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Nirav Patel | 1 Jul 01:08

Re: [OLPC-GSoC] GSoC Status Report: Vision Processing

Joel,

Thanks for testing it.  The python you were using looks fine.  I can't
say for sure without the hardware, but if it's crashing intermittently
during cam.start(), its very likely to be a driver issue.  Does the
webcam work with xawtv?  You might also check dmesg to see if the
driver is complaining about anything.

Nirav

>
> On 6/30/08, Joel Stanley <joel.stan <at> gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello Nirav,
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 5:37 PM, Nirav Patel <nrpatel <at> gmail.com> wrote:
>>> functions to add.  Also, I only have the camera in the XO, vivi, and a
>>> poorly supported USB webcam, so if anyone could test it on other
>>> webcams, that would be great.
>>
>> I've had a play with your work on my laptop - a ThinkPad with a webcam
>> supported by the out-of-kernel uvcvideo driver.  The demos you wrote
>> are cool, and it's fun being able to play with the webcam using just a
>> few lines of python.
>>
>> It works well for the most part - I can use it to give me an image 9
>> out of 10 tries, but occasionally the process locks up, requiring me
>> to kill it (ctrl-c was ineffective).
>>
>> I've been trying to reproduce the lockup today, but can't get it to
>> trigger.  I have been able to get the following to happen every 3 or
(Continue reading)

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Joel Stanley | 1 Jul 02:45
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Re: [OLPC-GSoC] GSoC Status Report: Vision Processing

Hello Nirav,

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 4:34 PM,  <nrpatel <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for testing.  The python you were using looks fine.  I can't
> say for sure without the hardware, but if it's crashing intermittently
> during cam.start(), its very likely to be a driver issue.  Does the
> webcam work with xawtv?  You might also check dmesg to see if the
> driver is complaining about anything.

I updated to the latest svn version of uvcvideo - there were a few
changes, not sure if they were applicable to my camera though.  I
haven't been able to reproduce any errors this morning, so perhaps the
bug is gone.

There doesn't appear to be anything about in dmesg. The camera works
fine with cheese[1], and xawtv.  There was some warnings thrown by
xawtv, I'm not familiar with it so I'm not sure if they're normal or
not.  I've included them below.

Cheers,

Joel

[1] http://www.gnome.org/projects/cheese/

--

$ xawtv
This is xawtv-3.95.dfsg.1, running on Linux/x86_64 (2.6.26-2-generic)
xinerama 0: 1440x900+0+0
(Continue reading)

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Guillaume Desmottes | 1 Jul 09:36
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Re: [SURVEY] builders, how do you build? what do you build?

Le vendredi 27 juin 2008 à 17:23 -0400, Erik Garrison a écrit :
> Developers, specifically those running build systems,
> 
> Many of us are confused about the software flows inherent in the daily
> build processes which are occuring at OLPC.  I would like to conduct a
> simple survey of all people building software for OLPC so that all of us
> can better understand the sources of the software running on the XO and
> XS without individually hassling the responsible parties every time we
> have generic questions about their build processes.
> 
> Builders, please describe your local build network:
> 
> 0) Who are you and who do you directly work for?

Guillaume Desmottes, working for Collabora Ltd.

> 1) What do you build?

The Telepathy Stack: telepathy-gabble, telepathy-glib, telepathy-salut,
telepathy-stream-engine
The Farsight Stack (used for the video-chat activity): farsight,
gstreamer-plugins-farsight, libjingle

and sugar-presence-service.

> 2) Where does it come from? / Who directly provides you with source code?

Most of the time I package mine own new releases (as I'm upstream of the
presence-service, Gabble and Salut) or include a patch I just wrote to
fix some issue.
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Tomeu Vizoso | 1 Jul 10:53

Re: Updates This Week to the Sugar Almanac - Using the Datastore and More

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:17 PM, Faisal Anwar <fanwar <at> mediamods.com> wrote:
> Hi Tomeu,
>
> Thanks so much for the clarifications. I understand now the abstraction
> intended for metadata accessed through DSMetadata and DSObject and will try
> to write that up a little more forcefully. I guess the main thing I was
> concerned about was having a consistent and lasting interface to the
> datastore (which can certainly be implemented in the form of a dictionary if
> that is most appropriate). I hope this abstraction will hold moving forward
> so that activity developers are confident that their hooks in to datastore
> will work with the same behavior over time (this is part of the purpose of
> the documentation I'm working on).

