ConFigures » OLPC

Almost 2 Months on the Palm Pre Smartphone

configures — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:22:47 +0000

I picked up a Palm Pre the first day it was available, June 6. I’m very happy with it overall. It works very well as a phone (both sound quality and override of other apps), and I love the easy flow and integration between the different apps and underlying software. Designers put a lot of thought into usability. Also, it feels good to hold (my sister was surprised by how much difference it made to hold it rather than just look at it), and it’s pretty. The 3 megapixel camera is *great*. Upgrades have come out pretty frequently, improving the battery performance and adding more functionality each time. I don’t care so much about the M$ Exchange and enterprise security stuff that came out with the 1.1 release last week, but it’s probably good for folks who want to read their work Outlook email on their phone.

Right now I’m listening to my Classical Gas station on Pandora on my Pre, checking my calendar (without having to pause/close Pandora), and charging off my OLPC XO laptop (where I’m composing this entry — the Pre keyboard works fine for me to compose short replies, up to a paragraph, maybe, but it’s not great for long compositions). In a pinch, it works ok as a primary computer (there’s even a way to hack it to run a terminal window for command line/ssh joy, though I haven’t done that yet). I had pretty minimal wifi access on a recent beach vacation with my family, but I was able to keep up with my usual Web hangouts via the Sprint network my Pre sees. I’ve been able to read my email on my Pre inside a concrete auditorium. Web rendering is fast and the landscape rotate and pinch/zoom and double-tap snap zoom (scrolling stays in the column selected) make it pretty easy even to read busy websites with 3 or more columns.

This is my first smartphone, but it’s hardly my first Palm — I started with a Palm IIIx pda, then moved up to a Zire after I dropped the IIIx on its corner. I might still be on the Zire, but it started flaking out in March and pretty much went into a coma in April. I was able to migrate my data each time. The Classic emulator lets me run my favorite tools from my old Palm. The Pre also syncs with my contact info from GMail and Facebook (after I enabled that), “stacking” the info from the different accounts so I can see it all together (automatically in most cases, but easy to link if it misses a connection between friends’ accounts). Most contact info is in the cloud, but there’s also an automatic backup of data I add to the Pre (though I haven’t had to restore from it yet, and it *doesn’t* save customizations such as settings tweaks to apps).

The Pre costs about $200 with a 2-year contract (Sprint, $70/mo for 450 minutes + unlimited data/texting/gps navigation). With taxes and the insurance I signed up for, it’s running about $87/mo. It’s not a must-have, but I’m having fun with mine.

Next, I’ll review the apps, and then the accessories. In the meantime you can check out very detailed reviews and videos on PreCentral.net. I’ve saved the most interesting articles from there and elsewhere in my links library with the Palm tag.

Etoys in Space OLPC Usability

configures — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:32:07 +0000

After my last post, a friend pointed me to usability big guy Jakob Nielsen’s online writings on Heuristic Evaluation, and I looked them over and passed specific links on to Mike Lee, organizing our “Code Jam”. I’ve mentioned Nielsen here before. I think the ideas they had did help some of us in testing the NASA learning tools on the XOs; I know the review beforehand was useful for me.

Mike Lee wrote up our day in email and I’ll link as soon as it’s online (photos are up already), but in short, we tested and provided feedback on 5 of their activities. I worked on the GIS activity.

Etoys are powerful. I can see the good they (it?) can be put to. They encourage exploration. I think I may generally prefer a more linear approach to master a subject than Etoys in Space offer, but I’m not the target audience. On this note, see also Greg DeKoenigsberg’s recent post about disruptive technology, learning, education (not always the same thing), and OLPC-esque possibilities. I’ve seen this positive use of “disruptive” more and more in the last year or so. GDK’s entry discusses ways to get around resistance to the disruption … assuming one buys into the goals.

