Summer of Tech (in general known as Summer of Code, but NZ expanded it to include more disciplines) is still almost half a year away for us. To shorten the time until then and to keep students and companies involved, the Summer of Tech team organized a Hackfest today.
They brought soon-to-be graduates and mentors from IT companies together to work on small programming projects in either PHP, Perl or Ruby on Rails for 5 hours and present the results at the end.
The e-learning team from Catalyst had dispatched François Marier and Jonathan Harker to mentor students in PHP programming. François supervised 2 students who worked on developing a block for Mahara that would display updates from Twitter and Identi.ca.
Jonathan had one student as another one had dropped out with short notice. His student created a search block for Moodle to read data from a library catalog that uses Koha.
The other teams developed a Twitter ticker, a system that would build your semester schedule according to previously defined rules, a spam protector, and a 3-player pong game to be played over a network.
The students worked closely with their mentors for the entire time. Occasionally, they had a brief break for drinks, food, Ubuntu stickers, PostgreSQL blue elephant pins, baseball caps, and shirt and bag prices.
Ruth McDavitt had the organizational hat on and made sure that everything was taken care of and that everybody was happy in general.
A group of enthusiasts of the OLPC project in New Zealand meet every Saturday at the Southern Cross Bar to play with the XO, test it, record tutorials, give newbies like me their first opportunity to see an XO live, and to have a good time.
After I had spent the previous two Saturdays in Wellington with shopping for stuff for my apartment, I finally found time to go to a meeting on 10 July 2010. It was a cold day, but I found my colleague Alastair, who is a member of the group, with a bunch of XO laptops sitting outside. I was thankful for the heaters outside because otherwise our fingers would have been frozen pretty quickly.
Alastair immediately set me up with two laptops and we started with something “geeky”: upgrading an older XO model to OS300. He basically told me the commands to type in and we watched the installation process. After that was done, a couple more people had joined in and Alastair had also installed Sugar, the Linux version that runs on the XO in my virtual machine so that I can also test it without actually having an XO.
The laptop is very sturdy and spill-proof with its plastic keyboard. The keys take a bit to get used to because they are so tiny, but I could type pretty well on them after I had gotten the hang of it.
OLPC = 2 per adult
The laptop is designed so that also very young children who may not yet be able to read can use it. Therefore, the default view lacks text and the favorites are aligned in a circle around the laptop symbol. Only when you hover over a symbol do you get the name of that activity. There is also the list view that offers more information, but nevertheless, everything is kept simple and without clutter.
The coolest thing we did, at least for me first-time user, was to set up a network among a couple of the XOs and write together in a text document. The so-called mesh network does not require internet access, and it can be activated within seconds by pushing a button on the keyboard and clicking on another user’s application that they want to share. And then you simply type away. Everybody receives their distinct color in the text document, and you see immediately what the other person is typing.
Application sharing à la XO
Our youngest XO tester that day was another colleague’s daughter who is approx. 6 months old. She happily clapped on the keyboard and was keen to test how sturdy the laptop material is by trying to bite into it.
Another regular at these Saturday meetings was Tim who recorded a couple of tutorials for upgrading to the latest version of XO and for revealing some of the hidden fun features.
He recorded a tutorial on my Nikon Coolpix S3000 and I was totally impressed by the quality of the video and the audio. As I am not into recording video, I have not had the need to use the video function of this camera which I have not yet had for very long. However, if I should need to record something, I know that I have a pretty good camera with me. And with a 4 GB SD card, I don’t have to worry to run out of memory too quickly.
If you want to know more about OLPC, here are a few links:
Accents and dialects: I either understand them or I don’t, but I am definitely not good at figuring out where people come from. Listening to a Kiwi on the phone, I pretty much detect the accent and love it. Meeting the same person face-to-face, s/he sounds differently and the accent is often not so strong.
However, what I can make out are words and phrases commonly used in New Zealand. My collection up to date is not so large as I have been in the country only for 3 weeks and do not constantly engage in conversations with Kiwis but people from around the world. What I already picked up are the following:
mate
“Hey mate, how are you doing?” “Come on in mate.”
–> used as a generic for men and also women. Also in “my mates came…” as in “my friends came…”
sweet
A: “I got this to work.” B: “Sweet.”
A: “Where do you live?” B: “Close to the CBD [Central Business District].” A: “Sweet.”
–> used as affirmative and to express a positive opinion on the topic, e.g. “That’s cool.” “That’s great.” “Good.”
The sales guy of my phone provider answered almost every single sentence of mine with “sweet”.
no worries
A: “Thanks a lot for your help.” B: “No worries.”
–> used in the sense of “you are welcome” or “don’t mention it”
3 in 1
And the best is that you could use all three expressions in one conversation turn:
A: “Thanks to your information, I found the correct information.”
B: “Sweet. No worries, mate.”
You can come up with unique Kiwi terms doing a simple Google search. Even back in the day before Google, I created a Kiwi English dictionary for a friend by doing some online searches. However, as my internet connection has not yet been established at home, I can’t check if I could find a site with background information on these three expressions and can thus just voice my observations.
P.S.
Today I learnt a new word: chur (for pronunciation check out this video). It’s an all-purpose word and can also be used for “hello, goodbye” among others.
