Re: [sugar] notes from the field - Mongolia
You can transfers files between systems, (in the absence of an XS server), using a light weight web server such as boa To install boa on the XO: su - yum install boa If you want more details on how to configure boa let me know and I will post the instructions. I use boa to pull log files off my XO. Similarly you get get files off a MS Windows system using IIS. Another email in this thread mentions the scripts for copying files to and form the Sugar Journal. /Robert H. On Oct 10, 2008, at 1:48 PM, Deniz Kural wrote: I see how my email wasn't so nice. Apologies for increasing the animosity level. I was merely trying show how USB transfer from: 1) Xo to Xo 2) Other platform to Xo could be useful. Marco, I'm glad to have provoked a laugh, I was indeed joking. I don't even know you. I agree with Martin -- I thought he didn't write anything offensive. I will follow your advice, Edward, Tomeu. So to stay on topic, 1) I understand that there is in fact an easy way to transfer files between XOs with a USB (which I believe is necessary per the conditions in Mongolia - people living in mobile yurts, even in the largest city and the capital etc. as explained). In the future, if one day the network is universal, and the mesh works etc. I can see why we wouldn't need it. 2) I understand that sugar might not have been intended to work with other OS's, and should be thought of as an educational tool meant for children instead of a general all-purpose laptop computer. But I also think, since this is a significant investment for many people, referring to my original example of a teacher typing up a reading (from a book let's say, or a handout) on a regular computer s/he already has back home, and being able to transfer files back and forth on an Xo so s/he can distribute it to his/her students. Thus, to fulfill its educational mission, Sugar cannot be a closed box. Deniz On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2008/10/10 Deniz Kural [EMAIL PROTECTED]: This whole why would you need a USB in mongolia? conversation shows how out of touch some people on this list are with the people the project is trying to reach. Deniz, this list if composed by people from all around the world, some of which have had contact with some cultures, others with other cultures. What we have in common is the desire to build a software platform that others can use to learn themselves and to teach others. As we have the wish that our work is universally used, we'll need to teach each other how is life in every part of the world and how we can better work so it serves best everywhere. Mikus hasn't been afraid of showing his ignorance about how USB sticks are used in Mongolia and you have kindly replied with an useful explanation. I hope we can keep sharing experiences like this but with a bit less of animosity. Regards, Tomeu ___ 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
Questions on activity signing and upgrade. (Some answers to follow later.)
Dear devel@ and security@, Scott asked me to spend some time thinking on the topic of activity signing [1] in the context of activity upgrade [2, 3, 4]. Since I have some previous thoughts on this subject already available [5, 6], I will concentrate on new thoughts in this thread. Please enjoy my questions and offer your own thoughts; I will offer more of my own as I succeed in organizing them. Purpose --- We have constructed (part of) an isolation system [7] to segregate some programs run by our human operator from that person's full digital agency (power to commit side-effects). Unsurprisingly, it is occasionally necessary or convenient to give programs a larger share of the human operator's authority than they would be granted by default. Therefore, given that such privileged programs are to be supported, it makes sense to provide some mechanism for their convenient use and to take some care that the need to distribute such programs does not increase our operator's vulnerability to purposeful malice [8]. We are also generally concerned with the ability to authenticate authors to interlocutors [9] though we take care not to conflate authentication with authorization [10]. Questions - Conceptually speaking, there are several sorts of sensitive data around which we might consider creating locks, for example: * UI-relevant identifiers like 'author' or 'package-name' * endowed permissions * private data of various sorts e.g. in the datastore or rainbow spool How, precisely, should this be done? Concerning credentials and environments: * What credentials should be considered sufficient to open each of these potential locks? * By what interaction might the operator forcefully open a lock? * Must be we able to guarantee access to sufficient credentials to laptop distributors and support organizations like OLPC? * If so, how might we do so? By key delegation? By escrow? * What conditions may be made necessary for the ability to generate credentials? * What conditions must taken to be sufficient for the ability to generate credentials? * What conditions may be made necessary for the ability to verify messages with given credentials? * What conditions must taken to be sufficient for the ability to verify messages with given credentials? * Is it good to try to aggregate credentials in some form of registry? Concerning protocols: * Does the authorization+endowment protocol need to be versioned? * If so, how should we expect to respond to messages from older versions? * Does the authorization+endowment protocol implementation need to be exposed as a public API? * How should we respond to invalid protocol messages? * If a Debian-scale compromise occurred, what responses might be available? * Should software packages be able to 'pin' themselves (preventing the installation of other versions of the package until forcefully overridden, perhaps by preparatory uninstallation)? * Should privilege endowments be automatically transferred newly encountered versions of an existing thing? * If this could be done in multiple ways, which way should be chosen? * How about other sensitive things like 'instance-specific data'? * Are there existing models for this sort of thing (e.g. [11]) which can be reused in some way? Concerning use via Sugar on XOs: * where might XO-user-owned credentials live? * how might the user request their use? * what would prevent other programs from using them without authorization? * how might authorization be granted to programs (e.g. Pippy) to which the user wants to offer some use of the credentials? References -- [1]: Bitfrost's directive on activity signing. -- http://tinyurl.com/4zb6ux#l450 [2]: Ivan's writings on activity update. -- http://tinyurl.com/3r4f2z [3]: #5657 - Loophole'd activities. -- http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5657 [4]: Activity updater design document. -- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_update [5]: First commentary on bundles and bundle versioning. -- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Bundles_1 [6]: Second commentary on bundles and bundle versioning. -- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Bundles_2 [7]: Foreword of the Rainbow design document. -- http://tinyurl.com/4hlsn8#l40 [8]: Bitfrost's discussion of purposeful vs. circumstantial malice. -- http://tinyurl.com/4zb6ux#l379 [9]: Definition of P_IDENT. -- http://tinyurl.com/4zb6ux#l838 [10]: Knowing my interlocutor doesn't mean I trust their code. -- http://tinyurl.com/4zb6ux#l497 [11]: Security and Permissions in Android -- http://code.google.com/android/devel/security.html ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] 0.84/9.1 planning.
