I’m currently involved in the Tracker project and our project will be presented by Ivan Frade at the Desktop Summit this Sunday.

We merged our experimental branch tracker-store to master. This means that our reachitecture plans for Tracker have mostly been implemented and are being pushed forward into the main development tree.

I will start with a comparison with Tracker’s 0.6.x series.

Tracker master:

• Uses SPARQL as query language
• Uses Nepomuk for its base ontologies
• Supports SPARQL Update
• Supports aggregates COUNT, AVG, SUM, MIN and MAX in SPARQL
• Operates for all its storage functionality as a separate binary
• Operates all its indexing, crawling and monitoring functionalities in a separately packagable binary

Tracker 0.6.9x:

• Uses RDFQuery as query language
• Has its own ontology
• Has very limited support for storing your own data
• Supports several aggregate functions in its query language
• Operates for all its storage functionality in the indexer
• Operates for all its query functionality in the permanent daemon
• Does file monitoring and crawling in the permanent daemon
• Operates all its indexing functionality in a separately packagable binary

Tracker master:

Architecture

The storage service uses the Nepomuk ontologies as schema. It allows you to both query and insert or delete data.

The fs-miner finds, crawls and monitors file resources. It also analyses those files and extracts the metadata. It instructs the storage service to store the metadata.

External applications and other such miners are allowed to both query and insert using the storage service. Priority is given to queries over stores.

Plugins that run in process of the application can push information into Tracker. We indeed don’t try to scan Evolution’s cache formats, we have a plugin that gets it out of Evolution and into Tracker.

Storage service’s API and IPC

The storage service gives priority to SELECT queries to ensure that apps in need of metadata get serviced quickly.

INSERT and DELETE calls get queued. SELECT ones get executed immediately. For apps that require consistency and/or insertion speed we provide a batch mode that has a commit barrier. When the commit calls back you know that everything that came before it, is in a consistent shape. We don’t support full transactions with rollback.

The standard API operates over DBus. This means while using it you are subject to DBus’s performance limitations. In SPARQL Update it is possible to group a lot of writes. Due to DBus’s latency overhead this is recommended when inserting larger sets of data. We’re experimenting with a custom IPC system, based on unix sockets, to get increased throughput for apps that want to put a lot of INSERTs onto our queue.

We provide a feature that signals on changes happening to certain types. You can see this as a poor man’s live search. Full live search for SPARQL is fairly complicated. Maybe in future we’ll implement something like that.

Ontology

We support the majority of the Nepomuk base ontologies and our so called filesystem miners will store found metadata using Nepomuk’s ontologies. We support static custom ontologies right now. This means that it’s impossible to dynamically add a new ontology unless you reset the entire database first.

We’re planning to support dynamically adding and removing ontologies. The ontology format that we use is Turtle.

Backup and import

Right now we support loading data into our database using either SPARQL Update, an experimental unix-socket based IPC, and by passing us a Turtle file.

We currently have no support for making a backup. Support for this is on priority planning. It will write a Turtle file (which can be loaded afterward).

Backup and import of ontology specific metadata

When we introduce support for custom ontologies it’ll be useful for apps that provided their own custom ontology to get a backup of just the data that has relevance to said ontology. We plan to provide a method to do that.

Volume support

Having a static custom ontology for volume support, volumes and their status is queryable over SPARQL. File resources also get linked to said volumes. This makes it possible to get the availability of a file resource. For example: return metadata about all photos that are located on a specific camera, although the camera isn’t connected to this device.

Volume support is a work in progress at this moment.

Some interesting observations that I've made (obviously from a western perspective) about Senegal:

The entire place shuts down from 1pm to 3pm. Without exception, people take a 2 hour long lunch break. It's really hard to do anything when there's no air conditioning and the humidity is like 70-80%.

There is little formal economy - i.e. the concept of "a hard days work" is foreign to most people because depending on how you look at it, they're always working or they're never working. You could say that everyone is always working because most boutique owners live in their boutique and if you want something at 3am they'll wake up and sell it to you. At the same time you could say that nobody is ever working because they're kind of lounging around their store all the time just talking with friends. The point is that almost nobody in Mboro except for factory workers has a job in the way we think about it in the United States. They all just sell mangos on the side of the street or own a boutique that's been in their family for ages. The reason the town does well is because the factory workers at the phosphorus mine/sulfuric acid plant get paid relatively well and spend their money in town. If not for that industry, the town would just be like every other town in Senegal - completely agrarian and dependent on weather/seasonal change for prosperity.

Sleep is not sacred. We were coming back late one night to the place where we are staying (it's an NGO run by this guy Mohamed Mbengue), and it was about 3am. He had locked the front door, so we were locked out, and we woke him up. In America, it would have been irresponsible of us to come back so late without telling him, and then to wake him up, because he had told us when he was locking the door. So when I called his phone to wake him up so we could get into our room to go to sleep, I was pretty apologetic - but he didn't really have a problem with it. I was talking to Devon and he was saying that we could basically show up at some persons house completely randomly and just hang out, watch tv, and ask for tea. In most situations in America, that would be unacceptable. Here, people would be fairly okay with it. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this, but Devon says it's happened to him once or twice. Eli seemed intrigued by this possibility and wanted to try sometime.)

