Open Source at SF State University - XO

OLPC-SF June 2008 meeting: a report

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:13:01 -0700

This is a report in reference to the OLPC-SF meeting held on June 21, 2008 at the Google campus in Mountain View. 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 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

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, SF-LUG, BALUG, EBLUG, NBLUG, etc). Mark Willey has developed a simple activity that manipulates the backlight as a flashlight. See http://superhappydevhouse.org/XO+Flashlight 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 is proprietary, but its resource requirements are pretty low. Robert was "on-the-phone" throughout the meeting. Running Asterisk may be a bit more hefty than TeamSpeak, but looking at AstLinux (embedded Asterisk server), there is some hope. I wonder if anyone has sugarized iaxclient for the XO.

I had a copy of build 708 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 and a member of OLPC-SF, had invited us to a 2pm demonstration of the Charles Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 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.

June 2008 OLPC-SF meeting at Google

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:56:59 -0700

June 2008 meeting of SF Bay Area OLPC Enthusiasts.

What: If you have an XO laptop, or are just interested in seeing how they work, come on down to Google campus in Mountain View for a get together on June 21, 2008. If you have an XO or two (or ten), bring them! Don't have an XO? Simply bring your enthusiasm.

Bonus: Gather at the Computer History Museum (CHM) for a tour/photo ops with the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 (Babbage engine with XO!), courtesy of Jay McCauley. Babbage Engine at 1pm and 2pm. Also scheduled are DEC PDP-1 tours at 1:30pm and 2:00pm. Short and long tours of Visible Storage (main exhibit area) are scheduled throughout the afternoon. CHM opens at 12. CHM is located right at the Shoreline exit off 101, about a mile from Google. Entry is free.

Why: Build a mesh network, share activities, generate intersting ideas. See the school server in action. Discuss translation activities. Get an update on pilot studies. And more...

When: June 21, 2008 from 10am to 2pm

Where: University Theaters @
Building 40 2nd Floor
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

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.

Wireless mesh at the beach

Sun, 04 May 2008 11:07:22 -0700

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.

An update on OLPC pilots and related projects

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:22:49 -0700

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.

Translating for the XO - Version 2.0

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:59:39 -0700

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.

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!

How green is the XO, and how does it get greener?

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:26:07 -0800

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.

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.

The XO laptop - two perspectives

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:15:16 -0800

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"

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

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..."