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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 2008-03-22=
=Laptop News 2008-03-29=


1. Peru: Carla Monroy Gomez is in Lima, helping with the final preparations for the second round of teacher preparation in Peru. This coming week, 600 teachers in four regional centers will use the XO Laptop to explore, express, and collaborate. The next phase of the preparation will be in 18 regions as the XO is moving in waves into the furthest reaches of the country.
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. Update.1: Michael Stone, Chris Ball, and the rest of the tech team helped to prepare a new software release (Release Candidate 3) for Peru and Mexico this week. Update.1 will be tested in country and presumably be released at in the first week of April.
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. Security: Michael and Walter reviewed the Bitfrost specification, which is being implemented in phases. The current status (Update.1) is reflected in the wiki (See [[Bitfrost#Current Status]]).
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. Kavre, Nepal: The Nepalese Department of Education, Ministry of Education in coordination with OLPC Nepal has launched a pilot program of OLPC in Janajyoti School, Kavre. Minister of Education, Pradip Nepal stated the pilot as the first step of One Laptop Per Nepali Child movement. Director General of Department of Education marked the distribution day as a historical moment in Nepalese education history. Ankur, Iswor, Jitendra, Jwalanta, Manish, Nirmal, Prakash, Shankar, Shishir, Suyesh, Ujjwal, Sulav, Suraj, Suvash are working in the field among other OLPC Nepal volunteers. "Everyone is excited, the government officials, OLPC Nepal community, the school, parents and THE KIDS." (OLPC Nepal team has codenamed the pilot as "Sunrise". See [[Sunrise]] and http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com).
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.


Sulochan Acharya has built a prototype "E-Pustakalaya" (E-Library) for Nepal's deployments using the FedoraCommons Repository Software and the Fez front-end. FedoraCommons differs from typical content management systems in that it can scale to millions of objects. E-Pustakalaya will be publicly accessible within a few weeks and Sulochan will work to document his configuration.
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.


Teacher preparation for Bashuki and Bishwamitra schools begins on Saturday, March 29th. Bipul Gautam, Kamana Regmi, and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta of OLE Nepal are conducting a four-day training session for 24 teachers and officials from Nepal's Department of Education. The training session will focus on general computer literacy for the teachers themselves (the majority of whom have never touched a computer), using computers in the classroom, and child-centered teaching/learning.
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. School server: John Watlington and Martin Langhoff coordinated a conference call to discuss the School Server Roadmap with a large group of interested parties. General goals and timeframes were covered, and the team will focus hard on the upcoming release, which be tagged 'xs-0.3' (See [[XS Roadmap]] and [[XS Conf 08 MAR 25 Notes]]).
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!


Martin has setup a fully portable build environment, and been cranking out preliminary XS images that contain fixes for some of the blocker bugs for xs-0.3. A local-to-OLPC-hosted build environment for the XS will soon be ready to take over the "xs-dev" role, thanks to the efforts of Henry Hardy.
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]]).


Martin and SJ Klein have collected some initial notes on a learning-object distribution strategy heavily inspired in Debian's repository format. Expect to see an edited version in a wiki nearby soon.
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: The [http://www.olenepal.org OLE Nepal] team has 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.


Documentation updates about the School Server are underway in the wiki, thanks to John Watlington, Martin Langhoff, and volunteers culling updated information from the mailing list.
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]]).


6. Support: Adam Holt helped provoke a very rewarding discussion between guest speaker Ric Holt (SW engineering professor), OLPC's Michael Stone, and the volunteer support team regarding OLPC's software engineering and bug-triaging challenges, including how we will support Update.1 given the concerns and anxiety around Activities "disappearing" as a result of the update process.
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)


[As of Update.1, we'll have separated the operating system updates from the activity updates, which may initially give the appearance of activities disappearing. The "customization key" process (See [[Customization_key]]) is intended to facilitate customization of activities; also Bert Freudenberg has written a script to install the default set of activities:
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


http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py
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.