Speaking of Mohamed, since he was the head of this local NGO called Projet D'Appui, I figured that he would be really "with it." He invited us to his room for tea a couple of times, and through our broken french/english/wolof conversations, I have determined that though he has been the head of the NGO for a year and 4 months, has a place that he uses for programs and rents out to random people (i.e. us and some other teacher), and has some money, he has no project plan. As an American (and the son of a project manager), this kind of blows my mind. He has this operation, a facility, money, and no written plan. I went to Africa for 2 months and I wrote down a detailed list of things I had to do, things I wanted to do, some goals, the dependencies, etc. The point is, this is an educated man and he's winging a major project. When asked about it, he said he had it mostly in his head and that he was solving problems as he identified them, but it didn't seem completely kosher. The idea of even creating a general outline just didn't occur to him because nobody else does it either. The attitude of "Inshallah" - god willing, it will happen, is pervasive.

Another thing is Senegalese generosity. An example of this was when we went to the factory club - it's probably the nicest place in town, and sandwiches cost 1000 CFA (about 2 bucks). Anyways, we were there with two of Devon's friends, and at the end they wanted to pay for everything that we had eaten and drank (this was not an insignificant amount of money). The point is we had met them literally the second before we went to dinner, and they already wanted to give us money, pay for stuff, etc. Senegalese society pressures them to do this if they have the money to do so. In my experience, and from what Devon has told me, if a Senegalese person gets money, s/he spends it quickly not because s/he is irresponsible, but because there is a sick cousin, or a baby shower, or a friend in need, ad nauseum. People expect other people to do this - it's kind of like a self-regulating form of socialism.

So back to the title of this blog - development in Africa. The point is that all of these things make development in the way that westerners think about it hard. The workday is shorter, there are no jobs other than what natural resources provide, planning is a foreign concept, and money is given out freely to friends and family.

Fortunately, the people at the school that we're working with are extremely competent and most of these things that I've mentioned before have not been a problem. Maybe it's because we are coming with supplies and not just money, or maybe it's because we're teaching them how to be self-sufficient with the computers, or maybe it's because they just "get it." Whatever it is, Devon helped us pick a great school, because everyone is excited and motivated to make this happen - from the headmaster to the teachers to the janitor to the donkey cart driver (who I need to get a picture of because he's such a character) everyone is great. And that's what keeps me going though there have been many snags and changes in our plan - the enthusiasm of everyone that's going to benefit from this project.

Just to let everyone know that I will be bringing along the Gold Coast OLPC Group’s XOs to the next Barcamp Queensland in Brisbane on Saturday 18th July. So, if you are interested in finding out more about the OLPC and OLPC Friends projects or just getting a look at the XOs please come along. I also plan to do a short demo of Sugar and how you go about writing a small sugar activity, so this will be of particular interest to developers. If you don’t live in Queensland, but know people up here who may be interested - please pass on.

For more info on the barcamp please take a look at our meetup page at http://www.meetup.com/barcampqld and RSVP if you are interested - we will be at East Brisbane Bowls club from about 9am-4pm.

The Ungana Foundation has been working tirelessly this month on a multitude of projects.  The hard work that the associates have been exerting towards the goals of this organization can be seen in the many recent successes Ungana has experienced.

Ungana is focused on what we believe are the four pillars of development: Education, Entrepreneurialism, Health, and Environmentalism.  Ungana has moved ahead with projects in both Rwanda (Gisenyi) and Congo (Goma) based on these core missions

The Ungana Foundation just completed a pilot education program at a second primary school in Gisenyi without the XO Laptops.  This program highlighted the Ungana Foundations emphasis on English, money management, and health education to primary schools.  The Ungana Foundation hosted five volunteers from various universities in the United States that each taught different subjects in the program.  The program went extremely well and we expect to use the structure of the program with a few modifications at multiple schools in the area. 

In addition to the primary school education the Ungana Foundation is also holding weekend English tutoring for educators in Gisenyi.  Rwanda is currently switching from a Francophone to an Anglophone country and as such will be mandating instruction in English.  This has been extremely difficult for the teachers as English is not their first language.  Almost all schools in the area that we have spoken to have expressed a strong desire for a program designed to help this transition.  The Ungana Foundation has been quick to oblige and we hope to help many educators in the area achieve their goals.  

Alyssa Callister

President

The Ungana Foundation

In the middle of a conference on education, it would be remiss for me to not give thanks to the schools that got me here.Willowbrook Elementary, where my kindergarten teacher said I'd learn anything I wanted through reading, where the librarians made a special exception to the book check-out limit ...

Although we haven't "formally" met any of the students, we are around and so are they. We also have fun green toys in our hands that most students are curious about. Yesterday we busted out a few extra computers and they were off. At the same time one student found my camera and a few others found James' juggling sticks. It was one big XO / Photo taking / Juggling party at the school. Here are some of the photos they took:

* You will also notice we live in one big sandbox.

Chuck Lawton at Wired writes about 2 years of the XO, after getting his hands on one for the first time.   Some of the review is the normal shock of changing window managers and interface styles, but he has a sense of how many details we have changed with education in mind.

What amazes me most through my experimentation with the XO is that attention to detail that the hardware and software designers have made when developing the product. To unthink how we do things and present the software and interfaces in a way that becomes intuitive to someone with out exposure to Windows is quite an accomplishment.

Two years ago, people were excited about the XO because of the prospect of a $100 laptop. But I think in that excitement, they missed the point. At the time, before the netbook explosion, all they were buzzing about was a cheap laptop. But the XO laptop is not a hardware experiment. What One Laptop Per Child has done is create an ecosystem whereby kids can learn through doing and sharing. They have organized a group of talented hardware and software developers and challenged them to invent something new. They have created a philanthropic organization to achieve their goal of production and distribution. The cost is only one part of the equation - a barrier that must be broken in order to make that ecosystem accessible. And it’s that ecosystem - their vision - that deserves more credit than many of the tech blogs are willing to discuss.

