Sunday, March 2, 2008

Adelaide OLPC Workshop

Sparky: When out this afternoon to a meetup with 6 other XO's. It was great!

Today (Sun, 2 Mar 2008), Adelaide held it's first OLPC Workshop, organised by Janet Hawton. Held in the Education.Au building in Dulwich, this meeting was attended by twelve people who had expressed an interest in the XO laptops in one form or another. Interest ranged from hacking the low level power management chip (and removing proprietary encumbrances) to 'Oooo pretty'.

David is hacking on support for the blind users, and has gotten the XO to talk, with the addition of just two programs.

Kim (with an XO in loan from Joel) was investigating recent issues with wireless interference between the mesh network and local access points.

Karl was doing a audit of the various wireless firmware versions on the XO's available.

Michael was describing his system for reducing Google query times from three seconds to 12 ms, using a combination of a custom protocol over UDP, and lazy DNS with IPv6. Called 'gnugo'l it would be useful to the OLPC project by speeding up the responses to web searches.

The event started off with lunch in Adelaide, before moving out Dulwich. A big thanks to Education.Au for making the venue available. Another OLPC workshop will definitely happen again... so watch out for it.

1 comment:

lucychili said...

Next one is planned for 16 March at Bridgewater Hall ITShare workshop.
This is a general Barcamp making kind of event and the olpc folk will be bringing their xo's to work with. 10.30 onwards
BBQ onsite BYO stuff

Cheers jh