[sugar] OLPC News 2007-11-10

[Gabriel Marcondes]

Hi!

I was in Game Jam Brasil, and posted some photos in my
blog<http://vainalousachefe.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/olpc-gamejam-brasil-como-foi/>.


Anyone who can read in portuguese will also know what happened with some
details ;-)

[]'s

On Nov 10, 2007 5:57 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:

> 1. Cambridge: The first of the monthly learning workshops was held at
> OLPC this week. More than 60 people from 14 countries (and one US
> city) attended. The focus of this workshop was to build a stronger
> understanding of laptops and learning; to make plans for deployment in
> the countries; and to build a strong community among the participants
> for ongoing support and collaboration. The energy, ideas, and
> excitement among the group was fantastic and gave everyone more hope
> about the learning potential about to be unleashed as laptops begin
> arriving in large numbers in countries shortly. Many thanks to David
> Cavallo, Lindsay Petrillose, and the OLPC learning team for all of
> their efforts.
>
> 2. Cyberspace: Larry Weber's dream of a digital PSA has been realized:
> Hilary Meserole reports that our first Give One Get One public service
> announcement, which features Heroes star Masi Oka, is online (See
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQbtebeftyA). The team is working with
> YouTube on ways to feature this on their home page during the
> fortnight that the campaign is running. We will be adding more content
> next week—outtakes from the PSA shoot, etc.
>
> Masi has joined OLPC as our media spokesperson, however, an ill-timed
> writers' strike precludes Nicholas and Masi doing some of the
> talk-show appearances that had been envisioned.
>
> 3. Give One Get One launches at 6AM EST on Monday (See
> laptopgiving.org). While we have no idea what the response will be,
> Hilary and the "volunteer army" that includes Pentagram, Nurun, W2,
> Racepoint, Digital Influence Group, Eleven, Inc., and Len Fink did a
> fantastic job raising the public awareness of the campaign. Examples
> include the beautiful full-page ad that was donated by the Economist
> (See http://wiki.laptop.org/images/a/ab/GiveOneGetOne.pdf). We will be
> able to reach many more children due to their efforts.
>
> 4. Mass production started this week this week in Quanta's new factory
> in Changshu. We would like to take this time to thank the team at
> Quanta for there support over the last two years. Major contributors
> to the effort include: Victor Chao, Gary Chiang, Arnold Kao, Matt
> Huang, Dandy Hsu, Agnes Huang, Johnson Huang, Frank Lee, Roger Huang,
> Elvis Wu, S.F. Chen, Ken Lin, Jacky Mu, Paying Liu, Terry Su, Alfred
> Lin, Gary Chiang, Alice Wang, Alan Lio, Jeff Tarng, Tim Huang, Jeffrey
> Huang, Rita Chen, Joe Lin, Jeff Yu, Ben Chuang, Sam Yeh, Johnnie Lui,
> Eric Tasi, Bruce Lu, Jeff Huang, Mikko Hsu, Vance Ke, Luna Huang,
> David Lin, Bryan Ma, Devin Lui, Arvin Lui, John Lin, Tess Yu, Chia
> Ying Lin, Gary Su, C.H. Yang, Ray Tseng, Sam Chang, Gary Liu, Lori
> Yang, Frank Feng, Cooper Zhou, Kaiser Feng, Neptune Zhan, Xiang Wei,
> Zihaw Zhang, Min Xia, Eagle Liang, Peter Huang, Pillar Hou, Yaya
> Zhang, Crystal Sun, Nana Pei, Bob Zhang, Yengeng Cen, Ian Huang,
> Chie-Hung Li, Sunny Cheng, Cancer Zha, Fly Chen, Javin Hu, Grubby Wei,
> Polin Chang, Anna Zhou, Tim Huang, Jim Chang, Eric Wang, Kenny Chung,
> Zenith Zhu, Rock Chien, Sunny Hsiung, Kiki Peng, Sunny Huang, Barry
> Lam, Michael Wang, Morse Chen, and Eddy Chao.
>
> There are many other people—from companies such as Marvel, ChiLin,
> Himax, CMO, AMD, ENE, QMI, Fuse Project, Gecko, Pentagram, Design
> Continuum, Foxconn, ALPS, and MIT, and many individuals as well—who
> have contributed to the hardware and mechanicals over the past three
> years. (Mary Lou Jepsen is pulling together a list of everyone to
> thank.) Collectively we have achieved something that just three years
> ago many believed that was an impossible dream.
>
> 5. Safety Certification: Behind the scenes another team (from UL,
> Quanta, and OLPC) has been quietly working for nearly two years on XO
> safety certification. The XO laptop is now fully compliant with UL
> safety requirements and has been thus certified. We have also been
> awarded radio, power, and system certification at national levels in
> several countries. We can now legally ship in US, Canada, Uruguay, and
> Peru, as well as many other countries. EU-wide approval is due in
> approximately a week. We are still in the process of applying for
> certification in countries on each continent with the most stringent
> safety standards.
>
> Among many tests, we have passed Ul/IEC 60950-1 (notebook computer),
> ASTM F693 (electronic toys for children), UL 1301 (mechanical assembly
> requirements, including larger face dimension requirements for child
> safety) and UL 2054 (batteries), as well as a passing UL on-site
