OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2008-03-29

1. Peru: Carla Monroy Gomez is in Lima, helping with the final preparations for the second round of teacher preparation in Peru. This coming week, 600 teachers in four regional centers will use the XO Laptop to explore, express, and collaborate. The next phase of the preparation will be in 18 regions as the XO is moving in waves into the furthest reaches of the country.

2. Update.1: Michael Stone, Chris Ball, and the rest of the tech team helped to prepare a new software release (Release Candidate 3) for Peru and Mexico this week. Update.1 will be tested in country and presumably be released at in the first week of April.

3. Security: Michael and Walter reviewed the Bitfrost specification, which is being implemented in phases. The current status (Update.1) is reflected in the wiki (See Bitfrost#Current Status).

4. Kavre, Nepal: The Nepalese Department of Education, Ministry of Education in coordination with OLPC Nepal has launched a pilot program of OLPC in Janajyoti School, Kavre. Minister of Education, Pradip Nepal stated the pilot as the first step of One Laptop Per Nepali Child movement. Director General of Department of Education marked the distribution day as a historical moment in Nepalese education history. Ankur, Iswor, Jitendra, Jwalanta, Manish, Nirmal, Prakash, Shankar, Shishir, Suyesh, Ujjwal, Sulav, Suraj, Suvash are working in the field among other OLPC Nepal volunteers. "Everyone is excited, the government officials, OLPC Nepal community, the school, parents and THE KIDS." (OLPC Nepal team has codenamed the pilot as "Sunrise". See Sunrise and http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com).

Sulochan Acharya has built a prototype "E-Pustakalaya" (E-Library) for Nepal's deployments using the FedoraCommons Repository Software and the Fez front-end. FedoraCommons differs from typical content management systems in that it can scale to millions of objects. E-Pustakalaya will be publicly accessible within a few weeks and Sulochan will work to document his configuration.

Teacher preparation for Bashuki and Bishwamitra schools begins on Saturday, March 29th. Bipul Gautam, Kamana Regmi, and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta of OLE Nepal are conducting a four-day training session for 24 teachers and officials from Nepal's Department of Education. The training session will focus on general computer literacy for the teachers themselves (the majority of whom have never touched a computer), using computers in the classroom, and child-centered teaching/learning.

5. School server: John Watlington and Martin Langhoff coordinated a conference call to discuss the School Server Roadmap with a large group of interested parties. General goals and timeframes were covered, and the team will focus hard on the upcoming release, which be tagged 'xs-0.3' (See XS Roadmap and XS Conf 08 MAR 25 Notes).

Martin has setup a fully portable build environment, and been cranking out preliminary XS images that contain fixes for some of the blocker bugs for xs-0.3. A local-to-OLPC-hosted build environment for the XS will soon be ready to take over the "xs-dev" role, thanks to the efforts of Henry Hardy.

Martin and SJ Klein have collected some initial notes on a learning-object distribution strategy heavily inspired in Debian's repository format. Expect to see an edited version in a wiki nearby soon.

Documentation updates about the School Server are underway in the wiki, thanks to John Watlington, Martin Langhoff, and volunteers culling updated information from the mailing list.

6. Support: Adam Holt helped provoke a very rewarding discussion between guest speaker Ric Holt (SW engineering professor), OLPC's Michael Stone, and the volunteer support team regarding OLPC's software engineering and bug-triaging challenges, including how we will support Update.1 given the concerns and anxiety around Activities "disappearing" as a result of the update process.

[As of Update.1, we'll have separated the operating system updates from the activity updates, which may initially give the appearance of activities disappearing. The "customization key" process (See Customization_key) is intended to facilitate customization of activities; also Bert Freudenberg has written a script to install the default set of activities: 

      http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py

Getting the activities back is then as simple as: 

      wget dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py
      python update-activities.py

...which works from the ctrl-alt-meshkey console.]

Adam plowed through a "zillion" more shipping/fulfillment tickets with Sandy Culver and Alan Claver as Brightstar completed its final *bulk* shipments to Give One Get One donors. This does *not* mean all shipments have gone out, as some exceptional cases still have to be dealt with over the month of April. Many thanks to our overworked and understaffed volunteers.

Adam organized shipments of broken machines to support volunteers and community and for-profit repair centers (five in the USA, two in Canada, and one in the Netherlands). A spare-parts supply-chain is still badly needed—especially for keyboards—we expect better news in coming weeks.

We'd like to welcome Support Specialist Emily Smith, who will start on Monday, 31 March, 9AM and work through at least the June/July time frame. Emily is brilliant, polished, believing—a library scientist who will be a huge help, even if only a our temp.

7. Sugar/Datastore: Eben Eliason will be giving the sugar-iconify script an overhaul in the near future. Among the changes there are a number for robustness, better error handling, and additional icon validation warnings. More useful to developers, Eben is also adding an option which will export a set of icons rendered in several styles, along with an html preview file, for observing them as they may appear within Sugar. The preview file also contains a list of items to validate the appearance of the icons.

