OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-09-15

1. Thomas Jacobson, a network consultant with over 30 years of experience with Internet and satellite communications, spent two days at OLPC discussing how we can best take advantage of satellites for very low-cost bit distribution (updates and content). He gave a talk on Thursday (See http://www.tcjnet.com/xosat.html).

2. Nortel CTO John Roese has been blogging about the XO (See http://blogs.nortel.com/ctoblog/2007/09/12/one-laptop-per-child-where-in-the-world-is-that-cool-green-and-white-laptop).

3. Microscope: Professor Robert Shapiro visited Mary Lou Jepsen at OLPC last week to discuss more issues of optimal microscope design to allow the XO to provide diagnosis of HIV/AIDs, TB, and malaria, which kill more than six-million people every year, worldwide. Low-cost detection of these diseases could save many lives. Surprisingly, the key for detection is not high magnification; low magnification of a large image area and a dye coupled with violet-colored LEDs for illumination can be combined with image processing is sufficient. Professor Shapiro showed a prototype microscope to Mary Lou and discussed the basic requirements. Barrett Comiskey (whose has been designing a periscope) is also working on a low-cost microscope for the XO.

4. Testing: Translation of Sugar and the various core activities has begun in earnest. Alex Larsson and Rafael Ortiz worked this week with John Palmieri to produce a build that properly supports multiple languages. (Spanish had been broken for the last few builds due to some translation problems.) Alex has plans for testing all of our international keyboard mappings.

There is now a link from the sidebar on the OLPC Wiki home page to “Test”, where you can get information on the latest build before you load it, test configuration notes, and review our current set of test plans. If you would like to help with our testing, there are lots of bug fixes that need verification and lots of test plans to get through.

5. Schedule: There are still some bugs that need triage in Trial-3. We want to be at code freeze on Monday, so please do the best you can to get your bug fixes checked in this weekend. Starting Monday we want to get approval from Jim Gettys for every code change (bug fix) before committing.

6. Suspend/resume problem resolution: This week the team working on the suspend/resume problems (including among others, Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, Javier Cardona, Jordan Crouse, Richard Smith, John Watlington, and Gary Chiang) found the root cause of our “crashes upon resume” bug (the infamous bug #1835). The hardware was not allowing enough time after powering up the system clocks before bringing the Southbridge out of reset. This requires a minor hardware change to correct. A dozen machines in Cambridge have been modified, and are being used in the search for remaining suspend/resume problems. One of Chris Ball's tests passed 25,000 successful resumes in Open Firmware with the fix. Testing now shifts to wireless suspend/resume again (#1752).

7. Activities and infrastructure: Many fixes for Sugar, telepathy, the presence service, the Journal and datastore, and various system components were checked in during the week:

  • Mime-type invocation was cleaned up in order to invoke the proper activities at the right time;
  • The security infrastructure for Bitfrost is now in the builds (turned off by default) to enable easier/faster testing of activity adherence to the security model;
  • Simon Schamijer added a hide/show tray button to the browser (which contains thumbnails of shared bookmarks) and a view-source feature in the browser (See Web_Browser);
  • Simon also got sound working in the Memorize Game, which uses Csound to play ogg files;
  • Ranier Herres completed a much improved version of the calculator, including plotting of functions;
  • Improvement on Etoys continues: Bert Freudenberg has been keeping up changes in Sugar and the datastore; Kathleen Harness, Kim Rose and Yoshiki Ohshima worked on quick-help contents; Takashi Yamamiya adjusted the color picker and fonts to the XO display; Ted Kaehler is fixing the painting system; and Scott Wallace fixed various issues around fonts and scriptors.
  • Gnash has been updated to Version 0.8.1; it is much improved, although patent concerns still prevent us from shipping the ffmpeg library used by many common codecs (the Adobe Flash player has also been tested extensively);
  • Measure can now be safely used with other audio applications, thanks in part to an audio-driver cleanup that Andres Salomon has completed (the driver allows for independent control of the bias voltage and AC/DC coupling); Arjun Sarwal and Eben Eliason have modified the user interface to use a graphical representation of functions to encourage children to “see what this button does.”
  • The TamTam team, led by Jean Piché, has been busy: TamTam has been split into three activities—TamTamJam, TamTamSynthlab and TamTamEdit—each with a massively reworked user interface;
  • Mark Maurer fixed bugs in the Write Activity, most notably some synchronization bugs that manifest themselves during collaborative writing sessions; Marc Oude Kotte fixed some bugs in libabiword; and
  • The Read Activity now support zoom and copy to the clipboard.

