Hi! <br><br>I was in Game Jam Brasil, and posted some photos in <a href="http://vainalousachefe.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/olpc-gamejam-brasil-como-foi/">my blog</a>. <br><br>Anyone who can read in portuguese will also know what happened with some details ;-)
<br><br>[]'s<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Nov 10, 2007 5:57 PM, Walter Bender <<a href="mailto:walter.bender@gmail.com">walter.bender@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
1. Cambridge: The first of the monthly learning workshops was held at<br>OLPC this week. More than 60 people from 14 countries (and one US<br>city) attended. The focus of this workshop was to build a stronger<br>understanding of laptops and learning; to make plans for deployment in
<br>the countries; and to build a strong community among the participants<br>for ongoing support and collaboration. The energy, ideas, and<br>excitement among the group was fantastic and gave everyone more hope<br>about the learning potential about to be unleashed as laptops begin
<br>arriving in large numbers in countries shortly. Many thanks to David<br>Cavallo, Lindsay Petrillose, and the OLPC learning team for all of<br>their efforts.<br><br>2. Cyberspace: Larry Weber's dream of a digital PSA has been realized:
<br>Hilary Meserole reports that our first Give One Get One public service<br>announcement, which features Heroes star Masi Oka, is online (See<br><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQbtebeftyA" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQbtebeftyA
</a>). The team is working with<br>YouTube on ways to feature this on their home page during the<br>fortnight that the campaign is running. We will be adding more content<br>next week—outtakes from the PSA shoot, etc.<br>
<br>Masi has joined OLPC as our media spokesperson, however, an ill-timed<br>writers' strike precludes Nicholas and Masi doing some of the<br>talk-show appearances that had been envisioned.<br><br>3. Give One Get One launches at 6AM EST on Monday (See
<br><a href="http://laptopgiving.org" target="_blank">laptopgiving.org</a>). While we have no idea what the response will be,<br>Hilary and the "volunteer army" that includes Pentagram, Nurun, W2,<br>Racepoint, Digital Influence Group, Eleven, Inc., and Len Fink did a
<br>fantastic job raising the public awareness of the campaign. Examples<br>include the beautiful full-page ad that was donated by the Economist<br>(See <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/images/a/ab/GiveOneGetOne.pdf" target="_blank">
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/a/ab/GiveOneGetOne.pdf</a>). We will be<br>able to reach many more children due to their efforts.<br><br>4. Mass production started this week this week in Quanta's new factory<br>in Changshu. We would like to take this time to thank the team at
<br>Quanta for there support over the last two years. Major contributors<br>to the effort include: Victor Chao, Gary Chiang, Arnold Kao, Matt<br>Huang, Dandy Hsu, Agnes Huang, Johnson Huang, Frank Lee, Roger Huang,<br>Elvis Wu,
S.F. Chen, Ken Lin, Jacky Mu, Paying Liu, Terry Su, Alfred<br>Lin, Gary Chiang, Alice Wang, Alan Lio, Jeff Tarng, Tim Huang, Jeffrey<br>Huang, Rita Chen, Joe Lin, Jeff Yu, Ben Chuang, Sam Yeh, Johnnie Lui,<br>Eric Tasi, Bruce Lu, Jeff Huang, Mikko Hsu, Vance Ke, Luna Huang,
<br>David Lin, Bryan Ma, Devin Lui, Arvin Lui, John Lin, Tess Yu, Chia<br>Ying Lin, Gary Su, C.H. Yang, Ray Tseng, Sam Chang, Gary Liu, Lori<br>Yang, Frank Feng, Cooper Zhou, Kaiser Feng, Neptune Zhan, Xiang Wei,<br>Zihaw Zhang, Min Xia, Eagle Liang, Peter Huang, Pillar Hou, Yaya
<br>Zhang, Crystal Sun, Nana Pei, Bob Zhang, Yengeng Cen, Ian Huang,<br>Chie-Hung Li, Sunny Cheng, Cancer Zha, Fly Chen, Javin Hu, Grubby Wei,<br>Polin Chang, Anna Zhou, Tim Huang, Jim Chang, Eric Wang, Kenny Chung,<br>Zenith Zhu, Rock Chien, Sunny Hsiung, Kiki Peng, Sunny Huang, Barry
<br>Lam, Michael Wang, Morse Chen, and Eddy Chao.<br><br>There are many other people—from companies such as Marvel, ChiLin,<br>Himax, CMO, AMD, ENE, QMI, Fuse Project, Gecko, Pentagram, Design<br>Continuum, Foxconn, ALPS, and MIT, and many individuals as well—who
<br>have contributed to the hardware and mechanicals over the past three<br>years. (Mary Lou Jepsen is pulling together a list of everyone to<br>thank.) Collectively we have achieved something that just three years<br>ago many believed that was an impossible dream.
