First of all, my research paper has been accepted in the Latin-American Conference of Informatics (CLEI), which is something that I am very proud of. My paper title stands for "Binary Classification Rules Evolution using Linear Genetic Programming: A livestock disposal problem application." I will explain more about it ASAP.
Secondly, I have been working very closely with Daniel Drake improving and extending Inventario and YAAS. Both systems are being used in other deployments like Nicaragua's OLPC deployment. I have am very impressed by Daniel's patches and enhancements and I am very proud of seeing my projects being used and improved by people like him.
So, what else have been going on lately? The last months I have been intensively working on a new OS version for the XO laptops in collaboration with the SUGAR development community, Activity Central and developers from Uruguay's Plan Ceibal. The whole purpose for this project was to provide a OS with features that are urgently needed by most of the deployments.
Please meet Dextrose! It was a long and stressful process but it was definitely worthed, and I am not only judging by the final software results. The most remarkable aspect of this project was the international collaboration between hackers all around the world. We even had a 10 days dextrose camp here in Paraguay!
My contributions to this project contain a lot of bug fixes, enhancements, local customizations and new features. I would not explain to much about the bug fixes and enhancements, but includes fixes for broken features, strange behaviors and storage space waste.
In the enhancement side I have merged Daniel Castelo (Plan Ceibal) extensions for my previous 3G support patches. His work includes connection statistics and proper connection errors displaying.
On the new features side, I have been working closely with Esteban Arias (Plan Ceibal) rewriting, refactoring and mering with my own work his usb stick backup system. The refactoring work allowed me to use the same dialogs and interfaces for OLPC's wireless backup system and other subsystems.
Another feature I implemented was a protected activities functionality which disables the erasure option for critical educational content. This feature is very controversial because in my humble opinion is a naive attempt to solve discipline problems with software. But it took me a very little time to implement so let see if it really helps ;) (UPDATE: It was merged on Sugar's mainstream code)
There are way to many improvements and new features for this new OS image, one of my favorites is Anish Mangal (Activity Central) implementation of a resource displaying tool which concept was designed by Sugar community suggestions (me included!). Other amazing contribution was Esteban Arias accessibility features pack.
In a lower level aspect, Bernie Innocenti and myself have been working fixing many problems with C libraries like Metacity. Most of the changes were not upstream-able so we had to roll local rpm packages for those changes.
I am hoping for other deployments to find Dextrose as useful as we do, so they can take advantage of all this new features and improvements. One surprising example was the New Zealand deployment tech guys using Dextrose and following its development closely.
If you want to contribute to this project don't hesitate! Please visit us at #olpc-paraguay at freenode. Ill update this article with a few photos and Dextrose screenshots soon :)
UPDATE: Please take a look a this slides used by Bernie at the San Francisco Sugar/OLPC Summit.
