<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:4BC4E1E2.5030701@fas.harvard.edu" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">William Schaub wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">The idea is basically a decentralized discussion forum that automatically propagates itself amongst all XO laptops that are in range. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> That's a great project! This is definitely something that OLPC and Sugar Labs are interested in. You should mention it on sugar-devel. </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">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. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> 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 </pre> </blockquote> 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. </body> </html>