> inspection of the Quanta's factory. We have formal RoHS (low toxicity)
> certification from Quanta, and independent testing of RoHS compliance
> by UL. Also, we have been safety approved for lap use—XO is the first
> "laptop" approved for usage on one's lap in many years. (The reason
> that most laptops are now called "notebook computers" is that they run
> too hot for safe lap use.)
>
> Many thanks to the core XO safety teams from UL, Quanta, and OLPC:
> Katherine Sims, Bob Delisi, Nicole Tatum, Kevin Ravi, Stacy Yu, Tom
> Burke, Derek Chen, Edgar Wolff-klammer, Tammi Gengegbacher, Greg
> Monty, Alfred Fung, Nicholas Boten, Seth Carlton, Bruce Lu, Kenny
> Chung, Victor Chao, Rita Chen, Arnold Kao, Mary Lou Jepsen, and
> Lindsay Petrillose.
>
> 6. Richard Smith has been setting up a suspend/resume manufacturing
> test and getting the process flow set up so that Quanta can do final
> quality analysis (FQA). Activation of laptops (part of the anti-theft
> system) presented a problem since the FQA process pulls laptops after
> the final shipping image has been installed and security has been
> enabled. We decided that the best way to deal with FQA is to pull FQA
> machines prior to enabling security and then enable it as the final
> part of FQA.
>
> 7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D04 as a candidate for
> Update.1. It has wireless-networking improvements and bug fixes and
> can be used to update the NAND Flash ROM over the wireless network
> (from the school server).
>
> Working with Javier Cardona, Mitch discovered the root cause on a
> wireless firmware problem that was breaking wireless support in Q2D03.
> There was a time window during which the module reported the wrong MAC
> address. This was not affecting the Linux driver because it had an
> arbitrary delay to block access during that gap. Marvell promises a
> proper fix in the next few days.
>
> 8. Wireless: Javier Cardona and Ricardo Carrano's efforts in debugging
> the open issues with the wireless subsystem are producing results. We
> now know the mechanism by which the driver fails (mishandling of a
> BUSY result returned from the firmware to a scan request); efforts are
> now focusing on finding the reason as to why that mishandling has such
> severe impact in the overall subsystem operation.
>
> Marvell released wireless firmware version 5.110.20.p0 which
> incorporates many enhancements requested by OLPC, including mesh
> running-state control, mesh beacon control, and throughput
> optimizations. After resolving the existing issues, the Marvell team
> is going to mainly focus on power optimization for the firmware.
>
> James Cameron tested the developer version of the active antennae (See
> http://dev.laptop.org/~quozl/2007-11-10-active-antenna/<http://dev.laptop.org/%7Equozl/2007-11-10-active-antenna/>).
> The antennae
> performed easily over the range, no doubt aided by being
> held at between 3m and 4m above ground. James reports that they hit
> the length limit of the test range before any significant bandwidth
> reduction was felt. We received the first 30 active antennae
> preproduction boards from QMI in Cambridge this week and completed a
> first round of testing without any issues.
>
> 9. Schedule update: There are only three weeks left to get the
> Update.1 release out the door. This week we focused on testing and
> some bug fixing; but not as many "Joyride" builds as lately—C. Scott
> Ananian has been concentrating on assembling the pieces for the first
> Update.1 builds. He expects that we will have this done over the
> weekend. The overarching goal for the Update.1 release is stability of
> the Trial-3 functionality; we are also folding in many new
> frameworks—such as security and the new tubes system; the goal is to
> have these frameworks in place without their causing regressions. One
> new feature we are are adding is robust upgrades, preferably via
> wireless network.
>
> 10. Testing: Ricardo has been detailing Ticket #4470—infrastructure
> mode failing over time—and assembling meaningful logs for the team to
> work with. Javier is going through these logs. Ricardo also finished
> installing network "sniffing" devices for our network testbed as part
> of the debug process. Ricardo and Yani Galanis tested the range of two
> laptops that were  brought back from field-testing at the Khairat
> school in Munbai, India. Their tests revealed normal behavior. (In the
> field, they exhibited unusually poor WiFi range.) Ricardo and Yani
> have also been testing different antenna designs to establish
> long-distance wireless links.
>
> Alex Latham has been testing Joyride, filing bug reports and
> uncovering the many regressions expected as we pull so many new bits
> together. He hasn't yet completed a full "1-hour smoke test" with an
> of the Joyride builds—Scott's Update.1 build series is expected to be
> more stable. Alex has also begun testing with security enabled. He
