secure educational tool," and focused, more generally, on the mission of OLPC and the technology that is being used in and for the XO laptops. It further included a brief description of the security platform of OLPC, given the subject of the TRUST seminar, which is mostly concerned about security technology issues.

4. Human Resources: Christopher Niland has joined the staff of the Chairman's office. Chris has seven years experience in meeting planning and administrative support. Martin Langhoff, New Zealand resident and OLPC School Server Architect, made his in-office debut this week. Martin will be here for the next two weeks and finds New England a bit colder than he is used to. After 18 months at OLPC Ivan Krstić is moving on to other opportunities. We'd like to thank Ivan for his energy and contributions to the project. He contributed to almost every aspect of the project, most recently helping with our deployments in Uruguay and Peru. His innovative work on the Bitfrost security platform was widely recognized and earned him a Technology Review 35 Award in 2007.

5. Summer of Code: SoC is accepting Mentor applications now. If you are interested in becoming a Mentor (See http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mentor_step1.html). Students can apply beginning Monday, 3/24.

6. Nepali Localization: Shankar Pokharel reports that OLPC Nepal developers organized a translation fest, "Translation Nite-out" with participation of 12 volunteers. The result: Nepali localization of all projects put in Pootle (except Etoys) is complete. Thanks to all who gave up their Friday night on behalf of the project (See http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com/2008/03/yaay-translations-over.html).

7. Squeak: Kathleen Harness from the Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education (MSTE) at the University of Illinois reports that www.squeakcmi.org has a Library Collection of OLPC/Etoys projects. Enjoy!

8. Drupal: Pablo Floresve installed Drupal in a XO laptop; he is "amazed with how fast it runs!!" There has been subsequent discussion about it being a great tool for blogging from the XO laptops (See http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-olpc and Drupal). There is also an active discussion thread around journalism tools (See Talk:Learning_activities/Journalism).

9. Bay Area Learning Workshops?: Kassie Petrick has inquired as to whether there are plans for Learning Workshops scheduled for the West Coast? She received a laptop that she has been using in her 7th grade classroom but would like to do a lot more with it. She is interested to be "part of a community of people (especially teachers) who want to talk up the XO." She'd also "love to have some kids participate."

10. Bishwamitra/Bashuki Journals: Bryan Berry et al. have been documenting their Nepali deployments (See Bishwamitra Journal and Bashuki Journal). Ram Singh is designing a power distribution rack for the XO's using locally available materials. Mahabir Pun and Dev Mohanty are using inexpensive point-to-point radios to connect the two remote schools to each other and to the Internet. They have posted their equipment specifications, network diagrams, and configurations in the wiki. You can read Sulochan Acharya's blog post "Nepal: ICT in Education and OLPC" http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/182 for an overview.

11. Wireless Testing: Giannis Galanis, Kim Quirk and number of volunteers set up a collaboration and networking testbed in an RF-quiet area, the town of Peabody, near Boston. We intend on using this testbed to measure performance of the system under a variety of networking conditions (Watch Collaboration_Network_Testbed).

Ricardo Carrano released two testing tools that ease testing of the networking stack. The Lab Rat is a small collection of python scripts that aid a tester to send "instructions" to all nodes participating in a mesh cloud. Instructions can be:

  • Commands to be executed
  • Files to be written or replaced
  • Tests to be performed (future releases)

MAE is a small collection of python scripts that mimics traffic from an XO activity. With MAE you can select:

  • A packet size
  • An interval between the packets
  • An optional random standard deviation to make the interval more user-like
  • The number of packets each participating node will send

Analysis of packet traces captures during congestion testing confirmed that we can reduce retransmisions by increasing the contention window. Marvell will incorporate automatic adaptation of the CW parameters in an upcoming release of the firmware.

12. Read Testing: Chris Ball and Michael Stone worked on debugging Read activity sharing. They managed to catch a sharing failure with full debugging logs turned on; analysis is forthcoming.

By reviewing Read's source code, they noticed two bugs:

  • When someone joins a shared Read activity, they choose a peer to download the shared file from at random, rather than always choosing the person who originally started the sharing. The person they choose this way might not yet have finished downloading the PDF themselves (Ticket #6736).
  • Read does not save files it opens to the Journal at all; this decision was made to avoid saving many copies of the same PDF. This breaks the idea of a teacher sharing a PDF (permanently) with their class, so the design decision should be revisited (Ticket #6729).

The good news is that chat and write work well. In simple laptop to laptop mesh mode, ten laptops can collaborate to write a report, and twenty one laptops can chat. The bad news is that the DHCP problems we are experiencing appear due to a driver/firmware problem.

John Watlington has verified that fixes to a couple of telepathy-salut problems (Tickets #6299 and #6728) do indeed work as expected. (Telepathy-salut is our collaboration middleware when using a simple laptop-to-laptop mesh.)