On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 9:33 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 3:23 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just to clarify: like our mini-conferences in the past, the plan is to have at least three days full of talks and hacking, so that we all Are you proposing something like: 17 - 21 Talks and hacking 24 - 25 Concrete priorities and goals I think more like: Nov 17-20: talks and hacking Nov 21: priorities meeting, wrapup. I'm not the planning committee, but this would be what I'd like to see. Works for me. Should we be concerned that talk (or aguing) might expand so much that there's little time to take actual decisions? Perhaps a strict schedule may help with this? Regards, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: getting mp3 sound working w/ Gnash easily
On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 04:13:22PM +0800, Carlos Nazareno wrote: We were having a discussion at the Gnash developer mailing list about the absurdity of the situation where it was so difficult to get sound working with Gnash on build 767 that the easy workaround to get sound I have Gnash with working sound and full YouTube video support on 767, and it wasn't even hard. What I mean is that if it's going to take so much difficult jumping through hoops to get sound working with Gnash on the OLPC, why not just recommend that users install the Adobe Flash player which can be done with a single wget-rpm combo and cause less of a support nightmare? Persovnally, the only way to fix this problem is to get political, and start lobbying for the end of software patents. It's the *legal* issues here around codecs and software patents that is the problem, not any technical issue. btw, this attitude is why I've personally given up on the OLPC project. It's been very upsetting to me to see such a great project slowly slide into the proprietary software world. Oh that's right, Nicholas says I'm a free software fundamentalist, holding back the OLPC project... Ship whatever you want... I give up again. And if we ship with 0.8.3, once Gnash 0.8.4 comes out (pretty close enough from what I read from Gnash dev), G1G1 users are going to be stuck with an older outdated version of Gnash for a long time. Which won't work, then everyone will say Linux/Gnash sucks, and give me XP and Adobe. Sigh... - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: journal is hard + sugar and the digital age
On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:55 PM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 12:13:02PM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote: On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Carlos Nazareno [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Tomeu. Some personal feedback: 3) Basically - The journal is really hard for people/ kids to use over a longer period of time. Kids and teachers can't find things that they did unless it was done within the last 30 minutes. Could you please elaborate on the difficulties that people have when using the journal? I've experienced the same problem. Items tend to clutter up in the journal over time, it's like viewing your entire web browsing history. Its current implementation simply leads to information overload with the accumulating number of entries. IMHO, the philosophy of nothing gets forgotten with the journal is a bit flawed because as people we don't even naturally do that. We selectively choose which information to remember and mark as important and discard the rest because that's just information overload. You're right on with this comment. Of course, I don't think nothing gets forgotten is really what we're aiming for; in fact, we aim for much the opposite. However, as it's currently implemented, you're right! The Journal is actually supposed to retain everything you've done *quite recently* so that you can always go back and find, remix, resume, etc. Experimentation is encouraged. However, the very principles the Journal was designed around include the concept of memory, and particularly the fading thereof. Over time, less used, unstarred, unimportant files will eventually be backed up and then removed (probably after confirmation, but perhaps you can opt out of the confirmation step) by the system, so that the further back in time you look, the less you have left, but the more relevant the remaining items are to your history with the laptop. This is a very important aspect of the Journal that just hasn't had time to happen, yet. You acknowledge that the system is not functioning as well as it should be in its curren state. Please stop saying we are going to do this and look for the simplest way to achieve a usable system for our usesr. I will gladly help in this endeavor, but I am concerned by our security system and the frequent implications that we are holding to old designs that my ideas and motivation have no place in this effort. No idea about what security has to do here. The journal development has stalled because a fundamental part of it (the datastore) hasn't had resources assigned to it. Don't ask me why. You're continually mixing implementation and design issues, which makes this discussion much more difficult than it already is. I don't think there's much interest in discussing that the current implementation sucks, we all agree here. What we would like to discuss and would welcome your contributions, is how the design can be improved in such a way that a much better implementation can happen soonish. Several people are contributing usefully to this discussion, why do you think you are not able to? I don't think we can incorporate the concept of memory and forgetting into the Journal in a programmatic way. Forgetting is as much a learned skill as remembering, and attempting to replicate it in software seems like a very difficult, if impossible, task. I feel that we are tilting at windmills if we believe we can reliably produce something so incredible in any conceivable timeframe. I don't think we aim to actually replicate any brain function. We just want to give the user tools that assist him in better managing his data in a space with restricted capacity. I positively