Stigmergic Productions Blog

I watched a presentation that Linus Torvalds gave to google. He told them that they were all ugly and stupid for using perforce. Which is always a fun thing to do to your audience... But one of his main points was that he is taking advantage of a network of trust when working on some large open source collaborative project he works on (called the linux kernel). He said he has a handful of people who he trusts and can 'pull' changes from them. They in turn all have their own webs of trust. This makes sense to me.

I've started playing with git. So far I like it but haven't quite had the aha moment of understanding. It seems like there is a deep metaphor at play but I haven't quite gotten it. I'm sure it has something to do with decentralization which I am all for.

By the way you can clone my repository at:
http://github.com/stigmergic/Open_Stigmergic.git

This is a very good idea. It would be interesting if they gathered data on the sate of these machines 2 years on. An untapped resource in this country is all the redundant technology sitting in attics and under piles of other junk.

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Dear G1G1er,

At the end of 2007 you participated in the Give One Get One program of One Laptop per Child (OLPC). Thanks to you and others like you, 75,000 laptops went to Rwanda, Ethiopia, Mongolia, Cambodia, Oceania, the West Bank, and Haiti.

An additional 75,000 laptops came into the USA as part of the "get" side of the equation. In some cases those laptops have since been put into closets for one reason or another.

We are gathering additional used XO laptops to send to Haiti. If you or the child to whom you gave the laptop is no longer using it, we appeal again to your generosity and ask you to send it to the address below (even if it is broken).

OLPC FOR HAITI c/o Exel
615 Westport Parkway #500
Grapevine, TX 76051

75% of the schools in Port-au-Prince have been destroyed in the recent earthquake, but by good fortune, none of our Haitian team was hurt. They have spare parts and OLPC technical staff and teachers, and stand prepared to deploy these XOs.

Because of the XO's unique features (sunlight readability, solar powered, water resistant, drop proof), it is also an ideal tool for relief work.

If your XO is in use, please ignore this email. We only want your broken or unused XOs.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Negroponte

So I don't know if I am a couple years late here and Google App engine fizzled while I didn't look but here is an article from the early days questioning the wisdom of GAE. http://highscalability.com/google-appengine-second-look

I'm trying out the google app engine. I am excited at the speed with which I can get a dynamic web site running. Not that I have the time to really go to far with it. My first app is just copy and pasted from a tutorial. It can be found at http://stigmergicweb.appspot.com.

This is a very interesting and challenging essay about the state of OLPC. Sounds like the project is disintegrating -- which was clear from the beginning but hope sort of put up big rosy glasses to try to keep it going....

http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi

Here is a very cool exploration of the XO innards.

Nice story about the laptop in Peru. It seems so hard to deal with expectations. They can be too high or way low. Perhaps this computer will undermine the teacher's authority--but it doesn't have to. Teachers don't always have to be right about everything. They don't have to know everything. They need to love learning and foster learning for their students.

My favorite anecdote about kids using the computer comes from this video from Carla Gomez.

And this is what Carla has to say about working with teachers in Nigeria.

BTW, Windows is not the model of efficiency, why work so hard to create an efficient computer just to put it at a stand still with Windows?

Wishes for warmth, light and happiness in this holiday season. May you and yours have a healthy and joyous New Year!

I haven't read much about the sugar gui yet but from what i have seen so far, it seems to have a bit of a learning curve. For one thing the concept of files seems to be really down played. Instead everything seems to be an 'activity'. Whenever you start a new activity it is recorded in the journal, This lets you go back to previous activities and resume them, For instance a session with the calculator activity may be named something like "finances" and used as a little notebook for managing a budget.

I'm not saying this would a particularly good idea but it is completely natural to the system. In fact I found this functionalty just this way when I reopened a previous calculator activity from the journal and saw all my work preserved there and ready to be revisited. It turns out that this is the idea behind the apps that are ported to the sugar system. The write activity for instance can be kept in the journal and stopped ot resumed at any time. Activities can be filtered in the journal either by type or time.

