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?

Battle for Wesnoth : A free turn based strategy game

While sitting around waiting for Starcraft 2 to be released, why not try out some of the other excellent offerings out there? Personally, I’ve been itching for some “You, move there, you kill him, you, build that” action for quite a while, and I was not particularly up for reinstalling Warcraft on the windows machines.
I had taken a look at Battle for Wesnoth about 2 years ago, and while I found it ‘interesting’, it didn’t really grab me. I checked the project page, and saw a lot of work had been done on it, so decided to give it another try, and boy am I glad I have.
I won’t go into details about the game. There’s a very nice Youtube trailer here that shows some basic gameplay and highlights the amazing artwork that has gone into the game. Artwork tends to be the achilles heel of many opensource games. Getting good artwork (and in the amount necessary) is very difficult. The Wesnoth folks have filled in their entire tileset, characters, and dialogs with very clean, professional artwork. It’s a joy to play.
Check out the Youtube video of the trailer.
Sure, by World of Warcraft standards, this game looks primitive. But the gameplay is intricate and detailed, no rough edges nor incomplete implementations. There is a decent music soundtrack, and sound effects in the game are amusing and bolster the enjoyability.
And it’s free. And runs under Linux, Mac, or Windows.
What more could you ask for?

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…




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Originally uploaded by eidolon

This past week, as previously noted, I was down in NJ visiting my client. As such, I managed to miss the first snowstorm that came through on Thursday night.

Hahahhaha. I was not to escape so easily!

It’s still snowing out. The cleared driveway and path are nowhere to be seen. I’d call it another 11″ of snow has fallen, and it’s still going. Forecasts are saying it’ll turn to rain this afternoon, but it’s awfully chilly right now.

The kids next door are trying valiantly to bounce on their backyard trampoline, while it’s covered with a foot and a half of snow.

Zach’s curled up on the couch reading Harry Potter.

I miss my snowblower.

I CAN HAZ COFFEE MAKER!

A few times in the past year I’ve commented to my lovely wife regarding coffeemakers, and gosh-wouldn’t-it-be-nice if we had one that had a timer on it. I generally make a pot of coffee each morning, which involves the standard wash out the pot and gold filter, grind a new set of beans, fill up the tank, and hit start cycle. I’ve almost got my morning routine timed perfectly – I know how long the pot will take to brew, and I know when I need to be back downstairs.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if I could set a timer and have the pot ready the next morning?”
Well, it being Channukah and all, Cat got me a new coffeemaker, but went far beyond the pale and got a SUPER GEEKY coffeemaker.
The machine is a Keurig B-60 ‘single cup brewer’. Now, don’t let the ‘single cup’ thingy scare you. This isn’t some weeny little device that makes weak tan colored coffee and requires a half hour with the kitchen drudges to get clean.
The Keurig uses the little puncture-cups that have pre-measured coffee (apprently known as ‘K-Cups’). I’ve been skeptical of these puppies for a while, but I have to admit the first cup or two has come out just fine. The machine avoids a lot of the pitfalls I’ve seen in other automated machines. It has a ‘time on’ and ‘time off’ setting that changes when the reservoir is kept heated (I set mine to start at 7am, and turn off by 1pm – avoiding the machine keeping the heating element on all day). A full cups’ worth of water is kept inside the machine when idle, so you can change out the big tank without affecting the next cup of coffee. If the tank is empty, the machine lets you know on it’s little LCD screen.
The K-Cup approach to prepackaged coffee is fascinating, and allows the machine to make dozens of different types of coffee, or tea, or hot chocolate, without requiring a change of hardware between uses. For shared machines (like in our house), this is wonderful.
My only mild complaint about it is the noise. It uses a water pump to cycle water out of the tank into the internal heater, and that can be pretty rattly. I tend to make coffee after everyone has left the house, but my roomies may use it at early hours. I suppose it’s really no noisier than a coffee grinder, but it was a little alarming when it first started.
And. It has a cool blue glowing effect on it. I can have my cup of nuclear waste!
All in all, a vast improvement over the old Krups standard filter / pot. It served me well, and will most likely be used for social gatherings still, but my daily 2-3 cups are now coming from this puppy. Thanks Cat!

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.

Our home.




