If you hadn’t had a devkit buffer open before the extradimensional mugging, you wouldn’t even have noticed the missing twelve thousand lines of code. […] 

“Who’s got access to your version control system?” you ask Venkmann.

“Huh?  What’s that got to do with it?”

“Plenty, I think.”

Version control!  In a fun near-future novel (international finance, spies and skullduggery, ubiquitous computing, and MMORPGs)! I was looking forward to seeing how the version control angle played out (and what tool was being used), but it was never directly mentioned again, just the larger security angle.

There are 15 reviews of this book already up at LibraryThing, so I’ll just mention a few more odds and ends:

•  annoyance at rushed ending was compounded by the realization that some of the interesting stuff that had been dangled before the reader in this book was just sequel set-up, like Stross did to The Family Trade
• but at least the romance was more believable in this book
• corporate and tech aspects were convincingly portrayed
• contrary to one reviewer’s confused account, the zombie flash mob was NOT the same as the zombie horde.  They were on/used by different sides, in different places, in different ways.  That was part of the *fun* of this book.

I enjoyed this book, but as a book, Stross’ Glasshouse was better, and one I recommend unreservedly.

It’s by no means a complete reference, but it should put their new person on the road to learning more.

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?

Benjamin Mako Hill

• Benjamin Mako Hill’s entry about Penguicon
• BMH after Negroponte’s remarks

OLPC changes and uncertainty

OLPC developers are not open source fundamentalists

Disruption and Hope

Back to the Roundtable:

• cmdln’s detailed write-up of Mako’s comments at the start
• photo 1
• photo 2

•  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.

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.

1.  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.
2. 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.

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1. Folks should be able to post and see comments immediately, without having to leave their name/emails (though they’re welcome to provide such information). Akismet should hold off the spam.
2. I changed the permalinks to use dates and entry titles — it only took a bit of fiddling to get the older entries (and their comments) working with it.
3. I switched to the PopBlue theme which shows Recent Comments, but I need to customize so it shows my blog name at the top.
4. I added the Bookmarkify plugin to assist in social bookmarking (not really for comments, but all part of making this site more sociable).

I was happy to read that my city now offers free wifi in its Town Square, though less enchanted to find out, upon trying it, that it required setting up Yet Another Account. I suppose someone advised the city it would make it slightly easier to track down any miscreants, or maybe it was the easiest way to get people to read their Terms of Service. However, if running an open, password-free wifi network is good enough for security guru Bruce Schneier, one would think that might have been good enough for them. Ah well! Having set up the account, on warm sunny days, I might take advantage of their generousity and sit on a bench to surf outside. On the other hand, the library is right off the town square, and their open wifi just works.

The Maryland primary / election was held Feb. 12, and I was a Closing Judge for it.

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• Cool Visualizations:  my Spanish-speaking brother may be especially interested in this tag display/analysis
• Cool analogy:  energy required for state changes between data/information/knowledge, like ice/water/steam

And old content from me:  the audio from my Knowledge Gardening presentation at Penguicon 2007 is online at the Internet Archive (mp3 and Ogg Vorbis):  Sarah Elkins on Knowledge Gardening

Thanks to whoever put it up there, and the 6 folks who found it and downloaded it already!

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

Me

• 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

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!

Note the emphasis on auditing the process there, not just the software. If one wants to know how well a process involving software works, it’s not enough just to look at the software, especially when one wants to be really, really sure about the process. What controls are in place to make sure that the right software is being used? Even assuming good faith, mistakes can happen, especially if one is in a rush to deploy a bug fix. Are there other elements that need controls, such as hardware elements … data devices that may be moved around, such as cards? Are all these elements uniquely identifiable? What logging is in place to be able to check that the controls are working? How accident- and tamper-resistant are the logs?

The more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to ensure that everything is functioning as expected. Electronic voting systems are complex, and it’s not just about the software. Others have written about specific issues with specific elections in the past, machines that were certified that never should have been, and so on.  Some electronic voting critics have acted as election judges to get a first-hand look (particularly after counter-claims involving ivory towers and lab conditions), and have written about their experiences.

I wanted to help out with elections this year, and get a closer look at what I’d read about. I went to my first Election Judge training last week, to be a Closing Judge for Montgomery County (Maryland) last week. The trainers did their best with us in two hours, but I’m going to just have to hope I get things right, with the help of the Chief Judge and more experienced judges there (we have a meeting at my precinct Monday night). It didn’t help that the trainers did not follow our written documentation (they explained they were skipping stuff because they knew the system cold, and we had to get done in time to clear the room for the next class), and did not always agree with each other about the training machines. Whatever Diebold had under the covers, the elements we were working with (tape, data cards, keys, printouts that had to be torn at just the right time or that machine’s results were invalidated, etc.) were complex enough that, given our insufficient training, it’s hard to see how we could pass an audit next week. I’m not blaming the trainers — there was too much to cover. Electronic voting (as opposed to using machines to fill out and print out the actual ballots to be counting) is complicated, and that complexity makes it difficult to maintain a secure voting process. I want a voting system at least as secure as good old paper ballots. We don’t have that right now.