Fixing locales

Just a note for Jeff,
if you ever get a warning like this

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

On Ubuntu just run this command: sudo locale-gen
so in this case it would be: sudo locale-get en_US.UTF-8

Water Sensor

At Jeff's suggestion, i've looked into what would be required to build a decent water sensor for the XO laptop. A basic set of would requirements would be

• a microcontroller (fairly cheap, probably go with a PIC)
• Salinity sensor (cheap)
• PH Sensor (rather expensive)
• sensors for chemicals commonly dumped into streams in el salvador (generally cheap, though some sensors have to be more sensitive driving up costs

Most everything else can be salvaged from old electronics or borrowed ( hopefully i can convince someone to let me borrow a PIC debug board,otherwise all testing will have to be in emulation)

Plan of attack:

1. Get in contact members of other XO sensor board projects
2. Emulate sample io between sensors > microcontroller/ microcontroller > XO | analog-digital conversion will probably take the most planning
3. Build one real world prototype (almost all components can be found at a well stocked radioshack or old equipment thats being thrown out)
4. If successful ,figure out a way to lay out on PCB, and build several for use in El Salvador

Gparted

Something I've noticed several people doing when using gparted

1. Delete partition
2.Create new partition
3.Change boot flags to match old ones.

This can be simplified down to one step

1. Use the Format To... feature to reformat the partition while preserving flags

Something I found amusing

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Creating sugar on a stick

I added sugar on a stick to 2 kingston datatraveler drives using the instructions from this site:http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Linux


So far, it seems like there are no problems.

EDIT: Filesystem must NOT be FAT32. Ext3/Ext2/FAT16 work fine.

First Post

For Jeff's sake, heres some of my old links:

• Student Server Zone administration
• CS Competition Journal
• Request Tracker
• LDAP Administration
• Our LDAP setup (restricted access at the moment

Project

Timelapse

Link to Project (Blueprints and code should give progress info )