OLPC News 2008-01-05

[Walter Bender]

1. Intel: John Markoff's article in today's New York Times provides an
accurate description of the events of the past 48 hours regarding
Intel (See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05laptop.html).
We made a sincere effort of rapprochement, but it was clear from even
the way that Intel terminated the relationship—with an "inadvertent
leak"—that their was no reciprocal sincerity. We made great strides
before Intel joined us and we will continue to make great strides now
that they have left the OLPC association.

2. Lagos: Ayo Kusamotu filed a preliminary objection to the Nigerian
keyboard lawsuit (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Lancor). The details
of the case have been discussed extensively on Groklaw (See
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071226210020415).

3. School Server: A long delayed update to the School Server software
to fix problems with large file transfers due to a now antiquated
libertas driver has finally happened. Pick up Build 141
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Installing_Software#OLPC_XS_141),
request an Active Antenna build through our developer program, and
turn some old junker PC near you into a school server! This was
delayed by the holidays and a QA process which turned out to be as
necessary as it was difficult. Several problems and unwanted
interactions had crept into the build, but these were mostly fixed in
this release. (John Watlington finally gave up getting an early
version of the school server software to work properly with the Active
Antenna he had for testing the upgrade process. After upgrading to
Build 141 (stable) it worked fine.)

We now have a jabber server running on the schoolserver in Cambridge
(See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ejabberd_Configuration), and are
starting to test against it. We have seen the "register" button work!
This should reach a school server build by the beginning of next week.

4. Open firmware (OFW): Mitch Bradley made a number of improvements
this week. It now reports the OFW version when in a failure condition
to simplify field support; the "remove all power" error message has
been made clearer; and the status of the game buttons is indicated
when pressed.

5. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith reports that several EC
issues are pending. The one that has received attention the SCI Mask
Corruption bug (Ticket #5467). While chasing this bug, Richard found
several small but critical typos in the handling of some of the
commands he had added since November. The net result of these typos is
that under some conditions, a value passed in as data would be run as
a command and some commands would not get run at all. Unfortunately,
fixing those typos does not fix #5467. Its cause goes much deeper into
the EC protocol handling. The next couple of days should shake out
what the problem is and get it fixed for good.

Battery problems: A growing number of reports of short battery life
are coming in. People are starting to run olpc-logbat bat and Richard
has
been looking at the resulting data. Based on the data he's seen so
far, he conjects that either (1) there are some "funky" batteries in
the field; or (2) the EC is failing to charge the battery up to full
capacity, yet it is  marking it as full. Most of the data gathered so
far has been discharge info. Richard will be responding to many of the
trouble tickets requesting several cycles of charge/discharge while
running olpc-logbat to flush out whats going on.

The report of "shutdown yet no red LED" is the result of the capacity
never going below 15% but the battery voltage dropped to the critical
cutoff point, followed by the EC dropping system power. An enhancement
Richard will make to the EC code is to also do something with the
status LED to indicted that a critical voltage shutdown is looming so
there's some warning your laptop is about to shutdown.

6. Schedules: For the next few weeks we will be focused on stabilizing
Update.1 (based on Joyride) through testing, documentation, and
limited number of bug fixes. We recently found two more critical bugs
that will need an unscheduled software release (USR): touchpad/mouse
jumpiness and data loss if you fill up the memory. We have created a
procedure for these USRs; we are using this process to get these fixes
out sooner than the next scheduled release (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Operating_system_release_procedures).

7. Test: Chih-Yu Choa is helping out with both test and support this
week. She has gotten through the 1-Hour Smoke Test on a recent Joyride
build, which revealed a few regression bugs from the Ship.2 (650)
release. Next we need to create and document some test cases for the
new features in Update.1, and some testing with the school server.

8. Support: Adam Holt has been working days, nights, and weekends to
grow the volunteer support group (now up to 40 people), who are
answering emails, hanging out on forums and IRC to help people. A core
crew of about 15 volunteers drives the process forward with
increasingly sophisticated answers. Others contribute part-time
working from the Support FAQ (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ)
and "RTFM" template answers as they get up to speed. We have almost
hit 1000 email help requests in the database! Katie Belisle and Casey
Ratliff are working on a next-generation documentation ideas for our
Support FAQ.

Adam is also coordinating "4PM Sunday" (Eastern Standard Time)
conference calls for the entire support-volunteers team. Last week's
call was extremely successful due to the contributions of the OLPC
developer community (special thanks to Bernie Innocenti and Arjun
Sarwal) (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_meetings). Anyone you
wants to join, email me well in advance at "holt AT laptop DOT org"
and be sure to include your phone number! All volunteers worldwide
will be considered, after a very brief phone call. (See
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang if you are interested in
volunteering.)

Adam, Kim Quirk, and Greg Babbin are now able to provide RMAs, which
will help off-load the donor support 800-number and email. Kudos to
Greg's genuine heroics. Our Asterisk-based VoIP virtual call center
has been briefly delayed. Matthew O'Gorman and Joe Phigan continue to
work hard on this, scripting prompts for rudimentary integration with
http://rt.laptop.org, and we should have our volunteer-training
shortly.

9. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped start Pashto and Bulgarian
translation teams and resolve an issue with Pootle that caused it to
reject new user registrations; it was being caused by a invalid
username in the Pootle database.