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Originally uploaded by eidolon

Yesterday I went over to the site for our once-a-month allowable visit onto the property while construction is going on. It was a nippy 18 degrees out, and the sky had that slate gray of “I’m a-gonna snow on you!” look (and in fact, did drop about 2″ of snow later)

The changes that have gone on there are quite amazing. Foundations are complete on about 70% of the buildings, and in Camelot’s case, they even have some of the framing in progresss on two of their units.

This particular picture is actually of the unit Cat, Zach and I will be living in. It’s a “large 3 bedroom + 2 1 bedroom flats” configuration, in this shot, our ‘side’ is on the right. If you’d like to see what it’ll look like when done, we have floor plans and exterior elevations available.

But there’s other wonders. The common house basement is in place, foundation poured and all the forms removed.

Seeing most of the foundations in place is really giving me a sense of what the space will be like. Our narrow walkways are… well, narrow! And the ‘upper lobe’ of buildings is going to feel more like a courtyard than anything else, an unexpected pleasure, to me!

After almost 8 years of working on this project, seeing it finally coming to life is a wonder. Walking down the north path toward the common house… pacing the actual walk from where the workshop (eventually) will be to my front door… it was stirring.

Dear Intarweb…

Somewhere, back in the mists of UI design, some bright light came up with the idea of making options in an application or desktop environment selectable by using a mouse to point at a menu along the top of a work area, clicking on the menu, and having it present more options.
This was called a ‘Pull down menu’
Handy! Picks were readily available when needed, and stayed out of the way until requested.
I’m fairly sure the original designers of menuing systems never said to themselves, “Hey guys, I think it would be a good idea to SHOW A PULLDOWN MENU JUST BECAUSE YOUR MOUSE HAPPENED TO ROLL ACROSS IT ON ITS WAY TO PAUSE YOUR MUSIC!
I’m flabbergasted that the ‘popup menu’ has become de rigeur in web pages. It’s a terrible UI design, and consistently gets in the way when trying to do other things. There’s no other menuing system on the planet that does this. Menus should show up when you ASK for them, not because you happen to TOUCH it. That’s what the little button the mouse is for. See? Clicky clicky. Now you try it.
Not that I expect this to change anytime in the near future. There’s a revolution going on in UI design now, with AJAX services redefining what it means to write a UI. Unfortunately, I have yet to see any AJAX application that comes near the functionality of existing systems. It appears programmers are going back to 1985 and starting over, thus jettisoning all the lessons learned in the last 20 years.

Facebook. Am I missing something?

Dave Belfer-Shevett's Facebook profileSo I have a profile on Facebook. It’s been enjoyable fiddling around with the apps and linking up with other folks, and all that has been peachy keen. In particular, I rather like the Twitter-esque ‘Status Updates’ that folks can use to say “I’m home, and eating sushi” or whatever else strikes their fancy.

The problem is, I frequently see a Status update where someone says “I’m feeling down” and what I really want to do is go “Oh? What’s up?”

But it appears the only way I can do that is to:

  1. Click on the users name to go to their profile
  2. Click on ‘Send [user] a message’
  3. Type a subject “So you’re down?”
  4. type a message
  5. hit send

This doesn’t seem like the interactive social structure I was looking for, where I could simply follow up on something I see with a “hey, what’s up?”. A message sent as above has no context, is not attached to the status update, etc etc.

In fact, Facebook seems structured in a way to NOT encourage that sort of spontaneous communication. It’s more geared to “Lets funnel people toward shared functions or applications” as opposed to “Lets make it easier for people to communicate.”

What am I missing? The initial funness of the site is starting to wear off a little bit. There’s zillions of people on Facebook. What keeps them there?

Google Sketchup – Okay, this is cool

I’ve been having fun playing with Sketchup, Google’s 3d modelling system. At first I avoided it because there was no native Linux version, even going as far as to get it to run under Wine (a process that… well, didn’t fail completely, but did result in a tool that’s unuseable – invisible menus, etc).
After biting the bullet and installing it on clipper, I set about learning what it could do. The project I had in mind was to model Mosaic’s building site in Berlin, MA, so folks could have a feeling for what it would be like walking
There was certainly a period of mental adjustment. After all, it’s not easy trying to model a 3d object using a 2 dimensional input and display method. But after a while, the keyboard shortcuts began to come naturally, and I found myself enjoying manipulating objects in this non-existent space.
I’m probably halfway through things so far. I’m regularly updating the drawing in 3dWarehouse, Google’s sharing service for Sketchup. If you have the tool, feel free to download the drawing so far…

I’ll let folks know when I’m done. But Google. Please? Make a Linux native version. You’ve already got Windows and Mac. This can’t be that hard.

