Re: Changing Name of Alsamixer controls 'Analog Input' and 'V_REFOUT'
On 9/6/07, Arjun Sarwal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1. There is a control 'Analog Input' which when enabled essentially allows us to switch to a DC coupling by shorting a coupling capacitor on the motherboard. To the user, it simply allows one to put a DC signal into the Mic input and thus switch to DC mode. The proposal is to change the name to 'DC Mode Enable' 2. V_REFOUT : This is also a control in Alsamixer and essentially switches ON the bias voltage required by the microphone. The proposal is to change the name to 'Mic Enable' I look forward to comments and feedback on the above two proposals. Hi Arjun, If the changes you intend to make to the alsa driver are intended to be generic and not OLPC specific, then I encourage you to CC the alsa-devel mailing list since AD1888 AC97 code is shared. The naming changes you propose look fine except for number 2, since not all mics don't need bias so calling it Mic Enable may not be accurate. I think Mitch's suggestion of Mic Bias Enable is a good one. Best regards, jaya ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Pippy and Calculate - Evolution Solution
Yoshiki Ohshima writes: Hi, Steve, I am a lurker, but this is an interesting discussion. I am a developer in health applications working with current dev release on a B4. Calculate is impressive; Pippy is impressive. They each serve a purpose which I think fits into an OPLC evolutionist philosophy. But, have you actually tried to use Calculate? It could not detect simple errors properly (which is now fixed), takes 10 seconds to calculate 3+4, and digits in a long floating point number are wrapped around, etc.? Errors ought to be detected as typed, with the text changing color at the point where syntax is violated. So this... 7+5-9*4)-5 ...would be highlighted starting from the ')' character. It may be good to display the expressions twice, once like a normal (C, Java, C#, C++) programming language for editing and once in a proper (TeX, MathML, textbooks) rendering. For the math itself, I suggest feeding expressions into the bc program. Again, this is not a criticism toward Reinier, but rather toward the fact that keeping up with the rate of change that Sugar and the UI guideline is not something a volunteer developer can easily cope with. Calculate is in Python, isn't it? Sugar and UI changes are deadly for the non-Python stuff. First, there are US toys that are remarkably similar to the OLPC in appearance that comprise a simple 4x4 calculator aimed at the under 5 year old crowd. Large keys that do arithmetic. I think the idea of clicking on on-screen buttons is fundamentally defective. The keyboard is far easier to use. I suggest displaying an on-screen copy of that, with the valid keystrokes highlighted. One could still use it with the touchpad, if one wanted to suffer. So in the above example, after 7+5-9*4 the ')' key would not be highlighted. Having such an on-screen representation would make it easy to show letter keys remapped as appropriate. For example, a key might serve as sin() normally or as arcsin() when control is used. (BTW, control might be made sticky) Well, if you consider under 5 years old crowd, then you would oppose to have variables in Calculate? (BTW, OLPC is not aimed at the crowd, I believe.) What do you think about the the use of e-notation in it? How about all these functions available in the tab? Arbitrary named variables are probably not good. Cut-and-paste gives you a variable, and the most recent answer (or two) could implicitly be a variable. If there is a scrolling log of answers, clicking on lines of the log could act as variables. Anything beyond that is probably getting into spreadsheet territory, but there are low-complexity ways to deal with that too: cut-and-paste to a text document, allow drag-and-drop to a saved-data area of the screen, or just scribble on something physical. Imagine if the functions that are available in the Calculate mode (such as sin, sqrt, etc.) are actually defined in a way that kids can understand (for example, the Newton-method for sqrt, or even a graphical version for sin and cos), and if the user goes to the Pippy mode, the user can look inside the definition and modify them? That would be very constructionist. Dear my. I'm all in favor of supporting the bright kids, but that suggestion sounds like grade 12 honors at minimum. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: save-nand problem
Hi Juliano, I just went through this process myself last night. The first time I did a save-nand it took many minutes. Unfortunately I had to do it again since I missed a few things. The second time it took many hours. It did complete (which surprised me). The next step, which is new since 406, is that you also have to create a .crc file. Scroll to the bottom of this page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Customizing_NAND_images I had to get someone to build the crc for me since I didn't have a build environment. I tried to upload the crcimg program that runs on a linux machine, but I had some issues with the wiki upload. I had to give it an extension. If you have access to a linux machine you may be able to create your own crc file with this: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Crcimg.sh Tell me if it works and we can add the link directly to wiki page. If someone creates a version that can run on a mac or on windows it would be great to upload them here so those of us without build environments could create crc files for custom images Regards, Kim On 9/7/07, Juliano Bittencourt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi folks, I'm having problems using the save-nand OFW command to created a customized version of the OS. In the near past I used this command several times for this purpose, but now, it seems not working anymore. There are several symptoms: 1. When I try to create the image file with the command 'save-nand disk:\nand.os', the laptop starts working but the entire process takes serveral hours to complete (about 5 hours) 2. Even when the process completes successfully, eventually the result is a 0 bites file; 3. When the process is completed and the resulting file has about 230mb, the problem is when I try to copy this file to a new laptop. The copy-nand command throws and error message : Image file size is not a multiple of the NAND erase block size. I repeated the process serveral times, on B2 and B3 machines with firmware q2c23. Am I missing something or is this actually a bug? Best, Juliano Bittencourt ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Pippy and Calculate - Evolution Solution