Getting the activities back is then as simple as:
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.


wget dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py
By reviewing Read's source code, they noticed two bugs:
python update-activities.py
* 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).


...which works from the ctrl-alt-meshkey console.]
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.


Adam plowed through a "zillion" more shipping/fulfillment tickets with Sandy Culver and Alan Claver as Brightstar completed its final *bulk* shipments to Give One Get One donors. This does *not* mean all shipments have gone out, as some exceptional cases still have to be dealt with over the month of April. Many thanks to our overworked and understaffed volunteers.
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.)


Adam organized shipments of broken machines to support volunteers and community and for-profit repair centers (five in the USA, two in Canada, and one in the Netherlands). A spare-parts supply-chain is still badly needed—especially for keyboards—we expect better news in coming weeks.
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.


We'd like to welcome Support Specialist Emily Smith, who will start on Monday, 31 March, 9AM and work through at least the June/July time frame. Emily is brilliant, polished, believing—a library scientist who will be a huge help, even if only a our temp.
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.


7. Sugar/Datastore: Eben Eliason will be giving the sugar-iconify script an overhaul in the near future. Among the changes there are a number for robustness, better error handling, and additional icon validation warnings. More useful to developers, Eben is also adding an option which will export a set of icons rendered in several styles, along with an html preview file, for observing them as they may appear within Sugar. The preview file also contains a list of items to validate the appearance of the icons.
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.


Eben worked out some new visual treatments for object transfers as a core component of the OS (Initial sketches can be seen at [[Specifications/Object Transfers]]). Eben also tackled the problem of palette alerts, for instances where a given icon in the Frame needs to convey additional alert information (eg. low battery, failed transfer, etc.)
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.


Morgan Collette released Chat-36.xo for Joyride/Update.2, with an improvement to open URLs using show_object_in_journal when you click on them. The "copy to clipboard" functionality is still there on rollover at this stage but probably not necessary any more. This release also fixes some minor user
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.
interface issues (Tickets #5053, #6621, and #6743) and also simplifies the telepathy code based on the improved Presence Service channel-creation API in Update.1.


8. Collaboration/Mesh: Chris Ball Worked on release testing and debugging, focusing his efforts mainly around activity sharing with Salut (Ticket #6739). The current status is that activity joining in 703 is reliable against a Jabber server, and fails sporadically on link-local access point or
16: Presence Service: Sjoerd Simons analyzed and fixed a bug in salut where chat stopped working in both directions after a short period of time (Ticket #6575).
mesh.


John Watlington continued testing and analysis of data taken in our new Collaboration and Networking Testbed (See [[Collaboration Network Testbed]]). This data indicates that our problems with using mesh networking to connect more than a small number of laptops to a school server seem due to fundamental problems with the routing algorithms used, not flaws in the implementation. More experiments are being run, to test adjustments to the existing algorithms, and possible modifications are already being discussed. In the meantime, we strongly suggest that school deployments use 802.11b/g wireless access points.
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).


Dafydd Harries Worked on improving documentation on the OLPC wiki about how activity sharing/collaboration work; he met with Michael Stone and Jonathan Hertzog to discuss how we might improve communications security in Sugar.
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.


Morgan released Presence Service 0.79.2 for Joyride/Update.2, with improved debugging, and assisted with debugging various sharing failures on Salut (Ticket #6739).
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]]).


Guillaume Desmottes continued the Salut refactoring. He tracked activity sharing problems (Tickets #6774, #6739, #6483). After investigation they seem to be due to network problems. He wrote a small Salut patch (#6782) improving debug output to help us to track these errors.
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.


9. Releases/Testing: Thanks for all the help testing Update.1 candidate releases 702 and 703 this week! Simon Schampijer set up a wiki page for these test results (See [[Testing Update.1 Results]]) and many have contributed, including Gary Martin, SJ, Eduardo Silva, Michael, Walter, and Chris. Also thanks to Bryan Berry, Kim Quirk, and Scott Ananian for help on the release notes for Update.1, which are beginning to shape up (See [[OLPC Update.1 Software Release Notes]]).
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.