Linksys router upgrade

Nothing like a nice quiet thanksgiving weekend to take it easy around the house, enjoy some quiet time with the family, and… UPGRADE YOUR ROUTER!
Our Linksys WRT54g has been happily managing our net connection for about 2 years now. I’ve been noticing some twitchy problems with it off and on (about once a month it stops handing out DHCP addresses, we have to reboot it), and it has shown other small problems. The final straw came about 6 months ago when I realized I had lost the administration password. This meant I couldn’t even log INTO the router to find out what was wrong with it. Something had to be done!
(6 months later)
Okay, time to fix it! I reset the router (holding in the reset button for 10 seconds does this) which resets it to factory defaults. The default password on Linksys routers is just ‘admin’ in the password field (surfing the neighborhood? See an SSID of ‘linksys’? Hit 192.168.1.1, and try ‘admin’ in the password field. Welcome to someone’s router! – some versions of the linksys may require admin in the username field as well).
The first thing I did was confirm that I could log into the router and that default configurations worked with our Comcast cable modem (they did). After resetting the password and the SSID, I took the opportunity to upgrade the firmware in the router. And I’m super-happy I did.
The firmware I was using was v 1.00.02. The current version is 1.02.2. The number of ‘fixes’ between those versions? somewhere around a bazillion. On the one hand, I do appreciate that Linksys is actively updating their firmware. On the other hand, that’s a lot of bugfixes for a router that’s only 18 months old.
I’m seriously considering checking out DD-WRT, the opensource firmware for the WRT54G. It has a truly impressive feature list, including native OpenVPN client and server support. Unfortunately, my router is a Version 6, which only has 2mb of flash in it. That means I can’t run fit a larger firmware image onto the device. Alas. Maybe I’ll eBay an older revision that has 16meg in it.
For now, I’m back up and running, and hopefully won’t have my roomies having to fight with constant connection drops and router resets.

OLPC G1G1 Program netting $2m a day

As reported on Engadget :

Negroptone’s OLPC Buy One, Give One program has been extended to 31 December, 2007 — well beyond the initial two-weeks originally announced. The deal buys both yourself (or rather, your kid supposedly) and a tot from a developing nation new XOs for just $399. Already, the non-profit claims to be pulling in about $2 Million worth of “donations” each day. They’ve also opened up bulk buying to schools in quantities of 100-999 ($299 each), 1000-9999 ($249 each), or 10,000 and more ($199). Oh, and the program is now officially renamed “Give One, Get One” (GoGo) — we presume BoGo’ing the kids just sounded a tad too dirty.

We ordered one for Zach already, and I’d been curious about how the sales were going. Folks on the #olpc Freenode channel were saying that the manufacturer would build based on orders, and if orders were slow, they wouldn’t ramp up the daily production. But it looks like things are moving briskly.
Yay!

Dear eBay. Fix your HTML. Again.

I know you’re the largest online auction house on the planet. I realize that despite the bazillions of dollars you rake in on a yearly basis, you still haven’t been able to hire a single competent site designer, and after 10-ish years of operation, your site still looks like it was hacked together by a business major playing around with Microsoft FrontPage.
Requiring ActiveX when selecting images to upload is patently ridiculous, particularly when my browser signature specifically says I’m coming from a Linux box.

c.activeXVersion = ‘1,0,3,48’;

You’ll be receiving a bill shortly for the 20 minutes I spent booting my Windows machine, moving images over to it, and recreating my auction from scratch.
Luv, me.

Life snapshot…

“Dad?”
“Yeah zach, what’s up?”
“I’m posting something in a forum, how do you make a link?”
(Dad pauses here, thinking scary thoughts about open forums, but willing to check it out…)
“What forum?”
“OneMoreLevel”
(Another pause to check it out – chats about online games. Okay, this seems innocuous enough…)
(details about how to make a PHPBB link in a forum post)
“Oh, that’s easy, thanks!”
“Enjoy!”
sakkura. My son. Am I ready for this? I mean, he’s already talking smack to other players 🙂 🙂 🙂 . Not sure if this should make me squee with glee or totally give me the heebee jeebees.