<br><br>5. Safety Certification: Behind the scenes another team (from UL,<br>Quanta, and OLPC) has been quietly working for nearly two years on XO<br>safety certification. The XO laptop is now fully compliant with UL<br>safety requirements and has been thus certified. We have also been
<br>awarded radio, power, and system certification at national levels in<br>several countries. We can now legally ship in US, Canada, Uruguay, and<br>Peru, as well as many other countries. EU-wide approval is due in<br>approximately a week. We are still in the process of applying for
<br>certification in countries on each continent with the most stringent<br>safety standards.<br><br>Among many tests, we have passed Ul/IEC 60950-1 (notebook computer),<br>ASTM F693 (electronic toys for children), UL 1301 (mechanical assembly
<br>requirements, including larger face dimension requirements for child<br>safety) and UL 2054 (batteries), as well as a passing UL on-site<br>inspection of the Quanta's factory. We have formal RoHS (low toxicity)<br>
certification from Quanta, and independent testing of RoHS compliance<br>by UL. Also, we have been safety approved for lap use—XO is the first<br>"laptop" approved for usage on one's lap in many years. (The reason
<br>that most laptops are now called "notebook computers" is that they run<br>too hot for safe lap use.)<br><br>Many thanks to the core XO safety teams from UL, Quanta, and OLPC:<br>Katherine Sims, Bob Delisi, Nicole Tatum, Kevin Ravi, Stacy Yu, Tom
<br>Burke, Derek Chen, Edgar Wolff-klammer, Tammi Gengegbacher, Greg<br>Monty, Alfred Fung, Nicholas Boten, Seth Carlton, Bruce Lu, Kenny<br>Chung, Victor Chao, Rita Chen, Arnold Kao, Mary Lou Jepsen, and<br>Lindsay Petrillose.
<br><br>6. Richard Smith has been setting up a suspend/resume manufacturing<br>test and getting the process flow set up so that Quanta can do final<br>quality analysis (FQA). Activation of laptops (part of the anti-theft<br>
system) presented a problem since the FQA process pulls laptops after<br>the final shipping image has been installed and security has been<br>enabled. We decided that the best way to deal with FQA is to pull FQA<br>machines prior to enabling security and then enable it as the final
<br>part of FQA.<br><br>7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D04 as a candidate for<br>Update.1. It has wireless-networking improvements and bug fixes and<br>can be used to update the NAND Flash ROM over the wireless network
<br>(from the school server).<br><br>Working with Javier Cardona, Mitch discovered the root cause on a<br>wireless firmware problem that was breaking wireless support in Q2D03.<br>There was a time window during which the module reported the wrong MAC
<br>address. This was not affecting the Linux driver because it had an<br>arbitrary delay to block access during that gap. Marvell promises a<br>proper fix in the next few days.<br><br>8. Wireless: Javier Cardona and Ricardo Carrano's efforts in debugging
<br>the open issues with the wireless subsystem are producing results. We<br>now know the mechanism by which the driver fails (mishandling of a<br>BUSY result returned from the firmware to a scan request); efforts are<br>
now focusing on finding the reason as to why that mishandling has such<br>severe impact in the overall subsystem operation.<br><br>Marvell released wireless firmware version 5.110.20.p0 which<br>incorporates many enhancements requested by OLPC, including mesh
<br>running-state control, mesh beacon control, and throughput<br>optimizations. After resolving the existing issues, the Marvell team<br>is going to mainly focus on power optimization for the firmware.<br><br>James Cameron tested the developer version of the active antennae (See
