Pycon 2008 Recap

I'm sorry that this is quite a bit late, but I 'd like to fill you in on some of the interesting thing that were accomplished at PyCon.

(Pic of attendees in main expo hall)

One of the first big OLPC related events at Pycon was a keynote by former OLPC employee Ivan Krstić. He focused on how the OLPC facilitates learning and the ways in which Python helps with that.

(Pic of Ivan's keynote)


Some of the other talks that focused on the OLPC project addressed issues that have plagued software development on the platform, such as a lack of proper unit tests in many applications.

(pic of slide from OLPC unit testing talk)

The second part of the conference that I attended was the OLPC Sprint. (for those who don't know, a "sprint" is a period of rapid collaborative development on a specific project, similar to the "hackathons" of OpenBSD fame)
Led by Mike Fletcher, the OLPC group made significant progress in creating several useful applications for the XO despite having no official representation from the OLPC organization( a fact that disappointed some)

(Pic of OLPC sprint room)

I worked quite a bit with James Hancock, the lead developer of GASP, as he started to work on an XO-friendly networking API and further Pippy (and possibly Develop ) integration.

(Pic of James Hancock)


An unexpected but familar face came in the form of Mel Chua , who I had worked with before on other OLPC related projects. She has been a great source of constructive criticism and advice for GASP , as well as helping us out with documentation.
(Pic of Mel Chua)

By the time I left PyCon, I realized that the OLPC project has many long struggles ahead, but there are plenty of people ready to meet the challenge head on.

New DC learning club meeting

A new meeting of the OLPC Learning Club DC is scheduled for Saturday, Febuary 23th and is to be hosted at the Nortel offices at 101 Constitution Avenue, NW. Suite 325 East, Washington, DC 20001


We will be working on improving our graphics API, GASP, as well as writing some examples to be included in Pippy. We will also be using a block of the time to mesh. It will run for 9am to 1pm.

Results from first day

The XO seems to have some strange issues with my wireless at home and I was only able to get it online for 30 minutes but in that time I learned several things.

1. You can share activities across the whole Internet
2. Google Video does not work (due to gnash lacking .flv file support apparently) Maybe I can install regular flash?
   
3. Normal computers can connect to the XO's mesh network (though it crashed my network card after a while).It shows up as "olpc-mesh"
4. Support for WPA appears to be very finicky

After trying for several hours to get it back online, I decided to try a firmware upgrade using a USB thumbdrive.At first it was giving me an error about "wrong machine type" but I found that taking it in 2 firmware steps worked fine.

Then I decided to start messing around with gasp , and I figured out several things

• In some areas of the system ,gasp works just fine natively but if it is part of an activity it needs(or rather pygame does) the olpcgame wrapper.
  
• Its better suited for building activities then being an activity itself
• Someone has already mentioned gasp as a useful game development tool on the game development page (this certainly was not me)
• Pippy example code would be really sweet.

Then ,just for fun , I decided to find out if it was possible to get activities installed without internet access.The answer is that yes it is possible,but you still have to go trough the browser(only to your usb drive instead of a website).So installed Sim City, which runs great.
Of course the nostalgia ran out in about 10 minutes,but it was still fun.

Well, hopefully I can figure out my networking issues and dig deeper into this great device.

Introducing the XO

Thanks to Jeffrey Elkner,Micheal Connet and our friends at Nortel for allowing me to test the XO laptop and attempt to get some of our learning activities working on it.

Information on the laptop
Color: Green(only color available at the moment)
Hardware Revision: B4-15
Software Revision : Unknown now(but working on it :) )

Current Plan for first day:
1. Change language to english
2.Investigate Pippy
3.Attempt basic gasp compatibility (draw a window. or activity)
4.Check out some of the basic networking capabilities of the XO