advocate a simplification of our expectations about what the Journal will do. Just a system which consistently suggests (but does not enforce) default, intelligent organizations for things in a traditional filesystem, provides manual and automatic tagging support, and indexes the text of written documents will be a giant step forward in terms of reliability and interoperability with the outside world. With metadata about files stashed in a database, such as time, date, text (for indexing and search), tags, creating application, etc. we can do everything the Journal is intended to do, but no sacrifice the simplicity and reliability of the default filesystem in the process of developing the Journal to its full capacity. For this we only need to work on three sets of components: 1) Journal -- a file browsing application which provides numerous views onto the corpus of data the user creates and handles; views being time-ordered, filtered, hierarchical (traditional), tag-based, etc. Allowing other applications to manage files will let contributors create or port existing systems to the Sugar environment to fulfill these functions as well. 2) Indexer -- a simple filesystem crawler that walks across the set of
Re: Gnash/Flash video support - Philippine CyberEd program
Hi Carlos, For delivering video on the web, you can also create an account on http://www.dailymotion.com, a video sharing web site available in many languages, upload your videos, add them to the group OLPC and they will become available in .ogg, Theora + Vorbis, for the XO. You can already watch videos on http://olpc.dailymotion.com, using the default embedded video player Totem in the browser. If you're using the release 8.2-767, you will even be able to watch them in full screen, which is great! We are looking for educational videos for the kids, so if you need more information, please don't hesitate to ask. Thanks. Sebastien On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Carlos Nazareno [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Hi guys. Can we try to get a little more support for Gnash + sound on the OLPC for the purpose of Flash Video? Flash video is now the de-facto platform for delivering video on the web, and the following piece of news from the Philippines might be of interest. It's about the Philippine Cyber Education program, and it also aims to deliver a lot of video lecture content to public schools via web. (UPDATE) Arroyo: CyberEd project to push through http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/infotech/view_article.php?article_id=93359 By Lira Dalangin-Fernandez INQUIRER.net First Posted 11:28am (Mla time) 10/09/2007 MANILA, Philippines -- Despite heavy criticism, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said Tuesday that the government would push through with the $460-million Cyber Education project and was planning to tap the academe to ensure the project would suit the needs of the students. In her opening statement at the Cabinet meeting of the National Security Council and the National Economic Development Authority, Arroyo stressed that investments and infrastructure projects should not be hindered by controversies. Hindi dapat mahinto ang imprastraktura at investment dahil sa mga batikos [Infrastructure and investment should not stop because of criticisms], she said. On September 22, Arroyo suspended the implementation of the Cyber Education and the $329-million National Broadband Network projects, blaming the political noise for her decision. Last week, Trade Secretary Peter Favila said the broadband project with China's ZTE Corporation would no longer be implemented, but that the rest of the projects signed in China in April, including the Cyber Education project, were merely suspended. Asked to clarify if the President's statement's meant that she has lifted the suspension on the project, Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye said Arroyo has given the go-signal for the review of the project. The review of the project could eventually lead to the project's implementation, Bunye added. Arroyo said she has ordered the China Projects Oversight Panel under Favila to ensure that the very important project of Cyber Education would push through for the benefit of the millions of students. Kokonsultahin nila rito ang Education Task Force sa ilalim ni Father Ben Nebres ng Ateneo, upang matiyak na sa alinsunod sa pangangailangan ng edukasyon ang proyekto [They will consult the Education Task Force under Father Ben Nebres of the Ateneo to ensure that the project will meet the students' needs], she said. Arroyo also tapped the Procurement Transparency Group together with the Civil Society for Procurement Reform to see to it that the processes in completing the project would be open and transparent. The Cyber Education project, to be undertaken in cooperation with a Chinese firm, aims to bridge the learning gap between urban and rural schools by using satellite technology to beam televised lectures to students and teachers in far-flung areas. The satellite-based distance learning program is capable of broadcasting lectures by the best teachers from DepEd model schools to other public schools nationwide. The program, which targets a total of 37,794 public schools in the next three years with an annual coverage of 13.6 million students, is the best thing to happen to Philippine education, according to Education Secretary Jesli Lapus. Originally posted at 11:29am -- Carlos Nazareno http://www.object404.com interactive media specialist zen graffiti studios [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ 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
Gnash/Flash video support - Philippine CyberEd program
