Open Source at SF State University - SFSU

OLPC-SF May 2008 meeting

Thu, 08 May 2008 12:24:00 -0700

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.

The Law of Code

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:33:29 -0700

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!

Third OLPC meet at SF State - a brief, and somewhat late report

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:01:50 -0700

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.

Third OLPC meet at SF State (March 15, 2008)

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:37:14 -0700

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!

Hop, skip and jump

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:33:55 -0800

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.

Feb 9 OLPC meet at SF State - a brief report

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 08:39:25 -0800

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/

Translating for XO using Pootle

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:08:09 -0800

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

Feb 9 OLPC meet at SF State

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:13:20 -0800

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

Keep jabbering

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:54:43 -0800

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

Yes, but can it run on the OLPC machine?

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:35:37 -0800

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..."

A Report on the first OLPC meet at SF State

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 09:10:01 -0800

We had the first meeting of OLPC/XO enthusiasts at San Francisco State University on January 12, 2008. I have had a B4 unit since July 2007, and some of my colleagues decided to get theirs via G1G1. So, we decided to get a group together on campus, but then opened up for others in the Bay Area. After all, there is strength in numbers! We had 22 enthusiasts who came by on the 12th.

The meeting started off with a minor scheduling glitch. Our room was double-booked. Luckily, I had keys to our Ubuntu lab, so that was handy. Next, we had Christian Einfeldt with his camera filming people as they came in. His videos are part of a documentary called Digital Tipping Point, a series of interviews about how free and open source software is enabling people all over the world. DTP videos are available in their raw (source code) goodness at http://www.archive.org/details.php?identifier=digitaltippingpoint

SFSU now hosting Moodle CVS mirror site

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:51:13 -0700

SFSU is now hosting the only North American CVS repository for Moodle. Developers from all over North and South America are now accessing moodlecvs.sfsu.edu to get the latest Moodle build. The CVS repository follows moodle.org standards:

Connections through CVS (Concurrent Versions System) software
Set up for anonymous access, no password
Updated every 15 minutes from the main Moodle trunk.

This is a sign of SFSU's leadership in the moodle community and SFSU's active involvement in the open source community.

LibX - a firefox extension for searching our (and other) library databases

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:00:40 -0700

Chris Mays, Associate Librarian at SF State informs us of a new and very cool plug-in for Firefox. This is the LibX plug-in released under the Mozilla Public License. From Chris's e-mail:

It's called LibX, and you can learn more and install it by pointing your browser here:

http://libx.org/editions/download.php?edition=sfsu

What does it do? Well, you can use it to look up books in our catalog InvestiGator, or look up our 200 databases and 20,000 electronic journals, or search Google Scholar, but it has some subtler and more powerful features.

LibX embeds a link on certain kinds of web pages, like Amazon or Barnes & Noble pages, NY Times book reviews, Google and Yahoo, Worldcat and many others. This link will search for the book on the page in InvestiGator! With "autolinking" it enhances any ISBNs it finds to search for the book. It also enhances PMIDs and DOIs (if you know what those are) to search for the full text article among our databases. It provide contextual menus (right-click or control-click) for any selected text on any web page to search that text as a keyword, author or title in InvestiGator, Google Scholar, WorldCat and elsewhere.

The URL above will take you to a page that will explain this in more detail, and allow you install it. We think it's really cool, and we sincerely hope you find it useful. And, if it works for you, why not tell your students about it?

OLPC presentation for 4C group at SF State

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:37:32 -0700

My slides from the 4C presentation are up at Slideshare and Google.

http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dgvbpf4x_14tcmnw2&fs=true

Software Freedom Day 2007: A great success

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:31:59 -0700

Software Freedom Day events were a great success and of course, a lot of fun. There's something liberating about heckling passers-by and enticing them with free software.

"Free software, free software! Come and get it. Free software, free software! No strings attached. Nothing to sign. No forms to fill out. Come and get it. Free software, free software!"