This promises to be a three part series with a focus on hardware next.   I hope by the time it finishes he covers Sugar in more detail and uses in the classroom (which is where the intro seems to be heading).

Have some time before a client meeting this afternoon... so here's the issue I've been turning over in my mind since it was brought up at the last PyGTA.  We've run into the same issue at multiple clients and while the "right" solution would likely be to make easy_install/distutils record the information, I've spent way too much of my life inside the distutils code-base already (we used to have custom distutils code in PyOpenGL).

So here's the problem/use-case:

You run easy_install to install TurboGears (or any other huge multi-package system) into a virtualenv, it downloads 45 (or so) eggs.  You run setup.py on your TG application... another 4 (or so) eggs.  You hand the package to someone else, they run the setup... and it doesn't work, some dependency changed version ever so slightly, you now get to track down which one and fix it.

Buildout, PoachEggs and the like seem to want you to manually specify all 49 packages (with the idea that you do it once and then everyone shares the joy).  Problem is, I'm a lazy cuss.  I may have issues with easy_install, but it's the closest thing we've got to a package manager for Python eggs at the moment, so how do I just ask easy_install to do "exactly the same install" as it just did on some other machine?

If you're me, you hack up a dumb script that processes the output of easy_install looking for "Downloading " lines.  You make the script download those files into a directory (and record an index file so it knows the order), you then add an option to the same script to replay the install with extremely restrictive easy_install options (i.e. no hosts, no dependency resolution, etceteras).

Obviously this falls into the "expediant hack" rather than "properly engineered" pile, but it does look like it would work.  It generates an editable file you can tweak, just as you might tweak a "recipe" base system's configuration, but it automates the initial generation of that recipe.

The project is on LaunchPad, as is the code (bzr branch lp:recordeggs) and the downloads are in PyPI.

To use it:

easy_install -i http://www.turbogears.org/2.0/downloads/2.0.1/index tg.devtools 2>&1 | recordeggs.py ../egg-sources
recordeggs -p ../egg-sources

The "redirect stderr to stdout" stuff is one of those things I always need to look up, so maybe I should just run easy_install as a captive process, but for now this seems to work.

[Update] usage is now:

recordeggs ../egg-sources [easy_install options/args]
recordeggs -p ../egg-sources

which feels a lot more natural, but I haven't yet got the pipes aligned so you could see the easy_install output as it processes (at the moment it kicks all the output out at the end of the run).

NECC, Days 1-2 - photo slideshow, and then I'll finish my notes for Monday (with the expectation that I'll feel better enough afterwards to head to Tuesday's NECC; I love my immune system.) Many attendees here have flipcams and netbooks - simple, few-function devices that they ...

Due to international politics, Seth is officially leaving M'boro tomorrow morning to make his several day treck back to Mauritania. Seth is Eli's brother and has been a great help informally training teachers and acting as our translator. This year's group of Peace Corps volunteers to Mauritania was recently cancelled and current volunteers have been given the option to "IS" or interupt their service and return home with full benefits. Seth and other PCV's in Mauritania have until July 6th to decide. As such, tomorrow morning he will go back to his site and take a few days to make that decision.

AQIM has claimed responsibility for the killing of an American teacher in Nouakchott. In addition to that one killing, Al Queda related violence has been increasing in Mauritania. The Peace Corps country director in Mauritania personally does not feel that Mauritania has somehow now become "unsafe" and many PCV's are already leaning toward finishing their 2 years in country. However, all PCV's now have the decision to either return home early or return home for one year and finish their last year after that.

Seth has been a great help here at Notre Dame and will certainly be missed during teacher training.

That’s the closest comparison I can think of when trying to describe the look I saw on 85 Rwandan kids’ faces this afternoon as we handed them their new XO laptops. It really was incredible to see the amazement come out as they booted up what was now their first trip into the information age. During the next few months, and then for the rest of their lives, they will be able to progress like never before.

Rwanda is quickly beginning its ascent into being the foremost technological country in Africa, and is committed to making it happen in all areas of the population, including in primary schools. This investment in the future is inspiring, and was seen in the children’s excitement as we handed them this new instrument. Right off, they began testing the XO’s capabilities; taking pictures, searching for more information in the Wikipedia activity, and drawing pictures of their houses. Until now, the children have been entirely dependent on others for their education, awaiting instruction from the overworked, underpaid teachers. With the introduction of the XO, a child can supplement the education given them in school with their own interest-driven activities, with a healthy dose of problem solving, hands-on discovery.

At the UNGANA Foundation, we appreciate this refreshing confidence in the future. We are devoted to making this endeavor sustainable. Education is not effective with a “flash-in-the-pan” mentality, but must be seen as a process that will continue indefinitely.

With that in mind, we will continue to work with the ULK Primary School, offering them tools and preparing them for the time when they will be able to proceed on their own, learning things that we aren’t capable of teaching.

Coy Whittier
Communications Associate
The UNGANA Foundation

In the style of "release early release often" and "perfect == good.enemy()" we bring you this totally unedited, rapidly typed post, because I need sleep.This was the late-night idea. Results forthcoming. Traffic not as good as hoped, but it did meet our primary criteria of "hey, we need a way ...

Hypothesis: sometimes it is better to release crappy existent stuff rather than nonexistent perfect stuff. It is late, I am tired and quashing a mild fever, here we go.Breakfast with Mike Lee while we picked up Sugar Labs flyers. Talked about the digital divide; seniors and the underprivileged are being ...

Today we’re going to the ULK Primary School to deploy 85 XO laptops to 85 5th graders who won’t even know what hit them.