> also helped John Watlington set up a testbed for our mass-production
> hardware.
>
> Manny Castillo has been testing the Browser activity with specific
> URLs chosen to exercise various plugins—such as Gnash—on Build 623; he
> will be testing with Joyride next week.
>
> 11. Sugar: Marco Gritti, Michael Stone, and Tomeu Vizoso worked on the
> integration of the Rainbow security system with Sugar and the
> DataStore (and Journal). They enabled activity isolation on Tuesday
> and solved all the known road blockers in the following days: access
> to
> audio and video resources; communication with the DataStore;
> activity-space directories and their permission; and out-of-container
> activities. Next week we will need a new round of testing; Marco is
> confident that we will be able to solve the remaining problems
> quickly.
>
> Marco rewrote the preview code to be much more efficient; it blocks
> for only the minimal required time. Switching between views and
> closing
> activities is now much faster and the previews are saved reliably.
> Marco temporarily disabled the startup sound in sugar to avoid
> blocking the sound device and tracked down the problem with muted
> audio at startup. Sound is expected to be finally back working fully
> in the next build.
>
> Tomeu implement a basic search in the mesh view, which greatly
> facilitates finding people on a crowded network; he exposed files from
> the DataStore to activities using hard links instead of doing a copy;
> and he made the DataStore's use of the temporary file space more
> efficient.
>
> Reinier Heeres added a way to switch between activities using ALT-Tab;
> fixed some issues with left-right inversion for Arabic; disabled
> closing the Journal with CTRL-Q;  and implemented a short-term
> solution to the problem of the "donut" on the home page not accurately
> reflecting activity memory usage. Reinier is working currently fixing
> some palette issues.
>
> 12. Activities: The Etoys team continues to make adjustments to the
> Sugar and Rainbow (security) system changes being introduced for
> Update.1; Bert Freudenberg is leading this effort. Yoshiki Ohshima and
> Bert have provided an improved version of Sugar menu bar; Yoshiki,
> Bert, and Scott Wallace put together the necessary bits to provide
> better "view source" experience—all of the code for Etoys can now be
> viewed without any degradation. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness have
> been improving the help system for Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and
> korakurider have stabilized the localization mechanism. Takashi also
> experimented a different UI for controlling choices in tiles.
>
> Simon Schampijer and Mark Maurer collaborated on getting "view source"
> working fluidly between the Browse and Write activities. By typing
> FN-Space (or CTRL+U) in Browse, the HTML source of the current page is
> opened in Write. The HTML can be edited in Write and when resumed from
> the Journal the modified page gets interpreted and displayed. While
> doing this work, they tracked down and fixed a new issue with the
> DataStore: it had been losing metadata between reboots.
>
> 13. Builds: C. Scott Ananian continued to work on forking the new
> stable Update.1 branch and stabilizing our build process. He setup
> download.laptop.org, mock.laptop.org, and pilgrim.laptop.org, which
> you should see being pressed into use in the next week. Scott also
> updated the Libertas firmware in the builds and refreshed the mesh
> testbed, with an eye towards testing the new firmware in a realistic
> network upgrade scenario.  He should be able to run that test on
> Monday.
>
> This week Andres Salomon cleaned up the kernel build scripts, made
> them auto-generate change logs, and dealt with getting updated kernels
> into joyride. Joyride builds now include sane kernels. Andres also did
> minor Libertas testing, and is in the process of debugging USB issues.
>
> 14. Power management: James Cameron and Chris Ball worked on some OHM
> (power manager) bugs. Once those were out of the way, Chris went on to
> implement some of our power management features:  "suspend on idle" is
> in place; there is now a distinction between "suspend" (screen and
> wireless still on, wake up on network traffic or key press) and
> "sleep" (screen off, only wake up on a power-button press). There are
> a few more OHM bugs to fight before this is ready to land in
> Joyride/Update.1, which should happen sometime early next week.
>
> 15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta and Xavier Alvarez have
> successfully completed the first phase of the Pootle installation. All
> of the translation files are in place. A number of users have signed
> up and have already started to submit translations in the form of
> suggestions. A discussion in the #olpc-pootle channel on how to best
> integrate an external project's translation-related files into our
