User talk:MitchellNCharity/Old

Feedback welcome

Please tag your comments with the "four tildes".

Random late-night brainstorming

• Angle measurement (as mentioned elsewhere). Converging lines to eye at edge of screen. Surveying demo. Some simple reduction software. Couple of kids could survey room, field, get size info, build 3D model, etc, very quickly. todo: see if i can get hands-on a laptop for a couple of minutes to get a feel. Oooo, camera as high precision angle measurement tool? have textures ready for 3d then too.
• Timer. Beep a second, 10 sec different one, etc. Measure velocity, etc.
• Order of magnitude feel for numbers. 200 dpi means lots of dots. 100 distinct dpi? Slider, exponential, 1 to say 100,000.
  • Fractions. Big square. 1. down to 1/100000.
  • Combined range. 1 is 1in or 1/2in.
  • Circle graph. Colaborative slicing, each kids controls a slice, excess region for leftover. Or break apart/reasemble?

What infrastruct exists for distributed dynamic ui?

• Mouse runs from machine to machine. Hiding, appearing. Fur can be painted. Whose machine is it on? Carry messages?

In general, what infrastruct for graphical agents moving between machines? Animals, numbers, etc.

• Painting with sound effects is apparently very popular. Paint activity have sound? Stamps, etc. Add? Sharing custom stamps as community activity. Saving also key. Art gallery app?
• How much parallax is needed to do cloud height measurement? Velocity.
• "Appropriate tech" build-it receipies? barometer (thread), humidity, ...?
  • water droplet magnifying glass
• big picture
  • ephemeris. orient laptop by sun. hold laptop in orthogonal positions (up, down, left, right, etc) - see through earth, solar sys, etc.

enough computes for simple 3d astro syms? ss, local stars, galaxy. at least pretty rotating anims of each.

angle measurement + solar system model + sky observation + model solar system school yard

• • see through earth could be a neat demo. can use camera as horizon sensor?
• what is the state of doing fermi questions with <5th graders?
• camera edge detection (w+w/o multiple machines) -> good model formation? (3d, velocity, position, etc). anything cheap enough? just how much computes do we have?
• nonmesh communication protocols. sound, light. interesting collaborative hackability?
• can kids create their own versions of the icons?

otherwise personalize the on-screen space?

• can information about users be encoded in the XO icons? activity level, battery state, activity-specific info (instruments, etc).

can kids program? might be worth some effort to have such a high profile part of the environment be at least a little kid programmmable.

XO "skins"? another tradeable item.

"Or keep it intentionally crude, and make it easy for kids to create them. High res permits nice icons, and much lower effort creation (getting a few large pixels to look good is hard, gimp pull-down menu 3d effects much less so). Perhaps the option of "stencils" or something to "play within a theme", distort/art-ify existing icons?"

• cross and parallel eye stereograph software. 3d drawing infrastruct in general. squeak have 3d env, or all just 2d?
• keep reminding yourself - very high resolution.
• 3d/2.5d drawing effects.
• shading, things crawling under screen background. eg, numbers wandering around, adding themselves. letters face shifting.
• kids are in tight sync with their own pc. allows pervasive customization. need backups or one's world, product of "years" of work, getting lost would be traumatic.
• is abiword being set up as a collaborative editor? what model?
• can leverage the old medialab collaboration tracking/analysis stuff? conversation dominance, etc. enough computes for speaker identification? hmm, enough for single speaker high-training voice recognition? big brother downsides.

bills & coins

Maybe the following links will be of your liking:

• The MegaPenny Project (how big is a million? billion?)
• The argentine bills and coins you can find them in the Central Bank website ... using the nagivation bar on the left go to "Billetes y Monedas" (bills and coins) and then "Emisiones Vigentes" (current notes). On the bill's section keep in mind that 'current' currency is on the right... the ones on the left are the old ones—we've had quite some changes ;) Cheers, --Xavi 23:26, 30 April 2007 (EDT)

  Nifty. I've added the ar links to the non-talk page. Though I had flash trouble with the site, and the bills. Feel free to comment/edit there. And the MegaPenny suggests and idea... Thanks! :) MitchellNCharity 20:29, 1 May 2007 (EDT)

Wow! moments

this is a great idea for a project. Something to build out. MegaPenny and various Cockeyed projects are also a great source for inspiration. Sj talk 13:36, 22 May 2007 (EDT)

Images for Emulation

I'd like to promote a 'get sugar' campaign to get lots of people emulating the OS. Making it easier to figure out how to do it, and how to make it fast, is an important step... Sj talk 17:57, 29 May 2007 (EDT)

Thanks for the email. Do write up your thoughts on how to launch 'get sugar' and we can get more people thinking about/working on it. See also Talk:Library for a tar.gz ...

