<b>Schedules/Releases</b>:<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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: (<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SW-ECO_5" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SW-ECO_5</a>). <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
<b>Sugar and Internationlization:</b><br>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. <br>
<br>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, <a href="http://8.1.1.">8.1.1.</a><br><br>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. <br>
<br><b>Network/Collaboration:</b><br>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. <br><br>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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br><b>School Server:</b><br><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" color="#888888">Martin Langhoff </font><font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" color="#888888">continued work </font><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">on XO backups and a few XS configuration issues.</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<br><b>Activities</b>:<br>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.<br><br><b>Power:</b><br>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.<br><br><b>Support:</b><br>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.<br>
<br>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 <a href="mailto:help@laptop.org" target="_blank">help@laptop.org</a>
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.<br><br><b>IT:</b><br>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.<br>
<br><font color="#888888"><br>- Kim<br><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"></span></font><br><br><br>