They’ll have no idea that with these new machines, they will be able to take education into their own hands. Right now, they have no idea that they’ll soon be:

• Writing the stories of their lives
• Adding pictures of themselves to the stories
• Sharing activities with their colleagues
• Drawing pictures of their favorite animals
• Learning English by creating their own memorize activities
• Surfing the Web for information on their own country
• Using an encyclopedia to learn more about the endocrine system
• Writing a report on the East African Community with research from various sources
• Learning along with their teachers
• Teaching each other
• Working in groups without even knowing it
• Emailing pen pals on the other side of the world
• Blogging
• Showing their parents how to use a computer
• Creating simple computer programming
• Who knows, maybe creating complex computer programming
• Playing problem-solving games

A whole new world of educational possibilities is waiting for these children to discover. In partnering with One Laptop Per Child, the UNGANA Foundation believes that, when given the right tools, children are capable of doing amazing things; even in the most remote places. Today we will see that seed planted, and we are committed to helping nourish it.

Coy Whittier
Communications Associate

A recent publicity push and a number of public demonstrations of Sugar on a Stick (which recently released its Strawberry edition) have attracted many interested new developers and a lot of intrigued parents and teachers.  I’ve seen it mentioned on digitial library lists and public education channels, in contexts that wouldn’t normally be discussing laptops or computers.

Sean Daly writes about a recent round of feedback from a local community of children and parents.  Chat and Maze seem the most immediately attractive to this community of computer-savvy children.  Some comments of interest:

The principals were interested in jabber collaboration which they had never heard of.

One mom expressed frustration that dropdown menu choices found by mouse rollover could not be validated with the Enter key.

Several parents and a teacher asked about translation tools.

Some parents who had already heard of OLPC asked where the crank was. [still!]

It’s worth a read.

Spent the afternoon testing PyOpenGL 3.0.1, dull, really.  Found a few errors in the Demo where code was trying to use OpenGL before there is a context (recent Linux drivers are getting really picky about that).  Added a flag to the root OpenGL namespace to control unpacking of single-length arrays, thinking that PyOpenGL 3.1 should finally break that API to return arrays instead.

Got bored with that and added primitive textured-sprite support to OpenGLContext's PointSet objects.  Basically if you have a texture in the shape the PointSet will enable sprites, however it doesn't currently have any mechanisms for configuring them (i.e. setting points sizes or attenuation).  The test/demo just hard-codes that at the application level for now.  Upshot is that the demo now has big fat water droplets instead of single-pixel points .

Last year i started a new component for Monkey HTTP Daemon called Palm which contains a python module to use the linux epoll syscall through CTypes, if you  will like to use it you can get it from here:

http://repo.or.cz/w/MonkeyD.git?a=blob;f=palm/lib/epoll.py;h=ff60e6ff9bc94549e2aaa38acd5b1bc4846486b0;hb=HEAD

hope it helps…

We had scheduled a meeting for exactly one week after our arrival; however, when we were notified of a meeting with OLPC Senegal, we had to move that meeting up. We did not want the teachers' first introduction to the xo's be a large, formal meeting among multiple parties.

There are 8 teachers at our school, 7 females and 1 male. Our first meeting included those 8 teachers, Pierre the school director, and Elizabeth the IT director of Catholic schools in Senegal. This was in addition to our corps team, Seth (PCV from Mauritania) and Devon (PCV here in M'boro). Our deloyment team is unique in that we are not deploying in an English speaking country and have limited local language skills. James can communicate most things he wants to say in French, Seth is here due to his French fluency, and Devon is fluent in Wolof and French. There are a surprising amount of cognates between French, Spanish, and English, so I can understand about half of what is spoken to me. In terms of speaking back, however, I am just beginning to learn.

While we anticipated language barriers to be a complication, we discovered quite the opposite in our first meeting. The teachers were excited at our minimal Wolof and started practicing their English with us. They said between the three languages, we will be just fine. One unexpected surprise occurred when introducing "child ownership" at the meeting. One teacher brought up his concern regarding theft and immediately after all the teacher chimed in. James and I quickly turned our heads in whatever direction French was being spewed, but could hardly voice our opinions in a sophisticated way. Due to our inability to converse, the teachers talked through their concerns of child ownership and problem solved various ways to overcome this challenge without us. When Devon translated their conversation after, he said the teachers were all concerned about theft since only one school in the community is receiving xo's. If they share it with their family members, it would be easy for a sibling, aunt or uncle to run off with xo and essentially lose it. However, the teachers also agreed it would be best for the students to do homework with the xo at home and to have freedom to play games. In the end, they decided the best solution was for the school to technically own the laptops and for each student to be responsible for his/her own laptop during their time at school. They wil take the computers home at night; but, during long vacations the teachers and Pierre agreed it best to keep them at school.

In the end, they came up with a similar solution to what we had imagined. Eli then suggested having a computer club during the long vacations so each student could have access to his/her xo. The teachers thought a computer club was a great idea and, in the very least, agreed one or two teachers should be around during vacations to allow students computer access. Since M'boro is a small community, walking from home to school is no problem.

The marriage between Peace Corps and OLPC in our deployment has certainly helped alleviate many forseen challenges. For example, when the 200 xo's arrived at customs in Dakar, we received an email from Devon (PCV in M'boro) asking for our tax exempt information. Five days later 40 boxes of computers appeared at the Peace Corps Headquarters in Dakar, no fee acquired. After reading fellow OLPCorps blogs and the gigantic fees they accrued, we were quite relieved. Peace Corps also lent us their jeeps and driver to transfer us, our luggage, and all the laptops / solar panels to M'boro. It took two trips. They then drove to the Mauritanian border to pick up the EU chargers that had already been shipped to Nouakchott.