Hi guys. Can we try to get a little more support for Gnash + sound on the OLPC for the purpose of Flash Video? Flash video is now the de-facto platform for delivering video on the web, and the following piece of news from the Philippines might be of interest. It's about the Philippine Cyber Education program, and it also aims to deliver a lot of video lecture content to public schools via web. (UPDATE) Arroyo: CyberEd project to push through http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/infotech/view_article.php?article_id=93359 By Lira Dalangin-Fernandez INQUIRER.net First Posted 11:28am (Mla time) 10/09/2007 MANILA, Philippines -- Despite heavy criticism, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said Tuesday that the government would push through with the $460-million Cyber Education project and was planning to tap the academe to ensure the project would suit the needs of the students. In her opening statement at the Cabinet meeting of the National Security Council and the National Economic Development Authority, Arroyo stressed that investments and infrastructure projects should not be hindered by controversies. Hindi dapat mahinto ang imprastraktura at investment dahil sa mga batikos [Infrastructure and investment should not stop because of criticisms], she said. On September 22, Arroyo suspended the implementation of the Cyber Education and the $329-million National Broadband Network projects, blaming the political noise for her decision. Last week, Trade Secretary Peter Favila said the broadband project with China's ZTE Corporation would no longer be implemented, but that the rest of the projects signed in China in April, including the Cyber Education project, were merely suspended. Asked to clarify if the President's statement's meant that she has lifted the suspension on the project, Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye said Arroyo has given the go-signal for the review of the project. The review of the project could eventually lead to the project's implementation, Bunye added. Arroyo said she has ordered the China Projects Oversight Panel under Favila to ensure that the very important project of Cyber Education would push through for the benefit of the millions of students. Kokonsultahin nila rito ang Education Task Force sa ilalim ni Father Ben Nebres ng Ateneo, upang matiyak na sa alinsunod sa pangangailangan ng edukasyon ang proyekto [They will consult the Education Task Force under Father Ben Nebres of the Ateneo to ensure that the project will meet the students' needs], she said. Arroyo also tapped the Procurement Transparency Group together with the Civil Society for Procurement Reform to see to it that the processes in completing the project would be open and transparent. The Cyber Education project, to be undertaken in cooperation with a Chinese firm, aims to bridge the learning gap between urban and rural schools by using satellite technology to beam televised lectures to students and teachers in far-flung areas. The satellite-based distance learning program is capable of broadcasting lectures by the best teachers from DepEd model schools to other public schools nationwide. The program, which targets a total of 37,794 public schools in the next three years with an annual coverage of 13.6 million students, is the best thing to happen to Philippine education, according to Education Secretary Jesli Lapus. Originally posted at 11:29am -- Carlos Nazareno http://www.object404.com interactive media specialist zen graffiti studios [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: journal is hard + sugar and the digital age
On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Carlos Nazareno [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Tomeu. Some personal feedback: 3) Basically - The journal is really hard for people/ kids to use over a longer period of time. Kids and teachers can't find things that they did unless it was done within the last 30 minutes. Could you please elaborate on the difficulties that people have when using the journal? I've experienced the same problem. Items tend to clutter up in the journal over time, it's like viewing your entire web browsing history. Its current implementation simply leads to information overload with the accumulating number of entries. I can understand that if you expect to be able to deal with all the items in the list view, you will find it unbearable after you reach some dozens of entries. We don't have an archive button that can take items from that list, so it keeps growing and growing. But I don't think that's how the journal is expected to be used. We don't have small, _fixed_ boxes in which you can deal with its contents in just one go. Rather, we give ways for the user to create those boxes dynamically. I think we have reached consensus that for the journal concept to go forward, we need to improve the tools that the user has to create those boxes in ways it makes sense to her. As an illustration, I have several thousands of emails in my GMail inbox, I never use Archive and only delete very, very occasionally (not even once per day). I _never_ try to navigate through the list of emails in inbox, and only use it to read the most recent emails (first page only). Of course I would feel overloaded if I tried! The other ways I use to find the information I want is to automatically tag email as they come, I have the following filter rules: - One rule per big mailing list: Devel, Sugar, Bugs (trac mail), Localization. - One rule that tags bug emails from Trac that matches some keywords important for my work, because I stopped reading all bugmail some months ago. - One rule for the rest of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to (lower traffic): Olpc-sur, Olpc-library, Testing, IAEP, etc - One rule for tagging email from members of my family. And that's all. The tags subdivide the biggest box in smaller boxes, but still too big to be dealt directly. So I can search by sender, receiver, full text, etc Sugar already has some very primitive automatic tagging. Activities set metadata based on the content of the activity and, hopefully, in terms of how the user would describe (and thus search for) the entry. We can do much better here, and have already plans to improve this further. And I'm very happy that I stopped using Evolution and thus struggling to keep my inbox clean, now I have more time to code and write emails. ;) IMHO, the philosophy of nothing gets forgotten with the journal is a bit flawed because as people we don't even naturally do that. We selectively choose which information to remember and mark as important and discard the rest because that's just information