Eben worked out some new visual treatments for object transfers as a core component of the OS (Initial sketches can be seen at Specifications/Object Transfers). Eben also tackled the problem of palette alerts, for instances where a given icon in the Frame needs to convey additional alert information (eg. low battery, failed transfer, etc.)

Morgan Collette released Chat-36.xo for Joyride/Update.2, with an improvement to open URLs using show_object_in_journal when you click on them. The "copy to clipboard" functionality is still there on rollover at this stage but probably not necessary any more. This release also fixes some minor user interface issues (Tickets #5053, #6621, and #6743) and also simplifies the telepathy code based on the improved Presence Service channel-creation API in Update.1.

8. Collaboration/Mesh: Chris Ball Worked on release testing and debugging, focusing his efforts mainly around activity sharing with Salut (Ticket #6739). The current status is that activity joining in 703 is reliable against a Jabber server, and fails sporadically on link-local access point or mesh.

John Watlington continued testing and analysis of data taken in our new Collaboration and Networking Testbed (See Collaboration Network Testbed). This data indicates that our problems with using mesh networking to connect more than a small number of laptops to a school server seem due to fundamental problems with the routing algorithms used, not flaws in the implementation. More experiments are being run, to test adjustments to the existing algorithms, and possible modifications are already being discussed. In the meantime, we strongly suggest that school deployments use 802.11b/g wireless access points.

Dafydd Harries Worked on improving documentation on the OLPC wiki about how activity sharing/collaboration work; he met with Michael Stone and Jonathan Hertzog to discuss how we might improve communications security in Sugar.

Morgan released Presence Service 0.79.2 for Joyride/Update.2, with improved debugging, and assisted with debugging various sharing failures on Salut (Ticket #6739).

Guillaume Desmottes continued the Salut refactoring. He tracked activity sharing problems (Tickets #6774, #6739, #6483). After investigation they seem to be due to network problems. He wrote a small Salut patch (#6782) improving debug output to help us to track these errors.

9. Releases/Testing: Thanks for all the help testing Update.1 candidate releases 702 and 703 this week! Simon Schampijer set up a wiki page for these test results (See Testing Update.1 Results) and many have contributed, including Gary Martin, SJ, Eduardo Silva, Michael, Walter, and Chris. Also thanks to Bryan Berry, Kim Quirk, and Scott Ananian for help on the release notes for Update.1, which are beginning to shape up (See OLPC Update.1 Software Release Notes).

10. Multi-battery charger: Richard Smith spent the week working with the 15-channel multi-battery charger prototype electronics. Testing has flushed out some software bugs, but nothing major so far. Overall the electronics appear to be working as expected. Many of the the mechanical parts have arrived at Gecko, where they have been inspected and approved or feedback submitted the manufacturer. The final parts are scheduled to arrive the week of April 4. Next week, Gecko should able to assemble a full prototype.

11. Active Antennae: John reports that a problem has been found with the cables used in building the 2000 pre-production prototypes (they aren't USB cables), requiring a rework. This will delay the arrival of these antennae for several more weeks. We still have around fifty in stock, so developers and small trials shouldn't be affected.

12. Keyboards: There are about 25 laptop recipients who wrote into the help support-gang looking for replacement keyboards. Membrane keyboards pose a tradeoff between the durability of the rubber membrane and the flexibility, or "give", of the resulting keys. We are looking at a variety of options.

13. FOSSCOMM: Diomidis Spinellis presented the XO at the Free and Open Source Software Communities (http://www.fosscomm.gr) conference at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. The presentation included a live demo of Sugar, Squeak EToys, and the Antikythera mechanism emulator developed using EToys.

14. Video of the week: Tom Boonsiri has posted a Youtube video of an ECG that uses the Measure activity. Power for a small breadboard is drawn from the USB port; the signal is input through the microphone input. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1QKTKAAug4). TOm notes that the amplifier circuit also doubles as an EMG: you can take an electrode and place it on the forearm and flex to see the muscle activity reflected in the waveform, a great example of using the laptop to allow children to explore how their bodies work.

15. FoodForce: Deepank Gupta, with support from Silke Buhr from the WFP, reports much progress on the port of FoodForce to the XO laptop (See Food Force).

16. SocialCalc: K.S. Preeti (Preeti), an engineering student from NSIT, who has been lately working with Manu Gupta to develop JavaScript-Python Communication support for any JavaScript-based application (See JS-Python). She has recently been selected in the elite group of "25 Best Women Engineering Students of India" by Google. Congrats Preeti!

Dan Bricklin has been busy as well. He reports that he has sped up the cursor display on the XO laptop such that "the cursor just moves" when selecting a cell or a range. Dan had also completed the main code in SocialCalc for handling named cells and ranges in formulas. He has inter-sheet support working in the recalculation engine. He has added a "comment" property to cells so that we'll be able to store a string of text with any cell containing descriptive information about the formula, the data, or whatever. He has written the code for saving and restoring the scroll position of the sheet, including the cursor position and the locked-panes settings. This is especially important for using SocialCalc on a small screen such as the XO.

17. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has been working on the Develop activity. He has posted the latest version on the wiki (See Activities and Develop). "It really works! Not just a toy."

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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