Peace Corps also allowed us to stay in their regional house in Dakar while we waited for the laptops to arrive. This certainly helped out our budget, as hotels in Dakar are not cheap.

Besides logistical help, the Peace Corps country director in Senegal selected Notre Dame in M'boro as the optimal school to deploy in. Devon speaks Wolof as if he has been speaking it his whole life. Due to his language skills and 2.5 years spent in M'boro people in the community like and respect him. From the little we have seen of Notre Dame, it appears to be a positive learning environment. Pierre, the school director, has a warm relationship with the students. He is a mix between mentor, father-figure, and Santa Clause. He retains his authority without relying on dictatorship. Their are 8 teachers total at Notre Dame and they travel between the many Catholic schools in Senegal. We are training all 8 teachers, but only giving xo's to the teachers whose classes are infiltrated. We will also give Elizabeth, the IT director of Catholic schools in Senegal, a computer. She will be in charge of helping out with technology problems and will be called on to teacher train if needed. Thankfully she lives in Thies which is less than an hour away. She is quite savvy, and when we had our meeting with OLPC Senegal, she held her ground well. Needless to say, she is a great asset.

Elizabeth is coming tomorrow morning with ethernet conduit and a new modem. From there we will install the access points. On July 4th the students are having their end-of-the-year party. Although we have already met many of the students, this will be our first introduction. After July 4th we will officially start teacher training!

The open-source-and-education fun at NECC started even before I hit the conference. On the shuttle from the airport, I sat in front of a bone marrow transplant delivery man and next to Randall Samstag, an environmental engineer from Seattle who (as it turns out) had some questions about OpenOffice.org. We ...

Recently, I presented at a workshop on telecommunications, open source and mobility at the First Caribbean Regional International Telecommunications Society Conference in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Key points in this workshop were:

• The network's value proposition can be fully realized only if it remains open and unencumbered. 
• Setting up independent, yet interconnected PBXs using Asterisk: small ones with AstLinux, large ones with Trixbox.
• Asterisk and the OLPC project. Setting up local phone networks in villages, schools, communities.

Slides are up at  http://www.slideshare.net/sverma/open-connect-network

Last weekend the weekly Wellington Friends in Testing group changed location to the National Library to join in the Digital NZ Hacktest.

Here’s the blurb explaining who DigitalNZ are:

DigitalNZ is a collaborative initiative led by the National Library of New Zealand. We work with a wide range of contributing institutions and organisations. Without these content providers and their content, DigitalNZ would not be possible.

We did the usual test of the latest build of Sugar, and some general playtime testing contributed applications. Some of us tried out the Digital NZ open data API, and thought creating a OLPC app that queries this API would be great, especially if it caches the data locally somehow, or turns into a collaborative activity.

There was coffee, pizza, lollies and beer. Thanks Digital NZ!

If you are in the region, you should check out the Linux Conference in Wellington, New Zealand and January 2010.

We are proposing a mini conf about OLPC and Sugar - If you want to help out, please contact tabitha@hrdnz.com and let me know how you can help.

Idly trying to get my (Lenovo W500) to suspend again this morning as I wait for the washing machine to finish.  Biggest problem is that there are so many sites all with outdated information so I have to filter through hundreds of posts most of which are discussing e.g. Ubuntu 8.10 (which suspended fine with compiz disabled), or how to get compiz+suspend working (I don't need the effects).

Seems we need a tracker somewhere that "moves" with the current version of Ubuntu, where we can install, test each component and report status and any work-arounds needed.  You'd be able to look at the 8.10, but 9.04 would be what's there by default.  You could search within each component's history...

Or we could all just write nice-o-grams to Lenovo to tell them to support Linux properly on their machines.

Ah well, laundry is finished, so no suspense for me...

Tinymail isn’t a sleeping project. I just stopped blogging about it. José Dapena Paz and Sergio Villar Senin are working very hard making it rock solid. Having worked together with Sergio a lot, I trust him. So a few months ago I made him Co maintainer of the project. He’ll probably perform the first release (or decide to do a few more pre-releases first). Being Modest’s technical maintainer Sergio has worked hard on and contributed a lot to Tinymail. Last few weeks José Dapena Paz is the guy who apparently is on fire, writing patches like a madman.

And it looks like there’s no stopping José! Maybe will GUADEC stop him for at least a few days? Maybe I should help Sergio a bit with reviewing all that stuff?

As far as I know will Modest be the default E-mail client on Maemo’s Fremantle device. It has been available for the N810 for some months of course, but for the Fremantle release I’m sure the guys have improved the user interface a lot. I, personally, have been working on Tracker and didn’t focus much on Tinymail. And of course I’m already thinking about how we can make E-mail part of that RDF platform. But that’s another story (and I think I wrote two articles on that already).

Anyway, just letting everybody know: people are still working on Tinymail. They just don’t blog about it as much as I used to do. No worries, though. They are doing great stuff.

When James and I first started our proposal to deploy laptops in the developing world, we knew that there would be problems that we did not plan for. When we switched our deployment site just days before arriving in Dakar we didn't know what to think. Now with some concerted effort and a good bit of luck we are well on our way to accomplishing our goals for the summer.

Devon Connolly, our new Peace Corps contact and local leader of the project has turned out to be fantastic. Many other Peace Corps Volunteers(PCVs) comment on his outstanding knowledge of Wolof and the culture at our site in Mboro. Also, the Peace Corps administration got our computers through customs on Monday. We hadn't expected them until Friday. We brought a few boxes of computers along with us from Dakar and the rest followed in another Peace Corps vehicle on Tuesday. Our European power adapters, which were shipped to Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, arrived today after the Peace Corps Mauritania passed them along to the Senegalese driver at the border.