overload. We actually aim to forget: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Laptop_Experience/The_Journal Think about it from a browser paradigm. You bookmark important items that you want to reuse later on. On the other hand, viewing your browser history over a prolonged period of time gets pretty unwieldy. I guess that's why FF has a search facility in its history browser. Another problem I've had is that I tried to offload some programs onto an SD card due to the XO's limited internal storage. This can lead to hundreds to thousands of files when opening up the SD card in the journal. The flat heirarchy makes navigation extremely difficult when you have this many files. How is this different from the main journal? If only that the SD card is potentially used to interchange files with other OSs, then I agree that presenting the same view as in other OSs makes sense. Now we only need to find someone who implements it... Sure, there's search, but that presupposes that you know the names of the files you're looking for. What if you stick in something that has hundreds of files and you were looking for an image file or something that you didn't know the name of? Well, that's why we have other means to aid in finding. You can for example filter by the Image type and reduce the list to only images. I'm sure we can improve here, what do you suggest? Perhaps considering path components as tags and allowing the user to browse the device by tags (Scott's proposal, I think)? Hmm. I think one improvement that can be added to the journal is to improve the display filters? Sure. Like for example, the ability to filter by delineated date? It would be a little better if users could browse the journal from a date range, like the range of 2 weeks to 3 weeks ago only because that's when the user remembers the activity that was used. Another one is the ability to view journal entries by name
Re: getting mp3 sound working w/ Gnash easily
Perhaps we could add a section on installing Gnash in the Flossmanual for Sugar??? It may be that the it belongs in the Running GNU/Linux applications chapter of the Extending Sugar section, or maybe we should have a chapter devoted to Extending/Enhancing the Sugar Environment?? -walter --- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] physical security of the XS and XO-as-XS
I have been discussing these issues off-list w/ Greg Smith. I will summarize some of our discussion and then reply to Sameer about physical security for the XS and to the general suggestion that the XO can serve as an XS. I have paraphrased Greg's question, don't blame him if I have bastardized his phrasings. Here is the quick gist, 1) a lot of poor schools can gather the funds to take care of the XS if shown the potential benefits and 2) IMHO using the XO as XS is not a good idea. Q: Are most of your target schools likely to have Internet and money/power to have a server? A: If the schools can afford to pay for the electricity to charge the XO's, then they can easily afford a server. Q: How did it go putting a server in schools and making sure they don't get stolen? A: This is true, it is hard to secure a server, but if a school can't provide a secure place for the server then they can't secure their copper electrical wiring, a wireless router, or any other kind networking equipment. If the school can't afford electricity, then the students who attend probably don't have electricity at home. Our requirement for working w/ a school is that the school already has electricity. A hosted solution can work as long as their is a really consistent Internet connection to the school. That can be hard in __a lot__ of developing countries. Frankly, I think it is much, much easier to secure the XS than provide a stable Internet connection to a remote school. Q: Perhaps we should focus on the poorest countries. Therefore no Internet and no server. The server can actually still add value even with no Internet but there is concern its hard to secure. A: Easy. If the school can't keep their electrical wiring from getting stolen, they can't keep the server safe. The copper in electrical wiring is quite valuable as thieves could easily repurpose it for home wiring. Q: What are some possible benefits to using a regular tower pc as XS? Virtually every Dept of Ed will want to put much more content on the XS than can fit on an XO. You can add external USB hard drives until it becomes one big kludge. Additionally, I am convinced that school administrators would see the XO-as-XS as a spare XO and distribute to kids who don't have XO's at their school or take it home to their own child. We can add a lot of value to the OLPC initiative through the XS, for relatively low investment of time and effort, but only if the XS hardware can be upgraded. The XO obviously can't be upgraded. A few examples: 1) e-mail for the teachers hosted on the XS. This gives teachers a bigger stake in OLPC deployments and in the making sure their Internet connection stays up. BTW, gmail is wy too slow across a slow Internet connection. 2) VoIP connection to the Dept of Ed., so the Dept of Ed can call the school, and vice versa. A great incentive to the school and Dept to maintain and fund that Internet connection. 3) Offline wikipedia, moodle courses, local copies of indigenous art and music resources, I could go on forever. There are drawbacks to the PC-as-XS, most notably power. However, you will have to to set up power backup anyways to maintain the Internet connection. There are some scenarios where an XS may not be feasible at all, but we must have a baseline requirement here for an XO deployment: the majority of the kids OR the school must have consistent electricity. Here in Nepal our base requirement is that a pilot school must already have electricity. -- Bryan W. Berry Technology Director OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: Panorama activity
