The little kid that could

This is Sumit, a little kid who lives next door from us in Bhagmalpur. I took this picture casually, as I walked the streets of the village back in 2003. I was amused by the tripod of a walker. It’s locally made, probably bought at the local faire, and it works well for what it’s supposed to do. It’s not something you’d find at your local Toys R Us, but then again, if you did, it would be in the retro throwback section, and would cost you a fortune!

Sumit and his tripod, circa 2003

Coming back to Sumit, I saw him again in January 2013. I didn’t know his name was Sumit, or he was the same kid in the picture! He showed a lot of interest in the XOs, the repair sessions, the reflashing, and installing new software. I asked him to help me with some minor tasks, like running a command, but he wanted to know the “why and how” of it. So, I explained to him how the datastore backup happens, and why it takes a random window of 30 minutes to backup (those who know ds-backup would know!). He was curious. He wanted to learn. This was surely not in his curriculum! Nor in a lesson plan! He had gotten the bug of curiosity, and that’s something I can relate to.

Eventually, Sumit helped me with installation, backup, running Python scripts, bash commands, rsync and such. He did a site survey of the village and helped us with installing the Wi-Fi access points. He took apart his XO laptop, repaired a WiFi antenna cable that had popped out, and put things back together. He learned how to access the server, install new Sugar activities, install the Hindi Wikipedia bundle, browse for a ton of offline TED talks, books and music, all  locally hosted on the server. In fact, given that I had a very short window to get a lot done, he became my point of distribution of information to the rest of the kids – a student assistant of sorts, and a fine one at that Then, one day, he told me that the photo of the kid with a tripod was really him! How cool is that?!

Sumit helping with a Wi-Fi site survey

Sumit repairing by flashlight – we had no electricity.

Could any of this be possible, if we didn’t have OLPC laptops there? Probably not. The local private and parochial schools have “computer classes” where the computer is always broken, and the teacher never shows up, and the parents still pay for all that’s not delivered. A little green laptop is making a difference where it matters…and Sumit is the little kid that could.

Sumit repairing a broken screen, circa 2013

Android on the OLPC XO-4 touch

It took up all of Spring break, but it’s done. I give you Android on the OLPC XO-4 touch!

Magical server platform

It has been a few weeks since I got back from Bhagmalpur. Looking through pictures and notes, I realize that the choice of server hardware is one of the most critical choices when one is in the field and all constraints decide to bite at the same time. We use a FitPC for this project to run XS 0.6 school server. A couple of years ago, Ben Tran (one of my students at SF State) had run through a whole bunch of load tests on six different hardware platforms. He did this as part of his thesis project. FitPC was one of the six platforms (page 149). From his simulations (using Selenium and jMeter) we found the FitPC to be fairly ok in supporting  basic loads for Bhagmalpur. After all, we weren’t thinking of doing any heavy lifting. It still runs Moodle on a PostgreSQL database, but we don’t in fact use Moodle in the traditional sense.

The FitPC box is great because it consumes only 8 watts of power. It is also small enough and has no moving parts (except the hard drive, but we are using a SSD, so everything is solid state). The body is made of aluminum and acts as a heat sink. At 64GB, the drive has enough space to host all TED Talks, some books, music, etc. and back up all the journals from the XO-1 laptops there. We use an external Wi-Fi AP (Ubiquiti Picostation2), powered by a Power over Ethernet (PoE) unit.

Fit PC 1 as School Server

We power the FitPC using a setup of solar panels, batteries, invertors, charge controllers, and a spaghetti of wiring. As I was perched precariously on a stool, installing the school server in -1°C weather, it occurred to me: What if we could get a server that was hardy, had its own battery backup, had a charge controller to take input directly from a solar panel, and could manage to serve the entire community? Surely we must have something that fits the bill!

It’s…an XO!

XS on XO w/piggyback USB storage

All said and done, the XO is a hardy platform that has its own battery backup, the EC to manage solar input, and a form factor that includes (unlike a Raspberry Pi) a keyboard, monitor and a touchpad. You can even hang it off a peg if you’d like! Need more storage? Use a SD card or a SSD in a USB enclosure, velcro’d to the back of the XO. Need an AP? Use a USB dongle and plug in anything that works for you. Sure the crunch of the AMD Geode on the XO-1 doesn’t leave much room for performance, but if all you are doing is serving files via Apache, its not bad at all. Of course, we also have XO 1.5, XO1.75 and soon the XO-4 as valid candidates.

To this end, I like where the XS Community Edition (XSCE) is going. A basic core plus optional add-ons built on top of a stable OLPC/Sugar release. Modular design, that allows for flexibility (add your own CMS, LMS, Book server). Best of all, the initial target is the XO 1.75. So far in the tests, the 0.21 build (Phoebe) seems to hold up fairly well. There is much work that needs to be done, but I think we are on the right track. The moment I get convinced that the server in Bhagmalpur can be replaced by a server on an XO, I’ll replace it. Until then, download, install, test. Repeat as needed.

Mapping the village

One of the challenges I had in Bhagmalpur was that I didn’t have a partner to tag team with me. I had to plan and execute everything. Hindsight wisdom: Get a partner to help out! I also wanted to map the village when I was there, but I couldn’t find enough time to get away from reflashing the XOs and configuring the school server. In the mean time, all these kids would hang around and follow me, carefully looking at everything I did. I don’t work well under that much scrutiny

So, I banded a few kids into a team. Then, I turned on the My Tracks Android app on my phone and gave the phone to the team. I explained what the task was, how GPS works, and then I asked them to walk the village – every possible street – and come back to me. They did so, with a lot of interest, and a while later, I had my GPS trace! I exported the trace to GPX format and uploaded to OpenStreetMap. Here’s the trace. I’m editing the various points of interest as I go along.

