OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2008-03-22

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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).

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!

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).

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 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.

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).

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)

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

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.

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.

By reviewing Read's source code, they noticed two bugs:

  • 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).

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.)

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).

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.

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/).

Belkin has donated some USB-ethernet dongles and USB memory sticks. Thanks to Josh Seal!

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.

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

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Video

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Testimonials about my XO laptop

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