Chris Ball

Jorge Cardoso - Milonga

Posted by Chris Ball Tue, 19 May 2009 03:47:00 GMT

I'm off to Taipei to help with the XO-1.5 bringup. Before I go, here's a new guitar piece — the milonga is a Uruguayan relative of the tango.

Tags guitar, music, olpc | no comments

The OLPC XO-1.5 and Fedora 11

Posted by Chris Ball Sat, 16 May 2009 02:20:00 GMT

Some good news from OLPC: we've decided to base the new XO-1.5 laptop's software release on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. (This will mostly be useful for older kids in high school.)

I'm particularly happy about this plan because it will allow us to catch up with the awesome work present in the Sugar community's most recent release, Sugar 0.84, as well as merging the latest Fedora work and including GNOME into the mix for the first time. The new machines will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both environments at once.

We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already, including Sugar; in fact, we already have an F11+Sugar+GNOME build for the XO-1 using pure Fedora packages. That build will get better as a result of this work (although OLPC's focus will be on getting the XO-1.5 running) and it will form the basis for the XO-1.5 build.

If you're interested in contributing, we'd certainly love your help, and you can find us on the fedora-olpc mailing list, and freenode IRC's #fedora-olpc channel. Our existing F11 build images for the XO-1 are here, and we'll soon begin publishing images for the XO-1.5 too. XO-1.5 beta machines will start to be manufactured over the next few months, and will be available to contributors as part of our Contributors Program once the hardware's up and running.

Finally, thanks are due to the volunteer Fedora packagers and testers who helped us get to the point of being able to commit to Fedora 11 for this new build, in particular: Fabian Affolter, Kushal Das, Greg DeKoenigsberg, Martin Dengler, Scott Douglass, Sebastian Dziallas, Mikus Grinbergs, Bryan Kearney, Gary C. Martin, Steven M. Parrish, and Peter Robinson. Thanks!

Tags fedora, gnome, olpc, sugar | 8 comments

Processing Time

Posted by Chris Ball Sun, 03 May 2009 15:28:00 GMT

Madeleine and I took part in the Processing Time code jam yesterday, and won a prize! Processing is a programming language for creating data visualizations, which Mad's been using to create graphs for papers recently. Our entry was a program that takes a description of a tree (in Newick format) and draws it, allowing you to zoom in to explore large trees.

The example we used, and the motivation for creating the program, was the phylogenetic tree of life. Since creating this comic, Mad's wanted a way to create a zooming interface to explore the same, but we didn't get around to it until we were put in the setting of having four hours to code and then present something. It was a lot of fun; I did the boring part of walking a tree recursively, and Mad worked out the geometry for a radial graphing algorithm that splits points along the edge of a semi-circle equally between end leaves of the tree.

For now, the code's in this Processing sketch archive, but we're hoping to make an applet out of it soon. Hat tip to the authors of TreeJuxtaposer, whose Newick format parser we used.

Here's the obligatory screenshot — zoomed in on part of the mammals section — which isn't very exciting since the whole point is to explore the tree interactively:


Thanks to the organizers and other participants for such a fun day; it's great to be given motivation to work on something fun, and lovely to be recognized for it too.

Tags biology, processing | 6 comments