10. Multi-battery charger: Richard Smith spent the week working with the 15-channel multi-battery charger prototype electronics. Testing has flushed out some software bugs, but nothing major so far. Overall the electronics appear to be working as expected. Many of the the mechanical parts have arrived at Gecko, where they have been inspected and approved or feedback submitted the manufacturer. The final parts are scheduled to arrive the week of April 4. Next week, Gecko should able to assemble a full prototype.
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.)


11. Active Antennae: John reports that a problem has been found with the cables used in building the 2000 pre-production prototypes (they aren't USB cables), requiring a rework. This will delay the arrival of these antennae for several more weeks. We still have around fifty in stock, so developers and small trials shouldn't be affected.
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).


12. Keyboards: There are about 25 laptop recipients who wrote into the help support-gang looking for replacement keyboards. Membrane keyboards pose a tradeoff between the durability of the rubber membrane and the flexibility, or "give", of the resulting keys. We are looking at a variety of options.
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 [[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.


13. FOSSCOMM: Diomidis Spinellis presented the XO at the Free and Open Source Software Communities (http://www.fosscomm.gr) conference at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. The presentation included a live demo of Sugar, Squeak EToys, and the Antikythera mechanism emulator developed using EToys.
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/).


14. Video of the week: Tom Boonsiri has posted a Youtube video of an ECG that uses the Measure activity. Power for a small breadboard is drawn from the USB port; the signal is input through the microphone input. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1QKTKAAug4). TOm notes that the amplifier circuit also doubles as an EMG: you can take an electrode and place it on the forearm and flex to see the muscle activity reflected in the waveform, a great example of using the laptop to allow children to explore how their bodies work.
Belkin has donated some USB-ethernet dongles and USB memory sticks. Thanks to Josh Seal!


15. FoodForce: Deepank Gupta, with support from Silke Buhr from the WFP, reports much progress on the port of FoodForce to the XO laptop (See [[Food Force]]).
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.

16. SocialCalc: K.S. Preeti (Preeti), an engineering student from NSIT, who has been lately working with Manu Gupta to develop JavaScript-Python Communication support for any JavaScript-based application (See [[JS-Python]]). She has recently been selected in the elite group of "25 Best Women Engineering Students of India" by Google. Congrats Preeti!

Dan Bricklin has been busy as well. He reports that he has sped up the cursor display on the XO laptop such that "the cursor just moves" when selecting a cell or a range. Dan had also completed the main code in SocialCalc for handling named cells and ranges in formulas. He has inter-sheet support working in the recalculation engine. He has added a "comment" property to cells so that we'll be able to store a string of text with any cell containing descriptive information about the formula, the data, or whatever. He has written the code for saving and restoring the scroll position of the sheet, including the cursor position and the locked-panes settings. This is especially important for using SocialCalc on a small screen such as the XO.

17. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has been working on the Develop activity. He has posted the latest version on the wiki (See [[Activities]] and [[Develop]]). "It really works! Not just a toy."


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 16:14, 29 March 2008

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Laptop News 2008-03-29

1. Peru: Carla Monroy Gomez is in Lima, helping with the final preparations for the second round of teacher preparation in Peru. This coming week, 600 teachers in four regional centers will use the XO Laptop to explore, express, and collaborate. The next phase of the preparation will be in 18 regions as the XO is moving in waves into the furthest reaches of the country.

2. Update.1: Michael Stone, Chris Ball, and the rest of the tech team helped to prepare a new software release (Release Candidate 3) for Peru and Mexico this week. Update.1 will be tested in country and presumably be released at in the first week of April.

3. Security: Michael and Walter reviewed the Bitfrost specification, which is being implemented in phases. The current status (Update.1) is reflected in the wiki (See Bitfrost#Current Status).