My First Code Jam?

configures — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:33:09 +0000

I’m going to my first-ever Code Jam next Saturday. We’ll be rating NASA Etoys for One Laptop Per Child. These NASA distance learning activities for children exist already, and the author has offered to adjust them for OLPC if we just step through them on the XOs and give him feedback. This will also get us more familiar with the Etoys learning platform, to build on for future jam opportunities.

OLPCLCDC NASA Etoys Jam

Anyone out there got any head-first usability testing tips?

Give One, Get One Solar Lantern/Flashlight (or Laptop)

configures — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:46:24 +0000

At this month’s OLPCLCDC meetup,

Mike Lee showed us the BoGo solar lantern/flashlight he got. This Buy One, Give One program benefits people in developing countries, but some US troops in Iraq are also using them (batteries can be harder to come by in the field than sunlight, and these rechargeable batteries have an estimated life of 3-5 years even with daily use). Charge one up and get 6 hours of use!
Three people responsible for a new OLPC Activity (package) that will help researchers record periodic audio presented The Lives of Laptops and Bees. Their energy, knowledge and giving spirit, and the feedback from attending, was exciting to experience.

I’m also happy about the new One Laptop Per Child Give One, Get One opportunity now available in Europe as well as the US via Amazon, but I’ve read plenty of blog entries about that already. Here are two:

dsd’s entry about his trip to Ethiopia, seeing the laptops in action in kids’ hands, and how to order
The unofficial OLPC News G1G1 Buyer’s Guide (who should G1G1 and who should not, and why)

Tangential to OLPC: I enjoyed this picture former OLPC-er Ivan Krstić posted about the “proper” use of quotation marks.

[Update: Mike Lee's OLPC XO and Bees write-up with links to video, photos, PPT]

CM jobs and volunteer opportunity

configures — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:52:16 +0000

I’ve been busy with work and family, but I thought I’d mention that I’ve been contacted about more than one CM position in the DC area this month. Both look like interesting work (one from someone I’ve worked with in the past and would be happy to work with again; I don’t know the other source), so if anyone wants a job in Arlington or a block from Gallery Place Metro, comment here with contact info and I’ll send more details. [Update: just got mail about a CM job in Linthicum, MD (near BWI)]

If I were still in between jobs, I’d be looking very seriously at an OLPC opening: buildmaster

OLPC builds a lot of packages. They are looking to set up and maintain an infrastructure that will allow them to meet their own unique packaging needs. They need a volunteer with a strong understanding of the Fedora packaging process — one who either understands koji now, or can learn to understand it in fairly short order.

Not sure if that would be in Boston (One Laptop Per Child Foundation), DC (which has a Red hat (Fedora) office), Raleigh (the job poster’s base, another Red Hat location) or simply anywhere with an Internet connection, but it sounds like challenges and fun (though probably unpaid).

XO flying on Firefox 3

configures — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:46:21 +0000

See my installing-Firefox comment on the OLPC News Forum for technical notes. Whatever they did re memory management seems very effective on the XO. Yay Firefox 3!

Laptop Bake-Off

configures — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:09:44 +0000

A much friendlier term than my previous “laptop shootout”! The Bake-off was held last weekend at a Friends (Quaker) school near Greenbelt, MD. I brought my two OLPC XOs (there were several others set up there already for folks to try out), and got to try out a Classmate 2Go, several Macs, the Asus EEE 700 and 900 series, and a Fujitsu T-4220 Tablet. The tablet was pretty neat, and I thought the Classmate exterior was pretty cute and came the closest to the XO’s ruggedness (still not there, but more so than the others). We (some adults, more kids) filled out evaluation sheets on the different laptops as we went along. Baked goods were also available for snacks. :-)

Blogging and Browsers

configures — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 03:27:11 +0000

My new job hosts internal blogs (via SharePoint), so I’ve been blogging there some, and expect that to continue to take up some of my blogging energy (as I come up to speed on various matters). I expect my ConFigures readers will have a better time keeping track of me via RSS feed readers than checking the site every day.

