Baked etoys

> From: "Walter Bender" <[hidden email]>
> Date: June 16, 2007 21:03:53  GMT+02:00
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News 2007-06-16
> Reply-To: [hidden email]
>
> 1. Montevideo: On Friday, the Technology Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU)
> released a bid for Project Ceibal (Conectividad Educativa de
> Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea)—one laptop per child
> in Uruguay.
>
> 2. Olin College hosted the first OLPC Game Jam (See
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Game_Jam) last weekend, bringing together
> ten teams of game developers and some freelance artists, musicians,
> and programmers, to make games for the XO. Organizers Mel Chua and SJ
> Klein are working on general notes re: organizing game jams and other
> local community events to develop materials for the XO. Most of the
> teams chose to work in Python, though a few developed in Flash. (A
> Flash developer who had rather vehemently against Python at the start
> of the weekend, wouldn't stop talking about how nice Python was by
> Sunday.) Teams collaborated with one another, in addition to competing
> to make the best game; they shared music and artistic expertise, and
> code snippets and coding advice. (The Flash developers uniformly
> wanted to write things that would work in Gnash on our platform, not
> standard Flash 9; they spent part of Friday and Saturday working with
> the Gnash team to help improve its utility for game development.)
>
> The two best reviewed games both used PyGame; they were a version of
> 3D Pong and a version of the old Crossfire game called Spray Play (See
> http://wiki.laptop.org/images/c/c6/3dpong.activity.zip and
> http://sprayplay.googlecode.com/svn/).
>
> 3. Taking the heat: We have decided to see how much heat XO can take.
> Mary Lou Jepsen has instructed UL to test our laptop for a 50C (122F)
> operating temperature. Typical laptops are only tested to 35C (95F) or
> 40C (104F), which is unacceptable for the children who will be using
> our laptops in hot temperatures (e.g., in direct sunlight and of
> course without air conditioning). Mary Lou and Tracy Price are also
> running a simple bake test at the OLPC office, pictured above. The
> laptop is running days at 52C (125F), and nights at 22C (72F). UL and
> Quanta are doing more extensive testing, but shown is a laptop,
> running the eToys demo that sits in the oven night and day. Try that
> with a conventional laptop!
>
> 4. Green: Mary Lou and Robert Fadel have started the application
> process for EPEAT Gold—the highest award given to laptops; one no
> other laptop has yet received. Also, late last week Google's Ethan
> Beard and Megan Smith, and Red Hat's Mike Evans invited OLPC to join
> with Google, Intel, Quanta, Red Hat, AMD, HP and others in the IT
> industry to launch Climate Savers, an organization dedicated to
> lowering the power consumption of computers through better power
> management systems, and more efficient AC adaptors. Climate Savers
> picked lower power as the single thing on which to concentrate in
> order to have the biggest positive impact on the environment. OLPC
> concurs with this believe. At first those that join Climate Savers
> agree to meet the Energy Star goals—OLPC is already 14× better than
> Energy Star.
>
> 5. $1 video microscope: Inspired by SJ Klein and EO Smith, Mary Lou
> made a 100× video microscope for her XO for $1 (three plastic lenses
> in plastic housing). She made videos of the XO screen compared with a
> standard LCD screen, where the details of the pixel structure can be
> clearly seen. She will be compiling a video for youtube.com in the
> coming days.
>
> 6. Sugar: Eben Eliason has continued to refine a series of mock-ups
> for rollovers, invitations, and notifications. He has created a new
> series of Activity mockups, including Browse, Read, Write, Memorize,
> Calculate, Photograph/Capture/Record, and TamTam that feature tagging
> and tabs. He also created a preliminary specification for keyboard
> shortcut design, now open for discussion. Also he worked with Jim
> Gettys to figure out some logic for the hand-held buttons in terms of
> desired functionality and semantic meaning. Marco Gritti has been
> making changes to the GTK theme to incorporate many of these
> improvements.
>
> 7. Marc Maurer continues work on the Write activity, with his focus
> mostly around collaboration. He has been working on a new algorithm to
> handle collisions in documents when people are editing the same part
> of a document. He also spent a lot of time fixing bugs in Abiword to
> close a blocker bug in the 406 Build.
>
> 8. Muriel de Souza Godoi updated the Memory Activity to the new sugar
> API; now all the memory games were unified in one activity. He also
> worked Eben designed a new Memorize Game UI; the new scoreboard was
> developed as a component, with methods such as: set fill color, set
> stroke color, increase score, set_current_player, etc. The new card
> table was also developed as a component and can be controlled using
> the hand-held-mode buttons. These UI components are designed to be as
> flexible as possible, focusing on reusing components.
>
> 9. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the Journal; he has added
> the ability to do screen capture by typing Alt-1; the image is saved
> to the Journal. He also has been working to make it possible to launch
> downloaded activities directly from the Journal. He has been updating
> the web browser in order making it work with the new Journal code as
> well as the new code to interface with Python. Ben Saller has been
> working on how to get the Journal to support alternate media such as
> USB drives. Eben created a new series of Journal mock-ups that
> incorporate tabbed toolbars, address support for "sort by, then by,"
> and for versioning.