<br><a href="http://dev.laptop.org/%7Equozl/2007-11-10-active-antenna/" target="_blank">http://dev.laptop.org/~quozl/2007-11-10-active-antenna/</a>). The antennae<br>performed easily over the range, no doubt aided by being
<br>held at between 3m and 4m above ground. James reports that they hit<br>the length limit of the test range before any significant bandwidth<br>reduction was felt. We received the first 30 active antennae<br>preproduction boards from QMI in Cambridge this week and completed a
<br>first round of testing without any issues.<br><br>9. Schedule update: There are only three weeks left to get the<br>Update.1 release out the door. This week we focused on testing and<br>some bug fixing; but not as many "Joyride" builds as lately—C. Scott
<br>Ananian has been concentrating on assembling the pieces for the first<br>Update.1 builds. He expects that we will have this done over the<br>weekend. The overarching goal for the Update.1 release is stability of<br>the Trial-3 functionality; we are also folding in many new
<br>frameworks—such as security and the new tubes system; the goal is to<br>have these frameworks in place without their causing regressions. One<br>new feature we are are adding is robust upgrades, preferably via<br>wireless network.
<br><br>10. Testing: Ricardo has been detailing Ticket #4470—infrastructure<br>mode failing over time—and assembling meaningful logs for the team to<br>work with. Javier is going through these logs. Ricardo also finished<br>
installing network "sniffing" devices for our network testbed as part<br>of the debug process. Ricardo and Yani Galanis tested the range of two<br>laptops that were brought back from field-testing at the Khairat
<br>school in Munbai, India. Their tests revealed normal behavior. (In the<br>field, they exhibited unusually poor WiFi range.) Ricardo and Yani<br>have also been testing different antenna designs to establish<br>long-distance wireless links.
<br><br>Alex Latham has been testing Joyride, filing bug reports and<br>uncovering the many regressions expected as we pull so many new bits<br>together. He hasn't yet completed a full "1-hour smoke test" with an
<br>of the Joyride builds—Scott's Update.1 build series is expected to be<br>more stable. Alex has also begun testing with security enabled. He<br>also helped John Watlington set up a testbed for our mass-production<br>
hardware.<br><br>Manny Castillo has been testing the Browser activity with specific<br>URLs chosen to exercise various plugins—such as Gnash—on Build 623; he<br>will be testing with Joyride next week.<br><br>11. Sugar: Marco Gritti, Michael Stone, and Tomeu Vizoso worked on the
<br>integration of the Rainbow security system with Sugar and the<br>DataStore (and Journal). They enabled activity isolation on Tuesday<br>and solved all the known road blockers in the following days: access<br>to<br>audio and video resources; communication with the DataStore;
<br>activity-space directories and their permission; and out-of-container<br>activities. Next week we will need a new round of testing; Marco is<br>confident that we will be able to solve the remaining problems<br>quickly.
<br><br>Marco rewrote the preview code to be much more efficient; it blocks<br>for only the minimal required time. Switching between views and<br>closing<br>activities is now much faster and the previews are saved reliably.
<br>Marco temporarily disabled the startup sound in sugar to avoid<br>blocking the sound device and tracked down the problem with muted<br>audio at startup. Sound is expected to be finally back working fully<br>in the next build.