4. Kavre, Nepal: The Nepalese Department of Education, Ministry of Education in coordination with OLPC Nepal has launched a pilot program of OLPC in Janajyoti School, Kavre. Minister of Education, Pradip Nepal stated the pilot as the first step of One Laptop Per Nepali Child movement. Director General of Department of Education marked the distribution day as a historical moment in Nepalese education history. Ankur, Iswor, Jitendra, Jwalanta, Manish, Nirmal, Prakash, Shankar, Shishir, Suyesh, Ujjwal, Sulav, Suraj, Suvash are working in the field among other OLPC Nepal volunteers. "Everyone is excited, the government officials, OLPC Nepal community, the school, parents and THE KIDS." (OLPC Nepal team has codenamed the pilot as "Sunrise". See Sunrise and http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com).

Sulochan Acharya has built a prototype "E-Pustakalaya" (E-Library) for Nepal's deployments using the FedoraCommons Repository Software and the Fez front-end. FedoraCommons differs from typical content management systems in that it can scale to millions of objects. E-Pustakalaya will be publicly accessible within a few weeks and Sulochan will work to document his configuration.

Teacher preparation for Bashuki and Bishwamitra schools begins on Saturday, March 29th. Bipul Gautam, Kamana Regmi, and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta of OLE Nepal are conducting a four-day training session for 24 teachers and officials from Nepal's Department of Education. The training session will focus on general computer literacy for the teachers themselves (the majority of whom have never touched a computer), using computers in the classroom, and child-centered teaching/learning.

5. School server: John Watlington and Martin Langhoff coordinated a conference call to discuss the School Server Roadmap with a large group of interested parties. General goals and timeframes were covered, and the team will focus hard on the upcoming release, which be tagged 'xs-0.3' (See XS Roadmap and XS Conf 08 MAR 25 Notes).

Martin has setup a fully portable build environment, and been cranking out preliminary XS images that contain fixes for some of the blocker bugs for xs-0.3. A local-to-OLPC-hosted build environment for the XS will soon be ready to take over the "xs-dev" role, thanks to the efforts of Henry Hardy.

Martin and SJ Klein have collected some initial notes on a learning-object distribution strategy heavily inspired in Debian's repository format. Expect to see an edited version in a wiki nearby soon.

Documentation updates about the School Server are underway in the wiki, thanks to John Watlington, Martin Langhoff, and volunteers culling updated information from the mailing list.

6. Support: Adam Holt helped provoke a very rewarding discussion between guest speaker Ric Holt (SW engineering professor), OLPC's Michael Stone, and the volunteer support team regarding OLPC's software engineering and bug-triaging challenges, including how we will support Update.1 given the concerns and anxiety around Activities "disappearing" as a result of the update process.

[As of Update.1, we'll have separated the operating system updates from the activity updates, which may initially give the appearance of activities disappearing. The "customization key" process (See Customization_key) is intended to facilitate customization of activities; also Bert Freudenberg has written a script to install the default set of activities: 

      http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py

Getting the activities back is then as simple as: 

      wget dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py
      python update-activities.py

...which works from the ctrl-alt-meshkey console.]

Adam plowed through a "zillion" more shipping/fulfillment tickets with Sandy Culver and Alan Claver as Brightstar completed its final *bulk* shipments to Give One Get One donors. This does *not* mean all shipments have gone out, as some exceptional cases still have to be dealt with over the month of April. Many thanks to our overworked and understaffed volunteers.

Adam organized shipments of broken machines to support volunteers and community and for-profit repair centers (five in the USA, two in Canada, and one in the Netherlands). A spare-parts supply-chain is still badly needed—especially for keyboards—we expect better news in coming weeks.

We'd like to welcome Support Specialist Emily Smith, who will start on Monday, 31 March, 9AM and work through at least the June/July time frame. Emily is brilliant, polished, believing—a library scientist who will be a huge help, even if only a our temp.

