User talk:MitchellNCharity/Old

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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.

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

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.

sugar-jhbuild

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.

repository access

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.". Widely spread commit bits, and widely enough spread admin bits that 24 by 7, there's someone on #olpc or #olpc-dev who can email them.

Two possible approaches:

1. Create a "common" project on d.l.o or olpc.coderanger, with the desired properties. This would get us going immediately.
2. Create yet another repo, either self run on on one of the repo services. This has some advantages, but unless we found someone uncommitted to do it, calendar time will scroll by before it happens.

We need option 1.

development support machine

So why haven't simple things like cron'ed tinderboxes and tars been done? It's bottlenecked on easy access to the software, and access to a development support machine. The cron jobs should be on the repo. The development community should have enough people with box access that updating the copies running copies is never an issue. This should be easy. There are lots of things, like irc bots which report commits, which would be easy for people to set up if there were lower barriers to entry.

You would think by now everyone would have their own boxes. So, if you want to run automated python documentation generation, they could do that on their own box. But they don't. And you still need the code in a common repo to permit collective incremental improvement. The odds of any one person having box, and time to get started, and time to maintain, and time to improve, approximates zero.

"how to get your software to kids" story

Currently, only Kuku has braved the informal process to be a non-core TRIAL-2 candidate. I, living here, have only the vague information gleaned from watching that, to shed any light on the process.

• Write down what people need to do for their software to be in CR1 or TRIAL-2 or whatever.

And send it to the game jam folks. Various of them have pleas for assistance on the wiki, but without specifics, of what needs to be accomplished by when in order to achieve what, it is vastly harder to actively recruit aid. You can't send mail to python list asking folks to help you make unspecified improvements in random code by an unspecified date in order that something fuzzily nice might happen.

And it makes it simply infeasible to solicit new projects.

wrapup

We need a much more wiki-like approach to our code development environment. At least for activity development.

And we need a getting started story which actually works.

TODO

• An editing pass to make tone uniformly positive and upbeat. Opportunity. It's all great opportunities.

Raw beginning of a draft recruitment email for EE lab tech

Target audience: 1st tier: Local MITERS+Make crowd. MIT alum. csail-related. media. 2nd: MIT grad list. ...

Since lots of folks will see it, include more general recruitment info. Which can be reused for post-emulation/sugar-gettable "goog python/gtk" sugar and trial-2 ticket hacking. Make clear this is a personal, non-official effort.

Target timescale: get out to 1st tier monday. Some individuals tomorrow.

EE lab tech needed - OLPC Boston for the next 2 weeks - Help change the world!

I'm doing volunteer work with One Laptop Per Child. I am looking for a couple of people to help out in Cambridge, MA (Kendall). But there is also great opportunity and need for helping out remotely as well. Here is a brief description of OLPC, why it matters, and what's needed.

THE WHY

There are a billion school age children in the world. Their opportunities for education could use dramatic improvement. But look at the scale. Do something which takes a year to spin up, and that's order 100 million missed. And another order 100 million entering primary school, which for most, will be their only schooling. Do something which takes a decade to spin up, and you've missed a billion kids.

One Laptop Per Child is the result of trying to find some way, any way, to have a major impact on this problem/opportunity. The observation was that with innovative hardware design, open source, and massive production, you can afford to give children a laptop to serve as textbook and collaboration tool, journal, library, camera, video, VOIP, musical instrument, platform for hardware hacks, and computer. Not sitting in a computer lab, but one the kids own and live with. Readable in sunlight. Usable in rain. Designed to survive the five years of primary school. Mesh networking. Usable off the net, off the power grid.

And not merely a few thousand here, and a few thousand there. But blanketing towns, regions, countries. Not local school systems deploying to a few schools, but national ministries of education planning deployments for states. With the laptop serving not only its primary (no pun intended) mission, but also as a focal point for efforts in education, health, infrastructure, and development.

Depending on which countries buy in, the very first production run will be several million laptops. Something like 10% of world annual laptop production. New hardware revs every year or so. Ramping up to order 100 million per year. 2008, 2009, 2010. Even with all this, we are going to miss most of those billion children. There are limits to what even an mass effort like this one can do. But as their brothers and sisters hit primary school, those we can reach. Those we can give an opportunity for education unmatched in their countries, singular in history.

There are other things one could do, instead or in addition. Create school libraries in a box. Aim to create a million school libraries. Construct and expand school buildings. Much lower impact than OLPC, both on kids and country, but a fraction of the cost per child. If you could get people to actually do it, rapidly, on the scale needed. I don't see that happening. But OLPC might.

Hundreds of children around the world have been using laptop hardware prototypes. And the final pre-production Beta-4 machines are in, and will go out to a thousand more for TRIAL-2 pilots in 10 odd countries. For the countries' to see whether this has all become real enough to turn their commitments into cash.

SOME TECH DETAILS

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification A dot-com-era equivalent x86 cpu. 256 MB memory and 1 GB of flash disk. USB slots, and a mic port which doubles as DC input. There have been assorted prototype hardware hacks, like a $1 lens set to turn the camera into a microscope, robot control, etc.

Software development has been less far along than the hardware. It's a stripped down linux. Custom UI, as office desktops aren't quite the right thing for young children. Pervasive collaboration infrastructure. Journal approach to filesystem UI. Lots of python. Recent efforts to slim down Java may get it light enough to include. Smalltalk, Squeak, and Scratch.

You might prefer language X, or desktop infrastructure Y to gtk. I do. But the choices made have been plausible, the result works. The need now is to flesh it out, and continue loading it up with creative software.

The educational model is very connectionist, Montessori. Collaborative creation and exploration.

(rewrite this section)

The core of OLPC is 10 something people. Who have been in "way too overloaded to get help" mode for a while. So that's what I'm doing here, trying to get them help. (...)

NEEDED - EE lab tech - OLPC Boston for the next 2 weeks

Measure power utilization of units on board.

Minimizing power consumption is a (...). There is a board with testing infrastructure in place. People got pulled over to EC coding. Lots of pencil pushing. And getting power measurement right isn't simple.

Looking for a good person with experience soldering of surface mounts, driving EE lab equipment, and who has ideally programmed microcontrolers and build hardware around it, including external interface logic.

Also debug issues like an audio pop (...).

(link trac)

Contact: Mitchell Charity ...

NEEDED - Field return triage - OLPC Boston

(...)

(...good python/pygtk for sugar and road prep) (...post road prep - trial-2 testing and bug hunt)

bills and coins

I can start working on getting images processed. Are there ones that are done [so I don't make redundant work]? Also, what would you like me to do with the images after I process them? --Nikki 22:00, 8 July 2007 (EDT)

update: I have Argentinian coins and bills - I was thinking of just putting them all into a .zip. I only included the new versions of the bills [that isn't a problem, I assume], but the different colored versions of the coins. --Nikki 00:14, 9 July 2007 (EDT)