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.

It was a great day to be at the beach in San Francisco (Apr 27, 2008). Thanks to Jason Stone and Jim Stockford for sparing their Sunday afternoon, we met up at Ocean Beach with three XO laptops. The little green machines attract a good bit of attention. Even before we got started with out little experiment, we had people stopping by to ask questions or just check out the green machine.

 

 

So, the experiment was: How far will the point-to-point mesh network on the XOs go in relatively clear RF (radio frequency) environment? At least cleaner as far as 2.4 GHz spectrum goes. We did such a run on campus and got about 600 feet max. or so across two XO units. I suspected that this was because our campus has a lot of Wi-Fi traffic, so the interference alone would decrease the hop length. We also have a lot of foliage, so that would add to the interference.

Ocean beach is right along the Pacific at the edge of San Francisco. I hoped that RF would be cleaner there. So, we got started by setting up the mesh of three laptops (me, Jim and Jason) and then got Jim firmly planted (say, position A) in the thick of beach population to answer questions. Jason and I walked south while pinging Jim's laptop all along. Well, we kept on walking...and walking...and walking. This was definitely way beyond 600 feet. Eventually, we started seeing "host unreachable" a few times, so we stopped. We saw ping times of about 25 to 30 ms. Jason became point B there. I kept walking further south and after a few steps, the pinging resumed with low latencies (3 to 5 ms). I kept walking...and walking...and walking. A quick note about walking on the beach. Walk closer to the water. Its a lot firmer and works well when measuring paces (1 pace approximately equals three feet). Eventually, I started seeing "host unreachable". I called Jim to verify. He was seeing the same. I tried holding the laptop higher up and the pings would resume. Eventually, I stopped at what I thought was the outer limit of pings, marked the spot and took the following picture.

Here's a quick set of links to update you all on different pilots that are either ongoing or are completed around the world. Then there is the "Our Stories" project that's very interesting.

Our Stories (http://www.ourstories.org) is a joint project involving OLPC, UNICEF, Google, and others to facilitate children telling their own stories and those of their communities around the world. The basic format will be 3-5 minute audio recordings with geodata, and optional text and images; these will be visualized on maps of the world, and shared publicly over local and global networks.

The Story Corps team helped with advice about their own process for interviewing a friend or loved one that will work for a young audience of interviewers; the idea is to localize the process and surrounding projects, and to carry out class activities around such interviews in OLPC partner countries. The project hopes to have a third of all XO owners record a story by the end of next year.

Updated slides for "Translating for the XO using Pootle" are now available at http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.pdf Original Open Document Format file is at http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.odp. Thanks to Sayamindu Dasgupta for updating the slides and content.

 

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!

The OLPC XO laptop is considered to be one of the most green of machines when it comes to sustainable computing. Of course, sustainable computing does not only mean green, but being green or small-environmental-footprint is a major component. How do computers run with as efficient a footprint as possible? In the following video, Dr. Mary Lou Jepson, the ex-CTO of OLPC explains how she got the XO to be a green machine.

Even more important though, is that fact that engineers are currently working hard on a very aggressive suspend-and-resume regimen for the XO laptop where the laptop will be able to suspend and resume on the boundaries of human perception (100 milliseconds or so). The idea being that the computer can remain suspended while you read the contents of a web page (the display is wired separately, so it still displays when the motherboard goes to sleep). That saves power and could effectively increase the runtime to 10 hours per charge. Of course, I am speculating the 10 hour benchmark, but that is the goal; 8 1/2 to 10 hours on one charge. The better part of this scheme is that some day, in the near future, my Sony VAIO running Ubuntu will be able to benefit from this work (FOSS) and will suspend (which it does today) and resume (which it does not) so that I can actually get something like 4+ hours out of my 7 1/2 hour Sony battery.

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.

This video interview is interesting in that it show the perspectives of two individuals about the XO laptop. One is from Texas (Bruce Sterling), while the other (Jasmina Tesanovic) is from Serbia. Their viewpoints about its utility, its price and its place in the geo-political arena makes for an interesting 9 minutes.

Oh, and there is the occasional sprinkling of "Linux, blah, blah, blah"

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/