7. Sugar/Datastore: Eben Eliason will be giving the sugar-iconify script an overhaul in the near future. Among the changes there are a number for robustness, better error handling, and additional icon validation warnings. More useful to developers, Eben is also adding an option which will export a set of icons rendered in several styles, along with an html preview file, for observing them as they may appear within Sugar. The preview file also contains a list of items to validate the appearance of the icons.

Eben worked out some new visual treatments for object transfers as a core component of the OS (Initial sketches can be seen at Specifications/Object Transfers). Eben also tackled the problem of palette alerts, for instances where a given icon in the Frame needs to convey additional alert information (eg. low battery, failed transfer, etc.)

Morgan Collette released Chat-36.xo for Joyride/Update.2, with an improvement to open URLs using show_object_in_journal when you click on them. The "copy to clipboard" functionality is still there on rollover at this stage but probably not necessary any more. This release also fixes some minor user interface issues (Tickets #5053, #6621, and #6743) and also simplifies the telepathy code based on the improved Presence Service channel-creation API in Update.1.

8. Collaboration/Mesh: Chris Ball Worked on release testing and debugging, focusing his efforts mainly around activity sharing with Salut (Ticket #6739). The current status is that activity joining in 703 is reliable against a Jabber server, and fails sporadically on link-local access point or mesh.

John Watlington continued testing and analysis of data taken in our new Collaboration and Networking Testbed (See Collaboration Network Testbed). This data indicates that our problems with using mesh networking to connect more than a small number of laptops to a school server seem due to fundamental problems with the routing algorithms used, not flaws in the implementation. More experiments are being run, to test adjustments to the existing algorithms, and possible modifications are already being discussed. In the meantime, we strongly suggest that school deployments use 802.11b/g wireless access points.

Dafydd Harries Worked on improving documentation on the OLPC wiki about how activity sharing/collaboration work; he met with Michael Stone and Jonathan Hertzog to discuss how we might improve communications security in Sugar.

Morgan released Presence Service 0.79.2 for Joyride/Update.2, with improved debugging, and assisted with debugging various sharing failures on Salut (Ticket #6739).

Guillaume Desmottes continued the Salut refactoring. He tracked activity sharing problems (Tickets #6774, #6739, #6483). After investigation they seem to be due to network problems. He wrote a small Salut patch (#6782) improving debug output to help us to track these errors.

9. Releases/Testing: Thanks for all the help testing Update.1 candidate releases 702 and 703 this week! Simon Schampijer set up a wiki page for these test results (See Testing Update.1 Results) and many have contributed, including Gary Martin, SJ, Eduardo Silva, Michael, Walter, and Chris. Also thanks to Bryan Berry, Kim Quirk, and Scott Ananian for help on the release notes for Update.1, which are beginning to shape up (See OLPC Update.1 Software Release Notes).

10. Multi-battery charger: Richard Smith spent the week working with the 15-channel multi-battery charger prototype electronics. Testing has flushed out some software bugs, but nothing major so far. Overall the electronics appear to be working as expected. Many of the the mechanical parts have arrived at Gecko, where they have been inspected and approved or feedback submitted the manufacturer. The final parts are scheduled to arrive the week of April 4. Next week, Gecko should able to assemble a full prototype.

11. Active Antennae: John reports that a problem has been found with the cables used in building the 2000 pre-production prototypes (they aren't USB cables), requiring a rework. This will delay the arrival of these antennae for several more weeks. We still have around fifty in stock, so developers and small trials shouldn't be affected.

12. Keyboards: There are about 25 laptop recipients who wrote into the help support-gang looking for replacement keyboards. Membrane keyboards pose a tradeoff between the durability of the rubber membrane and the flexibility, or "give", of the resulting keys. We are looking at a variety of options.

13. FOSSCOMM: Diomidis Spinellis presented the XO at the Free and Open Source Software Communities (http://www.fosscomm.gr) conference at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. The presentation included a live demo of Sugar, Squeak EToys, and the Antikythera mechanism emulator developed using EToys.

