J5’s Blog

I’ll be in various places other than the Boston area for most of November.  Starting this coming Friday I will be driving down to NY where I am catching a flight to Florence, Italy for a friend’s wedding.  I’ll be there for a week and then am going to work from Atlanta, Georgia while visiting my best friend who is getting married next spring.  To round things off I will be working from NY through Thanksgiving.

The Italy trip is pretty booked but I should be visiting the ATL and NY Red Hat offices to say hi since I will be there anyway.  If any Fedora or GNOME folks want to grab a beer or just meet up let me know.

It is good to see other distributions are picking up the eggcups printer autoconfiguration interfaces which I had started and Tim Waugh had perfected. It was more than three years ago that GNOME had a dream of making USB hardware ‘Just Work’ when plugging them in. Today one can’t imagine a desktop distribution which doesn’t have this. A key agenda at the next GUADEC should be getting a lot of this work accepted upstream and figuring out how last mile items like PolicyKit will add polish to great stack we have built up.

Thank you mugshot for pointing this out. Apparently RHEL5 will be shipping on HP computers in Australia. A tip of the hat goes to the desktop team which I worked on before moving to OLPC and the GNOME community which makes such a wonderful desktop.

As of Fedora 7 Red Hat had relinquished control of Fedora to the community by merging extras and core into one distribution and giving the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) oversight over the whole project. FESCo is somewhat analogous to the GNOME Board. Today it was unanimously approved by FESCo for the OLPC operating system Sugar to become part of the fold.

This means we will be moving from the Red Hat build and CVS servers to the Fedora servers which are open to the community. It also means we will be working within Fedora towards making it more and more flexible for targeted projects such as OLPC.

In the coming weeks I will be rebasing Sugar on Fedora 7 and moving all of our packages over. More information about the OLPC/Fedora partnership is on the Fedora wiki.

I am quite startled by those who predict gloom and doom because Windows (embedded) will be able to run on a general purpose OPEN computer like the XO. Is our goal a protectionist society where an elite group tells you what you can or can not use on your computer? Or, is our goal an open society where we win on merit and innovation? For our part, the Red Hat Sugar team believes it is building a best of breed OS for the target audience. How many systems will allow you to download activities just because you want to collaborate with a friend? A proprietary system won’t allow that. How many systems will allow you to hit the view source key and see exactly how the current activity works? Again you lose out if you run a proprietary system. Whether or not educators wants to allow for exploration and teaching children how to adapt to the ever changing world or just want to teach static skills is really up to them. I personally am not in the business of forcing people to use my products but rather developing the product for specific needs and letting the customer choose. I’m in the business of building better systems, period.

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.

Jono, you hate Heathrow, I hate San Paolo airport. I ended up missing my flight even though I was at my gate two hours ahead of time. Turns out they changed the gate and by the time I was about to board a plane to who knows where (they didn’t check my ticket when I boarded) my name was called. By the time I fought through the crowd coming into the plane my plane had taken off. I managed to get on a flight four hours later.The real hero in all this is Juliano Bittencourt who happily came to pick me up at the later time. I met him at the Bossa conference and I have to say the hospitality I have received in Brazil is top notch even if their airports aren’t.

So I needed a drink. I ended up having a bottle of Terranova Cabernet/Shiraz with steak in wine sauce. I must say even though they killed the meat (it was medium well, good steak should be medium rare) it was quite good. The Terranova was good but didn’t blow me away. The white Terranova Moscatel I had in Porto de Galinhas did blow me away so I was expecting a little bit more but it wasn’t bad.

Tomorrow we check out the OLPC/Red Hat/AMD booth and then head off to one of the schools which is doing a trial (all these armchair technologists who said we should be doing trials – well duh!!!) of the OLPC. I can’t wait to ask the kids what they want to see on the laptops, what issues they are having and how they use the machines.

If anyone needs to contact me while I am here I am in room 562 of the Novotel hotel.

My sister was up this week, taking a break from the upper east side of Manhattan to visit her bro and attend a business seminar. She didn’t bring her laptop so she ended up using mine while she was here. Her basic usage is Firefox, AOL web mail, Exchange web mail for work, a word processor and a spreadsheet. It helped that she uses Firefox on windows but she really liked how easy it was to do what she wanted. When she downloaded a spreadsheet from her work mail and launched it, it brought up open office. She was able to view all the web pages she normally goes to and she found everything quickly without asking my help.

I’m setting up one of my older laptops for her – a Fujitsu Lifebook which is really slow but is small and good enough for her to take to her MBA class. “Do I have to worry about viruses because I think my Laptop has one?” Nope.

About the only thing she found really irritating was the synaptics touchpad. When are we going to fix that? I mean the scroll functionality is fairly useful and doesn’t get annoying if it screws up but the browser back gesture is just wrong. Is there anyone who seriously uses this feature?

You hardly hear from him but when you do it is pretty profound. It was a similar manifesto which launched the D-Bus project and inspired David Zeuthen to write HAL. Go, go, go mugshot team. GNOME should really get onboard.

Red Hat Magazine is on an OLPC kick.  Their latest article by Greg DeKoenigsberg details The Anatomy of an Activity.  The tutorial shows step by step how to construct a Sugar activity bundle in Python.