8. Keyboards: Sarmad Hussain, Tariq Badsha, Babar Haq, Salman Minhas, Naveed Ikram, and Sufyan Kakakhel have been advising Walter Bender on the design of an Urdu keyboard for Pakistan. Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin has done the same for Mongolian.

9. X Window System: Ethiopian support is improving; Bernardo Innocenti filed some bug reports to upstream projects and built packages for the builds. We also have user-oriented installation instructions for testing.

On the Xorg front, Bernie started to look at a hard-crash bug in amd_drv, triggered when the Browse Activity renders a complex iGoogle page.

Bernie also make a lucky discovery: setting LANG=C take 5 seconds off the boot time, and possibly saves some memory too! We can set the proper locale later in the boot process: just before starting Sugar.

Stefano Fedrigo has backported promising EXA performance patches to Version 1.4. So far they resulted in a crashing server, but there is hope: while this server will make Trial-3, it may be ready for our first deployment system.

Jim Gettys attended part of the X developer's summit (XDS), where he discussed how to best secure the X Window System with Eamon Walsh's XACE extension. This is nearing completion, but will not be ready until early next year. He also investigated solutions of how to improve drag and drop onto the Sugar frame; there are several possibilities we will follow up on.

In the serendipity department, one of the talks at the XDS included information about a useful USB to VGA product on the market; there have been many requests for this capability for better use with projectors than our current network-based solutions, and this may be it.

10. Kernel: Andres Salomon committed audio-driver fixes (the capture device should now be in a sane state when the device is opened/closed, HPF and V_REF are no longer coupled, etc.), enabled the es1371 module for VMware users, and included a missing battery feature (accumulated_current) into the stable tree. The other major effort this week was in support of fine-tuning power usage; Andres has started working on tests using the battery's ACR registers to get better measurements of power savings that result from various tweaks.

11. Updates: Scott Ananian pushed manifests, upgrades, and OS signing into the build process and is working on updating our activation process with “real” cryptography. Scott also documented Eben Eliason and Rebecca Allen's startup UI design (See Startup_Sequence) and split it into a number of manageable implementation steps.

12. Firmware: Mitch Bradley continuing work this on firmware security, and on better tools for checking NAND FLASH integrity. Two bugs consumed 98% of Richard Smith's time this week: (1) the resume problem as reported above, which was resolved; and (2) a mysterious “turn off” problem—the core of the problem is that the timing used by the embedded controller (EC) to assert the PWR_BUT# signal is based a loop counter rather than a timer; Richard is looking into fixing this.

13. World Digital Library: The World Digital Library team, under the direction of John van Oudenaren and Michelle Rago, is finishing a working model of their visual seven-language library interface this month in preparation for a public demonstration at the UNESCO general conference October 15. The demonstration will draw on 60GB of materials from around the world, with highlights from the history of India. They will be showcasing the demo on three devices: the XO, the Classmate, and the iPhone.

14. Help wanted: ePals wants to hire a Python developer next week to finish a Sugarized activity that offers access to their PenPal services. They have a design almost completed, and expect this to be around 40 hours of work. The Library of Congress is considering up to three unpaid internships this fall with office space in their Science and Technology Sections, to identify educational and illustrative materials in the public domain and to get digital versions of them online and bundled for their own website and for OLPC collections. This is an opportunity to have unlimited access to their stacks and to get experience with modern digitization processes. Contact SJ Klein (sj at laptop dot org) for details regarding both positions.

15. Ethiopian texts: Emma Shercliffe of Macmillan and Ignatz Heinz of Avallain are finishing work on a language-learning tool this month, and a collection of Ethiopian texts and materials for the team in Addis. They will make this material available to the world. Macmillan is also interested in working with local teams across Africa to help share their experiences working with education ministries and schools; they have local authors and publishing branches in around half of the countries there.

16. Character recongnition: Thomas Breuel, a computer science professor at Kaiserslautern who is working on some of the harder character-recognition problems for Google's book scanning project, has been testing a handwriting-recognition application with the XO touchpad.

17. Email client: Mark Doffman has been working on the Python bindings for Tinymail. He could use some help with the actual “Sugarization” to complete a production client for an XO (See http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2007/09/05/python-bindings-of-tinymail and http://mail.gnome.org/archives/tinymail-devel-list/2007-September/msg00000.html).

18. Off-line wiki: Renaud Gaudin of moulin-wiki is working with the French development team at Linterweb (an open-source data-mining group) and the French Wikipedians. Together, they are building an off-line wiki reader.

More News

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News. Also on community-news.

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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