Vision test

We'd like to add a vision test on the first machine startup. Can you recommend a set of images we could use for this? Then we could develop an activity around it... Sj talk 15:58, 3 June 2007 (EDT)

Do you mean like my brainstormed list in Talk:Educational content ideas? Very much not my field, so not really. But I'll try to look into it tomorrow. MitchellNCharity 20:49, 3 June 2007 (EDT)

• vision
  • visual acuity tests (Snellen chart, E chart, near-test card, gratings, etc).
  • visual field tests (Amsler grid, perimetry testing, tangent screen test, ...?)
  • color vision tests

Yes, just like that list. Noah is also talking to some people interested in basic health, one of whom might want to own such a project. We should get a vision doc and someone who works with novice health workers involved to make sth that's an easy & foolproof diagnostic tool... Sj talk

Re: Truncating "vandalism"

Since you mention it in an editing comment, I thought I'd point out that Xavi has also noted various anonymous IPs that truncate a page at the first ampersand or remove all the plus signs. I'd guess these are either poorly coded spambots or poorly behaving web spiders. It could also be a niche web browser or web proxy that is mangling someone's legitimate edit, although I'd expect MediaWiki to have resolved any such problems. I don't know what people are doing about it besides reverting the edits. —Joe 15:08, 5 June 2007 (EDT)

Re: Content meetings in Cambridge

We used to have library/education meetings on Monday nights. I don't know if they're still on - should ask SJ. Mchua

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Draft - Opportunities to grow the XO developer community

I would like to see more people developing software for the XO. Soon.

Fortunately, there are several low-hanging fruit opportunities to make that happen.

vision

Hello python community!

Are you on vacation? Or a few hours you can beg, borrow, or steal? Want to directly help change the world?

In two months time, a thousand primary school children around the world, in ..., will have Beta-4 OLPC laptops. If the trials go well, production of the XO-1 will begin, and another million, yes, million, will have them by year end. When was the last time you had a chance to write software which would definitely be used by a thousand children? Potentially by a million? Never. That's the potential of this project. And the importance of the trials.

And it's mostly written in python. And pygtk, cairo, and a lot of other basic infrustructure.

The laptops have... can do... . We have working...

It is now vastly easier to contribute. Just go to wiki.laptop.org/go/For_new_developers. You will create a user page, come by #olpc-dev, and get commit access to our common repository. We generate an Ubuntu live cd about once a week, set up to let you instantly start developing. We also have a very large tar file, to get you started if you run linux.

making it easy to get started

When a developer is potentially interested in helping, the path should be smooth as glass. Do wiki page, get development environment, get commit bit, go. Not, as now, the subject of "what should we do with this person" emails.

And it is not technically hard to do this. There are big low-hanging fruit which could feed a hundred. No hard problems have to be solved. It's simply a matter of doing it.

• There are three barriers to using sugar-jhbuild. You can't download it (it is not infrequent that one of the several servers needed is down). Building is a pain. And it doesn't run on some platforms (eg, x86_64). The last is hard to address. The first two are _not_.
  • There should be a cron job whose role in life is to collect the scattered sugar-jhbuild sources. It just runs sugar-jhbuild update. And tars or serves the result. Getting the sugar sources should be as easy as tar xf, not an iffy, potentially multi-day process. If sugar-jhbuild update works, great. But when it doesn't, all you have to do is X.
  • I assume sugar-jhbuild actually builds on some platform, somewhere. Why isn't there a cron job snapshotting that, so at least people on that platform can get instant-on?
  • All it would take is one working Ubuntu snapshot for the masses of Ubuntu developers to roll it into a live cd. So let's do it, and ask them.

Sending patch emails isn't a viable development model for anything where you don't intentionally want to slow and throttle changes. As with the core os. For Activity development, one needs widely spread commit bits.

Currently, we have projects on two repositories, partitioned down to individual projects, with an "email Joe" access story. "You want to help? Find a project and join it."

What is needed instead is "You want to help? Bang, here you go. Do not become distracted and wander off. Do not come back to it tomorrow. You can have your first getting feet wet commit in a few minutes.".