OLPC Rochester, NY/Event history/26February2009

• • RIT Professor Jeff Sonstein spoke on the potential use of the XO in disaster-recovery efforts.
    • He described his involvement with Sahana, a free and open source disaster management system that was conceived and developed in response to the 26 December 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami (Wikipedia history).
    • Jeff described the ReSTful (Representational State Transfer) software architecture, and his plans to migrate Sahana to this architecture.
    • He then plans to port the software to the XO because of its ability to self organize a network. This will be extremely valuable in a disaster when the Internet is disrupted.

      After the meeting I learned that the OLPC Project will be sending 4 XOs to the Hastily-Formed Network Research Group at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California for testing and trial integration into their disaster Fly Away Kits.

  • Fred Grose demonstrated the Etoys environment on the XO using a VirtualBox virtualization of the Sugar on a Stick distribution of XO software environment.
    • Sugar on a Stick or virtualization is a convenient way to project a running Sugar system on a conference room screen.
    • Fred suggests you explore Etoys by steping through the short tutorials available by clicking the '?' icon in the Etoys toolbar.

• • Bill Hickok gave a presentation on getting started with Python.
    • He reviewed the history of the language and some of its advantageous features.

• • Karlie Robinson handed out some Fedor Sugar Spin LiveCDs for PC and Macs.
    • These are the same image as used in the Sugar on a Stick distribution and can boot on a machine without installing to its disc.

• • The group agreed to support Professor Stephen Jacobs' Honors Seminar on Developing for the OLPC XO (see the Projects section).