Transbot Todo list this weekend

So we're getting close to our first packaged version of Transbot. I want to get a few things down before then.

1. In channel commands: add/remove channel, change language, better help text, report bad translations.

2. Bot needs to handle incorrect language acronyms. It currently crashes if asked to translate to a language that doesn't exist.

3. We need to use a standard .ini config system instead of our custom .conf. This will standardize the configuration file and make it easier code-wise.

I think we can get this done this weekend and prepare for launching an rpm next week.

Transbot: Testing

Transbot is up and running this week for testing!!!

We are looking for community testing and feedback. For complete information regarding how to help please check out our wiki.

Here's how you can contribute:

1. Join the testing channels. #transbot-test-en is in English. #transbot-test-es is in Spanish and #transbot-test-rand is designed to allow users to change the language to anything. To set the language in a channel simply type ".xx" where xx is the two letter language acronym. You only need to type this once. Afterwards you can simply send messages and they will automatically be translated.

2. Try to break the bot. Feel free to play around with phrases you think will not be translated well. We want to see how well the bot can withstand abuse. Please don't hold back :-)

3. Give us feedback. You can contact us at tjr1351@rit.edu and mrt8449@rit.edu. You can also file bug reports here.

Transbot wiki

Okay finally got the transbot wiki up and running. It's a little bare bones but it's something to build off of. Mark and I have started outlining our milestones. Next step is to link tickets to the milestones. Oh I also made a user page on the Sugar Labs wiki. link

TransBot

So looks like I'm picking up Transbot for the HFOSS class I'm taking. I've started looking at the code and it looks like we can really take this somewhere. My partner, Mark, and I are going to improve the existing code and port it to a Sugar activity. Can't wait to start!

Boston Wrap-up

Boston was a great time! We were joined by the Fortune Hunter and Civx teams as well as some upstream developers. These developers included Adam Holt of OLPC, Luke Macken of RedHat, and Daf of Collabora. Daf really helped Fran and I to understand how to connect Farsight to the Sugar Presence service. That should help with development. The trip itself was a ton of fun. The new hostel had 100% less drug addicts but was a little hot. We got to sample some great Boston food and went to a Drum and Bass show after the hackfest and got our dance on. Good Times.

Boston HackFest This Week!!!

We're leaving for Boston tomorrow! If you'd like to participate in the event please sent a message to us through our mailing list ovc@lists.fedorahosted.org

What

Open Video Chat will be returning to Boston July 8th for a hack fest at OLPC headquarters. If you'd like to come, contact us on the Open Video Chat mailing list (ovc@lists.fedorahosted.org). We will be tackling farsight and telepathy-farsight to pave the way for cross platform communication.
When
July 8th @ 10am

Where
OLPC Headquarters
1 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, Massachusetts

How
Come hack with us or participate remotely through our IRC channel (#rit-innovation on freenode.net ). Please send us an email to our mailing list with your full name by Wednesday July 7th at midnight so we can compile a guest list for the security desk Thursday morning.


Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/event.php?eid=139205299429364&ref=ts


Official Event Page: http://foss.rit.edu/events/ovchackfest

-Taylor Rose
OVC Devel Team

OLPC/Open Video Chat Boston HackFest

What

Open Video Chat will be returning to Boston July 8th for a hack fest at OLPC headquarters. If you'd like to come, contact us on the Open Video Chat mailing list (ovc@lists.fedorahosted.org). We will be tackling farsight and telepathy-farsight to pave the way for cross platform communication.
When
July 8th @ 10am

Where
OLPC Headquarters
1 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, Massachusetts

How
Come hack with us or participate remotely through our IRC channel (#rit-innovation on freenode.net ). Please send us an email to our mailing list with your full name by Wednesday July 7th at midnight so we can compile a guest list for the security desk Thursday morning.


Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/event.php?eid=139205299429364&ref=ts


Official Event Page: http://foss.rit.edu/events/ovchackfest

-Taylor Rose
OVC Devel Team

Farsight Hackin

Fran has been hacking away at Farsight all day. I'm starting to get a grasp of how it works. This doc is actually pretty helpful for understanding how Farsight works.

3000+ Downloads!!!

Open Video Chat has been downloaded from SugarLabs over 3000 times!!!!! Download it for your XO 1.5 here.

