Working with OLPC and Sugarlabs over the past two and a half years exposed me to a number of “powerful ideas“, and to a culture which made learning fun, something that I wish I had access to while in School. While going through the “background philosophy” behind OLPC and Sugar, in the various examples and illustrations, I could find reflections of my younger self, asking questions which I was not supposed to ask, or trying to make my own theories and evolving them before figuring out whatever was written in the books.

This pleasure of finding a learning culture with which I could identify myself has led me to choose my next adventure. This year (tentatively in mid-summer) I’ll be joining the MIT Media Lab as a graduate student/research assistant in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group.

However, this comes at the cost of me leaving OLPC and cutting down my activities at Sugarlabs (though I hope to volunteer, I’ll certainly not be devoting anywhere near the amount of time I spend now). It has been an incredible two and a half years – working with such passionate and brilliant people has been an awesome experience and a rare privilege. There are certain experiences which change the way one looks at life and think, and this has been certainly one of them for me.

I will be also moving to the Cambridge/Boston area (it’s funny how, after working remotely across the globe for OLPC, once I have left the organization, I’ll be situated across the street from them). If you have any tips about living in and around Cambridge/Boston, especially about places to stay (I’m a still undecided about where to stay, and I’m looking for potential flat/apartment-mate(s)), do put in a comment in my blog or mail me at sayamindu at gmail.

From my friend Shamashis’s blog:

We took the route down Colaba Causeway, across Metro Plaza, Food Inn, Café Leopold and then turned once again towards Gateway. It was the same scene everywhere. Santa poured out gifts to toddlers, infants, teenagers, the policemen on the street, the security guards of Taj and the shopkeepers on the pavement. Santa went to the kid who sold vada pav and gave him his share. Everyone smiled, everyone was happy. We had achieved our goal. Every moment was turning out to be priceless.

His entire experience is narrated in two parts (1, 2).

Wow, it looks like one of the operators scheduled to release the iPhone in India has announced the price, and it is going to cost more than 700 USD for the 8 GB model.


And there will be no 3G as well, at least till the middle of next year (the process for rolling out 3G in the country has only just begun).

• Flight back from Boston was not as bad as expected, since I was upgraded to business class .
• Had a horrible pain on my right index finger throughout the last week, and decided to stay away from computers and do some reading during the weekend. (ultimately I ended up sleeping much more that I really should)
• My old mobile phone (Motorola A780) was causing a lot of problems, and so I decided to replace it with a Nokia E71. It took me some time to get accustomed to the new UI, but apart from that, I am quite happy with it (love the keyboard and the thin design of the set).
• Managed to set up the NAS device that I had got in my home network. I was a bit worried about the device supporting only Samba, but it turned out that it runs some kind of embedded Linux set up, and enabling NFS was pretty easy.

• Summer of Code Updates
  Julen has been showing awesome progress with his SoC project. He has already completed implementing the first feature in the project roadmap, and his ideas on feature #2 looks excellent.
• Going back home
  Today, I go back home, after spending around two weeks in Cambridge. It has been an exciting and productive visit – I got the chance to interact with a lot of people, and to do a lot of brainstorming on some of the problems that have been bugging us, and my personal TODO list for the next few months seems to be quite interesting.
• Some statistics
  People often wonder about the exact number of OLPC XO-1 laptops out there. Till date,
  Number of laptops shipped: 390,000
  Number of laptops being built per month (currently): 50,000
  That would be, I guess, one of the single largest Fedora derivative deployments out there .

• My Dell XPS M1330 laptop had been freezing randomly for the past one month or so, and finally, on Monday I decided to call up their customer support. After around 40 minutes of being kept on hold and being redirected among different departments and IVRSs, I finally got hold of a support guy, who was quite helpful. He told me that complaints similar to mine had been coming in for some days, and he would send someone to replace the laptop’s motherboard by Thursday. Which was OK, till Thursday evening…
  On Thursday evening, I got a call from a Kolkata number, and the guy on the phone told me that the replacement motherboard has not arrived yet, and they had no clue whatsoever on when it could land up. The guy was however, helpful enough to give his direct contact number, but explained that he was working for some subcontractor hired by Dell (Wipro ??) and all I can do at this stage is call up Dell support again. Bleh… so much for “Next Day On Site Service”.
  (I really hope that this does not turn out to be like my previous experience with Dell)
• In case you are trying to flash your OLPC XO-1 drive with a SD card, and if you get an error which says SDHCI: command ready timeout, Bad read of .img file, take a look at this workaround. It should work.
• Finally managed to watch Khuda Ke Liye. Highly recommended.