I did have some tabs open of things to blog about on Opera on my OLPC XO, but something happened and it froze up. Up until now, when I’ve had to reboot Sugar (the UI), Opera has been able to restore the previous session, but not this time. It’s not like I have a lack of things to blog about (it’s more a matter of making the time), but it’s still annoying. Anyway, I’ve been using Opera on the XO because they came out with an OLPC-specific version, but I may try FireFox 3 when it comes out, as they appear to have gotten better at memory-hog issues (more important on the memory- and CPU-tight XO than other systems). We’ll see.

When I sat down to write this tonight, I noticed that spam keywords had been inserted at the end of my previous entry. I’m concerned about this, but will wait to see if it happens again before I do serious digging.

Laptops, Education and the Freedom to Tinker: The example of OLE Nepal

configures — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:29:05 +0000

Along with a number of other One Laptop Per Child enthusiasts (software and hardware contributors, Give One Get One participants, wiki/forum answer-givers), I’ve been a bit dismayed by developments and revelations at OLPC. My experience as a configuration manager and occasional release manager tells me that large-scale deploys of software don’t “just happen” even if it’s completely off-the-shelf (no customization/localization required), whether the distribution is physical (tapes, CDs, DVDs, printers) or electronic. Whatever comes to OLPC, however, the project has accomplished some good, from laptop design re-thinking to the cross-fertilization between the open source community and open learning education efforts.

OLPC’s XO was supposed to be an educational and empowerment tool, with localization (facilitated by the open source approach) to make it more relevant to places where it went. OLPC (Negroponte) may have lost sight of that, but some organizations have used it as a launching pad for efforts that matter. For an example, look at OLE Nepal, which has worked very closely with Nepalese teachers to roll out customized OLPC laptops with software to help the teachers teach particular subjects.

Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLE_Nepal (overview from an OLPC perspective)
http://www.olenepal.org/ (separate from OLPC)
http://blog.olenepal.org/ (seems to have latest updates)

Bryan Berry (OLE Nepal External Relations Manager) gave a presentation to the OLPC Learning Club DC back in December (and hung around for discussion afterwards) which certainly sounded like they did their homework before aiming for measurable results.

http://www.technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DWVG4hSsIk_k
http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/test_scores_olpc_teach.html
http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/nepal/ (some overlap with above blog link)

OLE Nepal’s efforts are still moving along, with some hitches here and there, but the team is flourishing and has already shown what can be done with an open attitude and serious planning.

OLPC Penguicon Roundtable notes

configures — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:04:48 +0000

Benjamin Mako Hill (Penguicon Guest of Honor, OLPC Common Resources developer, and of other fame) joined us, so the roundtable started with a 15-minute Q&A with him (I hope he was ok with that; the panelists (Frank Schreiber, cmdln, and I) hadn’t really come up with a game plan for that contingency). There were some questions about the recent departures and Microsoft’s increasing presence (this roundtable was before Negroponte’s incendiary remarks, or I’m sure Mako Hill would have gotten questions on that, too). He was positive about the future of the OLPC organization, scaling up (hiring, better project/bug management) and moving forward. Other topics included mesh/wireless connectivity and OLPC program implementation details.

The rest of the time, we went around the table talking about what software we like using on the XO (Opera, Firefox, StarChart, Moon, Speak, Synergy), resources for information and answers (OLPC wiki and forum, OLPC News forum), community jabber servers for collaboration, and peripherals (SD flash cards, USB memory sticks, mice, and keyboards).

After our hour was up, some of us went on to the Computer Lounge, and talked about some XO bugs and fixes, but I had to go on soon to prep for my next panel.

I had chatted with Mako Hill for a couple of minutes up in the con suite the night before, while I was assisting with liquid nitrogen ice cream making, and during the roundtable I loaned him my extra G1G1 laptop , which he had said would be newer than the XO he has. I’m not sure if he used it much or what he thought of the differences, though. I’ll never wash my XO again?

