[Community-news] OLPC News 2007-08-25

Sat Aug 25 13:43:56 EDT 2007

1. Ethiopia: Nicholas gave the keynote at UN hosted World Information
Technology Forum at which 52 countries were present, virtually all
African nations.

2. Breaza: As part of our on-going outreach in Romania, OLPC intern
Joel Stanley gave a presentation to Forum IT, an annual five-day
computer summer camp for young people in Romania, run by Catalin Grosu
(See http://tabara.forumit.ro/2007/arhiva.php).

3. Microscope: TB, malaria, and HIV/AIDS kill about 6M people a year
in resource-poor areas. Simple, afford diagnostic methods for these
diseases could save many lives. Our video-microscope add-on to the XO
may help with the diagnostics efforts: HIV/AIDS can diagnosed through
video microscopicy with signal processing: an automating method to
count T-Cells. TB (including drug-resistant TB) and malaria can be
diagnosed in similar ways. We are discussing the best way to proceed
with Dr. Howard Shapiro, who runs the Center of Microbial Cytometry
and wrote the widely used textbook, Practical Flow Cytometry, which
can be read online free of charge (See
http://probes.invitrogen.com/products/flowcytometry/practicalflowcytometry.html).
Howard has already developed low-cost cytometers for this purpose.

4. Pippy: Chris Ball released a Python-programming activity called
Pippy, which is in the base image as of Build 553. It is a simple
programming console in the style of the consoles for basic interpreted
languages that many of us grew up with, and comes with a selection of
introductory Python code. The next goal is to make it easy for
children to distribute activities that consist of the code they've
written.

5. Wireless resume: Chris Ball spent most of the week working on the
wireless-resume problem. Javier Cardona and USB experts at Marvell
have been coming up with firmware patches. They are making
progress—the number of successful resumes we get per cycle is
increasing.

6. Kernel: Andres Salomon fixed some build failures due to kernel
config and sent the patch upstream. Our build scripts needed to be
updated as well, so that was done. With that out of the way, Andres
took the opportunity to do a large update of our kernel config. This
included enabling network and sound drivers used by VMware and
Virtualbox, dropping some unused NAND drivers (including ATest NAND
support), fixing IPv6, and building some drivers statically. Andres
also reviewed a number of vserver updates and committed some of them.

7. School server: John Watlington announced a build (125) for testing.
  It is missing a number of crucial services, but verifies the build
and installation process and supports laptops on the mesh. It should
install on most x86 platforms, requiring only an Active Antenna to
provide the mesh interface. More information is available from the
wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Server_Software). You can also
obtain the Live CD image from
http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs/OLPC_XS_LATEST.iso
Release notes and installation instructions are also in the wiki (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Installing_Software). Over the next week,
we hope to include all required services in this build. Thanks go to
Holger Levsen, Dan Margo, Scott Ananian, and RedHat team.

8. Updates and security: Scott Ananian—with help from Ivan Krstić,
Michael Stone, Noah Kantrowitz, and Mitch Bradley—wrote or edited the
following specifications in the wiki:

 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Manifest_Specification
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firmware_Security
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firmware_Key_and_Signature_Formats
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Early_Boot
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Cheat_codes
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Yellow_Treaps

Scott also made good progress towards getting
boot-from-multiple-images support into the initial ramdisk, a
component of our improved upgrade code. Scott worked on the
auto-reinstallation image, hand-holding users through the new
auto-reinstallation process and debugging some genuine problems.

9. Firmware: Lilian Walter got the router to advertise a DNS IPv6
address and the code to use those data. For completeness, she is
working on setting up DHCP6s to do the same. Mitch Bradley released
Q2C25; he is focusing on security support in the firmware

10. Schedules: Monday is feature freeze for Trial-3. We will be
following up on all unfinished features to see how to close them down
or move them out. We will start attacking the blocking and
high-priority bugs starting next week.

11. Testing: There was regression over the past week, especially in
activities, but by the end of the week, many fixes had been checked
in. Check this weekend's build (557). Please write up your notes in
the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Group_Release_Notes).

12. MaMaMedia: The MaMaMedia team has a new release for Build 542 that
includes seven activities, including a Jigsaw Puzzle, Poll Builder,
and Slider Puzzle feature mesh-based creative and collaborative
sharing; and a Learning Center as a place for teachers and students to
share learning tips. All of activities are now using the (almost)
stabilized Sugar features: journal, clipboard, and tubes for sharing.
Many thanks to Carla Gomez Monroy, SJ Klein, and Lauren Klein for
their feedback and to Lincoln Quirk, Eben Eliason, and Marco Gritti
for their collaboration with Morgan Collett, Carlos Neves, Terrence
Grannum, Ed Stoner, Rich Goehl, and Shannon Sullivan (See
http://www.worldwideworkshop.org/olpcwiki/index.php?title=MaMaMedia_Activity_Center
and
http://www.worldwideworkshop.org/olpcwiki/index.php?title=Teacher_Center).

13. Map creation: Christopher Schmidt, Schuyler Erle, and SJ Klein
worked out a process for turning existing map-layer tools and public
data into a lightweight browsable atlas, whose most detailed layer
links out to text or image content. This should be able to run on an
XO, with tiles generated by libraries on a server.  Early versions are
working online as a browsable page. Christopher is working on an
activity version that clones Browse.

14. Games: Roberto Faga got a lightweight NES emulator to work on the
XO, with a set of bundles or ROMs. We need a copyright release on the
ROMs and source code from Nintendo (or the original publishers) before
we could ship them. Patrick Dejarnette got his Side-Scroller engine
working, and is now developing images and some levels over the weekend
(See wiki.laptop.org/go/Side-scroller).

15. Content Jams: Brendan Ballou in NYC is organizing a content jam
for September 21-23 around news and journalism; they have their
organizational team and a test group set up. Roberto Faga is also
preparing a Game Jam in Brazil for the end of September; he is looking
for interested Portuguese-speakers to help out.

16. Misc. activities: Lauren Klein and Charles Smith are continuing to
work on a Bug Blitz activity and plan to have something to test next
week. Some biologists from Argentina have offered to help with the
project by reviewing photographs to help identify bugs and other life
that children photograph in their vicinity.

An activity that need support and work: a simple video editor for
splicing together images and video and matching them with spoken
sentences (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/ColingoXO).

17. Grassroots: OLPC Philippines is gathering local interest; a Manila
content jam is planned for the start of October, and they are filing
papers to set up their own local nonprofit. OLPC Indonesia is starting
to take shape as well; they have recruited a number of interested
people and set up their own Indonesian-language mailing list (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Indonesia and
http://groups.google.com/group/olpc-indonesia).

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