[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-07-08)

[Walter Bender]

1.  San Diego: Nicholas delivered the conference keynote to an audience of
6,000 teachers, researchers and education policy makers at the
International Society for Technology in Education's (ISTE)  National
Education Computing Conference (NECC).

OLPC was the highlight of the conference's special-features pavilion.
Immediately following Nicholas' speech, crowds gathered in our exhibit
space, where Barry Vercoe and Simon Schampijer presented “Walk Among the
Music” and “Sound Match,” two interactive-music applications that utilize
OLPC A-Test boards and the mesh network. Dan Williams of Red Hat set up
Sugar, the user-interface (UI) framework for the laptop, on four additional
boards and worked non-stop answering questions from classroom teachers
about open source development. Kim Rose from Viewpoints Research demoed
Squeak and eToys as examples of learning applications that will be run on
the laptop. The working prototype was in such demand that Stephen Michaud
and Nia Lewis had to give demonstrations of its features in order to limit
handling of the prototype. More than half of our visitors wanted to either
to photograph the machine or have their picture taken with it. Exhibit
visitors were eager to get involved, wanted to know how their schools could
help, and delivered continuous gratitude to OLPC for our work.

2. Brazil: The main headline and story on the front page of Friday´s
edition of  Valor, one of the major business newspapers of Brazil, affirmed
the governmen's intention to enter into agreement with OLPC this year. The
story highlighted Cezar Alvarez, a top staff member of President Lula, who
is in charge of all projects for social and economic inclusion. There were
also two other related articles in the Business Section, including a
picture of a smiling Prof. Marcelo Zuffo holding a development baord and
discussing how the work-groups and Brazilian labs intended to build related
products and services on top of the platform.

Positivo, a major educational publisher and services company that provides
one of the major educational portals demonstrated their adaptation of their
portal and content to run on the laptop and within the screen size. They
intend to have all their content ready in time for the introduction of the
laptop in Brazil.

3. Dan Williams and Marco Gritti continue to iterate on Sugar. The three
basic components of the framework are activities, the Home Page, and the
People Page. The latter two components are slide-in windows. Activities are
run in a full-screen window and they are shared with other children by
default. (Details can be found at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_design_review_3.)

4. Benj. Mako Hill and Nathan Keyes have begun work on a Tamagotchi-like
interface whose purpose is to allow children to interact with the
system-level controls of the laptop in a simple and fun way. Named
Amiko—the Esperanto word for friend—the animated character can be called
onto the screen by pressing the “Status” button. Various features of
Amiko’s physical appearance will portray the status of system elements such
as battery life, available memory, and wifi signal strength. Amiko will be
reprogrammable such that a child should be able to easily change its
appearance to approximate his or her own appearance, through skin and
clothing style and color. These customized appearances will be sharable
over the mesh.

5. Red Hat's David Zeuthen has fixed the daily “builds” so that people
using developer boards will be able to start testing our software on a
regular basis. He as included RPM (package management) databases, so anyone
should be able to install developer tools on the images we've created.
David is also working on developing an improved initrd that will allow us
more  flexibility in terms of where those images can run; we hope to have
an image that works equally well on NAND flash, USB flash, and a USB HDD
attached to a machine.

6. Imran Akbar, an OLPC intern this summer, has been doing work on a
software and hardware system exerciser that has been commonly used on
server systems, adapting it for use on the laptop. This will be useful for
stressing systems during alpha and beta testing and is now needed for
manufacturing testing being done at Quanta.

7. Jordan Crouse of AMD has just made available an initial version of an
EXA driver for the X Window System, and it is on track for probable
inclusion in the upcoming X11 R7.2 release in September. Every character
painted on the screen on Linux is now alpha blended anti-aliased text.
Alpha blending is the process of compositing images together, which are
themselves possibly partially transparent. EXA support allows for efficient
use of the Geode's alpha blending unit. This will increase performance,
lower power consumption, and give us more options for the user interface.
Our great thanks to Jordan for his hard work reaching this milestone much
faster than expected. Left to do is screen rotation, full Xv (video)
support and extensive testing.

8. Two of Ivan Krstic's Summer of Code students spent half of this week at
the OLPC offices. The students are working on importing external data
sources—such as Project Gutenberg and subsets of Wikipedia (known
affectionately as the One Encyclopedia per Child project)—into the OLPC
eBook reader platform. The office discussions centered around choice of a
back-end format and user interface for the eBook reader, and the students
produced a pair of specifications detailing both problems. Next week, Ivan
will meet with Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, to discuss a
closer collaboration on some of the OLPC eBook issues.

-walter

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Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org