My roomate and I wrote an auto-stitching Panorama Activity during the Yahoo Hack Day at CMU yesterday (ended up winning the Hack for Good award). I'll be posting it in the wiki at some point today. It needs a whole lot of polishing, since it was written in 24 hours. I ran into the same problem that Ben did with autowhitebalance and autoexposure. I looked through the ov7670 driver, and it seems changing V4L2_CID_BRIGHTNESS should flip the auto exposure control (AEC) bit in one of the registers. I added support for changing brightness to the camera module in Pygame, but either disabling AEC doesn't work, or it just makes auto gain control and auto white balance work even harder to change the image. Other than that, the stitching seems to work ok. I'm going to pyramidize it at some point to make it faster, and do something to improve the accuracy. The slowness of stitching doesn't effect the user experience much though, because it only stitches after the user is done taking the pictures. The Activity we wrote uses the Flickr API for an upload to Flickr button. I feel that this is the most important part. There is support for saving the stitched images as Journal entries, but it would be wonderful if a kid anywhere in the world could see panoramas taken by other kids elsewhere. Flickr is far from ideal for this. Beyond not really being designed for viewing panoramas, it is currently set up to just upload every picture to my personal Flickr account. My API key, secret key, and an authentication token are prerecorded in the activity, so anyone could potentially use those values to edit existing photos and upload whatever to my Flickr account: http://flickr.com/photos/nrpatel/ It seems Gigapan doesn't have an upload API. gigapan.org works in Browse on my os767 XO, but panning around an image is pretty slow. Anyone have ideas on this? A better way to Flickr, ideas for designing a new site, getting Gigapan to add an upload API, etc? The other issue we ran into is integrating OLPCGames with pyGTK stuff. We used OLPCGames to take advantage of capturing the images as SDL surfaces, but we also wanted pyGTK to pop up a Dialog box when the user hits Save, asking for a Title, Tags, and a Description of the panorama. We hacked together something that does pop up the box and saves correctly, but fails to ever destroy the box. It then just sits with the box open, preventing the user from using or exiting the Activity. Is it possible to use pyGTK beyond the toolbox while still using OLPCGames? Nirav On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 6:41 PM, Jeff Keller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah -- I sent my loaner unit off to Burning Man, but I should get it back soon, and I'd be delighted to talk about stitchers. Randy Sargent and I wrote our own for GigaPan last summer because nothing else was up to the task. It relies on a model of the GigaPan device's behavior to do rough placement, but it can auto-stitch 1000+ images with 10 pixels rms displacement error, and it should be open-sourced one of these days. Of course, it uses much more storage, RAM, and CPU than an XO has, but nothing inappropriate to what it does, and there are some nice improvements in the works. Oh, and my office is down the block from OLPC's. --Jeff On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Speaking of which, Jeff Keller has been trying to get OLPC folks to learn more about using his gigapan group's cameras (and perhaps to borrow one to bring them into a country for weeks) for a while. Jeff, Ben Schwartz and Nirav are really interested in large-scale image splicing... SJ --- 617 529 4266 On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Brian Jordan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: *bump* http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Panorama_camera_activity (code? Nirav is interested in doing something similar!) Brian On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 11:56 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 The XO happens to be perfect for shooting stitched panoramic photographs, due to the swivel design. I tested it out in the OLPCHQ lobby. Then, I wrote a simple panorama stitcher in 50 lines of Python. It runs in 3.4 seconds on my Core Duo, producing this output: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bmschwar/lobby_ugly.jpg The results aren't too bad. I also tried stitching this scene with Hugin, the most powerful panorama stitcher I know of. Hugin required significant user intervention and half an hour of computing time, producing this output: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bmschwar/lobby_pretty.jpg This scene is unusually difficult because of the huge indoor-outdoor contrast. Given this positive result, I would like to work on a panorama-making activity, possibly inside Capture. I know that at age 10, I loved making panoramas out of photographs. Panoramas provide an immersive way for children to communicate their environments to each other and to the
Hosting request for GCompris
1. Project name : GCompris
2. Existing website, if any : http://gcompris.net
3. One-line description : Educational Suite
4. Longer description : GCompris is an educational software suite
comprising
: of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10.
: Some of the activities are game orientated, but
nonetheless
: still educational.
5. URLs of similar projects :
6. Committer list
Username Full name SSH2 key URLE-mail
- --
#1 bdoin Bruno Coudoin http://gcompris.net/bdoin_ssh_key.asc [EMAIL
PROTECTED]
If any developers don't have their SSH2 keys on the web, please attach them
to the application e-mail.
7. Preferred development model
I don't need a git account. The project is under cvs, hosted by gnome at:
http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gcompris/
8. Set up a project mailing list:
[X] No
9. Commit notifications
[X] No commit notifications, please
10. Shell accounts
As a general rule, we don't provide shell accounts to developers unless
there's a demonstrated need. If you have one, please explain here, and
list the usernames of the committers above needing shell access.
11. Translation
[ ] Set up the laptop.org Pootle server to allow translation commits to be
made
[X] Translation arrangements have already been made by the gnome translation
teams
12. Notes/comments:
What is most important for me is a file space. I am currently hosting
bundles under gcompris.net but it creates way too much traffic for us.