On Tuesday the director of the school had cable run from the office to the two independent buildings. Each building has three classrooms and we will run cable between each room for our routers. After we complete the installation all the computers will wirelessly connect to the school server. Also, we unpacked the computers and reflashed them (installed new programs and the new version of the operating system).

Yesterday we had a meeting with the teachers and explained the program to them. They are excited and realistic about the program. They asked good questions and while Devon acted as a translator

through most of it, our presence

was appreciated.

We will finish our installation soon and then begin on teacher training. Yesterday at our meeting in Thies with the regional director of schools, the training of teachers was heavily emphasized. The conversation also leaned towards the benefits of information technology or ICT as it is called here. It will be interesting to see the benefits of the XO laptop going forward as we believe in the learning idealogy of the One Laptop Per Child Association, however we cannot neglect the obvious benefits of exposing children to computers that have never used one at length before.

For all OLPCorps blog followers or OLPC fans, OLPC News is not affiliated in any way to OLPC or OLPCorps. OLPC news is run by individual bloggers who follow one laptop per child projects around the world. It is not properly fact checked and relies on the knowledge and honesty of other bloggers for information. While our team appreciates the publicity, we have found these types of forums can sometimes do more harm than good. 

What has been done since arriving in M'boro:

Our introduction to the school went better than Justin or I could have ever expected. The school is on the local factory's power grid and can easily charge all two hundred xo's at one time. In addition, there is a communal space in between two school buildings that may benefit from internet connectivity. The headmaster was wondrful and extremely willing to help. In fact, when he found us thinking over the logistics of having only one outlet per classroom, he called the school's electrician. Now they are installing 9 extra outlets in each room to more easily charge the laptops. The school is having an end of the year party on July 4th which will be a great introduction to the students.

Our high expectations remain. When we were unable to deploy in Mauritania, the Peace Corps country director in Senegal hand-picked Notre Dame in M'boro as the best possible test deployment and Devon as the most culturaly integrated PCV. After 2.5 years in country his Wolof is perfect.

We also are situated in a nearby and free housing situation. Both the house and the school are absolutely beautiful. We are basically living in sand dunes with mango trees galore. Due to the fact that our school is one gigantic sand pit, we are considering putting up a volley ball net. There are already volley balls floating around and we can easily incorporate the xo to research rules and map out the court's dimensions.

Also, all 200 computers arrived today and we were able to bring half with us. The other half is being sent by the Peace Corps from Dakar tomorrow. For now we are happy and things are going smoothly. We will update you with complications to come:)

Im once again at FISL in Porto Alegre, Brasil. I feel much more comfortable here this year. I understand some portugese but not alot and speak very little. Communications this year are better. Also in attendance are Fedora ambassadors from other parts of Latin America, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico, and elsewhere im likely forgetting now. there is a mixture of English, Spanish and Brazillian Portugese.

its nice to see that Fedora makes the press in Latin Aerica

I gave my talk on spacewalk this morning. There was a good turn out. I had hoped for more questions. But i guess i either answerd them all, they did not have them at this point in time. or i just confused them all. Im hoping it was the first two options. I did have positive feedback.

The Kigali press have been attentive to our new learning center there, and the New Times has run a number of reports after the opening ceremony with quotes from Kagame and his staff, a series on education by David, a spotlight on children and their XOs, and a Sunday feature.

There have been local radio interviews with the staff of the center as well ( ICT in education ). More images after the jump.

I apologise that it's taken a little (a lot) longer than anticipated to get some updates going. Internet access was tough in Rwanda, and well.. time has gotten the better of us since we've been back. Anyhow, here's an attempt at a back-story.

So, how and why did I get involved in this in the first place? Fate, serendipity or fortune could potentially be words to explain how this has all crazily come together. I'd like to think it's just been one tremendous blessing after the other, so let me begin to share some thoughts.

During my senior year, I'd been taking my time deciding what it was exactly that I'd like to do with my years out of college. I was looking for a service opportunity that was akin to the Peace Corps, but one that I could apply to as an international. I knew I was keen in the larger goal of poverty alleviation, but I wanted the opportunity to be immersed in a place where I could serve and also learn a tremendous amount about social justice issues. The best resource I found to begin this tedious search was idealist.org, an online resource which has anything and everything to do with public service within the US and around the globe. I'd been getting daily digest updates, with anywhere from 30-50 little descriptions on potential jobs and internships catered to my interests. I was real busy one morning, the 27th of Feb to be exact ;) , but something made me want to sift through the idealist email. Sure enough, i read 3 little lines that seemed almost too good to be true. "Intern in Africa, deploy 100 laptops to kids ages 6-12, One Laptop Per Child Corps Africa" and a hyperlink. I recognised the name OLPC from it being in and out of the news, so my interest was piqued and i hurriedly checked up on it. Needless to say, i couldn't stop smiling for the rest of the morning. Too good indeed, but I immediately knew it in my bones that the grant would come through.