14. Video of the week: Tom Boonsiri has posted a Youtube video of an ECG that uses the Measure activity. Power for a small breadboard is drawn from the USB port; the signal is input through the microphone input. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1QKTKAAug4). TOm notes that the amplifier circuit also doubles as an EMG: you can take an electrode and place it on the forearm and flex to see the muscle activity reflected in the waveform, a great example of using the laptop to allow children to explore how their bodies work.

15. FoodForce: Deepank Gupta, with support from Silke Buhr from the WFP, reports much progress on the port of FoodForce to the XO laptop (See Food Force).

16. SocialCalc: K.S. Preeti (Preeti), an engineering student from NSIT, who has been lately working with Manu Gupta to develop JavaScript-Python Communication support for any JavaScript-based application (See JS-Python). She has recently been selected in the elite group of "25 Best Women Engineering Students of India" by Google. Congrats Preeti!

Dan Bricklin has been busy as well. He reports that he has sped up the cursor display on the XO laptop such that "the cursor just moves" when selecting a cell or a range. Dan had also completed the main code in SocialCalc for handling named cells and ranges in formulas. He has inter-sheet support working in the recalculation engine. He has added a "comment" property to cells so that we'll be able to store a string of text with any cell containing descriptive information about the formula, the data, or whatever. He has written the code for saving and restoring the scroll position of the sheet, including the cursor position and the locked-panes settings. This is especially important for using SocialCalc on a small screen such as the XO.

17. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has been working on the Develop activity. He has posted the latest version on the wiki (See Activities and Develop). "It really works! Not just a toy."

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 2008-03-29

1. Peru: Carla Monroy Gomez is in Lima, helping with the final preparations for the second round of teacher preparation in Peru. This coming week, 600 teachers in four regional centers will use the XO Laptop to explore, express, and collaborate. The next phase of the preparation will be in 18 regions as the XO is moving in waves into the furthest reaches of the country.

2. Update.1: Michael Stone, Chris Ball, and the rest of the tech team helped to prepare a new software release (Release Candidate 3) for Peru and Mexico this week. Update.1 will be tested in country and presumably be released at in the first week of April.

3. Security: Michael and Walter reviewed the Bitfrost specification, which is being implemented in phases. The current status (Update.1) is reflected in the wiki (See Bitfrost#Current Status).

4. Kavre, Nepal: The Nepalese Department of Education, Ministry of Education in coordination with OLPC Nepal has launched a pilot program of OLPC in Janajyoti School, Kavre. Minister of Education, Pradip Nepal stated the pilot as the first step of One Laptop Per Nepali Child movement. Director General of Department of Education marked the distribution day as a historical moment in Nepalese education history. Ankur, Iswor, Jitendra, Jwalanta, Manish, Nirmal, Prakash, Shankar, Shishir, Suyesh, Ujjwal, Sulav, Suraj, Suvash are working in the field among other OLPC Nepal volunteers. "Everyone is excited, the government officials, OLPC Nepal community, the school, parents and THE KIDS." (OLPC Nepal team has codenamed the pilot as "Sunrise". See Sunrise and http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com).

Sulochan Acharya has built a prototype "E-Pustakalaya" (E-Library) for Nepal's deployments using the FedoraCommons Repository Software and the Fez front-end. FedoraCommons differs from typical content management systems in that it can scale to millions of objects. E-Pustakalaya will be publicly accessible within a few weeks and Sulochan will work to document his configuration.

Teacher preparation for Bashuki and Bishwamitra schools begins on Saturday, March 29th. Bipul Gautam, Kamana Regmi, and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta of OLE Nepal are conducting a four-day training session for 24 teachers and officials from Nepal's Department of Education. The training session will focus on general computer literacy for the teachers themselves (the majority of whom have never touched a computer), using computers in the classroom, and child-centered teaching/learning.