How cool it is to see the work of these kids on the web! I hope that some day they’ll get good Internet access and they’ll be able to see their trace themselves.

GPS trace of Bhagmalpur

The constraints of time and temperature

I had a short visit to Bhagmalpur a few weeks ago. I got to the village on January 7, 2013 in the evening, and left on the morning of Jan 13, 2013. Much had to be done in this duration.

I had to unlock the XOs so I could use a Dextrose image from Activity Central. The main reason for choosing this image was the Hindi language support. After getting the keys through the collection stick process, and many thanks to guys at OLPC, I got the machine unlocked. Next, I had to flash all the 26 XO-1 laptops there. NANDBlaster gave me all sorts of errors, so I had to do it by hand.

I had to reconfigure the XS school server to use an Access Point instead of a Mesh antenna (Bhagmalpur might have been the only OLPC deployment that still used a mesh antenna…but no more!). The network interfaces had to be fudged with. Thankfully xs-swapnics worked nicely. I had to show them how to use the Wireless Graph activity to do a site survey and determine the bounds of their Wi-Fi bubble. I had to do the wiring for the XS so it could run off a 12V battery. I had to install the APs in a high location and load balance with a repeater in WDS mode, at someone else’s house, so we could extend the Wi-Fi bubble.

I had to add oodles of content – 1,368 TED videos, music, books, activities, and build a simple HTML page for navigation. I had to show the kids a few neat tricks with the Tuk lens kit. I had to show the kids how to repair XOs.  I had to repair damaged screens, keyboards, chargers (a mouse chewed through one), backup all the journals to the XS and then make a copy.

Oh, and this being my family’s house, I had to also be social, chat with visitors, eat the good stuff, walk the cane fields and take loads of photos.

To add to all this, I had to contend with two constraints. The state of Uttar Pradesh is terrible at several things. One of those is electricity. The AC grid comes alive at 11AM, and goes away at 1PM. Then maybe another hour or so in the evening, and then it’s back at 1AM for a couple more hours. Bulk of the work had to be done when the electrical juice went live. The timings are approximate, with no guarantees. So, I found myself sitting up at midnight, reflashing a stack of laptops.

The other constraint (and the UP government has no control over this one) was that the temperatures dropped to -1 C. With no electrical heat, and uninsulated walls, I had to sit by the fire, warm my bones, and then run off to work the laptops for 10 minutes or so, until I started to shake, and then it was back to bone-warming

Of course, my family was not quite sure why I’d give up the warmth of the fire and run off to the cold to work on laptops. To them, it didn’t seem like such a big deal if the work didn’t get done. To me, the show had to go on, no matter what.

Thankfully, I got it all done I’ll post some details soon, but in the mean time, here are the pics.

Tunnel from Bhagmalpur to SF State to Providence Basic school, Jamaica!

Ubiquiti Picostation2

A mini Internet in a box

Sumit repairing by flashlight

Named after my grandmother Kamala Verma

Charged by AC and solar

Freezing winter!

Looking at this blog site. Internet comes via the cell tower in the background.

Why are Australians dark brown?

I’m recovering from a horrible/wonderful trip to India. Bhagmalpur, Goa, Khairat and other places were great. Mumbai, not so much. Horrible to see the filth and corruption in places like Mumbai. Wonderful to see the children are doing well and there indeed is some hope.

I’ll start off by recounting a brief query by one of the children in Bhagmalpur. They were flipping through a couple of OLPC newsletters when one of them spotted the article on Australia and asked “If he is Australian, why is he dark brown?”

Two things struck me:

1) They were not simply flipping pages. They were paying attention. They were perhaps looking at others like them, elsewhere in the world.

2) How did they know Australians were anything other than dark brown? This time I wasn’t paying attention. Cricket of course! They had seen Australians on TV umpteen times, and none looked like this dark-brown kid in the picture above.

So, I sat down with them, pulled up a world map on the XO and walked them through the story of the human migration and how the indigenous Australians came to live on a continent of their own. We also talked about how the modern, fair-skinned Australians came to be, starting with the discovery of the continent and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales.

Have I planted a bug that all peoples of the world are essentially the same, and look different because of evolution over the generations? I think so. I had no choice but to let them in on the secret of Melanin.

The journey of Sugar

As I head to Bhagmalpur, I am reminded of my family’s sugarcane fields. The cane is crushed to produce sugarcane juice, which is then cooked in iron woks to make jaggery or Gud, as it is called in Hindi (गुड़). It’s quite an operation to go from sugarcane to Gud.

The etymology of Sugar reflects the geographical spread of this commodity as well. The English word “sugar” originates from the Arabic and Persian word “shakar”, which itself is derived from the Sanskrit word “sharkara”. Sugar came to English by way of Spanish/Italian/French words azúcar, zucchero, sucre. As an addendum, modern-day Rum comes from fermented molasses from sugarcane (produced in the Caribbean), comes from the last syllable of the Latin word for sugar, saccharum.

So, sharkara (sanskrit) -> shakar (arabic) -> sucre (French) -> sugar (English). Perhaps by extension, sugar (Python)? I’m off to harvest some sugarcane (गन्ना)