Yes, I'm confident that we'll be able to maintain compatibility with
activities that use the current API, although I also hope that we'll
come up with something much better soon.

> With regards to the lower level DBus calls in datastore and elsewhere, what
> I'm really looking out for is what levels of the tech stack an activity
> developer will need to learn to build a fairly robust and complex activity.
> Of course, for some things lower level Dbus calls may be unavoidable, but
> I'm assuming that there should be a substantive interface in python that
> abstracts away the Dbus functionality for most developers. As I go through
> more of the code in datastore, presence, and elsewhere, I'll try to identify
> cases where perhaps a low-level Dbus call could be abstracted to some
> standard python calls.

Well, the low level API isn't really that hard to use. The dbus-python
bindings already do a great work of making easier to use DBus services
from python. If you find any capability in the low level bindings that
(Continue reading)

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David Van Assche | 1 Jul 13:56
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Re: offline moodle

Hi Bryan,

Comments are inline...

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan.berry <at> gmail.com> wrote:
That's a great overview David,

We need to get working quickly on developing course materials. Our two
full-time educators, Kamana and Sunil, currently write out lesson plans
and activity descriptions in MS Word. Not quite ideal :)

Don't you have a local moodle install in the office? that might help in the very short run...
 
I want to get them using Moodle asap. It will improve collaboration b/w
the developers and educators. Also, we are currently storing
supplementary materials on the fileserver, which is again a pretty lousy
way to do it. Kamana and Sunil want to lay out a whole course, i.e.,
class2 mathematics with descriptions of activities and exercises they
want developed, and then help the developers build activities that meet
their ideas. Eventually I want to put the courses on a public server (if
I had the hosting budget) so volunteers can more easily create
activities to meet the ideas dreamt up by Sunil and Kamana.

yeah, in terms of supplementary materials, I suggest looking at DOOR, which allows for exporting and importing of such materials to the moodle community (and other IMS based systems) at large. But the best solution for what you mention is of course some kind of offline moodle.
 

>and at the moment only the course material is downloaded (no events, no
>task
>manager, etc.)

At the moment, this is enough for us to work w/, just the static
materials. What was the resource consumption of Jolongo on your eeePC?

I've got bad news about Jolongo. At the moment it will not install on the eeepc, I'm trying to iron out bugs with developers of the Jolongo team, but it could take some time. In terms of Adobe AIR, that totally kils the XO... as in, try to install it and the system reboots, and takes the journal with it. So, I guess that's a no-go for the time being.
 

Perhaps an interim option as we wait for the offline clients to mature
is to write a shell script that harvests the static html and embedded
activities like Flash and Etoys to an .xo bundle.

I mentioned there are quite a few moodle plugins that allow for embedded flash content (not sure about etoys)... but... the import/export function of Moodle, which is what both offline moodle solutions use to transfer courses is probably your best bet.

Now for the good news (maybe.) I've managed to get apache2+php5+mysql5+moodle working great on the asus eeepc. I first tried installing with an xampp package, which works ok, but then you have to install moodle manually from source, and put it in the right places. So I tried the old fashioned way (apt-get install moodle apache2 mysql-server mysql-client php5 php-mysql php-pear) and voila... it installed everything necessary and it was just a matter of going to localhost/moodle to do the rest. With that setup it is very easy to create local courses then export them to another moodle... a one click  process...  basically... this is the open university way... and I'm now going to try the same with the XO - incremental backups which I'm looking into now.

What is surprising is how fast it runs... basically instant gratification... though maybe flash intensive items might slow it down... If you could give the course creators eeepcs instead of XOs, the issue would be solved...

Kind Regards,
David


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Bryan Berry | 1 Jul 15:54
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Re: offline moodle


>Don't you have a local moodle install in the office? that might help in
>the very short run...

already set up and hope to get Kamana and Sunil started on it later this
week. 

>What is surprising is how fast it runs... basically instant
>gratification... though maybe flash intensive items might slow it 

great to hear, I bet w/ optimizations we could really throttle down
mysql and apache until sqlite support is ready for moodle

>I mentioned there are quite a few moodle plugins that allow for
>embedded flash content (not sure about etoys)
We could just embed a link to launch etoys as a separate application,
not w/in the browser. This will require hacking the sugar security
mechanisms but we can do it.