<br><br>Tomeu implement a basic search in the mesh view, which greatly<br>facilitates finding people on a crowded network; he exposed files from<br>the DataStore to activities using hard links instead of doing a copy;<br>
and he made the DataStore's use of the temporary file space more<br>efficient.<br><br>Reinier Heeres added a way to switch between activities using ALT-Tab;<br>fixed some issues with left-right inversion for Arabic; disabled
<br>closing the Journal with CTRL-Q; and implemented a short-term<br>solution to the problem of the "donut" on the home page not accurately<br>reflecting activity memory usage. Reinier is working currently fixing
<br>some palette issues.<br><br>12. Activities: The Etoys team continues to make adjustments to the<br>Sugar and Rainbow (security) system changes being introduced for<br>Update.1; Bert Freudenberg is leading this effort. Yoshiki Ohshima and
<br>Bert have provided an improved version of Sugar menu bar; Yoshiki,<br>Bert, and Scott Wallace put together the necessary bits to provide<br>better "view source" experience—all of the code for Etoys can now be
<br>viewed without any degradation. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness have<br>been improving the help system for Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and<br>korakurider have stabilized the localization mechanism. Takashi also<br>experimented a different UI for controlling choices in tiles.
<br><br>Simon Schampijer and Mark Maurer collaborated on getting "view source"<br>working fluidly between the Browse and Write activities. By typing<br>FN-Space (or CTRL+U) in Browse, the HTML source of the current page is
<br>opened in Write. The HTML can be edited in Write and when resumed from<br>the Journal the modified page gets interpreted and displayed. While<br>doing this work, they tracked down and fixed a new issue with the<br>DataStore: it had been losing metadata between reboots.
<br><br>13. Builds: C. Scott Ananian continued to work on forking the new<br>stable Update.1 branch and stabilizing our build process. He setup<br><a href="http://download.laptop.org" target="_blank">download.laptop.org</a>
, <a href="http://mock.laptop.org" target="_blank">mock.laptop.org</a>, and <a href="http://pilgrim.laptop.org" target="_blank">pilgrim.laptop.org</a>, which<br>you should see being pressed into use in the next week. Scott also
<br>updated the Libertas firmware in the builds and refreshed the mesh<br>testbed, with an eye towards testing the new firmware in a realistic<br>network upgrade scenario. He should be able to run that test on<br>Monday.
<br><br>This week Andres Salomon cleaned up the kernel build scripts, made<br>them auto-generate change logs, and dealt with getting updated kernels<br>into joyride. Joyride builds now include sane kernels. Andres also did
<br>minor Libertas testing, and is in the process of debugging USB issues.<br><br>14. Power management: James Cameron and Chris Ball worked on some OHM<br>(power manager) bugs. Once those were out of the way, Chris went on to
<br>implement some of our power management features: "suspend on idle" is<br>in place; there is now a distinction between "suspend" (screen and<br>wireless still on, wake up on network traffic or key press) and
<br>"sleep" (screen off, only wake up on a power-button press). There are<br>a few more OHM bugs to fight before this is ready to land in<br>Joyride/Update.1, which should happen sometime early next week.<br><br>
15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta and Xavier Alvarez have<br>successfully completed the first phase of the Pootle installation. All<br>of the translation files are in place. A number of users have signed<br>up and have already started to submit translations in the form of
<br>suggestions. A discussion in the #olpc-pootle channel on how to best<br>integrate an external project's translation-related files into our<br>Pootle setup has let to an improved workflow for external projects<br>that want to take
<br>advantage of our translation infrastructure.<br><br>Currently, we have translators for the following languages signed up:<br>Amharic, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (traditional), French,<br>German, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish. Additional
<br>translators and languages are needed, particularly for the Indic<br>languages, Quechua, and Aymara.<br><br>The next stage of the Pootle deployment will consist of making the GIT<br>integration work—we are waiting for GIT write access to
<a href="http://dev.laptop.org" target="_blank">dev.laptop.org</a><br>to go forward on that. A set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) has<br>been created in the wiki (See <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle/FAQ" target="_blank">
