[Community-news] OLPC News 2007-06-30

[Walter Bender]

1. Washington: Walter Bender had to dust off his tuxedo in order to
receive the Bridging Nations "Bridge Builder Award: Technological
Innovation for Bridging Digital Divide" on behalf of OLPC.

2. Porto Alegre: Juliano Bittencourt reports that UFRGS (Federal
University of Rio Grande do Sul) held a small conference, INOVA, to
share the best research from the university with the local community.
As they did at the International Free Software Conference (FISL),
researchers from the university brought a group of children to
conference to share their experiences with the use of the XO. The
children stole the spotlight: "it was very satisfying to see how they
talked with people, how they became autonomous, and were very proud of
their projects. They behave like small scientists, making interviews
with their laptop using the camera, taking notes in the Write
Activity, and posting reports to their blogs on AMADIS."

3. Green: Mary Lou Jepsen has completed all paper work for
environmental compliance with EPEAT, the organization that implements
the IEEE 1680-2006 computer environmental standard. OLPC's EPEAT
"Gold" status is now pending. Mary Lou has a draft version available
of our ISO14001-compliant OLPC environmental policy, which is required
for EPEAT compliance. In addition, OLPC has joined and filed for
Energy Star 4.0 recognition; the XO exceeds the Energy Star compliance
requirements by 14-fold.

4. Safety: OLPC, Quanta, and UL met this week to discuss progress on
safety testing. Preliminary findings are excellent; further details of
testing were discussed, including specific in-country requirements.
The XO appears to be on track for UL certification; further testing of
batteries and AC adaptors is planned. UL will help us apply for CE
markings to allow us to ship in Europe.

5. Trial-2: Tuesday marked the feature-freeze date for the Trial-2
software release. We have begun testing of the software release (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_issues); there are test plans for
activities, connectivity, performance, mesh view, suspend/resume, and
updates. Thanks to Zack Cerza, John Fuhrer, Cameron Meadors, and Ronak
Chockshi, who have contributed to these plans.

6. Network: The Collabora team continued work on the peer-to-peer
networking pieces that will allow Sugar Activity authors to readily
share data between their activities; the focus has been on "tubes" and
multicast support for the mesh. Dan Williams helped debug direct
XO-to-XO communications and plowed through more network manager (NM)
issues. Dan, along with Kim Quirk, John Watlington, Scott Ananian, and
Michail Bletsas continue to refine NM as we realize more functionality
and stability in our network drivers and get more feedback from
internal testing and the field.

Michail tested the latest wireless firmware from Marvell
(5.110.16.p0). It solves the issues with lazy-WDS access points (like
the extremely popular Linksys WRT54G). This is the issue where XOs
associated with a WiFi  access point will stop passing traffic
intermittently for which we had a temporary (ugly) workaround in
place. The current firmware, besides having the latest suspend/resume
code bits, uses a new mesh frame format that is closer to the latest
proposals circulating in the 802.11s standard committee.
Unfortunately, the new format is incompatible with the older format;
we will incorporate the new firmware in the XO builds and server
software ASAP to minimize confusion.

7. User interface: Marco Gritti hooked up Sugar and the core
Activities into the Fedora translations system and has already
integrated a community-contributed Arabic translation.

Marco and Benjamin Berg continue to refine the GTK (GIMP Toolkit)
themes in conjunction with the design work being done by Eben Eliason
and the Pentagram team. They also revisited the Journal core feature
set that will be part of the first release software. Tomeu Vizoso
continued his work on the web browser. He implemented an
"object-chooser dialog" that is used in place of the standard file
picker for the browser; items can now be uploaded from the Journal to
the web. Tomeu also add the ability to shut down the XO from the home
view (the power button will be used for suspend). In the Journal, he
also implemented the latest toolbar design, added the ability to erase
items, copy items onto the clipboard, and support for removable
storage devices (e.g., USB sticks).

Dan, Marco, and John Palmieri also did packaging work in support of
the Fedore Core 7 update. Dan also worked on some unresolved X video
(Xv) bugs.

8. Power management: Richard Hughes worked on the XO's power
management interfaces. He reports that our hardware abstraction layer
detects and exports proper power supply interfaces, which means
Activities have an easy way of querying the battery and the AC
adapter. His patches should land soon. Richard also worked on D-Bus
system activation; important in order to start system services through
a standardized interface. He has a policy manager (OHM) running on the
laptop that will do things such as dim the backlight when the machine
is idle and turn off the panel when the lid on the XO is shut.

9. Software updates: Scott Ananian, Ivan Krstić, Chris Blizzard, David
Woodhouse, and Alex Larsson engaged in a (somewhat heated) discussion
of the XO upgrade model; a concrete specification will be the outcome.

Meanwhile Alex spent the week working on the "Updatinator" code. His
utilities that can generate manifests, generating differences between
manifests, verify a directory tree against a manifest, and upgrade a
directory tree from one manifest to another. He also has a tool that
can generate a manifest from a set of images. His code, written in
Python, knows how to download blobs and manifests from a http server,
using a well-defined format and uses Avahi to automatically find local
machines that have newer versions of a manifest. He also put together
a small web server that an XO can run in order to export an image such
that other laptops can upgrade from it.

Chris Ball has written a script that performs a backup of user data
during upgrades; we can start using it next week. Scott benchmarked XO
upgrades between Builds 464, 465, and 466 using rsync, "improved"
rsync, and "improved" bittorrent. (He wrote code to use per-directory
manifests to improve rsync and added the ability to bittorrent
filesystem images, complete with user/group/mode and special file
information.) He also started implementing a skeleton XO upgrade
system that we can use to automate our 100+ laptop mesh-network tests
in the coming weeks.

10. Microphone: Chris Ball reports that the audio driver now keeps the
microphone-in-use LED off while the audio hardware is not being used.
There is still a bug remaining: the LED turns on during both recording
and playback (because the default state of the driver is to have the
V_Ref microphon bias turned on).

11. Fun and games: Lincoln Quirk has been working on infrastructure
stuff and the pygame wrapper. He has been experimenting with various
techniques for integration of GTK and pygame; he also did some
preliminary work with Eric Nelson to use the camera as a game input
device. It still in process, but the wrapper supports the game keys
properly. Lincoln also done a lot of documentation work in the OLPC
wiki.

Roberto Faga has been working on an adventure game toolkit; he has
been tackling the challenging problem of creating a simple generic
parser that can cope with different noun/verb/object word orders in
different languages. At the same time, he's trying to construct a user
interface (UI) that would allow the creation of these games in a
purely graphical model.

Patrick DeJarnette's side-scrolling game engine got a lot faster this
week, and now has semi-intelligent moving "enemies." It should be a
lot of fun for the children to design their own game levels.

12. Analog input: Arjun Sarwal has created a basic UI for turning the
XO into an oscilloscope. He has built controls for AC/DC, bias, RMS
AVG, and Pk-Pk values. He is working with John Watlington to
characterize the frequency characteristics of the AD1888 and they are
working towards enabling the double sample rate that this chip
supports. They are also studying the filter in the power supply, with
the goal to reduce the noise floor. Another target is to bring down to
0V the minimum voltage that the analog input port can sample (the
current minimum is 0.4V).

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