Why it especially means so much is this. Back in 2007, i spent a semester abroad in Grahamstown, South Africa. While I was on my semester exchange, I volunteered a good amount as well. One place was St Mary's Daycare, and I grew to care deeply for these children. Just before I'd left, some of the kids asked if I'd forget them; and I most certainly assured that that I never would. Since then, I'd been thinking of multiple ways to try and give back, but nothing really jumped at me. But as soon as I read the opening lines of the grant application, i just knew this had their names on it! With the faces of the children in mind, I excitedly shared this idea with my roommate Megan, and Anna who had studied in South Africa with me. Right away, I found the Director of St Mary's online (good ol Facebook!), and got cracking on getting our project proposal in order. In time, all the components of our project came together:
- focus on kids ages 6-12
- find a local partner willing to support you
- plan for longevity

That's when I checked in with Rebecca at Off Campus Studies. I wanted to prove that since a good number of Gettysburg students study in Grahamstown every semester, there'd be a great way of establishing a long-term partnership between our 2 towns. In time, we got the support of the Center for Public Service in Gettysburg, and the Centre for Social Development in Rhodes, and they suggested a second afterschool care program, Mariye, so that we had 100 children in all.. it was all coming together! On that first day itself that I read the grant application online, i put on my brass south african bracelet and promised to only take it off only after I was back from SA. (I'm still wearing it... It reminded me to think positively and pray hard for it to all happen! hah). Things just kept getting better. Caroline Hartzell, my advisor and prof at college (and most helpful grant-editor!), informed me that one of her old students Drew Stinson was going to grad school in Rhodes Univesity, back in South Africa. Thanks to that tip, I got in touch with him and learned that Stephanie Bonnes was there too. How perfect - 2 Gburg grads and current Rhodes students IN SAfrica already! They were just as excited about being a part of the project, and were the perfect people to be there and help us coordinate so many things on the ground. So, in a flurry, Megan, Anna and I put our proposal together and got it in right on time. To cut the next bit short.. we waited anxiously only to find out that we were narrowed down to a group of finalists out of over 250 proposals that had come in from around the world! We had to sit tight for another week :\ Then, we get an upsetting (now unimportant!) email that they sadly could only choose a few teams, and we were not selected. We were absolutely devastated, but knew that something good was still going to come out of it - like I said, I was so sure in my bones that we'd get it! Sure enough, 3 days later we get an email saying that more funds came in and we were a part of 30 teams that were selected. The circumstances didn't matter, we were shouting and dancing in the streets when we found out at 1 in the morning! (yes, that was us.. hah)

So, it all came together. And while I'm beyond thrilled that this has happened for the kids, I'm beginning to see how it's been planned all along. See, in 2003 while I was in 11th grade (JC1) in Singapore, I was a leader for the local youth delegation that attended the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva. It was one of the most incredible experiences that I'd been privileged to be a part of. Along with my first visit to South Africa (on a school trip I did with the Drama Society), i knew that I wanted to get into the field of internatinal relations and public service. The summit was where I learnt about the Digital Divide, and also the potential of ICTs and open source products in creating a more equitable playing field. I'd heard talk of the beginnings of an 'affordable laptop for children' based on all the principles being talked about at the summit. Sure enough, at the UN WSIS in Tunisia 2 years later, Nicholas Negroponte revealed the XO along with OLPC. It made sense that my experiences from then and through college were all coming together!

Phew.. I'm probablty boring all of you, but I can't stop smiling thinking about how this has all progressed :) Life is full of the most amazing opportunities. Dream big, and blessings will abound!

Tomorrow, we're having the Community Presentation Ceremony. I promise we'll have that up soon, along with the phenomenal experiences we've taken away from Rwanda. Till the next time!

I wrote up a summary of my experience in Paraguay, you can read it on the OLPC wiki.

Last week, I gave a presentation about OLPC in the field at an OLPC UK meeting. It went well and it was nice to meet everyone for the first time. They are planning an exciting pilot deployment in a London school. I’ll leave them to announce the details as things progress.

The development of the XO-1.5 software release is progressing nicely. We have automated builds that work reasonably well.

And now would also be a good time to mention my upcoming plans; on July 18th I will be flying out to Nepal to spend 12 weeks as a volunteer for Open Learning Exchange Nepal, the organisation implementing One Laptop per Child in that country. Exciting!

I was originally going to wait for all my travel plans to finalize, but there's no reason why I shouldn't holler out right now that I'll be at  NECC this year. If you are also coming, let me know!NECC is the National Educational Computing Conference, and it is - from ...

Subtitle: hurry up and wait

The laptops are still in customs and we are still in Dakar. However, the peace corps has graciously allowed us to stay in their regional house in Dakar until Monday when they will use their jeep to bring us and all our luggage to M'boro.

On the more productive side, the OLPC Cameroon team has already visited the school we are deploying in and has met with the principal. They also have meetings set up for Monday and Tuesday to discuss OLPC with local officials. One member of the Cameroon team is from Senegal and has a home nearby. For now, it simply helps to have some local support that is also well trained in the XO and is familiar with deployment challenges.

Normally I don't use my blog space to advertise commercial airlines, but this is certainly the exception!

All 8 plus hour layovers in Addis Ababa receive the following:
1. Free Hotel
2. Free Visas
3. Free Transportation
4. Free meals

To our pleasant surprise the OLPC Ethiopian team joined us on our flight through their country and made it their primary concern to show us around their city upon arrival. Since teams departed over a two day period, this is more of a coincidence than it may sound. I've never had a better 13 hour layover. Thanks to their language skills, we were able to check into our hotel and zoom by the group waiting for their hotel vouchers with ease. We were privy to a complentary history lesson from our taxi driver who escorted us to a nearby piano bar that also has cultural dancing on the weekends. Similar to Kigali, light were a rarity and safety was not a concern to the late night street goers. Unlike Kigali, Addis Ababa is massive. In the end both Justin and I agreed it was certainly a place we could spend several months getting to know.

I thought is remind everyone that there is approximitly 2 days left to vote in the fedora elections going on right now. I honestly dont care if you vote for me or not, but i would really like for everyone to have there say in who they think will help guide fedora forward during the next year. To vote you need to be in cla_done and one other group in fas, then go Here.