A long-standing blocker bug (Ticket #1525) regarding the invalidation
of the fontconfig cache was finally fixed. Font cache generation in
the XO should be more robust now, even in the face of clock failures.

10. Software potpourri: Tomeu Vizoso proposed fixes for a number of
bugs that have highest priority: previews are not deleted when their
matching datastore objects are removed (Ticket #5707); deleting a
large file from a USB stick copies it into NAND (often filling NAND)
(Ticket #5719); Sugar shell consuming vast amounts of memory (Ticket
#5532); "resuming" a large file from USB copies it into NAND (filling
NAND) (Ticket #5744); and objects accumulate on the clipboard,
impacting system performance (Ticket #5760).

Chris Ball fixed many power manager bugs.  We now perform power
management regardless of whether you're on an external power source,
we remember the user's previous brightness setting when we dim the
screen during suspend, and open hardware manager (OHM) no longer exits
when X does.

Chris Ball wrote "slideshow" over Christmas, which is a Pippy example
that queries the datastore for camera images and then shows them
full-screen in a slideshow.  He can't decide whether it should be a
Pippy example (since it demonstrates performing datastore searches in
Python) or a separate activity.

Dennis Gilmore spent most of the week troubleshooting issues, working
around an issue today causing build failures and mostly trying to put
the pieces together to make things better.

Michael Stone and Dennis spent some time working out why iputils fell
out of our builds. Michael also worked with Bernie and Tomeu on
address a problem with olpc-update in regards to persistent activity
directories (Ticket #5033), with Ben Schwartz on problem with stream
sockets (Ticket #5818), and with Eben Eliason on the beginnings of a
security user interface.

Ivan Krstić is exploring a more secure way of isolating Browse for
Update.1; it might be trivial.

11. Presence: Robert McQueen finished an out-of-band data (OOB)
implementation (he added IP detection code) and wrote tests for it.
That means OOB bytestream is now working with Gabble. The next step
will be to define and implement bytestream renegotiation and fallback.

Dafydd Harries made updated packages for Presence Service and Avahi,
although Koji cannot build the former for some reason. He also
debugged problems registering laptops with school servers (Ticket
#5834); it turns out that the ejabberd RPM doesn't generate an X.509
certificate. Dafydd also spent time trying to coax OpenFire into
working. It works ok as long as your account is not in the shared
roster group, but authenticating becomes unreliable as soon as you are
a member. The web interface becomes unreliable from time to time too,
necessitating restarting the server. It seems that, like with
ejabberd, we are using it in a way it is not designed to handle. Our
scalability improvements should solve this for Update.2, but it is not
clear yet what the best approach is for the Update.1 time frame.

Morgan Collett fixed the scrolling bug (Ticket #2351) in Chat for
Update.1 thanks to a patch from Marco Pesenti Gritti. (C. Scott
Ananian's view source changes for Chat are in Update.1, but will
require a newer Pippy.) Morgan is testing a fix for Presence Service
#5368 where the buddies in an activity weren't reliably clustering
around the shared activity icon.

12. Activities: Muriel Godoi progressing on his port of Food Force for
the XO (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Food_Force_2). Progress includes
artwork (builds and villagers); next, the game model need more work to
get a playable game. The code is in his public_git folder
(https://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/murielgodoi/foodforce2;a=summary).
Please contact Muriel if you'd like to help.

Arjun Sarwal reports progress on the Measure activity: he is
rethinking certain aspects of the code design of the activity that
would make it more easily expandable and scalable.

13. OLPC Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports progress amidst chaos. Urdu
localization is 100% complete. They have had a useful discussion with
an Afghan graduate student of International Islamic University (IIU)
who is keenly interested in translating OLPC bundles into Dari and
Pashto. They are also mobilizing volunteers from the Pakistan
Institute of Engineering & Applied Sciences, (PIEAS). A training
package for Afghan teachers is nearing completion, including software,
hardware, and activities tutorials. They've also launched an effort to
convert into e-books all the text books written on curriculum of the
Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad. Beta versions for Grades one
through four are ready. The subjects are English, Social Studies,
Science, and Urdu.

14. Cow power:  Arjun have completed documentation of the project (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Cow_Power). The page details the current
design and the proposed mechanical design. He is hoping to get
feedback from the community on the proposed mechanical design before
moving forward in the implementation of the changes.

15. Community: The OLPC Austria team reports progress on OpenWRT. It
boots an XO (currently with minimal driver support) in 15–20 seconds.
John Crispin and others want to look into porting Sugar to OpenWRT if
there is community interest.

Pascal Martin of Linterweb, an open source software company based in
France that has worked on desktop and wiki search tools, has offered
their support and development time to help with the search component
for the Journal. Tomeu Vizoso spent some time explaining to Fabien
Coulon from their team what has been done to date in the datastore.

Jesper Taxbøl is helping organize this year's Nordic Game Jam; he is
angling to run it on XOs and lead off with an introduction to PyGame.
They are looking for 10 laptops for their 100 participants to use
February 1–3. This is quite a popular jam and produces some pretty
polished games each year.

Many people are asking for ways to contact the creators of bundles and
activities. Please add your name and some sort of contact info to
projects you have worked on, on their own wiki pages, and on the
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities page.

Happy new year.

-walter

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