13. Translation/I18N: Sayamindu reports that a project for translating the OLPC website (http://laptop.org) is now in Pootle (https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/website/). (Previously, the PO files were stored in the wiki, where they were accessible, but not as easy to manage.

14. School Server: Martin Langhoff arrived in Cambridge on Tuesday, and immediately started planning the work to be done to bring the school server to maturity, spending much of the week in discussion with John, Jim, Michael, Scott, Henry, and Kim. Over the next week we hope to revamp the school server wiki pages to reflect the new vision.

In the meantime, there is a quick bug fix release for the school server software, Build 161. The main reason for this is the availability of new firmware (22.p6) for the Active Antennas which allows them to survive a reboot.

15. Power: Afghanistan, among other deployments, needs an off grid solution for powering the laptops. Richard Smith looked into using 10W panels as a solution. Afghanistan turns out to be one of the best places on earth to do solar: they have an average of 315 sunny days per year.

Schedules on the Multi-Battery Charger has been delayed by three weeks due to problems in tooling at the manufacturer. Richard received a fully populated 15 -channel multi-battery charger board(s) with the new charging circuit.

16: Presence Service: Sjoerd Simons analysed and fixed a bug in salut where chat stopped working in both directions after a short period of time (Ticket #6575).

Guillaume Desmottes is doing a refactoring to abstract Avahi bits in salut; he has decided to refactor the activity management as well with the goal to make it easier to maintain. He also investigated sharing problems with Record (Ticket #6716) and released telepathy-salut 0.2.3 (Ticket #6728).

Morgan Collette provided some assistance to community ejabberd operators: we now have four working community servers with more to come (See Community_Jabber_Servers). He also ported Chat to use show_object_in_journal to send URLs to Browse instead of copying them to the clipboard; he refactored the messiest bit of telepathy boilerplate out of Chat so it can go into sugar.presence post Update.1.

17. Sugar: Eben Eliason worked with interested parties on the mailing lists to complete the first revision of the sugar-iconify script for converting SVGs to the format sugar expects, with all necessary entities (See Sugar-iconify), and compiled a comprehensive overview of the icon creation process (See Making_Sugar_Icons).

Eben continued his foray into sugar-jhbuild, making several commits to improve the visual appearance and interactions within the Sugar redesign. Among them, he hid the "invite to <activity>" option on buddy palettes when the buddy is already in the activity, and when our current activity is the Journal, since the action doesn't make sense in these contexts. He also ensured that oneself is always represented in the people edge of the Frame. Finally, he made several minor visual and layout changes to match the designs, including improved grouping of buddies in the Neighborhood and a simple sinusoidal pulsing algorithm for launching activities.

Tomeu Visozo continued working on the shell redesign, implementing new shell notifications (See Designs/Frame#12). He has also done some quick measuring of memory usage when using a launcher process and thus reusing the python interpreter. Preliminary results suggest that we could save around 3.5MB per activity, but only for activities written in python (most of them). This memory saving would allow us to use the composite X extension, that in turn will make the UI much more responsive.

Simon Schampijer reviewed the Sugar redesign patches submitted by Tomeu, did some more work on the control panel, and released a new version of memorize. (Memorize did not play sound when using with another locale than English. This was the same issue TamTam had described in #3165. Thanks to Victor Lazzarini for all the effort to spot this hard to find bug.)

18. Schedules/Releases: Update.1-699 has been tested this week and a short list of the blocking bugs is being managed by Michael Stone to get to the final Update.1 release candidate. It should be out next week. Scott Ananian has agree to call for proposals and ideas for the upcoming "State of the Update.2" mini-conference, which is where we will be planning Update.2--targeting development finish in 1 - 1.5 months, release in 3 months. Please send your proposals to cscott at laptop.org (and copy devel at laptop.org).

19. Support: Adam Holt reports working with relentlessly unstoppable support volunteers Alan Claver and Sandy Culver on dozens of missing shipping/payment orders, broken hardware dilemmas where the donor has no escalation path, and 656/Update.1 "what's going on" tickets; he began more serious repair center discussions on 12-person conference call, with an increasing number of serious worldwide plans emerging (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Repair_center_locations). Adam ran small Sunday support meeting, due to invitation failing to go out as a result of a mailing-list hiccup last weekend.

20. Other: Michail had a conference call with Michael Connet of Nortel's LearnIT and his team of high school students (which includes the famous "ffm" ;-) to discuss further advancing their work on XO tutorial animations (See http://nortellearnit.org/One_Laptop_Per_Child/OLPC_Networking_Tutorials/).

Belkin has donated some USB-ethernet dongles and USB memory sticks. Thanks to Josh Seal!

Bernie Innocenti reports that he presented the laptop at the ACP-EU joint parliamentary assembly in Ljubljana, Slovenia; he demoed the laptop to the President of the European Union Danilo Türk and distributed over 60 laptops to the delegates of African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. He is working with Giulia d'Amico and Walter De Brouwer on the foundation of OLPC Europe.

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. 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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