5. School server: John Watlington and Martin Langhoff coordinated a conference call to discuss the School Server Roadmap with a large group of interested parties. General goals and timeframes were covered, and the team will focus hard on the upcoming release, which be tagged 'xs-0.3' (See XS Roadmap and XS Conf 08 MAR 25 Notes).

Martin has setup a fully portable build environment, and been cranking out preliminary XS images that contain fixes for some of the blocker bugs for xs-0.3. A local-to-OLPC-hosted build environment for the XS will soon be ready to take over the "xs-dev" role, thanks to the efforts of Henry Hardy.

Martin and SJ Klein have collected some initial notes on a learning-object distribution strategy heavily inspired in Debian's repository format. Expect to see an edited version in a wiki nearby soon.

Documentation updates about the School Server are underway in the wiki, thanks to John Watlington, Martin Langhoff, and volunteers culling updated information from the mailing list.

6. Support: Adam Holt helped provoke a very rewarding discussion between guest speaker Ric Holt (SW engineering professor), OLPC's Michael Stone, and the volunteer support team regarding OLPC's software engineering and bug-triaging challenges, including how we will support Update.1 given the concerns and anxiety around Activities "disappearing" as a result of the update process.

[As of Update.1, we'll have separated the operating system updates from the activity updates, which may initially give the appearance of activities disappearing. The "customization key" process (See Customization_key) is intended to facilitate customization of activities; also Bert Freudenberg has written a script to install the default set of activities: 

      http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py

Getting the activities back is then as simple as: 

      wget dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py
      python update-activities.py

...which works from the ctrl-alt-meshkey console.]

Adam plowed through a "zillion" more shipping/fulfillment tickets with Sandy Culver and Alan Claver as Brightstar completed its final *bulk* shipments to Give One Get One donors. This does *not* mean all shipments have gone out, as some exceptional cases still have to be dealt with over the month of April. Many thanks to our overworked and understaffed volunteers.

Adam organized shipments of broken machines to support volunteers and community and for-profit repair centers (five in the USA, two in Canada, and one in the Netherlands). A spare-parts supply-chain is still badly needed—especially for keyboards—we expect better news in coming weeks.

We'd like to welcome Support Specialist Emily Smith, who will start on Monday, 31 March, 9AM and work through at least the June/July time frame. Emily is brilliant, polished, believing—a library scientist who will be a huge help, even if only a our temp.

7. Sugar/Datastore: Eben Eliason will be giving the sugar-iconify script an overhaul in the near future. Among the changes there are a number for robustness, better error handling, and additional icon validation warnings. More useful to developers, Eben is also adding an option which will export a set of icons rendered in several styles, along with an html preview file, for observing them as they may appear within Sugar. The preview file also contains a list of items to validate the appearance of the icons.

Eben worked out some new visual treatments for object transfers as a core component of the OS (Initial sketches can be seen at Specifications/Object Transfers). Eben also tackled the problem of palette alerts, for instances where a given icon in the Frame needs to convey additional alert information (eg. low battery, failed transfer, etc.)

Morgan Collette released Chat-36.xo for Joyride/Update.2, with an improvement to open URLs using show_object_in_journal when you click on them. The "copy to clipboard" functionality is still there on rollover at this stage but probably not necessary any more. This release also fixes some minor user interface issues (Tickets #5053, #6621, and #6743) and also simplifies the telepathy code based on the improved Presence Service channel-creation API in Update.1.

8. Collaboration/Mesh: Chris Ball Worked on release testing and debugging, focusing his efforts mainly around activity sharing with Salut (Ticket #6739). The current status is that activity joining in 703 is reliable against a Jabber server, and fails sporadically on link-local access point or mesh.

John Watlington continued testing and analysis of data taken in our new Collaboration and Networking Testbed (See Collaboration Network Testbed). This data indicates that our problems with using mesh networking to connect more than a small number of laptops to a school server seem due to fundamental problems with the routing algorithms used, not flaws in the implementation. More experiments are being run, to test adjustments to the existing algorithms, and possible modifications are already being discussed. In the meantime, we strongly suggest that school deployments use 802.11b/g wireless access points.

