J5’s Blog

ONE is a campaign to make poverty history. I found out about it through a news story on the CNN. It is a nice complement to the work I do at OLPC as it focuses on some of the more basic needs outlined by the UN Millennium Goals. What I liked about this particular effort is it is bipartisan, having picked up members from all over the political spectrum. Their One Vote ‘08 initiative is geared towards putting political pressure on all the US candidates towards focusing policy into trying to solve the issues of world poverty. This is a much better strategy than backing one horse in the race and brings change through unity and not division. I’ve signed the declaration, joined the facebook group, and offered to help and am now seeing if there are any like minds who would like to do the same.

Daf talked about it, Robert McQueen followed up on it. Perhaps Senator Ted Stevens wasn’t so wrong after all.

TUBES the video!!!

Our latest Sugar builds now have Collabora’s excellent work on TUBES!!! I just got off an Internet video chat between myself and demo Walter Bender is doing down in Argentina. Sound was amazing. We also have a Connect 4 activity, and shared PDF activity going. Eric Blankinship is on the verge of tubafying his excellent Capture activity so kids can share photos and videos over TUBES and we have some guys tubafying a drum circle activity. I should be getting to Block Party soon and releasing a bunch of tutorials in the process.

So we belatedly proved the Senator correct. The Internet is now made up of a bunch of Tubes. There is still one thing he got wrong though. I hereby state that D-Tubes, which is D-Bus messages over Tubes, can also be called Big Truck. So now the Internet can be a Big Truck which drives over TUBES!!!!

Digg it

…from the XO’s point of view

The FISL congress is over and it was great talking to the enormous amount of people who showed interest in the XO learning laptop and the OLPC project. It was nice to see people’s interest turn into large smiles by the time I was done explaining the project and answering their questions. Many stayed for fifteen minute or more and some even came back multiple times to play around with the machines and ask more questions.

However the one thing that made this trip truly wonderful was seeing the laptop in action at one of the trial schools in Porto Alegre.

Here, in this school, with a library no bigger than the size of a small classroom mostly filled with desks, we found enthusiastic children happy to see us. Now with the laptop and the Internet, children in the school have access to information which would fill their library a hundred times over.

One of the things we first noticed when walking into a classroom of kids using the laptops was the way the kids personalized their computers with stickers.

The white surfaces of the laptop offered perfect canvas for their creativity, which was as vibrant as any grade school child I have ever met.

We went around talking to children, mostly with the teachers translating for those of us who did not speak Portuguese.

They were also happy to listen to English. For those of them who have learned a bit, hearing from a native speaker can be very helpful. “What is your name?” was a question asked many times.

I wasn’t the only one taking pictures. One of the children’s favorite activity was taking pictures with the XO’s built in camera. Perhaps they will use them to create a photo journal – just as I am doing.

The teachers themselves are enthusiastic about the project. Many of these children do not have toys at home, let alone computers. The school has implemented a toy program where children who are more privileged than others donate their toys to a shared toy chest. They recognize that it is important for a child to play. The teachers are keen to give these kids as much as they are able.

But even with play one thing that amazed me during my trip to the school was when the kids were let out into the courtyard. While some of them went running around playing games a good portion of them sat down outside with their laptops and continued to work…

…in groups.

Each child was different, bringing a smile to my face with their creativity, intelligence and yes, funny antics.

Some of the children were able to make it to the congress, walking around the showroom with their XO’s and showing attendees what they liked best about the laptop.

The experience made the long hours working the booth worth it. It also affirmed to me the real reasons I decided to work on the project when given the chance to switch from Red Hat’s desktop group.

Look for video taken at the school a day after I had visited in Red Hat Magazine some time in the future.

While we have had images out for some time (and LiveCD’s) my current focus on a development enviornment LiveCD had caught the eye of engadget and slashdot.  The outcome of said LiveCD is to eventually have a hard disk installable, self hosting development environment.  Essentially one will be able to use the LiveCD to develop sugar activities and eventually produce LiveCD’s and customizable OLPC images.  It is our goal to have countries figure out how their children learn best and to customize the distribution to fit their needs.  The LiveCD will provide the tools for that process.  All that being said it is still a work in progress.  Please file bugs on the “distro” component on OLPC’s trac server.

This article from Linux Today is pretty in-depth. Read it, read it now I say

Don’t have a digital camera? Why not grab your Internet connected XO-1 to hock your wares? I belive these are the first still picture taken directly by the XO-1 and used for something other than just testing out functionality.

Now imagine what this means in the hands of an enterprising individual in a developing nation. Hypothetically, let’s think of a person who has goods but is remotely located where they can only get into a large trading zone about once a month. When they get there sometimes they sell well and sometimes they come home with what they left with. Now imagine if they can hook up with potential buyers before they get to market through the magic of a mesh network, repeaters and the Internet. Sellers can be more efficient in selling their goods by setting up times and places to meet. Buyers get exposed to a greater range of goods and can even special order for their needs.

One might ask, if this is such a good economic tool, then why are we developing these machines for children? The answer lies in the fact that it will be the children who learn how to best utilize these machines. They are the entrepreneurs of the future in which we need to invest in. When my father bought an Apple IIe when I was seven or eight, to him it was a neat gadget but to me it eventually became my livelihood. I for one can’t wait to see what develops once we have these machines in children’s hands.

Fresh off the mugshot wire, a review of the hi-tech high points of 2006 by columnist Bill Thompson at BBC News puts the XO Laptop in the driver seat:

The really significant change this year was the successful development of the Children’s Machine, which started life as the ‘$100 laptop’, a project to create a low-cost computer that governments can give to children around the world.

I just read an AP article talking about the design of the XO’s Sugar interface.