[Community-news] OLPC News (2007-02-03)

[Walter Bender]

 Weekend

*1.* Dick Rowe has joined us as President of the OLPC Foundation. Former
associate dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, member of the
Massachusetts State Board of Education, and Chair of the Massachusetts
Business Alliance for Education, Dick spend several years working in Nigeria
with the West African Examinations Council and more recently directed the
Internet and Information Services team of the Howard Dean Campaign.

With Dick's leadership, the Foundation will be responsible for the "bottoms
up" work of the OLPC mission: raising investments from corporations,
foundations, and individuals that will be used to stimulate local grassroots
initiatives designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of
XO Laptops as learning tools for children. OLPC's new website contains
information about the Foundation under the "Participate" arrow.

*2.* Davos: The OLPC Foundation was officially launched last week at the
World Economic Forum, where guests at a formal dinner hosted by Rupert
Murdoch were able see a demonstration of the XO's talents at making music
and taking pictures.

*3.* Addis Ababa: Calestous Juma gave the keynote address at the Summit of
the African Union, a meeting of the African heads of state. In his address,
he introduced them to the XO Laptop.

*4.* New York: Walter and SJ Klein presented at the UN Committee on Teaching
About the UN. The audience included roughly 500 educators, many of whom have
connections with schools in the least-developed countries (LDCs).
**

*5.* Rio de Janeiro: Michail Bletsas ran a two-day technical workshop on
mesh networking at the Federal University of Fluminese. National
coordinators from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, technical teams, and
students working on the mesh attended.

*6. *B2 build: 650 units have been built at Quanta Shanghai. The rest of the
B2 units will likely be built by the end of this week.

*7. *Touch pad:* *Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Mitch Bradley and Chris
Ball spent much of the week diagnosing (and fixing) problems with the touch
pad.

*8. *Chris Ball, Adam Jackson, Dan Williams and Jordan Crouse all
spent timethis week investigating why many graphic operations on the
machine appear
too slow. They came up with some strategies for improving performance. More
work needs to be done in this area; a final resolution on these issues has
not been made.

*9.* John Palmieri has been working on fixing issues in our front-end
infrastructure. This includes more fixes for the canvas, some memory-leak
fixes for the underlying message bus and more work on the Python bindings
for the bus. He also spent some time looking at a Python launcher process
that Johan Dahlin, an active external community member and owner of some of
our more important components has created for us. This process is very
likely to decrease the startup time for activities built with Python as well
as save us a good bit of memory for each process by taking advantage of Unix
copy-on-write capabilities.

*10.* Marco Gritti updated Sugar to use xulrunner 1.9 (the basis for the
upcoming Firefox 3); he also pushed out a bunch of new Sugar snapshots and
did more work on the activity-bundle specification.

***11.* On Friday, John, Dan, Chris Ball, and Chris Blizzard went to Boston
University to take place in FUDCon Boston 2007, a gathering of several
hundred Fedora users and developers from all over the world. Fedora-specific
topics were discussed including a large number of topics related to OLPC.
Saturday and Sunday of this weekend are the Fedora Hackfest days; the laptop
will be one of the "hackfests" taking place. They intend to work on the
Python launcher and some bundle and activity topics.

-walter

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