OLPC Roundtable at Penguicon 2008: Links

configures — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:34:39 +0000

Links relevant to the post I will make shortly:

Benjamin Mako Hill

OLPC changes and uncertainty

OLPC developers are not open source fundamentalists

Disruption and Hope

Back to the Roundtable:

Penguicon 2008 Overview

configures — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:42:54 +0000

Due to unavoidable circumstances, I was unable to make it to the con (in Michigan) until Saturday night, but I did make it to the Giant Singing Tesla Coil and the Hampster Dance, and then was able to assist with the making of 6 liquid nitrogen ice cream flavors that night. From midnight until past 2 am :

mint irish cream
triple chocolate
cinammon orange creamsicle
vanilla raspberry
another chocolate
soda slushies

Sunday, the OLPC Roundtable and Fiction Genome panels I participated on went well; I’ll put more details in separate entries. I got to see the liquid nitrogen splashdown in the pool, too. I was disappointed that I didn’t actually get to attend anyone else’s technical panels, but it was important to me to get enough sleep to be alert for my panels. Maybe the third time (next year) will work out better in that respect.

I didn’t make it to the game room except for 5 minutes once, but I did get to play euchre in the con suite Sunday night. I like it because it’s a *team* card game. I haven’t gotten to play it much since I left upstate NY (Rochester). My partner Bob and I did well at first, but Bill and Gerald caught up and beat us eventually. It was a nice close game.

Penguicon has a very well-stocked consuite for food (fresh vegetables and sandwich makings, not just snack food), but I highly recommend these two restaurants within a short drive of Troy:

Elie’s Mediterranean (Birmingham) - the best of that cuisine I’ve ever had, in a lovely setting (cobalt blue hanging beads, rollaway glass garage door in the front of the store)
The Inn Season Cafe (Royal Oak) – vegetarian and vegan; listed in Health Magazine’s top 6 US independent restaurants this month.

Sustainable Development and Software

configures — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:56:14 +0000

I’ve used the tag “sustainability” (on Connotea) for close on to two years to organize and track articles about ecology, esources, and other matters concerning living on the earth in the future. A few days ago, without thinking about that, the phrase “sustainable development” popped into my head during a discussion of the future of OLPC. I like my use of that phrase, the more I think about it, as I think it may provide some context for why I care about configuration management, knowledge management, and process and standards in general. Doing config management for a number of years at a number of places, software maintenance is something I’ve dealt with a lot. Practices may be tailored somewhat to the scale and needs of a project or an organization, but it can be difficult to maintain a product or an effort if recreatability, repeatability, and tracking the reasons for decisions/changes are mostly afterthoughts.

As with ”knowledge gardening”, a web search reveals that others have used the phrase “sustainable development” (in the context I mean in this entry) before me. In fact, Kevin Tate wrote what looks like a pretty good book about about it; here’s an excerpt.

Co-Paneling at Penguicon 2008

configures — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:44:29 +0000

Penguicon 2008 is almost here! Guests of Honor include Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager for Canonical), Benjamin Mako Hill (Debian/GNU, MIT Media Lab, Free Software Foundation, Ubuntu, Wikimedia), and Vernor Vinge (multiple-Hugo-winning science fiction author, computing visionary). I’ll be participating, too! I’m on two panels, both on Sunday, April 20:

OLPC Round Table (noon): XO owners discuss their experiences, demo the XOs, and talk about our perspectives on OLPC and the XO’s past, present, and future.
Sequencing the Genome of Fiction: Having worked at Applied Biosystems, doing configuration management and web support for AB and its sister company, Celera Genomics, I have some understanding of the Human Genome Project and related science (AB was big on science training, yay!). Being a user of Pandora.com, I have an appreciation for the Music Genome project. I’ll be bringing my software engineering experience to the table.

