Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
William Schaub wrote:
The idea is basically a decentralized discussion forum that
automatically propagates itself amongst all XO laptops that are in
range.
That's a great project! This is definitely something that OLPC and Sugar
Labs are interested in. You should mention it on sugar-devel.
I just wanted to get your comments and see how I could best turn this
into something that could benefit the OLPC community
as well as the general public at large.
It sounds like you've already started thinking about what might be the
most important problem here: supporting a variety of transports. Sugar
currently uses Telepathy for all peer identification and communication,
but different mechanisms are appropriate in different situations. I think
you'll have the most success if you can be flexible enough to play well
with a variety of identity and communication systems.
The other important thing is to maintain a strong abstraction between
storage and display so that new GUIs may be created without rewriting the
core. It sounds like you're doing that too.
The other fun problems relate to retention/transfer policy and space
utilization, but those can likely be adapted after the design is in place.
For plain text there's hardly a problem at all, but I expect you'll want
to do more than just text.
By the way, Sugar probably won't integrate anything that depends on Perl,
so I suggest that you minimize your reliance on it. Also, for efficiency
it would be cool if you could make sure that the background memory usage
is small.
--Ben
It is basically just a private usenet over adhoc wireless (or the mesh
network) and other transports.
Anything that can be done with usenet can be done with this system it is
implemented mainly as a collection of native Linux software (the usenet
server being one of them) and some scripts that make the usenet server
exchange articles with whatever machine is detected using the perl
scripts. I used Perl because that is the language I have the most
experience with. and its really good for throwing things like this
together in a hurry.
I really want to implement the thing in Java so that I can try and run
it on various smart phones. I may be getting a blackberry to play with
soon for that purpose.
As far as managing the space the news spool takes up is concerned with
inn there is a storage method called the circular news filesystem. which
basically fills up with articles and when it is full the earliest
articles are overwritten with new ones.
so you could dedicate a fixed amount of space for article storage and
not consume more than that.
I would be interested in getting this integrated in sugar but right now
its way too much of a mess for that. I wish they would just distribute
perl with sugar and be done with it but that will likely never happen.
I'm sure I could re-write the glue in python or even C if I needed to.
but I figure Perl is probably Ok to stick with for the early stages of
the project.
Since I want to make it work on smart phones and PDAs I will need to
make a streamlined version that isn't just glue around INN. That version
would likely be the one to consider for Sugar.
I didn't start out with the idea of making it just an OLPC project but
rather a generic Linux and eventually cross-platform project. but the
idea first came up at an OLPC users group meeting and the XO-1 has been
a nice platform to develop/test on.
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