OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2008-02-24

1. Solar power: Richard Smith’s reaching out to the community has had very good results. OLPC now has several options available to them for solar test sites. It turns out that Rob Savoye (“Mr. Gnash”) is a big supporter of alternative energy and already runs his house “off grid” using a mix of solar and wind power. Rob is interested in working with OLPC and is already providing valuable “from the trenches” info.

2. School Server: We are still unable to generate new school server builds. (Dennis Gilmore has been looking into this.) John Watlington spent the last week looking at the operation of the laptop without a school server. Tomeu Vizoso has contributed a patch to Abiword that will fix Write crashing shortly after entering in a collaboration session.

3. Activities: Dan Bricklin has blogged about the latest milestone reached in the SocialCalc (spreadsheet) activity; 109 functions—the “small group”—have now been implemented in the activity (For details, please see http://danbricklin.com/log/2007_12_05.htm#milestone).

Luke Closs has been able to change the gecko security settings to allow a local HTML file access to XPCOM. Subject to Rainbow review, this means we can now communicate messages between Python and JavaScript. Todd Whiteman from ActiveState, who works on the “Komodo” application has suggested the use nslObserver interface as the method of passing messages back and forth between Python and JavaScript.

A simple Moon phase viewer that includes lunar-eclipse information has been written for the XO laptop. (See Moon).

Simon Schampijer updated the Browse activity documentation (Please see Browse). He also updated the Browse test plan (See Tests/Browse).

Chris Ball worked with Richard Boulanger ahead of his release of Csound samples—Pippy is now able to list and play CSound *.csd compositions.

Guillaume Desmottes debugged and provided a patch for a problem with Read sharing with Salut (Ticket #6483).

Simon added a 'Set multicast rate' option to the Sugar control panel (Ticket #6461).

Arjun Sarwal continues to work on the Measure activity. He has explored various built-in peripheral devices/sensors of the XO, including:

  • a camera mode within Measure calculates the average values over all pixels of each frame and displays it in real time (See Image:Camera_in_measure_1.jpg);
  • extracting the wireless signal strength and wireless noise power from iwconfig;
  • getting the values from the built-in temperature sensors.

Arjun continues to work on an improved UI for Measure and he has corrected a bug in Turtle Art with Sensors that was giving the sensor values of the previous rather than current sensor block when queried. Arjun discussed details with Barry Vercoe and also Richard Boulanger about sensor support in CSound. It emerges that getting sensor data would result in the form of a modified “in” opcode sampling at control rate and he discussed in detail with Dale Joachim about the various options for undertaking environmental studies using the XO and sensors in the proposed pilot/deployment in Haiti.

4. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Turkish, Romanian and Creyole (kreyòl). Also, the Scratch developers exploring the use of Pootle for translations. (Scratch is developed externally and does not use any public version control system.) If this works out properly, we can use it as a model for supporting other non dev.laptop.org git hosted projects relevant to the OLPC.

Edgar Ceballos has translated the “Getting Started” pages in to Spanish (See http://laptop.org/es/gettingstarted and PO-laptop.org-gettingstarted-es).

Usman mansour reports that an XO laptop user manual in the Pashto and Dari language has been completed.

5. Testing: Chris Ball has prepared a test plan for next week's mesh scaling work (See Mesh_Testing). Chris wrote a tool that automates key-presses for the Write activity, so that we can perform automated tests that keep track of how many keypresses fail to get through to as we add more laptops to a collaboration.

6. Bundles: Michael Stone wrote a first draft of software for “bundle-distribution” over USB keys. These keys, when used to boot an XO, will unpack a collection of activity and content bundles (contained in $USB/bundles) into appropriate locations on the NAND. The rapid completion of this prototype built on and would not have been possible without access to the excellent previous work of Scott (olpcrd) and the Debian-Installer team. Michael documented the first part of the process used for writing similar software (See Building_initramfsen).

7. Presence service: Morgan Collett started looking at handling chat with normal Jabber clients better and started looking into ways to promote community Jabber servers. (Morgan had found several references on the wiki to people who tried to set up a Jabber server with the required patches and modules, and just couldn't get it to work and gave up.)

8. Production: The final batch of laptops for the G1G1 program are finishing up in production and making their way to Chicago. They will start shipping out to consumers as early as Monday. We expect to ship them all before the end of March.

9. Support: With the help of a couple of volunteers, Kim Quirk and Adam Holt opened all the returns currently at the Brightstar warehouse to sort the boxes into three categories: no problem found, will not boot, or other problem (keyboard, battery, screen, or touchpad). One goal of the evaluation of the returns is to create volunteer repair centers from the parts of broken laptops.

A strong grassroots community is coming together in Peru in support of the project there: over 50 people came to the first gathering, and about half that number have written into voluntario@laptop.org asking to help out.

10. ICDL: Tim Browne and Ben Bederson of the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) have optimized their outstanding online Mongolian children's book collection (www.read.ma) for the XO laptop. ICDL and OLPC were featured at a World Bank event in Ulaanbaatar last week following the launch of the XO laptop in two schools in Mongolia. Tim and Ben also announced that the ICDL’s improved readability updates for the OLPC have been implemented. The exemplary books from their collection, now totally more than 2,600 children's books from around the world, are dramatically easier to read on XO. Next up for ICDL and OLPC: translations and “pop-out” text.

11. OLPC health: Dr Lia Meisinger has joined the health efforts and she would be curating content on Maternal Health, Childbirth and related issues (See Health_meetings). XO laptops are being used at a rural medical clinic in San Blas, Mexico (See http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdorfman/2262339766/).

12. Science and Maths: Arjun helped Jayawant Patki from “Aptara – The Content Transformation Company” from India to get their content running on the XO. They have extensive Science and Maths content for primary school children that would be accessible using the Browse Activity.

13. In the community: Sebastian Silva has a team of people working actively together on his new Spanish-language community site (http://meta.fuentelibre.org/trac). OLPC Austria is sending a delegation to CeBIT. Many people, including Mel Chua and Ian Bicking, will be at PyCon to help man an OLPC booth.

14. Library and creation: Mako Hill and SJ Klein are finalizing a specification for internationalizing content bundles to share for discussion early next week. The library core will be fully localized next week using this structure, as an example.

A number of Spanish literary materials, written and spoken, were identified over the weekend as part of an open texts push, including the Spanish versions of the primary science guides and resources developed in France by LAMAP. One of the LAMAP directors is currently in Lima and plans to meet with the ministry of education next week. Bundled collections are being developed from these, and the first should be available next week.

Lauren Klein has been working with Pablo Flores on a publishing channel for stories from his schools. She is also writing about ways to use Omeka and Moodle for teachers to share their works and maintain collections.

Wade Brainerd reports a “sugarized” 3D Pong is almost ready. The Jordan brothers, at the Game Developers Conference this week (on the passes they won at last summer's Olin Game Jam), are working on the next version of SprayPlay.

15. OLPC Memo series: Marvin Minsky has begun a memo series on learning. Read his essay: What makes mathematics hard to learn? (See Marvin Minsky).

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.

  1. redirect OLPC:News#Press

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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