Albert, Oh, good. You weren't simply trying to flame the discussion after all^^; For now, let me just jump to the last part... Imagine if the functions that are available in the Calculate mode (such as sin, sqrt, etc.) are actually defined in a way that kids can understand (for example, the Newton-method for sqrt, or even a graphical version for sin and cos), and if the user goes to the Pippy mode, the user can look inside the definition and modify them? That would be very constructionist. Dear my. I'm all in favor of supporting the bright kids, but that suggestion sounds like grade 12 honors at minimum. No no. Do you have any reason to believe that cannot be done under grade 12? (You can't really mean 12th graders... You mean 12 years old, right?) I happen to have a chat with my boss on this topic, and he told me an interesting experience with a HyperCard stack called the function machine done by a elementary school teacher in LA. This HyperCard stack basically has a funny looking picture of machines. This machine sucks a number, does something on it and spits out another number. Kids are first to guess what the machine does inside. First graders could do simple additions, and often could do linear relation and with linear relation with additive part. Of course, then kids get to open the machine and write the function (symbolically) in it. Now, this becomes a sort of quiz; kids exchange their machines and play with machines made by friends. This was largely sucessful with kids from 1st to 4th graders. The Newton-method, etc. may be too early for 4th graders, but understanding the concept of functions is not that magical. You can imagine to make a machine with other machines, etc. Remember the famous quote from Jerome Bruner: We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. To make this hypothesis stand, the environment and the form have to be carefully thought out, but like teaching differential vector geometry with Logo, there are a lot of evidences. -- Yoshiki ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Pippy and Calculate - Evolution Solution
Yoshiki Ohshima wrote: Remember the famous quote from Jerome Bruner: We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. Sounds more like a statement of faith than a falsifiable hypothesis. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Pippy and Calculate - Evolution Solution
Mitch, Remember the famous quote from Jerome Bruner: We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. Sounds more like a statement of faith than a falsifiable hypothesis. Well, if you just take this statement without knowing what he has done to support it, I might agree that it looks like a simple non-falsifiable hypothesis. To talk about childhood education and constructivist theory in education, Jerry's books are must-read, whether you agree with him or not (to say the least. Actually, he is one of *the* guys.) -- Yoshiki ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: show source keybinding
On 09/06/2007 09:53 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote: So ... what is the keybinding? I tried using xev in 569 but I do not see a key event generated. Supposedly I need to press fn+space, right? But all I see is that fn nonsensically auto-repeats by itself, and pressing the space bare along with it produces a focus- in, -out, and keymap change event ... I noticed that too, but only in the Sugar sesion, so I thought the key was already being trapped by the window manager or Sugar itself. If you run a classic X session (startx from root), you'll see the key works fine. From comment 4: I temporarly assigned it to the XF86Start because defining a new keysym requires importing a new libX11 and at this time (Trial3) we'd prefer not to. You can easily change the keysym by editing: /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/olpc And then reloading the settings: setxkbmap -v -model olpc us -- // Bernardo Innocenti \X/ http://www.codewiz.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Pippy and Calculate - Evolution Solution
Albert, Again, this is not a criticism toward Reinier, but rather toward the fact that keeping up with the rate of change that Sugar and the UI guideline is not something a volunteer developer can easily cope with. Calculate is in Python, isn't it? Sugar and UI changes are deadly for the non-Python stuff. And why? If you follow the development in past several months, you probably found that the difference of language used to write an activity has very little correlation with when and how often the activity stopped working. (A high-level messaging/component model usually cuts the dependency to a particular implementation language.) It seems that what it matters is *person* than language. In that regard, we should give Bert (Freudenberg), who has been doing the Sugar integration part of Etoys, big kudos. He's been corresponding with core developers, not only keeping up with the changes but also give back a lot of good suggestions. Take a look at the history of Sugar on Fedora 7 page on the wiki. (http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Sugar_on_Fedora_7action=history) You can almost tell that he is pretty much the only guy who is interested in supporting outside developers. Yes, he is dedicated to do so. That certainly does the trick. -- Yoshiki ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Changing Name of Alsamixer controls 'Analog Input' and 'V_REFOUT'
