Call for Action!

Hi everyone,

Two points regarding Call for Action. First, some of the more technical people got the impression from Chris' intro that there wouldn't be much technical "meat" in the class. Au contrare, for those of you who are interested, we will be building toward some very innovative experiments; we'll even try to build our own pirate GSM radio tower. We didn't emphasized this much because the class is mixed, and we didn't want to scare anyone off. But if you want to get deep into tech, you will be able to. Details below under point 2.

For everyone, point 1 covers a time-saving aspect of the class; we are distributing a guaranteed-to-work workspace for playing with handsets, gateways, gis & web applications, etc. We'd love it if you'd go through the steps below to prepare your system.

Finally, if you haven't filled out the questionnaire at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pnJjv-CnDNoerSiJzRV5fVw&hl=en
then please do so!

1) VMWare

In order to focus on the interesting parts of the programming exercises and tutorials, we pre-installed a virtual machine (VM) with most of what you will need for the class. As its name implies, a VM is like a virtual computer that you can run as a program inside your computer without having to install a new operating system or partition your hard drive. The program that runs those VM's which is called, to much surprise, VMWare. So a Mac can run Windows, Windows can run OS X, or -- as is the case here -- you'll all be running Ubuntu, an easy-to-use brand of Linux that makes it especially easy to program.

If you are a member of the MIT community, we ask that you install the VMWare Fusion (Mac) or Workstation (Win or Linux). Don't worry about making it work, just install the software available at: https://nic-too.mit.edu/cgi-bin/vmware
You will need an MIT Certificate; if you don't have one, it's about time you got one at: http://web.mit.edu/is/topics/certificates/
Please note that, as you download the software, it will also download a text file that contains your special MIT serial number. Be sure you remember where that downloaded to, as you'll need to enter it.

If you are not part of the MIT community, you can get the free VMware Player for PC or the trial version of VMWare fusion for mac:
* VMWare Player: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
* VMWare fusion for mac: http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

This is just the program to run the VM's - we'll give out copies of the specific VM that we made for the class in a week or so. By that time, please please free several gigabytes of disk space for that VM.
If you are having any technical problems just let me or Chris know and we will help you with the setup or with backing up files to free up space.

2) Technical details for class syllabus:
Here are some more technical details regarding what we aim to be playing with during the semester
(again - for the non-technical people in the group - don't worry about this, feel free to ignore)

Emphasis of this list is on mobile technologies, I'm not including anything we'll do with web platforms, PCs etc.

- Platforms: We will go over Symbian development (mostly from the Python side), and Android. Possibly OpenMoko if there is interest.
- Devices: We will hopefully get a batch of Nokia s60, G1's and a few OpenMoko's for use during the semester, and we also have a bunch of N810 Internet Tablets.
- Mobile Topics: Aside from what Chris mentioned about SMS, which is useful for doing applications for any old cellphone, we'll be going into some more innovative topics:
We will see and learn how to do device-to-device/peer-to-peer communications between phones as well as other devices. We'll do it using things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, possibly IR and maybe some less traditional methods like communicating visually (though phone cameras) or using sound.
- Our own open source cell tower (hopefully!): We are doing our best to get one of these little guys to play with: http://bs11-abis.gnumonks.org/trac/
In short: some hacker reverse engineered the protocol between a cell tower's radio and a higher up part of the system. This hack allows connecting a commercial GSM base station to a PC and running our own cellular services - both duplicating traditional ones and we could also think of new and original uses for this... (imagine: mobile provider in a backpack)

Email us if you have any questions!
Nadav and Chris