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Re: Read bug hit in Rwanda
Hi, On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 2:29 AM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Sayamindu, Are you maintaining Read now or is Morgan? I got a ping from Brian who is in Rwanda and he confirmed that this bug: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7090 was actually seen by kids there. Just as cjl predicted in Trac, it was hit by kids on first exposure to the XO. Can we get some attention on that one? Especially if it can be fixed in the activity, I would like to have a new version in place when we try to upgrade Rwanda 8.2.0 later this year. Morgan is maintaining Read, but I'm helping him with the work, especially in the UI and features segment (Read needs a lot of love :-). I'll look into the problem, and if no other quick solution is found, as Brian suggests, I'll restrict the upper zoom limit of Read so that at least it would not crash. I noticed that even in Evince, the maximum amount of allowed zoom is a factor of 4 (400%) - so probably they are also restricting the maximum zoom. Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: getting mp3 sound working w/ Gnash easily
Rob, On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 5:44 AM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 04:13:22PM +0800, Carlos Nazareno wrote: We were having a discussion at the Gnash developer mailing list about the absurdity of the situation where it was so difficult to get sound working with Gnash on build 767 that the easy workaround to get sound I have Gnash with working sound and full YouTube video support on 767, and it wasn't even hard. What I mean is that if it's going to take so much difficult jumping through hoops to get sound working with Gnash on the OLPC, why not just recommend that users install the Adobe Flash player which can be done with a single wget-rpm combo and cause less of a support nightmare? Persovnally, the only way to fix this problem is to get political, and start lobbying for the end of software patents. It's the *legal* issues here around codecs and software patents that is the problem, not any technical issue. btw, this attitude is why I've personally given up on the OLPC project. It's been very upsetting to me to see such a great project slowly slide into the proprietary software world. Oh that's right, Nicholas says I'm a free software fundamentalist, holding back the OLPC project... Ship whatever you want... I give up again. The only deployment that I know is shipping proprietary stuff (flash/java) is the Birmingham deployment which has a lot of legacy proprietary ties to discovery-kids videos and other legacy closed-locked-in education websites. SJ and I were/are working with some people at DailyMotion to serve up videos embeded as OGG and using only free formats. I really *want* people to be able to use ONLY free formats on their XO. I *want* them to know what installing proprietary codecs mean before they try to install adobe flash. And if we ship with 0.8.3, once Gnash 0.8.4 comes out (pretty close enough from what I read from Gnash dev), G1G1 users are going to be stuck with an older outdated version of Gnash for a long time. Which won't work, then everyone will say Linux/Gnash sucks, and give me XP and Adobe. Sigh... - rob - This is the second time that I've heard from you that you've had gnash running on/in sugar better than OLPC is, but I haven't seen any of your packages. Is there a permission or access you require that is stopping the publication of your work upstream? If you're not happy with OLPC, is there something stopping you from contributing directly to Sugarlabs? Even if you give up on OLPC, satisfy your own politics by educating the 10's of thousdands of people in the US with XO's about Gnash and codec's. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Panorama activity
On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Nirav Patel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My roomate and I wrote an auto-stitching Panorama Activity during the Yahoo Hack Day at CMU yesterday (ended up winning the Hack for Good award). I'll be posting it in the wiki at some point today. It needs a whole lot of polishing, since it was written in 24 hours. I ran into the same problem that Ben did with autowhitebalance and autoexposure. I looked through the ov7670 driver, and it seems changing V4L2_CID_BRIGHTNESS should flip the auto exposure control (AEC) bit in one of the registers. I added support for changing brightness to the camera module in Pygame, but either disabling AEC doesn't work, or it just makes auto gain control and auto white balance work even harder to change the image. Other than that, the stitching seems to work ok. I'm going to pyramidize it at some point to make it faster, and do something to improve the accuracy. The slowness of stitching doesn't effect the user experience much though, because it only stitches after the user is done taking the pictures. So cool -- can't wait to try. The Activity we wrote uses the Flickr API for an upload to Flickr button. I feel that this is the most important part. There is support for saving the stitched images as Journal entries, but it would be wonderful if a kid anywhere in the world could see panoramas taken by other kids elsewhere. Flickr is far from ideal for this. Beyond not really being designed for viewing panoramas, it is currently set up to just upload every picture to my personal Flickr account. My API key, secret key, and an authentication token are prerecorded in the activity, so anyone could potentially use those values to edit existing photos and upload whatever to my Flickr account: http://flickr.com/photos/nrpatel/ Awesome! :-D Maybe one could set up a one-way upload script for this on dev (or some appropriate community-developed-web-services-server-of-the-future)? This script, then, could handle the uploading via flickr API securely. Regards Brian It seems Gigapan doesn't have an upload API. gigapan.org works in Browse on my os767 XO, but panning around an image is pretty slow. Anyone have ideas on this? A better way to Flickr, ideas for designing a new site, getting Gigapan to add an upload API, etc? The other issue we ran into is integrating OLPCGames with pyGTK stuff. We used OLPCGames to take advantage of capturing the images as SDL surfaces, but we also wanted pyGTK to pop up a Dialog box when the user hits Save, asking for a Title, Tags, and a Description of the panorama. We hacked together something that does pop up the box and saves correctly, but fails to ever destroy the box. It then just sits with the box open, preventing the user from using or exiting the Activity. Is it possible to use pyGTK beyond