This is a report in reference to the OLPC-SF meeting held on June 21, 2008 at the Google campus in Mountain View [1]. I'd like to thank our host, Weihaw Chuang for making the necessary arrangements. The meeting had approximately 30 people, including the usual suspects of Linux enthusiasts, newbies, and (grand)parent(s) with (grand)child(ren). We also had Christian Einfeldt of the Digital Tipping Point [2] filming his neighbor while she unwrapped her new XO laptop from its shipping box. That video should be available some time soon.

While meeting and talking with others is quite productive in getting ideas going, we need to have a bit more focus on activities. I've attached slides from the meeting. These are more like starting points instead of a plan to move forward. We will probably start a sub-group focusing on children and their use of XOs. We heard from two children at the meeting where they expressed their excitement and frustration with the XO. Let's see if we can kickstart a sub-group with parents and children, and not get bogged down by the discussions about software and operating systems only. If anyone is interested in kicking off activities with children and XOs, please speak up on the list or write to me at sverma@sfsu.edu [3]

There is definitely a strong sub-group that likes to tinker (and there is nothing wrong with that ;-)), so the discussions tend to get technical. We also have a fairly good overlap with Linux User Groups from around the SF bay area (SVLUG [4], SF-LUG [5], BALUG [6], EBLUG [7], NBLUG [8], etc). Mark Willey has developed a simple activity that manipulates the backlight as a flashlight. See http://superhappydevhouse.org/XO+Flashlight [9] for details. He talked about it a couple of meetings ago. I haven't seen it yet, but I'd love to see it at the next meeting as an example for developing simple activities.

One highlight of the meeting was that Robert Howard demonstrated a VoIP session with another person in New York, New York, using a TeamSpeak server located in Alabama. TeamSpeak [10] is proprietary, but its resource requirements are pretty low. Robert was "on-the-phone" throughout the meeting. Running Asterisk [11] may be a bit more hefty than TeamSpeak, but looking at AstLinux [12] (embedded Asterisk server), there is some hope. I wonder if anyone has sugarized iaxclient [13] for the XO.

I had a copy of build 708 [14] on a USB key, so a few people updated their G1G1 machines from 656 to 708. This build has "suspend on closing the lid" enabled which makes the battery run longer. A quick press of the power button usually brings the machine out of suspend.

We wrapped up around 1:45pm, but the fun didn't end there. Jay McCauley, a docent at the Computer History Museum [15] and a member of OLPC-SF, had invited us to a 2pm demonstration of the Charles Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 [16] which is currently on display at the museum. So many of us went down to the CHM for a demo of the Difference Engine. What a terrific piece of work! The saddest part of modern machines is perhaps that as they get progressively faster, they lose their mechanical parts. For example, there is a certain charm in watching a hissing steam engine in spite of its inefficiencies while I find no pleasure in watching an idling electric locomotive :-)

Here's a video of the Difference Engine in action.

 
Next meeting will be in a couple of weeks or three. It will be announced on OLPC-SF list at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sf [17] and on the wiki at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SanFranciscoBayArea [18]