[OLPC-devel] Weekly work summary [6/12]

[Eric Astor]

OEPC (One Encyclopedia per Child) Tools

>From ranking to export utilities - and at the moment, file formats!

 

Git tree (web) : HYPERLINK
"http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/soc-oepc"http://dev.laptop.org/git.
do?p=projects/soc-oepc

Git tree (git) : git://dev.laptop.org/projects/soc-oepc

 

This week:

 

*         I spent half of the week in Boston, at the OLPC offices for the
first time. I worked directly with Matthew Harrison, who is working on the
eBook Reader project. We started a discussion page for a common file format
for our two projects, as OEPC articles can use the same reader as normal
eBooks, at HYPERLINK
"http://dev.laptop.org/wiki/EBookViewerFormatSpec"http://dev.laptop.org/wiki
/EBookViewerFormatSpec. At the moment, this is a little behind, as we’ve
begun to focus more on the idea of a lightweight text formatting standard,
rather than any XML-based markup.

*         We also drafted a functional (interface) spec for the Reader
application itself, available at HYPERLINK
"http://dev.laptop.org/wiki/ReaderSpec"http://dev.laptop.org/wiki/ReaderSpec
. This will be developed further in the near future.

*         After some discussion between ourselves and Ivan, we’ve decided to
use a lightweight text format for document formatting rather than any
XML-based system – in particular, we’ve chosen to base our format on
Markdown, a well-established language based primarily on plain-text email
formatting. I’m in the process of building a formal grammar for a large
subset of Markdown, allowing us to create a high-performance, lightweight
parser.

 

Next week:

 

*         I’ll continue to work on the Markdown grammar, and continue
learning about formal grammars in the process.

*         As time allows, I will also be working with a few people I met in
Boston (the Freelogy group) on the topic of porting my PageRank code for a
distributed system, as we’ve been offered access to a high-powered 96-node
cluster. This would allow us to run PageRank against the full English
Wikipedia, rather than just the Simple English Wikipedia, giving us more
options when it comes to the OEPC.

 

It was great to meet and work with the others at the OLPC offices this week,
particularly Matthew, and I’m very excited about getting our projects
together on the user-interface side.

 

- Eric


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