Bernie also tried xamp on the XO and says it was fairly responsive
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Martin Langhoff | 1 Jul 17:15
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Re: offline moodle

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 4:01 AM, David Van Assche <dvanassche <at> gmail.com> wrote:
>    I'm currently working with OLE Nepal to find the best solution for
> synchronising online and offline course material via Moodle. There are
> currently 2 projects that do exactly this via different mechanisms, though
> currently they use what some might consider to be a heavy memory and cpu
> footprint by using the same mechanisms of a regular online moodle (namely a
> webserver, server side scripting and database (mysql or sqlite) )

Cool. This is somewhat of a re-post of an earlier message to
server-devel, IIRC. I'm glad you've done more research on the jolongo
track as I hadn't heard of it before.

> 1. Open University Moodfle on a stick

As you say, I have been involved on this track. The work OU is doing
is great, and it advances Moodle in various fronts that we care about.
The overall implementation of it is not a good long term bet for us.
It might be feasible short term but it will surely need a ton of work
to fly, including a port to sqlite and a threaded or forking webserver
in pure PHP.

In other words, if there's anyone interested in doing the heavy
lifting, I can provide a bit of mentoring on what needs to be tuned on
the PHP & Moodle side. It will need a wrapper similar to the
wikislices activity too.

> 2. Jolongo (meaning backpack in slang Latin American Spanish)

also a Spanish native speaker - but I didn't know Jolongo as a slang term :-)

> adobe AIR

That is possibly not redistributable by us :-(

Is there a good explanation anywhere of what techniques are being
used? My long term plans are to work on a disconnected operation based
on Google-Gears or something similar. XPycom is included with Browse
IIRC, but it's very hard to get traction ustream with an XO-only
technology, so GG is much more likely to be a long-term viable plan.

If the AIR-based code can be ported to GG, then it could be a viable track.

> version will be using sqlite, so that could even things out. Giving it a
> couple of months will allow us to see which one of these projects is the
> best adapted to usage by OLE and olpc.

For OLPC, I suspect AIR is a no-go due to licensing reasons. Gears, on
the other hand, is definitely possible.

cheers,

m
--

-- 
 martin.langhoff <at> gmail.com
 martin <at> laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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Bryan Berry | 2 Jul 02:49
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Re: offline Moodle

Martin,

I will be speaking w/ a potential full-time volunteer today who has some
significant web development experience. I will discuss w/ him the
possibility of working almost entirely on offline Moodle for the next 12
months. He may take you up on your generous offer of mentoring.

>In other words, if there's anyone interested in doing the heavy
>lifting, I can provide a bit of mentoring on what needs to be tuned on
>the PHP & Moodle side. It will need a wrapper similar to the
>wikislices activity too.

>used? My long term plans are to work on a disconnected operation based
>on Google-Gears or something similar. XPycom is included with Browse

I also think that Google Gears is the long term way to go
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Martin Langhoff | 2 Jul 05:06
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Re: offline Moodle

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 8:49 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan.berry <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> I will be speaking w/ a potential full-time volunteer today who has some
> significant web development experience. I will discuss w/ him the
> possibility of working almost entirely on offline Moodle for the next 12
> months. He may take you up on your generous offer of mentoring.

That is great to hear! It's not an easy space though, I don't want to
scare anyone, but it is a complex area to work in :-)

cheers,

m
--

-- 
 martin.langhoff <at> gmail.com
 martin <at> laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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Bryan Berry | 2 Jul 05:23
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Re: offline Moodle

I should caveat that this is my idea on how best to use him. others in
the OLE Nepal team may want him to focus more on our fedora-commons
based E-Library. don't worry, it's all open-source :) and all will code
and config will be available by an open-source license except for our
passwords :)

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff <at> gmail.com>
To: Bryan Berry <bryan.berry <at> gmail.com>
Cc: sugar <at> lists.laptop.org, David Van Assche <dvanassche <at> gmail.com>
Subject: Re: offline Moodle
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:06:00 -0400

That is great to hear! It's not an easy space though, I don't want to
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Gmane