> Pootle setup has let to an improved workflow for external projects
> that want to take
> advantage of our translation infrastructure.
>
> Currently, we have translators for the following languages signed up:
> Amharic, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (traditional), French,
> German, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish. Additional
> translators and languages are needed, particularly for the Indic
> languages, Quechua, and Aymara.
>
> The next stage of the Pootle deployment will consist of making the GIT
> integration work—we are waiting for GIT write access to dev.laptop.org
> to go forward on that. A set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) has
> been created in the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle/FAQ).
>
> Sayamindu has been looking at an issue where fontconfig seems to treat
> the font cache invalid if the mtime of the cache is greater than the
> system time. This is documented in Ticket #1525 (and in upstream
> Freedesktop bug #12107). Sayamindu had backported the relevant changes
> to the fontconfig used in Fedora 7; he will be testing out the package
> in the XO over the weekend.
>
> 16. Security: Michael Stone announced a new release of Rainbow (See
> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=234221) to the
> devel and sugar lists today. The release incorporates a number of
> resolutions to the current crop of 'rainbow-integration' bugs that the
> community has worked so hard over the last three days to document for
> us.
>
> Changes include:
>  • relaxed multimedia-device permissions that should make it possible
> for activities to use the camera, microphone, and speakers;
>  • availability of the user's public key;
>  • activities are now started in $SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH instead of
> $SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT;
>  • activities can run under "strace" by defining the environment
> variable RAINBOW_STRACE_LOG (in the dictionary passed to Rainbow in
> /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py);
>  • tracebacks of your activity's log file can be viewed with "less -R"
> (e.g., less -R /home/olpc/.sugar/default/logs/org.laptop.Record-1.log);
>
> Special thanks Marco, Tomeu, and Alex L. for their extraordinary efforts.
>
> 17. Community reporting: Dan Sutera and the team working on the Report
> activity made it to the next round of the Knight News Challenge.
> Pablo Flores is working on something similar in Uruguay, and has found
> some federal support to develop local blogs from children, stored at
> the local schools. We discussed how the projects could work together;
> Pablo is focusing on the web activity that would help editors arrange
> blog feeds into beautiful editions, and the Report team is working on
> an XO activity that would let children read and write blog and news
> feeds. Meanwhile, Jack Driscoll, former editor of the Boston Globe—who
>  has been leading community journalism projects around the world for
> over ten years—has put some journalism guidelines in the wiki (See
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Learning_activities/Journalism).
>
> 18. SimCity: SimCity is now available under the GPL, thanks to the
> generosity of EA and the hard work of Steve Seabolt and Chuck Normann,
> John Gilmore, and Don Hopkins (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SimCity).
> The game is in the process of being "sugarized", but is already
> playable on the XO. This is the first time that a major publisher has
> open sourced the original of a popular title. EA should be
> congratulated.
>
> 19. Game Jams: A competitive game jam is under way this weekend in São
> Carlos, Brazil, with the support of a number of local universities and
> sponsors. Any who are interested in their progress are welcome to
> follow along in #olpc-content on IRC; they are looking for outside
> help with art and music for the developed games (See
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Game_Jam_Brazil). In advance of the CMU
> game jam next weekend, the ETC team at Carnegie Mellon university has
> finished a draft of its first game, a peg solitaire affair (See
> http://www.olpcgames.org/).
>
> 20. Community: A discussion with Greg DeKoenigsberg about how to
> involve more Fedora developers in OLPC work led to some work on
> improving test and review processes for activities and bundles (See
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Testing_Project).
>
> -walter
> --
> Walter Bender
> One Laptop per Child
> http://laptop.org
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar mailing list
> Sugar at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
>



-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gabriel Marcondes
Engenharia de Computação
Universidade Federal de São Carlos
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