WeSay Development Progress

Wednesday we said goodbye to the last of our guests who flew over to discuss collaborating on applications for language development on low-power computers. Everyone seems to have had a good time, or at least have a lot of good Thai meals.

Berm not only to time off from his real job and young family to come and help us work through a bunch of user interaction issues, but he even showed up with T-shirts bearing the WeSay logo. Thanks!
I gave a presentation on the first day of the meetings, covering the following topics:

* Our Customers

* Goals

* Architecture

* Status as of July 2006

You can get it in pdf format here.

The attendees at the meeting have spent time in several different cultures, including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and some countries in Africa. They all felt that the needs, motivations, and environments we are targeting describe pretty well the situations they have found in their travels. In other words, the customer we are trying to serve is found all over the world.

We’ve been needing a good name to describe applications which works similarly and collaborate together on low-power computers for language development. Names are always hard. Thanks to a good laugh we all had over the medicinal vegetable juices offered at a local noodle shop, we joked about “hairy basil” applications for a day and then settled on “Basil” as our cover term. We will be writing more about Basil applications in the future.

After two discouraging days of trying to get Mono to work on the OLPC image, I have finally figured out why I was up against such a brick wall. The first problem I had was that the Mono installer for linux only provides bindings for GTK+2.4 and we have been using GTK+2.8. After unsuccessfully trying to use a machine.config file to tell mono that it can use GTK+2.4 in place of 2.8 (which I don’t know that it would have worked but I couldn’t get it to recognize that even), I finally decided to just copy over the 2.8 bindings from my ubuntu install.

Now I thought it would be easy from that but after awhile of getting all that hooked up, I determined that the gtk version on the OLPC must not be old enough and I copied over the ubuntu libs, only to find when I was going to copy them that the OLPC distribution is using GTK+2.10.

Apparently Fedora has a version of Mono that will work with GTK+2.10, so I have now decided I’m either going to have to build my own image Mono as a part of it or wait until Mono supports GTK+2.10.
On a whim, I took up Daniel Olivera’s offer to access his OLPC motherboard and ran some performance benchmarks to see how this compares to our test machine. The benchmarks seem to indicate that our test machine is about 75% as fast as the OLPC. You can read more details about it here. This puts my previous blog about the performance of WeSay on our test machine into better perspective.

Further testing on the memory usage seems to indicate the WeSay+Mono footprint on Linux is not 49MB as we previously thought but 19MB which is more like what we had found on Windows as well.

Besides buying paint for the office (which we fear may now end up looking like a coffee house), I drew up some mockups of a configuration application, here.