I wonder about making activities read only, or resettable, or some thngs remember and others forgotten. Anyway I'm sure this must be detailed somewhere. It is a bit different from how we have come to understand how applications/files work. Linking them so closely more resembles the AJAX web 2.0 world... Which makes sense I guess.

BTW This post comes from my XO but I am cheating and using a USB keyboard to type. I mean why not if you can, right?

I took my XO shopping downtown yesterday and ended up showing it to many people. It is definitely a conversation piece...it looks so different from any other computer. But it reminds me of the little tape player I had as a kid. The case is very rugged and very easy to carry. It is nice having a gadget that doesn't have that fragility hyper awareness. This machine can be tossed in the back seat of the car with no worries.

The neighborhood view is very fun. Downtown Santa Fe filled the screen with access points, many of them open BTW. I was able to check in with google news sitting on the plaza.

I was surprised how many people have heard of the XO/OLPC initiative. Generally the people I talked to seemed very interested in the effort and the device. Though the US isn't a developing nation it may be more a un-developing nation. It seems to me that a lot of good could be done with these laptops here in the US and with the open-source ethic of communities building there own tools and sharing them with others this could only be to the good of the over all project...

Count me as one (very privileged) child happy with this laptop. There is a very interisting video on olpc.tv about a guy's experiences with a pilot project in Nepal that is definitely worth a watch because it points to a real problem with the laptop: lack of content.

FOSS or "Free and open source software" is at the heart of the OLPC project. The computer comes with almost a complete FOSS software stack. The only exception that I know of is the mesh networking firmware on the wifi card, which is not open source. This presents the first problem with the laptop out of the box. It couldn't play my jams!

This is because I use the ubiquitous and closed format, mp3. But there is a work around! The olpc webpage has this work around: buy a mp3 decoder for $0. The fluendo company is selling a licensed mp3 decoder for the Gstreamer system for $0 and the acceptance of a license to not distribute the code...

Following the instructions at OLPC may be a problem on the XO as it was very hard to find the downloaded file. I finally downloaded the file on my MacBook and used scp to get it over to my XO. Probably easier still would be to put it on a thumb drive and sneaker-net it.

Which brings me to the under the hood bit. This computer is like a little OSX era Mac in a lot of ways (and why not the Mac is so cool, ask any 8th grader). The most striking way they are similar for me is that you are given a UNIX terminal from the get go. It is a major "activity" placed on the little activity bar on the bottom of the screen.

This terminal opens the machine up as a full blown RedHat linux computer... And maked it the perfect hacker's computer right out of the box (well in the category lighter than a MacBook...) It warms my heart to think of the new generation of hackers this computer is going to enable. I can't wait to see what happens!

So far to play mp3s I have used the totem player which came installed, but not available from the sugar gui. Instead you can launch it from the terminal by typing totem &.

I have since learned a lot more about the file system under sugar and it seems like a really interesting concept but we can leave that to another post.

There was a surprise waiting for me when I got home Friday evening. My XO laptop arrived! The box contents are incredibly minimalist and without the usual piles of commercial flyers, manuals, etc. Simply a laptop, a power adapter, two plastic bags to wrap them in, two cardboard supports to keep the laptop snug in the box, a simple orientation sheet, and a message from Nicholas Negroponte.

If I had only looked at the sheet I might have saved myself a bit of confusion over how to get into the darn thing... You have to open the ears first to unlock the laptop.

I think the design is great. The keyboard takes a bit to get used to. It took me a couple hours. But my highschool senior sister adapted to the keyboard within two typed sentences. Such are the skills of the new texting generation (this keyboard is a luxury in comparison to the mini qwerty on here phone).

The laptop came charged and ready to go. Joining the internet took another couple of minutes of messing around. You have to go to the neighborhood view and find an open access point. Clicking on it is all that it took for me, though I haven't yet needed to join a password protected access point so don't know what is involved there. But later watching someone else do it on a unboxing video looks like it was a fairly simple process...

Anyway I am so excited about this new computer!

This is my new Drupal site. I haven't quite figured out how I will use this site but here goes...