Exhibiting Linux and XOs at FOSE

configures — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:27:39 +0000

This Thursday, I helped out at the Tux.org booth at FOSE. Tux is the name of the Linux mascot penguin. TUX is a network of Linux User Groups (like the Northern Virginia group to whom I presented the OLPC XO user interface, journal system, etc. in February). FOSE is the Federal Office Systems Exposition which happens every year in DC. FOSE let us have booth space for free, to hand out Ubuntu CDs, Linux Journals, TUX flyers, and answer questions about Linux and open source applications. On Thursday, we also had three OLPC XO laptops, which drew a lot of attention. We had a busy day — a couple of visitors to the booth at almost all times, with occasional surges of 6-10 folks. According to TUX volunteers from previous days, it was even busier on Tuesday and Wednesday. We were so busy, I hardly got any time to look around at other booths. Maybe next year! As it was, I had fun talking with people about open source and showing them the XOs (which run on a version of Linux based on Fedora).

My badge:

Paul Frield’s write-up from Thursday and Friday (with pictures)

Other pictures, from nicdanger:

Tux working the booth
Green Table (XOs and the April “Greening the Data Center” issue of LJ)
Testimonials (booth poster on left, with quotes from federales about Linux and open source)
We the People (booth poster on right, patriotic Tux with signatures from booth workers and visitors)

OLPC Resources

configures — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 23:13:12 +0000

This is from the talk last week:

OLPC RESOURCES

One Laptop Per Child

Website
Wiki
Forums (developers and users, some critics)

OLPC News

not affiliated with OLPC!
Blog
Forums (mainly users, fans, and critics)

OLPC Learning Club – DC

OLPCLCDC Blog
OLPCLCDC Wiki (at OLPC)
OLPCLCDC Forum (at OLPC News)
Email list
Meetings

Tech blog: (here)
Forums and OLPC wiki (see above)
Social Bookmarks:
- http://www.connotea.org/user/selkins/tag/OLPC
- Can specify further, e.g., … tag/OLPC+how-to
- Also see old tag, learning, for more general articles on OLPC

Tour of OLPC at NoVaLUG: How We Did

configures — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:17:23 +0000

Jonathan Blocksom and I were pretty happy with how our talk went at the Northern Virginia Linux User Group last Saturday. There were over 30 people there, and we got questions throughout (and into the parking lot). I had to slow myself down when I talked too fast or moved the mouse too fast (the presentation software couldn’t keep up), but other than that, once we got going, it all went pretty smoothly.

My part (an overview of the XO: hardware and software interfaces, home view, activities, etc.) took over half the time because I was first, and so a lot of general questions came my way (though Jonathan took on several of them). Some people were almost as interested as I am in how the Journal works as a combined file manager, metadata, activity log, and version control system. Jonathan’s interactive demo of the learn-programming activities (Pippy for learning Python, Turtle Art (sort of like LOGO), and eToys (from Squeak, smalltalk-related) also went well (more questions!).

Technical details for giving the presentation:

Rather than trying to use Open Office to run slides (which I had heard is pretty slow on the XO), I just put my main points into the XO’s Write activity. Not a perfect solution, but they showed up well on Oracle’s big screens, and I was able to scroll down as I talked — I knew my points pretty well, and it was more of show -and-tell presentation than a heavily-detailed slides presentation anyway.
Before the talk, I went to the OLPC Remote Display wiki page and tried to download x11vnc as per instructions there. I encountered an Unexpected Error message and got a lot of help from people (Mike Cariaso, FFM, etc.) at the OLPCLCDC meetup Thursday night (Jan. 31). It actually turned out that the errors I was getting stopped once I shut down all other activites before running the rpm command to get x11vnc onto my XO.
Also at the meetup, I bought a lovely XO-compatible USB-Ethernet adaptor (prototype) from Jonathan Hsu. They come in three flavors (XO-green, Wii-silver, and clear-circuit-board). If you scroll down Leslie Bradshaw’s blog entry about the meetup, you’ll see a picture of the one I got. It came in very handy during our test attempt and the presentation itself, because the Wifi connection has to be pretty stable for the VNC software to work. So we used XO-ZoWii-Ethernet-someotherUSBethernetadaptor-loaner Linux laptop instead of wireless.
My friend Phil Salkie loaned us his Linux laptop (running client VNC software to my XO’s x11vnc server), fought through many issues during the test attempt (hooking up to a monitor he’d brought along), and came to the presentation to help us hook the loaner laptop up to the Oracle projector system, working through the complexity of their twin-screen projector. Thanks, Phil!
This week I updated the Remote Display wiki page to incorporate short versions of the tips above. Thanks to Mike Lee and others for pointing me there in the first place — it was a big help!

