Eduardo SilvaEvery week I get a new email about people wondering if the Monkey HTTP Daemon development still continue and always I reply saying: yes!, but be patience!.
The goal of Monkey is to be a small webserver with less than 60 KB on it binary size, so I don't expect to include big new features than can make increase it's binary size. Before Dec 31th I will release a new version with minor bug fixes, maybe a new webpage... more news coming soon
The new website for XO-Monitor is located here :
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Monitor
Contributors are welcome!
Three days ago I lost my cellphone and the next day I lost my USB Key too. Is Mr. Murphy the responsible of these facts ?. I needed my cellphone to get some calls and my USB in order to Upgrade my XO-B4.
I bought a new USB Key and I couldn't read their content from OpenFirmware, because the company ,that made this product (USB Key), likes to avoid some technical design specifications, so thanks to Mitch Bradley who made a quick patch to Openfirmware I could get the USB key content without problems.
Always I'm wondering, what are the real reasons of every life's situation?.. in my case the answer may be is to give me some peace and fix Openfirmware/OLPC, who knows...
is God behind the Merphy's laws ?, I'm sure he is 🙂
Since 2005, the Summer of Code Google Program has been taking an important place with a lot of foundations and students as participants. I've been participating since 2006 on this program and I can say that 'it's an exciting experience'.
I asked to my self what happened with the people, who are under 18 years old and can't participate.., why can they not take part of it?, well, the answer for my question is that for the younger people there is another program that is called The Google Highly Open Participation Contest, that is the new Google program that recruit students from primary high school to colleges in order to involve them in open source projects.
That's a very interesting program, I wish I was young again!, Good luck boys !, new open source hackers are welcome !!!
In my free time, I've been writing a new application called 'XO-Monitor'.
The idea of this application is to watch a XO through the network from a normal PC or Laptop, something similar to the old-developer console but using a GUI + SSH + FUSE, it's still in an alpha stage, at the moment it can:
There's a long TODO list, and many bugs to fix, if you want to contribute ... you're welcome. The first snapshot can be found here:
http://dev.laptop.org/~edsiper/projects/xo-monitor-alpha-0.1.tar.gz
Yesterday I was playing with Psyco trying to get a little bit faster Sugar shell, today I've done a couple of tests using Sysprof to watch the behavior of a normal sugar v/s a modified one using Psyco, so here we go:
Machine: XO-B4
Build: Joyride 227
| Library/Function | Normal Sugar | Sugar + Psyco |
| /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.1200.13 | 86.26 % | 63.06 % |
| /usr/lib/libgtk-11-2.0.so.0.1000.14 | 86.17 % | 65.80 % |
| /usr/lib/libpython2.5.so.1.0 | 84.09 % | 85.75 % |
| /usr/bin/python | 82.21 % | 55.46 % |
| /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/gtk/_gtk.so | 82.11 % | 60.57 % |
| __libc_start_main | 81.62 % | 62.35 % |
| /lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.1200.13 | 75.20 % | 63.06 % |
| /usr/lib/libhippocanvas-1.so.0.0.0 | 65.81 % | 76.48 % |
| in kernel | 3.95 % | 3.92 % |
The optimized files were:
the methods/functions binded by Psyco were the most heavier profiled, the resources used in this performance are just some CPU time at the beginning and 50KB of extra memory... it's time to send patches? >:)
Today I've been doing a lot of test to my XO-B4 machine, I was looking for different ways in order to speedup the Sugar Shell, and I found an interesting project called Psyco:
"In short: run your existing Python software much faster, with no change in your source. Think of Psyco as a kind of just-in-time (JIT) compiler, a little bit like what exists for other languages, that emit machine code on the fly instead of interpreting your Python program step by step. The difference with the traditional approach to JIT compilers is that Psyco writes several version of the same blocks (a block is a bit of a function), which are optimized by being specialized to some kinds of variables (a "kind" can mean a type, but it is more general). The result is that your unmodified Python programs run faster."Testing Joyride 227, I decided to install Psyco and do some benchmark with it to the Sugar Shell using the profile() method provided. Psyco gives to every method/function/call an "importance level" so I got a lot of interesting data about which calls are more heavier than others, by default the profile system shows the top ten heavy calls:
01:08:31 AM.77 ______
#1 | 5.7 %| do_paint_below_children .../graphics/icon.py:448
#2 | 5.3 %|
#3 | 5.2 %| _get_cache_key .../graphics/icon.py:93
#4 | 5.0 %| get_surface .../graphics/icon.py:201
#5 | 5.0 %| _get_xo_color .../graphics/icon.py:187
#6 | 4.7 %| _parse_string ...aphics/xocolor.py:203
#7 | 3.8 %| do_set_property .../graphics/icon.py:392
#8 | 3.5 %| _pulse_cb ...ctivitiesdonut.py:148
#9 | 3.4 %| __init__ ...aphics/xocolor.py:219
#10 | 2.8 %| buildfncache ...psyco/profiler.py:66
01:08:33 AM.66 ______
#1 | 7.5 %| do_paint_below_children .../graphics/icon.py:448
#2 | 6.1 %| _get_xo_color .../graphics/icon.py:187
#3 | 5.2 %| __init__ ...aphics/xocolor.py:219
#4 | 5.0 %|
#5 | 5.0 %| get_surface .../graphics/icon.py:201
#6 | 4.4 %| _get_cache_key .../graphics/icon.py:93
#7 | 4.2 %| _pulse_cb ...ctivitiesdonut.py:148
#8 | 4.1 %| _parse_string ...aphics/xocolor.py:203
#9 | 2.8 %| do_set_property .../graphics/icon.py:392
Psyco doesn't try to improve the performance of all your software, you have to tell it which calls you want to improve, obviously you want to decrease the importance level of the ones that are heavier. For this, Psyco provides a pysco.bind() method where you decide which one to improve. I got good results, the importance level of the calls chosen has decreased and I can see that Sugar is a little bit faster than before but... it takes a little more time to start and it takes more memory than usual. I'll continue doing more tests to get real values of this optimization.
In early versions of OLPC builds, there's was a tool called Developer Console, the main idea of this application was to have a GUI where's possible to have a CPU usage graphic, logviewer, terminal, memory analysis, etc. But in the meaning time, developer console was trying to have a lot of features, but every feature means to be watching something in the XO and it start to consume a lot of resources :/ . So talking with Marco and Eben we decide to change this current model by a Developer Environment, which is composed by three Sugar activities:
Some people still miss the old developer console, every tool has advantages and disadvantages, in my personal case is more confortable to have separated tasks that all together in an application that eat a lot of memory and do a lot of I/O.
At this moment I'm working in a XO-Monitor application, I hope to publish about it this weekend 😉
Between Nov 21th to 23th, the Open Source 2007event took place in
Chile, it was organized by Inacap Valparaiso.
The audience was from students to business people, a lot of speeches
were made and practical classes about different pieces of software,
every event is a good opportunity to meet new people and enjoy to talk
about open source softwares and related projects. Lot of speakers were
invited to talk about something interesting, I gave a speech about the
OLPC project and I decide to give a second speech about the Summer Of
Code program in order to promote and motivate to the students and let
them know about the program and how to get involved in the open source
world.
A lot of people attend the speech, at the beginning nobody knows what
it's exactly 'Summer of code', they all just know that it's something
related to Google, I talked about the 'Hacker culture', some history
about the open source software and Google.
They started to feel so exciting with the idea to get involved in a OS
project and much more if is through Google.
A lot of directors of the university agree that if someone of their
students become a GSoC student, they can accept that job as a
practical required in they program career. They asked me a lot of
interesting questions, so I hope that next year more Chileans can send
their applications and get a good opportunity to learn and
contribute...
Well, there's no change that come without good news, I'm very happy with my new blog, thanks to the WordPress Team for create this wonderful blog system!!! It's late right now and it's time to get some sleep, I will be posting soon again...