Planet Geek

Boston OLPC Meetup - A success!

This evening saw the third Boston OLPC meetup, this time congregating at Cosi restaurant in Cambridge, right across the street from OLPC Headquarters in Kendall Square.

My son and I arrived at around 6:40pm, and things were already in full swing, with a table full of XO laptops up and running and various folks working through getting a mesh network started and fiddling around with sharing. There was some consternation at the beginning about how to actually get shared chat going, but apparently what was needed was the influence of a 9yr old, who charged in and helped get it working.

There were around 8 XO's, with Diane showing particular verve with her 2 laptops and accompanying green accessories (including OLPC Green headphones and roll-up keyboard. Outstanding!).

One of the goals of the evening was letting folks have some experience with activity sharing - something that many of the people there had never seen. After a bit of fiddling, Zach and Tracy got the Write activity running in Shared mode, and had quite a bit of excitement co-editing a document together.

With my non-XO laptop, I hopped on #olpc on FreeNode and mentioned the get together, and lo, Chris Ball (master coder of the Python development activity 'Pipppy') and Michael Stone came down to join us and mix with us users.

A great time was had by all. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Michael, Chris, and the other 'grownups' work with Zach on various things he was interested in, as well as showing him some new tricks. In the US, Zach is a perfect representative of "kids who are into the XO". He's teaching himself Python, is a big fan of Scratch, and loves learning stuff. Okay okay, so I'm a little biased.

Thanks to everyone who made it, I look forward to the next one!

Why the XO Laptop is better than the Classmate

There's been some awful FUD flying around the OLPC world in the last few days, with misquotes, misinformation, and flat out lies being propagated left and right. Even Engadget, one of the better geektech blogs out there, got it completely wrong regarding OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen's departure from the project.

Fortunately, there's good resources around that tell the story from the people who really do know what is going on. First, there's the interview with Mary Lou Jepsen on Groklaw. In it she explains the real reasons behind her choice to move on to Pixel Qi, and her ongoing relationship with OLPC. Astute readers will note that her commentary there bears little or no resemblance to some of the FUD flying around other news sites.

Of particular interest is this tasty quote. There's been lots of noise about OLPC squashing competition (in particular, the Classmate PC), and making unreasonable demands from Intel. That's complete hooey. Competition should be between competitive products. So how does the Classmate stack up against the XO?

Classmate is more expensive, consumes 10 times the power, has 1/3 the wifi range, and can't be used outside. Also, the Classmate doesn't use neighboring laptops to extend the reach of the internet via hopping (mesh-networking) like the XO does. So not only is the XO cheaper than the Classmate, the XO requires less infrastructre expenditure for electricity and for internet access. In Peru we can run off of solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or perhaps 20 years. Just try running electricity cables up and down the Peruvian Andes for that cost while making sure it's environmentally clean energy. The Classmate isn't as durable as the XO, and its screen is about 30% smaller, the batteries are the type that can explode and only last 1-2 years and can't be removed by the user and harm the environment. The batteries are expensive to replace: $30-40 per replacement. The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made, the Classmate isn't – this matters a great deal when one proposes to put millions of them in the developing world.

Given that comparison, why would any country, any organization, pursue the Classmate over the XO? Answer? Underhanded dealings, lies, and unfair practices. That is not to say that aggressive competition doesn't happen in the marketplace at large, but OLPC is not trying to compete in a marketplace. It has a mission to do some good in the world. It's purpose is not to broker back room deals to increase stockholder value. It's goals are far more noble, something that carries far too little weight in the world today.

Back on the clarification train, we have the inimitable Ivan of OLPC giving the full details behind the whole 'Microsoft Dual-Boot XO Laptop" spiel. Unsurprisingly, it's nothing like what the blogs and the news sites are characterizing it as. I'm rather disappointed that the tech community seems to be aggressively looking for a reason to bash the OLPC project - looking for schisms, problems, and interpreting every change or update in the project as a sign of it's imminent demise. While it's certainly common to see this all the time in mainstream media, I had, perhaps naively, hoped the geek world would take a broader, less sensationalistic approach to reporting on this project. Sad to say, that's doesn't seem to be the case.

Doesn't matter. The project is a success, and continues to be so. And I for one am glad.

OLPC G1G1 final numbers

A couple folks have asked me how successful the OLPC "Give One Get One" program was, since we participated in it to get Zach his XO.

OLPC News reports:

OLPC just announced that G1G1 raised $35 million dollars with the sale of 162,000 X0 laptops - half (81,000) destined for Haiti, Rwanda, Cambodia, Mongolia, Afghanistan.

I'd call that pretty durned successful.

Well, Dang.

We just got mail saying that the XO Laptop for Zach won't arrive until at least January 15th. On the one hand, I'm glad they let us know so I can stop frantically hitting <refresh> on Fedex's website, but I'm sad because he won't have it for his vacation.

I am consolidated knowing that our contribution is still helping the OLPC project, and somewhere in central or southern America, a child -will- get a laptop because of our contribution, but I still wish Zach had his for the winter break.

He's happily spending time working with Scratch on his desktop machine anyway, so at least when the XO does get here, there'll be an environment he's already familiar with on it.

Know a foreign language? OLPC needs you!

According to OLPC News, the OLPC project is enlisting help translating software for the XO laptop into other languages using Pootle :

How it works is that you go to the localization server for the One Laptop per Child Project. Register by creating a username and password and providing your name and email address. Choose the languages you wish to contribute to, and then the specific file of the project, like "XO Core" or "Terminology."

Pick a word from the list on the left and write a suggestion in the box on the right. Clicking "Suggest" sends the translation to the server. If your Amharic is rusty, and you're not quite sure about your suggestion, check the box beside the word "Fuzzy" to let the program know that too.

I'm a dumb 'murrican, so I'm no help here, but maybe others can chime in?

XO Laptop environment - Try it yourself!

I can't help it, I'm too impatient. While waiting for my Zach's XO laptop to arrive, I wanted to get a feel for what the environment was going to be like.

The XO uses a modified version of Redhat's Fedora operating system, with a custom written 'desktop' called Sugar. Coupled with Sugar are several tools, including a music editor, video application, several programming tools, a web browser, etc etc. The environment had to be built in a way that non-english-speaking children could pick it up easily, and if the early reports are true, the team has done a great job at this.

But I wanted a chance to work with the environment before the laptop arrived. Fortunately, there's a great series of pages on the OLPC Laptop wiki that describes how to set up an emulator, and run the laptop OS on your desktop machine.

After a little fiddling, I got it up and running, and was able to play around with the environment for a while.

First note - the emulator runs things -slower- than the laptop itself does, so I had to take into account I was seeing things at about half the speed a typical user would. But even with that, I was able to get a good feel for what the user experience was like.

I recommend anyone interested in this system to follow the emulator steps and take a look at it. I'm of the opinion that with several million of these going out to kids all over the world, the environment and tools are going have a major impact on the net at large. Opensource code (all written in Python, very good visual programming tools (like the Logo environment pictured here) - all will contribute to a new digital landscape over the next few years.