Why Fix a Clock

configures — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:34:23 +0000

Just added a little config management perspective on the OLPC New Users wiki page. I hope to cover a CM perspective on electronic voting software here tomorrow.

My “Tour of OLPC” at NoVaLUG on Feb. 2

configures — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:10:37 +0000

I’ll be giving a presentation on the OLPC XO laptop on Saturday morning at the Northern Virginia Linux User Group, at the same swanky Oracle auditorium we met at the last time. I’m hoping that Jonathan Blocksom will be there to talk more about the developer end of things; I’m concentrating on the user experience. If folks appear interested, I’ll also talk aobut what tinkering I’ve done on mine so far, and the design philosophy as I understand it. If you’re interested in going, you should probably give the organizers a heads-up so you can get into the building.
10 am – noon
1910 Oracle Way

Reston, VA 20190

Community and Ownership issues for Knowledge Gardening

configures — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:14:25 +0000

What happens when an organization tries to foster a community, but there’s disagreement between them (and/or within the community) over priorities, principles, and procedures of knowledge management?

Not that most of them are quick to identify them as knowledge management issues, but many of the recent organization-community conflicts I’m aware of have a lot to do with knowledge management, as affected by ownership.

EVE online (game): How is sensitive information secured/accessed? How is information about controversies managed? Who has the ultimate say on what topics are allowed on the community boards?
Wikipedia: What information is appropriate for Wikipedia? Is it a good venue for knowledge development (semantics: is organizing references knowledge development, or only when new analyses are allowed is that knowledge work (as opposed to information management))? What happens when the neutrality of editors/judges is called into question? Are links to sites critical of Wikipedia going to be allowed?
LibraryThing: What information should be on a work page or an author page? What if there’s disagreement about the legitimacy/accuracy of including/excluding certain types of information (see previous LibraryThing entry)? Does “Common Knowledge” imply truth, or truthiness? Which should it imply? What if one workflow is better for adding books from the user point of view, but another is better at generating accurate book data?
One Laptop Per Child: Is “go explore” a reasonable response to a new Give One Get One XO laptop owner’s question about the laptop? What if the US user base gets way ahead of OLPC in generating information about it, but, impatient with the official wiki, puts most of that information over on discussion forums on OLPC News (not associated with OLPC; in fact, sometimes highly critical, though often enthusiastic about the technology and mission) instead?
For any of these, who owns the information users contribute, and how portable is it?

An obvious answer from the organization’s point of view is “we sponsor the site/project; someone has to decide, and we’re the ones who’ll make the final decision.” A vulnerability of this approach is when they depend on a large user community for contributions for their reason for being (Wikipedia) or for profit (LibraryThing). If their community grows disenchanted, they’re in trouble (especially if/when the Next Big Thing comes along). If the organization depends more directly on ads for survival (e.g., LiveJournal) than its users, it’s not such an immediate issue.

I think most flourishing communities have growing pains from time to time. Some resolve the conflict and move on, some paper it over and move on, and some splinter or go out with a whimper. I’m not sure what the sociology is of which direction a community is likely to go depending on whether it’s a mission-oriented community (e.g., an open source project) or a community of proximity (geographic, or common interests without a strong mission, e.g., people who like to chat about movies). I’d be interested in any studies about how the financial angle (e.g., non- versus for-profits) plays in, too.