Larry Dignan asks, “OLPC: How do we gauge success? Will 490,000 units do?… So what’s success here? My take is Negroponte’s project is a success simply because it brought an issue to the forefront and got tech giants on board.”
I believe Negroponte’s goal was to put tools in the hands of children eager to learn to use them. Let’s hope that success continues; there’s a lot more need than the initial half-million OLPCs.
Fourteen people managed to find their way to the Amoskeag Business Incubator (it’s on SOUTH Commercial Street, contrary to the directions on the ABI site) for the November meeting, one week later than the usual fourth Thursday of the month, of the Python Special Interest Group.
A number of new attendees arrived this month. We pointed out that the mailing list for the group can be found on the DLSLUG and GNHLUG sites, look for “mailing list” and that there was an announcement as well as a discuss list for the group. We pointed out the main calendar at GNHLUG.org as well and talked about other resources.
Several members were new to the area or had come up from Cambridge, MA (our fair city) for the SIG meeting. They pointed out the Cambridge Python Group, who usually posts meeting announcements on Meetup.com, which boasts 103 members on their list! We discussed the ideas for mutual cooperation, and will be glad to cross-post their announcements to the PySIG -announce list.
Kent S. Johnson was the main presenter, and showed us how Django is used to host the http://www.blogcosm.com site. Without going into details on the business aspects of the site, Kent was able to give us a tour of several of the pages, talk about the RESTful URL formats, the model-view-controller model that’s used, demonstrate some of the code used to describe a model and the actions that can be taken on it, and show us some of the templating language that generates the HTML. The built-in administrative functionality, creating simple CRUD pages based on the model descriptions, was an impressive Django feature.
An excellent meeting, with lots of code and lots of ideas. Thanks to Kent for the main presentation, to our Cambridge brethren for making the long trip, to Bill Sconce for arranging, announcing and MC’ing the meeting, and to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the great venue. Hope to see you all again at next month’s meeting, held on the 27th of December, likely just an informal chat due to the proximity with the holiday.
Ouch! Encrypted communications between your computer and peripherals have to be impractically difficult to crack. The encryption scheme described in “Security firm cracks encryption for Microsoft’s wireless keyboards – heise Security” is beyond pathetic. I hope other manufacturers have more reasonable encryption schemes. In the mean time, don’t type anything on a Microsoft wireless keyboard you wouldn’t want to see published like, say, your bank account password. Disgraceful!
Link via Schneier on Security
In the Never-A-Dull-Moment category, David blogs Riding Rails: Rails 2.0: It’s done! and provides a summary of new and improved features. As he said at the recent Railsconf (audio here), Rails 2.0 was not an earth-shaker as much as an evolutionary move. Looking forward to trying it out.
Thanks to Garrett Fitzgerald for pointing to this brilliant piece of writing. Mark Pilgrim writes The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts), a short and very well done piece. A must read!
A client had a demo web site developed by someone else and they were really excited about the interactivity. It was a very rich client application, with drag-and-drop and sizers and interactive widgets. The client wanted my team to use the same platform, which they thought was something-Dot-Net. Once we were finally able to chase down the developer, it turned out to be a commercial Javascript library. We looked up the vendor, and it is a curious site.
They have an online store, one of those generic things with box-shots of a product that’s download only (there must be an add-on for Photoshop or GIMP to make these fake boxes, don’t you think?), an “About Us” page that has the usual mission-statement-ish stuff, but no “Who We Are” or where they are, a “Customer Support” page that lets you submit a ticket online, no history, no searching. The only contacts are email addresses (generic, “marketing,” “legal,” “info” not “bobsmith@example.com”) and an 800-number I have no doubt is an answering service. There’s no online forum. It looks like no one’s home.
Searching about them in Google, there’s their web site, of course. There are a couple of mentions about XSS (cross-site scripting) and a few other exploits posted to the usual security sites, a good sign that someone is actually using the code. A couple of echos of their press releases. And… nothing. No user communities, either a forum on their web site or an ad-hoc third party set of posts. No additional information. No one posting anything, anywhere from @example.com. This is pretty strange.
So, what’s the deal? My best guess is that this is an off-shore operation without any US representation nor tech support, perhaps even no ability to provide support in English. Between a proprietary license and questionable support, I’ve recommended we do some more research and see if some of the open source or openly-available Javascript libraries can fulfill the client’s needs.
Just got a note that the Greater Boston Chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery just released its most recent GBC/ACM: The Real Times Newsletter, a remarkable publication. Highlights: the GBC now accepts their (paltry) $10 annual dues via Google Checkout, and posts from related groups like the Boston PHP and others. Note also the Jared Spool seminar — a not to miss event!
I found this elegant little hack the other day while browsing for something completely different. I see that the code has made the rounds, and appears on sites like xmpp.com and ietf.org, but the credits seem only to lead to other marketing sites harvesting page views and hosting ads. A sample is available at http://www.phlapjaxs.com/demo.html and consists of a span tag defined as absolutely positioned and block-display, which in turn is inside an anchor tag set to position: relative. That means the block will “pop” at the location of the anchor and can display whatever text (or images or other content) is within the span. Spiffy!
Ivan Krstić blogs First OLPC deployment: now it’s real.: “This week, Uruguay became the first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops. And I was there to hand out the first one.” Very cool! Uruguay is due to deploy ninetu thousand and Peru just signed up for a quarter of a million of them. The pundits can say what they want, but the experience in the field will be far more educational than the prognostications. Looking forward to the results.
On NHPR this morning, the On The Media show had an episode on the One Laptop Per Child program. Here’s what they say on their web site:
In 2005 computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte announced his bold plan to build a laptop that costs $100 and deliver it to the world’s 150 million poorest schoolchildren in just 4 years. But the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Stecklow says competition from companies like Intel and Microsoft seems to have put that goal out of reach.
I’d be disappointed if the OLPC itself doesn’t succeed, but in some senses, it already has, spurring innovation (real innovation, not marketing slogans) in the low-power rugged laptop-form-factor marketplace. OLPC is radically innovative hardware where many of the other version one-oh products are the same old stuff in a smaller case. OLPC has screen that works in full sunlight and uses little to no power as an eBook. It has a mesh-based network capability that will allow ad-hoc networks over great distances in field conditions. Every aspect of the design was considered. These are elegantly engineered machines. The software is as innovative as the hardware, with a simplified UI that allows and encourages exploration and collaboration. I’ve contributed to the project, and I encourage you to do so.