Friday we went and got a look at the physical layout of the school. We definitely partnered with the right school. They are very accommodating to everything that we need.

Here's how it works out. The primary school is housed in a separate building from where the internet connection comes in. Which means server in one building and routers in another. Which means, you guessed it, drilling holes through buildings, running wire down support posts, digging a trench and finally getting the wire to the router in the other building. Tomorrow is going to be a good day.

Here is a rundown of the equipment we will be using.

--WRT54GS with dd-wrt custom firmware installed on them. This is because the stock firmware on the WRT54G has connection limitations. At 30+ connections the router slowed down. With 40+ students in each class that wouldn't fly. The loading of the custom firmware was easy enough, James from the Cornell deployment gave a good post about it here [http://cornellolpc.blogspot.com/2009/06/flashing-routers-with-dd-wrt.html]

--Server with the follow specs

- SolidLogic GS-L02 Fanless Mini-ITX System
- Mainboard: EPIA LN10000EG 1GHz
- Case: Serener GS-L02 Fanless Mini-ITX Case - Black
- Memory: DDR2 667 RAM 1GB
- Hard Disk/Flash: Seagate Barracuda 3.5" SATA Hard Drive - 160GB
- Operating System: None
- Accessories: None
- Build and Test: Build & Test: Fanless - Standard (3-5 full business days)
- Power Switch: None - Unit will be set to Auto-Power-On
- Wireless: None
- Dimensions: 31cm X 21.5cm X 5cm

Random fact about the servers. They were put in an oven for a week at ~190 degrees Fahrenheit and they still survived.

The server is a great addition to our deployment. It increases the ability for collaboration. It backs up all of the XOs every 24 hours. It can act as a content filter for the internet.

--1,000 ft of raw cat 5e cable. I bought it because it was cheaper to buy 1000 feet rather than 300 or 400 (some marketing schemes I will never understand) and it sure as hell was ridiculous to carry over here. Though having been to our site now, I am glad for the versatility that the raw cabling will provide us.

--We bought 10 1GB USB sticks so we can flash the laptops to the most recent operating system. We also learned that instead of having to individually update the system software we can use the NAND blaster (it is as cool as it sounds). One XO broadcasts the system software while up to 100 other XOs can pick up that signal wirelessly update the software. That will make updates a lot easier to run.

--A Flip Video Recorder is being generously provided to us by OLPC. We aren't sure which model we're going to get, but since OLPC said that it was going to be HD, and I assume they want to save money, we're probably getting the Flip UltraHD. It's a nice bit of electronics :).

That is about it for now. The install is tomorrow. Wish us luck.
greg

I couldn't have imagined I would have gained so much from the workshop in Kigali. From the lectures by David Cavallo, to the speeches by Nicholas Negroponte, to the tech sessions by Reuben Caron, it was a truly comprehensive experience. Of course much will be improved upon next year, but the first time is always challenging. I look forward to starting next week, it will be the project of a lifetime!

 Began work on simplifying the PyQNet API.  Got rid of blocking/non-blocking versions (everything is non-blocking now, though there's a "wait" operation to block until incoming messages are received).  Also simplified the callback-based (server) interface.  Added (optional) zlib compression to the packages and added support for arbitrarily sized messages.

Probably next up would be getting the Pygame event sending version up and then building a default "portal" application for matching up players.  Not really something people should be integrating into their games yet, but it's beginning to shape up a little.

So when we got to Dakar 2 days ago, we immediately noticed how things were different just by the way the immigration guys gave us a hard time. In Rwanda, the immigration officials kind of looked at our passport, flipped through it to check out the visas from the different places, and stamped it. Here, the guy barked at me and interrogated me about where in Mboro I was going before Eli rescued me by telling the officer something about the Peace Corps in Dakar.

Speaking of the Peace Corps, I am so glad that they're our NGO. They're providing us with cars to drive the laptops up to Mboro, they're talking to customs for us and just making our lives a lot easier. We've been sleeping at the regional house (which is a little Peace Corps hostel that volunteers stay at when they come into Dakar for whatever reason) and all the PCV's there are a bunch of wonderfully skeptical and hilarious people. I have now heard more stories about sept-places (station wagons with 7 seats in them) than I would ever want to. Some crazy stuff goes on in Senegal and Mauritania - trucks tipping over on the way to Guinea, a little bit of pyrotechnics, goats being strapped to the roofs of cars, etc. Most people really love their sites, though it is slow going for everyone. There is no pill that will make Africa "better".

Going back to Dakar, people are a little more aggressive here - somebody is always trying to sell you something on the street, or trying to get you into a taxi. It's pretty dirty here, people just throw trash into the street or spit out the window. However, the food is definitely better than Mauritania. They have great baguettes, just like France, so the sandwiches are quite good and cheap. (the exchange rate is 450 CFA to 1 dollar). Yesterday, I ate a bean sandwich for breakfast for 150 CFA, then ate an egg sandwich for lunch for 300 CFA, then ate 2 goat (or lamb? counldn't tell) sandwiches for 500 each for dinner. So total that's 1450 CFA, which is like 3 bucks for food for an entire day. Pretty crazy, not going to lie.

On Monday we're going out to Mboro to settle into our apartment, meet Devon, and start doing what we came here to do. From what all the Peace Corps Volunteers say, Mboro is quite beautiful, so I'm pretty psyched about going. We'll see what the actual situation in the school is when we get there. From what I heave from PCV's, kids don't speak a whole lot of French - it could be a problem, but we don't know yet.

That's what's going on - give us a call at (+221) 77 358 7498 or shoot us an email/comment on the blog if you want to get in touch.