Dafydd Harries Worked on improving documentation on the OLPC wiki about how activity sharing/collaboration work; he met with Michael Stone and Jonathan Hertzog to discuss how we might improve communications security in Sugar.

Morgan released Presence Service 0.79.2 for Joyride/Update.2, with improved debugging, and assisted with debugging various sharing failures on Salut (Ticket #6739).

Guillaume Desmottes continued the Salut refactoring. He tracked activity sharing problems (Tickets #6774, #6739, #6483). After investigation they seem to be due to network problems. He wrote a small Salut patch (#6782) improving debug output to help us to track these errors.

9. Releases/Testing: Thanks for all the help testing Update.1 candidate releases 702 and 703 this week! Simon Schampijer set up a wiki page for these test results (See Testing Update.1 Results) and many have contributed, including Gary Martin, SJ, Eduardo Silva, Michael, Walter, and Chris. Also thanks to Bryan Berry, Kim Quirk, and Scott Ananian for help on the release notes for Update.1, which are beginning to shape up (See OLPC Update.1 Software Release Notes).

10. Multi-battery charger: Richard Smith spent the week working with the 15-channel multi-battery charger prototype electronics. Testing has flushed out some software bugs, but nothing major so far. Overall the electronics appear to be working as expected. Many of the the mechanical parts have arrived at Gecko, where they have been inspected and approved or feedback submitted the manufacturer. The final parts are scheduled to arrive the week of April 4. Next week, Gecko should able to assemble a full prototype.

11. Active Antennae: John reports that a problem has been found with the cables used in building the 2000 pre-production prototypes (they aren't USB cables), requiring a rework. This will delay the arrival of these antennae for several more weeks. We still have around fifty in stock, so developers and small trials shouldn't be affected.

12. Keyboards: There are about 25 laptop recipients who wrote into the help support-gang looking for replacement keyboards. Membrane keyboards pose a tradeoff between the durability of the rubber membrane and the flexibility, or "give", of the resulting keys. We are looking at a variety of options.

13. FOSSCOMM: Diomidis Spinellis presented the XO at the Free and Open Source Software Communities (http://www.fosscomm.gr) conference at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. The presentation included a live demo of Sugar, Squeak EToys, and the Antikythera mechanism emulator developed using EToys.

14. Video of the week: Tom Boonsiri has posted a Youtube video of an ECG that uses the Measure activity. Power for a small breadboard is drawn from the USB port; the signal is input through the microphone input. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1QKTKAAug4). TOm notes that the amplifier circuit also doubles as an EMG: you can take an electrode and place it on the forearm and flex to see the muscle activity reflected in the waveform, a great example of using the laptop to allow children to explore how their bodies work.

15. FoodForce: Deepank Gupta, with support from Silke Buhr from the WFP, reports much progress on the port of FoodForce to the XO laptop (See Food Force).

16. SocialCalc: K.S. Preeti (Preeti), an engineering student from NSIT, who has been lately working with Manu Gupta to develop JavaScript-Python Communication support for any JavaScript-based application (See JS-Python). She has recently been selected in the elite group of "25 Best Women Engineering Students of India" by Google. Congrats Preeti!

Dan Bricklin has been busy as well. He reports that he has sped up the cursor display on the XO laptop such that "the cursor just moves" when selecting a cell or a range. Dan had also completed the main code in SocialCalc for handling named cells and ranges in formulas. He has inter-sheet support working in the recalculation engine. He has added a "comment" property to cells so that we'll be able to store a string of text with any cell containing descriptive information about the formula, the data, or whatever. He has written the code for saving and restoring the scroll position of the sheet, including the cursor position and the locked-panes settings. This is especially important for using SocialCalc on a small screen such as the XO.

17. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has been working on the Develop activity. He has posted the latest version on the wiki (See Activities and Develop). "It really works! Not just a toy."

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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