the toolbox while still using OLPCGames? Nirav On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 6:41 PM, Jeff Keller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah -- I sent my loaner unit off to Burning Man, but I should get it back soon, and I'd be delighted to talk about stitchers. Randy Sargent and I wrote our own for GigaPan last summer because nothing else was up to the task. It relies on a model of the GigaPan device's behavior to do rough placement, but it can auto-stitch 1000+ images with 10 pixels rms displacement error, and it should be open-sourced one of these days. Of course, it uses much more storage, RAM, and CPU than an XO has, but nothing inappropriate to what it does, and there are some nice improvements in the works. Oh, and my office is down the block from OLPC's. --Jeff On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Speaking of which, Jeff Keller has been trying to get OLPC folks to learn more about using his gigapan group's cameras (and perhaps to borrow one to bring them into a country for weeks) for a while. Jeff, Ben Schwartz and Nirav are really interested in large-scale image splicing... SJ --- 617 529 4266 On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Brian Jordan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: *bump* http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Panorama_camera_activity (code? Nirav is interested in doing something similar!) Brian On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 11:56 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 The XO happens to be perfect for shooting stitched panoramic photographs, due to the swivel design. I tested it out in the OLPCHQ lobby. Then, I wrote a simple panorama stitcher in 50 lines of Python. It runs in 3.4 seconds on my Core Duo, producing this output: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~bmschwar/lobby_ugly.jpg The results aren't too bad. I also tried stitching this scene with Hugin, the most powerful panorama stitcher I know of. Hugin required significant user intervention and half an hour of computing time, producing this output:
Re: [Server-devel] physical security of the XS and XO-as-XS
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 3:43 AM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2) IMHO using the XO as XS is not a good idea. Nothing explains your post why it's a bad idea. If you are going to setup a safe cabinet of some sort, it's not very different to make an XO safe from making a tower pc safe. Your points about other bits of infra are valuable too. But I have to tell you _deployment countries_ are asking us whether the XOs can be used in the XS role. People on the ground there are asking for it. I see some reasons for this: - Procurement process is complex. Once they have the govt OK to get XOs, it's relatively easier to request extra XOs for the role. Getting other hw for the XS can take months if not years. - Very few hw makers are offering machines that are solid state, heat/dust/humidity resistant. The XO has all of that and is cheap. The few hw makers I've seen offering similar features are rather expensive. Additionally, I am convinced that school administrators would see the XO-as-XS as a spare XO and distribute to kids who don't have XO's at their school or take it home to their own child. It won't even boot to Sugar, and user education call take a part here -- I don't think the confusion will last very long. You may not want it for the Nepal deployment, but we cannot argue with the fact that there is intense interest. There are also other use cases where it's useful to be able to run the XS sw on an XO - for example, the warehouse scenarios where you take 1 XO and use it as the server that will update all the other XOs. The issue of theft is real, but is not limited to the XO hw -- and in fact, a normal tower pc is in some cases more desirable - as it's a general purpose machine. Uruguay has -- I believe -- done some interesting work in securing their school servers, though I don't know the details. This is work that needs to happen for a long list of reasons. Within the constraints we have, I aim for flexibility: give the local teams a range of options, and this is a _very_ valuable one, one that is within reach now that a vanilla Fedora boots on the XO. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
[Server-devel] physical security of the XS and XO-as-XS
[Note: this is a resend - with some better editing - the earlier email got sent prematurely...] On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 3:43 AM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2) IMHO using the XO as XS is not a good idea. Nothing explains in your post why it's a bad idea. If you are going to setup a safe cabinet of some sort for the server, it's not very different to make an XO safe from making a tower pc safe. Your points about other bits of infra are very valuable. Cable theft, antenna theft are also important. Interstingly, _deployment countries_ are asking us whether the XOs can be used in the XS role. People on the ground there are asking for it. I see some reasons for this: - Procurement process is complex. Once they have the govt OK to get XOs, it's relatively easier to request extra XOs for the role. Getting other hw for the XS can take months if not years. - Very few hw makers are offering machines that are solid state, heat/dust/humidity resistant. The XO has all of that and is cheap. The few hw makers I've seen offering similar features are rather expensive. Additionally, I am convinced that school administrators would see the XO-as-XS as a spare XO and distribute to kids who don't have XO's at their school or take it home to their own child. It won't even boot to Sugar, and user education call take a part here -- I don't think the confusion will last very long. You may not want it for the Nepal deployment, but we cannot argue with the fact that there is intense interest. There are also other use cases where it's useful to be able to run the XS sw on an XO - for example, the warehouse scenarios where you take 1 XO and use it as the server that will update all the other XOs. The issue of theft is real, but is not limited to the XO hw -- and in fact, a normal tower pc is in some cases more desirable - as it's a general purpose machine. Uruguay has -- I believe -- done some interesting work in securing their school servers, though I don't know the details. This is work that needs to happen for a long list of reasons. Within the constraints we have, I aim for flexibility: give the local teams a range of options, and this is a _very_ valuable one, one that is within reach now that a vanilla Fedora boots on the XO. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