>
> 10. Mesh Activities: Dan Williams made progress with Network Manager
> (NM) and the mesh. NM will now automatically scan and get an address
> on the mesh network. The Collabora folks continue down the path of
> making the peer-to-peer presence-discovery code and tubes code work.
> They also added a "Hellomesh" Activity that shows how to build a
> tubes-enabled activity. (Please note that the activity will change
> over time as the tubes API stabilizes.) Eben worked extensively back
> and forth with Pentagram on an updated UI design for the mesh view.
>
> 11. Fedora Core 7: John Palmieri has been moving our builds to a
> Fedora 7 base. Once that is done we will have a lot more opportunity
> to collaborate with the community and also get more direct help from
> the 1200 or so Fedora contributors. Moving to Fedora 7 also means that
> many of our modified packages are rolled up into the main repository.
>
> 12. Build 406.14: Firmware and a stable kernel were released to Quanta
> for the Btest-4 build, derived from Build 406. Suspend and resume are
> working in a full build for the first time, including autonomous mesh
> networking, a first for any system anywhere! It is almost, but not
> quite stable enough for widespread use; a few remaining bugs need to
> be squashed before deployment to a large audience.
>
> 13. Firmware: This week, Mitch Bradley worked on stabilizing software
> and firmware for the B4 build. Mitch also merged ECC checking code
> (written by Segher Boessenkool) into CAFE NAND driver and worked out a
> plan for storage of the public key that secures firmware updates.
>
> 14. X Window System: Richard Smith worked with Adam Jackson of Red Hat
> to figure out why his DCON mode patches to the X driver were causing
> the DCON to flicker and glitch on the switch from DCON mode to GPU
> mode. This will enable the window system to disable the video unit and
> allow the GPU to idle when not in use.
>
> Bernardo Innocenti has been enhancing our X keyboard definitions to
> include all the missing keyboard symbols and working with upstream to
> cleanup and merge our changes into the official repository. Miles
> Grimshaw has designed two new keyboards for the XO: Turkish and
> Ethiopic.
>
> Daniel Stone of Nokia suggested to Jim that our slider keys be
> represented in the X input extension in a better way: we're going to
> have three "analog" sliders on the first row of the keyboard, which
> will look like absolute axes to programs. This requires some kernel
> work that Bernie has not yet started.
>
> Generally, we are in a much better shape this week. The new input
> framework in X works already, EXA rendering pretty much works too.
> Next week Bernie will look into packaging issues with Adam. Jordan
> Crouse has fixed many bugs in the X driver, and the he number of bugs
> blocking #1604 is quickly shrinking, so we may be able to push this
> upgrade just in time for the Fedora Core 7 migration.
>
> 15. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged the device-tree patch, giving access
> to hardware and manufacturing information. The wireless-driver version
> supporting suspend/resume was also merged. The EC protocol was
> debugged, and debugged some more, and is now mostly fixed. We have a
> kernel/firmware combination that suspends/resumes in about two
> seconds. The delay is mostly from libertas and USB; Marcelo Tosatti
> and the Cozybit team are actively working on these drivers.
>
> Chris Ball did a lot of stable-build debugging. He found that our
> camera's colormap becomes strange after resume and that the
> "camera-active" LED comes on at resume even when the camera isn't
> being used. Chris wrote a kernel patch to only power up the camera
> when a user wants it; Jon Corbet is reviewing the patch.
>
> 16. IPV6: Scott Ananian began the week by trying to cram the entirety
> of "Essential IPv6 Networking" into his head. He set up some IPv6
> tunnels and IPv6-enabled his home site to: (A) make sure he knew how
> things worked; and (B) serve as a testbed for the school server
> environment, which will likely be behind similar NATs. He took over as
> the liaison to SIXXS, which is going to be providing our IPv6
> connectivity via tunnels for the short term, at least until we set up
> infrastructure (and possibly write some code) to terminate
> NAT-tunneling IPv6 tunnels ourselves here in Cambridge. Scott also
> confirmed that private IPv4 addresses are properly assigned to the
> laptops if a DHCP server cannot be found.
>
> Scott's second network-manager-related task was to get it to
> understand DNS information sent via Router Advertisement messages as
> part of IPv6
> autoconfiguration, so that the machines "just work" without requiring
> round-trips to a DHCP server or other setup. Scott noticed that radvd
> on our local (OLPC) network (tubes) was giving out "bogus"
> information, and wrote a patch for radvdump and sent the patch
> upstream in the process. As it turns out, radvd was still using a
> stale config and just needed to be sent SIGHUP, which was simple
> enough. Scott sent mail to a number of people (including the
> appropriate kernel mailing list) outlining a plan to add support for
> DNS-in-RA to the Linux kernel and to Network Manager. Scott hasn't
> heard any objections yet, so will assume
> the plan is good and code up a first-draft implementation next week.
>
> 17. Hardware: The asynchronous input/output (SPD) bus on the XOs has
> problems when coming out of suspend/resume and was causing write to
> the display controller (DCON) to fail. Mitch figured out the root
> cause of a failure to resume that only shows up on some machines: a
> DCON/system-management (SM) bus bug was found and a DCON hardware bug
> discovered. Richard, Mitch, Andres, Chris, and Jordan Crouse worked
> together to find and produce a fix.
>
> -walter
> --
> Walter Bender
> One Laptop per Child
> http://laptop.org
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