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.

Copy files to and from the journal

To get started, download the following files to the XO

• http://turl.ca/fromxojournal
• http://turl.ca/toxojournal

The usage for these files are as follows:

Usage for to: python   -m MIMETYPE [-t TITLE] [-d DESC] [-T tag1 [-T tag2 ...]]
Usage for from: python  [-o OBJECT_ID] [-q SEARCH_STR] [-t SEARCH_STR] [-m] OUTFILE

State of flash support

Here is the status of flash support on serveral XO software builds :

Build 625 (Gnash support out of the box(no GV), Flash installable but slow,Increase in speed with config file changes)

Build Ship.2 (Gnash support out of the box(no GV), Flash installable but slow,Increase in speed with config file does not work )

Latest Joyride (Gnash support out of the box(no GV), Flash install breaks web browser?(luke,edit with more specific infomation)

A weekend update post with more information is forthcoming.

Bugs, bugs, and more bugs

Sorry I haven't posted in the last few days, I have been busy finding bugs and reporting them.
Here's a summary of a few:

• Clipboard items cannot be copied to clipboard - When a text snippet is saved to the Journal, it cannot be re-added to the clipboard later.
• Files are written with wrong extension - Documents written in Write are saved with an ODF extension when copied to a flash drive, even though their format is ABW.
• SimCity does not quit when closed in donut - Violates the Sugar Human Interface Guidelines, as it shows an "Are You Sure" message when user quits via the donut, it should quit without further prompts.
  

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