Last Saturday, I appeared for what was the last examination of our four year BTech degree course. College life has ended for me, at least for the time being. It was fun while it lasted, bordering on insanity sometimes (can you imagine “normal people” participating in a sport which involves pouring rotten, and really stinky paper-maché over each other’s heads ?). The last few days were bitter-sweet, with a lot of memories, some of them happy, some of them not so happy, coming back all at once. I guess, in the end, all of us had a wonderful four years, years that made us mature, strong, and much more acquainted with the ways of the world. Thanks to everyone who has been beside me during the past four years, through all my ups, downs, successes and failures. Thanks a lot .

This week, I’m starting full time with OLPC. Apart from facilitating and helping with the l10n and i18n efforts (which I have been doing for the past six months), I also expect to start helping out with various parts of the OLPC software stack.

This part of life is called: interesting .

• The beginning of 2008 has been a little rough for me, as I had fever and headache for the past few days (starting from the 2nd, to be exact). Luckily, things seem to be getting better now, and currently, the fever seem to have subsided, leaving behind a pretty nasty cough though .
  My Hyderabad trip, on the other hand, turned out to be a refreshing break, and I met my little niece for the first time .
   
• It looks like I’ll be going for Gnunify, though the details are not finalized yet.

• Exams
  End semester exams are over. Only one more semester to go before I graduate. Yay!!
  
  
• Hyderabad
  I’ll spending Christmas in Hyderabad – and will be probably there fpr most of the week as well. I will be online though (hopefully), except when I’m travelling (it looks like I’ll be coming back by train – a 30 hour journey).
  
  
• New Camera
  I finally decided to replace my aging Canon A95, and thought that I would move to a DSLR. Kushal had got a Nikon D80 a few months back, and after playing around with his camera for sometime, I decided to go for the same. I also bought a 50mm prime lense to go with it. ..and I’m having fun with it
   
  
    
  
  
   
  
  
• OLPC Translations
  I must admit that the rapid progress of the OLPC translations has somewhat surprised me. The project is barely over a month old, and we have a very active and enthusiastic community growing up very quickly. I think that the decision to use Pootle has worked out very well for us, inspite of the initial pains, primarily due to
  • Low barrier of entry for translators
    You need not worry about VCS access, or having to understand PO files – you simply create an account, and start to translate the strings.
    This of course, requires that the language coordinator has to be extra careful before pressing the “commit” button, and check that all the translations actually make sense before they go into the master git repository at dev.laptop.org. But in some ways, this is also applicable to translations being done via other methods as well, and Pootle has a system where the language coordinator can actually approve each translated string before it is integrated into the PO file.
  • Support for offline translations
    This is very important, because it is wrong to assume that volunteer translators have good quality internet access all the time. Pootle allows you to download PO files, and upload them (with options for either merging the translations, or overwriting them) when you are done.

  In the end however, all of this boils down to having an active l10n community, and I would really like to thank each and everyone of the translation community for pushing things so far. You all rock .

• A report on XO deployment at Peru

  Parents in Arahuay are asking Mendoza, the visiting psychologist, what the Internet can do for them.
  Among them is Charito Arrendondo, 39, who sheds brief tears of joy when a reporter asks what the laptop belonging to ruddy-cheeked Miluska — the youngest of her six children — has meant to her. Miluska’s father, it turns out, abandoned the family when she was 1.
  “We never imagined having a computer,” said Arrendondo, a cook.

  The entire article makes for a fascinating read – it is available online here.

The organisers of FOSS.IN have released the preliminary list of speakers in the event and we seem to have a really interesting set of talks for the GNOME Project Day. From the FOSS.IN website,

• Andrew Cowie – The challenges and opportunities of properly writing multi-threaded GTK based GNOME programs
• Lennart Poettering – ZeroConf Networking with Avahi
• Mairin Duffy – Beginners guide to UI design
• Naba Kumar – Integrated communication framework for GNOME – elements of telepathy
• Ritesh Khadgaray – hunting bugs
• Runa Bhattacharjee – Gnome Translation Project-Your language on the Desktopv
• Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay – Bring your own hammer – I have the nails !
• Shreyas Srinivasan – Clutter: Fun with opengl interfaces

I would have loved to attend FOSS.in (especially the Project Day), but unfortunately my seventh semester exams begin on the 3^rd of December. Maybe from next year…


In other news, I have started to do contract work for the OLPC, and right now I’m helping out with the establishment of a smooth work flow for the localisation of various activities and software targetted for the XO. I’m pretty excited about this, especially since intially after getting a negative response from our HRD Ministry, it looks like the XO will be used by Indian children after all, through some other channels. That adds a new dimension to my work altogether .