On 9/7/07, Arjun Sarwal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jaya, Thank you for your email. The changes that I have proposed seem OLPC specific to me. Oh, ok. I assumed you were going to change the AD1888 AC97 mixer control names in sound/pci/ac97/... Those are not OLPC specific at the moment. However there is another change that we are thinking about, which I think will be a generic change and I will post on the alsa-devel list. Cool, it'd be a good idea to propose the change to alsa-devel since that's where the AD1888 users are. The other change that we are thinking about is to remove the 'High Pass Filter Enable' control from Alsamixer and internally coupling its functionality to the state of 'Analog Input'. HPF is enabled when AnalogInput is disabled and vice versa. The idea behind this is that we can't forsee any situation when the user would want to toggle HPF without toggling AnalogInput. Sounds interesting. One thing to keep in mind is that the AC97 driver is intended to be codec specific rather than board specific. It doesn't and probably should not know about OLPC's non-RC trace. cs5535audio on the other hand already has OLPC specific and OLPC board revision specific code for the analog switch to the non-RC trace. Also keep in mind that HPF is a general control and there are mic1, mic2 on the AD1888 chip so some boards may have mic2 on a non-RC trace for example. I can understand wanting to decouple analog input kcontrol (which currently pokes both HPF and VREF) but removing HPF as a separate kcontrol may not be appropriate for all boards. I hope that helps. Best regards, jaya ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Changing Name of Alsamixer controls 'Analog Input' and 'V_REFOUT'
On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 13:02:01 +0800 Jaya Kumar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 9/7/07, Arjun Sarwal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] I can understand wanting to decouple analog input kcontrol (which currently pokes both HPF and VREF) but removing HPF as a separate kcontrol may not be appropriate for all boards. Right, I currently have a patch that removes it specifically for OLPC: http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/analog/0001-OLPC-cs5535audio-override-the-AD1888-s-High-Pass-F.patch (note that it replaces it with OLPC's own HPF; that was written before the proposal to change the name.) I hope that helps. Best regards, jaya -- Andres Salomon [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Pippy and Calculate - Evolution Solution
Hi, James, I'm in Australia. In our school system we use lowest common denominator, class based teaching ... advancement in knowledge and skill beyond the plan for the year is socially punished. Wow. Sounds like Japan. Bright kids learned to hide their ability. However, even with that, I have met 5 to 9 year old kids who could do the math that was to be learned at age 15. So I have no trouble with the idea of revealing the details of these function derivations. At worst we'll create a generation who know math better than anyone else ... and where's the problem with that? A little problem is that we would like to get 80% of students to go beyond a threshold. May or may not be so high threshold, but reasonably high. Definitely we should try to make curriculum that fit almost everyone in a class except a few hopeless, not a few talented. -- Yoshiki ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Pippy and Calculate - Evolution Solution
On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 03:34:18PM -0700, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote: No no. Do you have any reason to believe that cannot be done under grade 12? (You can't really mean 12th graders... You mean 12 years old, right?) I'm in Australia. In our school system we use lowest common denominator, class based teaching ... advancement in knowledge and skill beyond the plan for the year is socially punished. Bright kids learned to hide their ability. However, even with that, I have met 5 to 9 year old kids who could do the math that was to be learned at age 15. So I have no trouble with the idea of revealing the details of these function derivations. At worst we'll create a generation who know math better than anyone else ... and where's the problem with that? -- James Cameronmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://quozl.netrek.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Changing Name of Alsamixer controls 'Analog Input' and 'V_REFOUT'
On 9/8/07, Andres Salomon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 13:02:01 +0800 Jaya Kumar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 9/7/07, Arjun Sarwal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] I can understand wanting to decouple analog input kcontrol (which currently pokes both HPF and VREF) but removing HPF as a separate kcontrol may not be appropriate for all boards. Right, I currently have a patch that removes it specifically for OLPC: http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/analog/0001-OLPC-cs5535audio-override-the-AD1888-s-High-Pass-F.patch (note that it replaces it with OLPC's own HPF; that was written before the proposal to change the name.) That patch looks good. Thanks, jaya ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