More researching

So Fran and I have begun banging our heads against the Farsight wall. As far as we can tell this is the best solution to our problems. Unfortunately we pretty much have to sift through uncommented example code and figure it out ourselves. Asking for help from Collabora has only gotten us snarky comments and limited help. That would be understandable if they had good documentation that we were ignoring like noobs. However when we start looking through their docs we find pages like this. So we're going to try this ourselves it seems. Hopefully we can find someone online with farsight experience that is willing to talk us through the API.

Tech Symposium Wrapup

So we just finished at the Tech Symposium today. We got to show OVC to a whole lot of people. I had a great time and got to practice my ASL skills a lot. In the mean time we managed to get a good amount of response from the Boing Boing Article I posted earlier. It seems like we might get some help from the upstream so we can finally start hacking at OVC again.

Boing Boing!

So OVC just got blasted on Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/21/students-create-vide.html#comment-815708 Represent!

Tech Symposium Prep

We've been preparing for the NTID Technology Symposium today. Fran spent the day trying to write a script that would write Sugar on a Stick to pen drives while I worked on a poster and flyers.

Wow so that took all day. I installed Fedora 13 and configured everything and then found out the Fedora 13 default partitioned my drive with only 4.8 gigs in my home directory. So after all that setup I had to reinstall and customize the partitions. After I got F13 running however, me and Fran we able to play with the demo client for Muji. It seems like a cool protocol. We may incorporate it into our project in the future after our primary goals have been reached.

F13 here I come

So i've been playing with Muji today and run into some headaches. Muji requires the newest version of Empathy. Or at least newer than what's available on Fedora 12. I tried compiling from source but empathy requires all sorts of other dependencies that would also need to be compiled from source. /sigh

I guess I'm rolling cycles today to get Fedora 13 up and running.

End of Day Mind Dump

So we found some example code http://pastebin.com/82HV2cAc and played with it a bit. Could be useful, we need to play more and get it working. It's already running Theora too :D

I just saw a cool development from Collabora. http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/MujiDemoClient

4 way capable open source video chat

I'm excited to crack open the code tomorrow and check it out.

Farsight Round 1

I'm cracking on some farsight example code today. My goal is to have it running by the end of the day. If we can get this running in an open video format then we can start wrapping it with a GUI and get this thing rolling.

Multi-platform Research

I've been looking up ways that we can take OVC multiplatform today. It looks like the best way may be using Farsight. Tomorrow I'm going to try to play with it and make some prototypes hopefully.

The Summer Research Luncheon was today. There was a huge turn out. I'd estimate fifty or more people came. Hopefully this will be a catalyst for the Center for Student Innovation to get a central server for all these students to open wikis and blogs on.

Summer Week 1!!!!!

So we're back in the new and improved Foss Box. This week is just going to be the same old bootstrapping. The OVC team is pretty set but we're helping out the other teams that are new to RIT Storytelling and the Open Source ecosystem. Our first goal this week and next to to check out the RTP fix to Gstreamer. If this is fixed properly we should be able to do a lot of optimizing and add some features. The RTP bug has been a real bottleneck for us in the past. We have a research orientation meeting later today in the library. Should be interesting. Peace

User Testing Summary

-------------------

NTID Survey Results

-------------------

Total Participants: 14

----------------------

1. How comfortable are you with American Sign Language?

5: 11

4: 1

3: 2

2: 0

1: 0

0: 0

2. How clear was the video?

5: 1

4: 7

3: 3

2: 2

1: 1

3. Would you like the option to remove the preview window to increase the size of the main video?

Yes: 11

No: 3

4. Would you use this product to communicate with a Deaf person?

Yes: 12

No: 2

5. Would you use this product to communicate with a hearing person?

Yes: 10

No: 4

6. Would you use this product for text chat?

Yes: 12

No: 2

7. Would you use text and video in the same chat?

Yes: 12

No: 2

8. Would you like the windows to change size if you closed the chat window?

Yes: 11

No: 3

Additional Comments:

--------------------

Comments were generally positive. The negative comments were about things that we could not change. People complained about the hardware and asked about how we will set up internet in other countries. These are issues for One Laptop Per Child to consider. We may not have conveyed that we are only responsible for the software, not the hardware or deployment.