Calling the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC community!

If you have an XO laptop, or are just interested in seeing how they work, come on down to SF State campus for a get together on May 11, 2008. If you have an XO or two (or ten), bring them! Don't have an XO? Download a LiveCD from  http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd/ or simply bring your enthusiasm.

I wrote a short article for the Decision Line magazine, on the topic of how law and code intersect and why it is important for us to pay attention to document formats. An excerpt from the article to tease your senses:

Now, imagine your collection of literary works, where, say, verbs become proprietary. What if your books refused to reveal their pages every 10 years or so because the publisher went out of business? Of course, all this sounds downright silly in the context of analog media, but digital media brings with it possibilities of encryption, lock-ins and DRM—Digital Rights Management. It remains to be seen as to whose rights are being managed.

The entire PDF is at http://www.decisionsciences.org/DecisionLine/Vol39/39_1/dsi_dl39_1ecom.pdf Read and feel free (pun intended) to pass it on! 

This is a brief report on the third OLPC meet that happened at SF State on March 15. Its a bit late, but I figured, better late than never. It is, after all, Spring break, so work seems like a distant memory. Ah, the joys of selective amnesia!

Coming back to the report. We met on March 15, in a conference room. Attendance was somewhere between 25 and 30 people. What continues to surprise me is that we seem to keep up that number and have different groups rotate through. Some repeat attendees, of course, but majority of the crowd was new.

Calling all San Francisco Bay Area OLPC enthusiasts!

If you have an XO laptop, or are just interested in seeing how they work, come on down to SF State campus for a get together on March 15, 2008. If you have an XO or two (or ten), bring them! It is after all St. Patrick's Day and the XO is very green indeed!

At the previous meeting for OLPC enthusiasts at SF State, we ran a test where we took three XO laptops and walked to locations on campus where the three were aligned as follows:

• A can talk to B
• B can talk to C

A cannot talk to C directly, because the distance between the two is too much for XO's Wi-Fi radios - they cannot "see" each other directly. At this point, we set up pings to see if data sent from A would get to C and it did! In spite of the fact that A cannot see C on the radio, it can see B, so the packets hop off the XO in the middle and reach out to C. Well, this is no surprise because this is how the XO mesh is supposed to work.

The second OLPC meet at SF State was interesting. We now have a momentum that is reassuring. Initially I was not sure about attendance. Many people tend to lose interest in their XO laptops after two to three weeks. However, we had a little over 20 people who attended the get-together.

 

We managed to update some XOs to build 656, which is labeled Ship2.2. This build is considered stable and is being pushed by OLPC automatically in batches to different laptops (See item # 9 at http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-February/000098.html). You can either wait for the push from OLPC or ask one of us to help you update it. For instructions, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Update_paths . Also see helpful instructions from Doug Jones at http://frombob.to/XO/

These are slides based on how one would go about translating text for different pieces of software on the XO machine for OLPC. Typically, translation involves a good understanding of different pieces of software, but Pootle makes it easy. Its a web component that allows anyone to type in translated strings and click a button. That's it!

See attached slides for more specifics. 

Update: Slides with newer screenshots are available at http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.odp and http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.pdf 

Calling all San Francisco Bay Area OLPC enthusiasts! If you have an XO laptop, or are just interested in seeing how they work, come on down to SF State campus for a get together on Feb 9, 2008. If you have an XO or two (or ten), bring them! If not, bring your enthusiasm.

What: OLPC meet at San Francisco State University

Why: Curiosity, strength in numbers, plain fun! Build a mesh network, share activities, pictures, measure distances with acoustic tape measure!

When: Saturday, February 9, 2008 from 10am to 2pm

A long time ago in a far away land there was Jabber. In the same era in a strange land (SF State) we installed Jabber and had fun with it. This was a time when PDAs ruled and Handspring was king. Remember that time? It was a long time ago indeed.

I had a Handspring that had a modem powered by two AAA batteries. I was tinkering with messaging protocols, but the problem with most IM protocols was that they were proprietary, so there were no apps for Handspring. That led me to Jabber. First, I signed up for an account on their server and got the IM going on two different computers. It was fun to watch the XML stream going between the two ends. Next, I downloaded the code and got it running on a server at home. I remember that just like everything else back then, there were several attempts at the "three steps to nirvana": ./configure, make, make install

SF State is currently in the midst of moving to a Lotus Notes (IBM) based e-mail and calendaring system. Why? That's out of the scope of this post. An interesting side effect of this move is that we get to test the native Lotus Notes client on different platforms. I plan on testing it on Ubuntu shortly. We also get to see if their Domino Web Access (DWA) system works on different browsers. My Firefox install works on Windows, but tends to freeze on Ubuntu Linux. Both use Sun Java to perform tasks. If I switch to IE7 on Windows it loads ActiveX and does similar magic.

Yesterday, while trying to troubleshoot a quota problem on my account, one of the admins jokingly mentioned "I wonder if it will load on the OLPC laptop..."