[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-05-17) - Tech Team

[Kim Quirk]

*Schedules/Releases*:
Many of the Tech team members were involved in discussions, reviews, and
recommendations as to the messaging and Q&A around the Microsoft
announcement this week.

Dennis Gilmore worked on rebasing our builds to fedora 9 which was released
this week. He has ported NetworkManager from OLPC-2 to OLPC-3 and now needs
someone to work on moving to NetworkManager-0.7. He has started customizing
initscripts for olpc. By the end of the weekend he should have a build that
can be tested. At this point many activities will need some work.

Michael Stone published planning draft with help from Mitch Bradley and has
volunteered to drive our releases through August. He worked with Sayamindu
Dasgupta and Dennis Gilmore to kick off the USR (unscheduled software
release), 8.1.1, to include keyboard fixes for Ethiopia & Haiti: (
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SW-ECO_5).

Discussed the PenTablet changes with Blake as possible feature for an
upcoming release. Worked on process for new Sugar releases with Marco Gritti
and stubbed out a Telepathy-Cerebro connection manager with Polychronis
Ypodimatopoulos. Michael also reviewed Gadget and discussed results with
Dafydd Harries, John Watlington, and Scott Ananian.

*Sugar and Internationlization:*
Tomeu Visozo proposed patches for all the remaining known regressions in the
shell redesign. He started investigations into problems with links in browse
(gmail, specifically) and into activity startup speed.

Sayamindu Dasgupta and Arjun Sarwal investigated and fixed two important
keyboard layout issues which has been plaguing us recently, trac items 6945
and 6943. Ethopian keyboards were not able to switch to English. The problem
was caused by the Amharic GTK Input Module being selected automatically,
overriding our XKB setup. Haitian keyboards had many incorrect key mappings,
which was caused by a type on the "ca" xkb symbols file. These are scheduled
to be fixed in the upcoming bug fix release, 8.1.1.

Simon Schampijer has added a control panel option to set a delay for the
frame activation or 'Hot Corners'. He also added an option to toggle a 'warm
edge' at the top of the screen. The packages needs to be applied to a recent
joyride or the faster branch. The control panel can be found in the palette
of the XO in the home view. Simon also reports on some good work done by Dan
Krejsa, who fixed a bug that prevented downloads from being invoked in
Browse, and 'ffm' (prefers his irc name) contributed a patch to fix
sugar-install-bundle when no parameters are passed.

*Network/Collaboration:*
Dafydd Harries and Guillaume Desmottes worked on Gadget, a Jabber-based
activity/person searching service, to add support for the mesh view.Dafydd
worked with Michael Stone on a web interface for builds, packages, and
sources. He worked with Jim Gettys on collaboration APIs.

Morgan Collett pushed another bit of boilerplate code required for
collaboration, from activity code to sugar.presence, Sugar's client for the
Presence Service D-Bus API - to convert from Telepathy handles to Buddy
objects (#6473). He patched Connect and HelloMesh to take advantage of this
and will provide patches to other activities and will update the Tubes
Tutorial next.

Morgan reviewed the previous approach for converting between buddies and
handles which maintained a cache of the handle <-> Buddy mapping. It had the
problem of not removing the mapping when buddies left (or removing the
mapping but not being able to report who left as they had already left).
This could be removed, but it requires reverting changes to the PS API
(which probably haven't been used) - some discussion needed here by all
involved with PS and its API. He discussed collaboration documentation with
Marco, with the aim of producing API documentation for activity authors as
the current documentation is targeted more at developers of the whole stack.

*School Server:*
Martin Langhoff continued work on XO backups and a few XS configuration
issues.

*Activities*:
Chris Ball worked with a number of people on the Wikiserver project,
containing a snapshot of the Spanish Wikipedia's popular articles and
images.  New developments this week include links that redirect to the
schoolserver or Internet. Ben Schwartz was involved in the addition of a
large selection of images rendered in low quality to the snapshot. Madeleine
Ball created a portal page with links to main articles. Wade Brainerd
contributed many parser and server improvements.  A first release of the
activity is planned during the next week.

*Power:*
This week Richard Smith continued to work with the Mulit-Battery prototype.
Testing results reveal some weak points in the charging electronics that
fail at high temperatures.  He is working with the rest of the hardware team
to explore solutions. A decision was made on how to mil the plastic parts to
make it easier to get the batteries in and out of the charger. This allows
the first build of mechanical components to continue.  We will reopen and
fix the tooling at a future date before production starts.

*Support:*
Emily Smith, Sandy Culver and Adam Holt have shipped about 400 XOs in the
last month between the laptops that were never delivered, replacement units,
and miscellaneous other problems. Michael Taylar and Sara Lesko have started
answering the emails and at this point OLPC is directly answering all emails
from donors. We expect to get all the phone calls directly into OLPC by next
week.

Adam worked with Kim Quirk and John Watlington on support planning and
discussions for country deployments. We would like to provide help and
advice for countries to pull together their own FAQ and problem tracking
database. We also talked about the escalation path of our own
help at laptop.org for concerns that can't be answered in country. One of our
needs will be to build the volunteer base with multiple language
capabilities. Caryl Bigenho and Nikki Lee are two Spanish speaking
volunteers who are already helping out in the Support-Gang.

*IT:*
Henry Hardy is still waiting for the delivery of the three servers to
replace pedal, crank, and xs-dev as well as the IBM server for replicating
the mfg server in China. He reports 100% uptime for all servers that are
being monitored, except 'sawzall', which had 9 hours of unexplained downtime
(being investigated). We have reorganized a number of mailing lists for
greater efficiency; but in the process we need to ensure people can sign up
or be signed up for the right ones.


- Kim
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