[OLPC-devel] Weekly work summary [7/12]

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, 2006-07-17 at 01:24 -0400, mharriso at student.umass.edu wrote:
>  eBook External Data Sources
>  http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/soc-eds
>  git://dev.laptop.org/projects/soc-eds
> 
> 
> Status Update
> Updated the Reader spec at http://dev.laptop.org/wiki/ReaderSpec .  Also see the
> screenshot attached to the bottom of the page (gui5.png).  I was experimenting
> with making some GUI mock-ups in PyGTK, but at this point, it is rather unclear
> as to what I am/am not supposed to be doing with the GUI.

We might want to grab Bryan, Diana, and Walter at some soon point and
start talking about the interaction design here.  Better sooner than
later, I've found.

> I've started using the Twisted networking suite to start implementing a
> client/server design for the reader.  The laptops will send search requests to
> the server, which will then send search results and download/convert/send the
> actual books to the laptops.

Read the wiki bits on the c/s model stuff; we have to be careful here
too because you won't always be able to reach the eBook server.  We need
to make sure the laptops are almost as functional away from school as
they are at school.

At least for the sugar stuff, we have to allow kids to chat/voip with
others they can see on the mesh around them and share stuff they have
with each other without a central server.  I guess the point is that
hitting a server is an _optimization_ for scalability/speed/storage,
(like you've already described for the search function on the wiki).

But we can't use lack of central server availability as an excuse to
hobble the software in significant ways at any future point.  We just
need to keep that in mind.

Cheers,
Dan