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle/FAQ</a>).<br><br>Sayamindu has been looking at an issue where fontconfig seems to treat<br>the font cache invalid if the mtime of the cache is greater than the<br>system time. This is documented in Ticket #1525 (and in upstream
<br>Freedesktop bug #12107). Sayamindu had backported the relevant changes<br>to the fontconfig used in Fedora 7; he will be testing out the package<br>in the XO over the weekend.<br><br>16. Security: Michael Stone announced a new release of Rainbow (See
<br><a href="http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=234221" target="_blank">http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=234221</a>) to the<br>devel and sugar lists today. The release incorporates a number of
<br>resolutions to the current crop of 'rainbow-integration' bugs that the<br>community has worked so hard over the last three days to document for<br>us.<br><br>Changes include:<br> • relaxed multimedia-device permissions that should make it possible
<br>for activities to use the camera, microphone, and speakers;<br> • availability of the user's public key;<br> • activities are now started in $SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH instead of<br>$SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT;<br> • activities can run under "strace" by defining the environment
<br>variable RAINBOW_STRACE_LOG (in the dictionary passed to Rainbow in<br>/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py);<br> • tracebacks of your activity's log file can be viewed with "less -R"
<br>(e.g., less -R /home/olpc/.sugar/default/logs/org.laptop.Record-1.log);<br><br>Special thanks Marco, Tomeu, and Alex L. for their extraordinary efforts.<br><br>17. Community reporting: Dan Sutera and the team working on the Report
<br>activity made it to the next round of the Knight News Challenge.<br>Pablo Flores is working on something similar in Uruguay, and has found<br>some federal support to develop local blogs from children, stored at<br>the local schools. We discussed how the projects could work together;
<br>Pablo is focusing on the web activity that would help editors arrange<br>blog feeds into beautiful editions, and the Report team is working on<br>an XO activity that would let children read and write blog and news<br>
feeds. Meanwhile, Jack Driscoll, former editor of the Boston Globe—who<br> has been leading community journalism projects around the world for<br>over ten years—has put some journalism guidelines in the wiki (See<br><a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Learning_activities/Journalism" target="_blank">
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Learning_activities/Journalism</a>).<br><br>18. SimCity: SimCity is now available under the GPL, thanks to the<br>generosity of EA and the hard work of Steve Seabolt and Chuck Normann,<br>John Gilmore, and Don Hopkins (See
<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SimCity" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SimCity</a>).<br>The game is in the process of being "sugarized", but is already<br>playable on the XO. This is the first time that a major publisher has
<br>open sourced the original of a popular title. EA should be<br>congratulated.<br><br>19. Game Jams: A competitive game jam is under way this weekend in São<br>Carlos, Brazil, with the support of a number of local universities and
<br>sponsors. Any who are interested in their progress are welcome to<br>follow along in #olpc-content on IRC; they are looking for outside<br>help with art and music for the developed games (See<br><a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Game_Jam_Brazil" target="_blank">
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Game_Jam_Brazil</a>). In advance of the CMU<br>game jam next weekend, the ETC team at Carnegie Mellon university has<br>finished a draft of its first game, a peg solitaire affair (See<br><a href="http://www.olpcgames.org/" target="_blank">
http://www.olpcgames.org/</a>).<br><br>20. Community: A discussion with Greg DeKoenigsberg about how to<br>involve more Fedora developers in OLPC work led to some work on<br>improving test and review processes for activities and bundles (See
<br><a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Testing_Project" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Testing_Project</a>).<br><br>-walter<br><font color="#888888">--<br>Walter Bender<br>One Laptop per Child
<br><a href="http://laptop.org" target="_blank">http://laptop.org</a><br>_______________________________________________<br>Sugar mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Sugar@lists.laptop.org">Sugar@lists.laptop.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar" target="_blank">
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar</a><br></font></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>Gabriel Marcondes<br>Engenharia de Computação
<br>Universidade Federal de São Carlos