musings

Education, Technology, Outreach...

My slides from a couple of weeks ago. I did this presentation to a class of Early Childhood Education students. It was featured as “Editor’s pick” on Slideshare.net!

Slides are at Education, Technology, Outreach and the One Laptop Per Child project

Concrete and grass

Groklaw – Interview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs

I liked PJ’s comparison of Sugar to grass “You can pour concrete over it, and it will still grow, pushing through every crack in a sidewalk to reach the sun’s rays, and then it grows and spreads and flourishes.” Microsoft just
seems sooo determined to cover the world in concrete.

Sugar everywhere

55,000 Sugar/GNU/Linux XO machines are being shipped every month to kids all over the world. This is a generation getting ready to break the bonds of digital slavery and build a commons for themselves on free and open source software and open content and standards.

In the meantime, Microsoft announced a pilot study to run Windows XP, that seven year old system that it is desperately trying to ditch in the US and Europe, on the same XO laptops in a last ditch effort to continue to poison the pool. Keep at it, Microsoft. Your own incompetence will be the end of you.

By the way, I’m curious – why not Vista on the XO? Too fat for kids?

A hunger for books

Doris Lessing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing), aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the ‘inanities’ of the Internet.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331488257-110738,00.html

I am not sure I completely agree with the whole “inanities of the Internet” business though, especially in light of what OLPC aims to do. Sure, the “book” will not have paper pages, but it will nevertheless be a book. There is also a great bit of focus currently on providing books via the XO laptop. I hope we eventually graduate to the possibility of writing books via the XO. Children have great imagination and would be a great source for short stories.

From the article:

“The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.”

Perhaps the “inanities” of the Internet will help create the new storyteller, dream-maker, myth-maker.

'tis the season for giving ...and getting!

http://www.laptopgiving.org/

A system for fools, with limited choice added for good measure.

Build a system that even a fool can use and only a fool will want to use it.

Ever since I switched over to free and open source software I find the whole process of buying a “limited edition” of any software foolish. I am not against buying software. I used to earn a living by selling software. I however disagree with the whole concept of selling software with limitations. For example, if you buy proprietary software for academic use, you are usually not allowed to use the software for commercial purposes. For commercial use, you have to go and buy yet another piece of software (more specifically, a license for commercial use).

Here’s a thought. Go ahead and download Workrave. Its a simple, yet powerful program for avoiding Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSI). It works on Linux and Windows. This program is made available to you under a license (GNU General Public License) that holds no limits on the use. In essence, there is no discrimination whatsoever on the basis of fields of endeavor. RSI is a problem, and whether you get it from academic work or commercial work, RSI is painful! Should a license get in the way of avoiding that problem? Isn’t software simply a tool to get the job done?

When people raffle away software at events, giving away the “oh-so-special” titles of software to a select few, I can’t help but wonder how they chugged down the koolaid. There are an insanely large number of software titles available for people to use with no limitations, only if they knew such a thing existed!

Don’t believe me? Take a look: http://www.theopencd.org/programs. You’ll get 30+ programs ready to run on your Windows computer, with only one string attached – freedom to use it in any form whatsoever. Oh, and if you don’t like it, you get your money back! (wink, wink)

iPhone: iWait or iWon't

I am sure you’ve heard of the iPhone by now. Its all the rave by now. People are buying two and selling one at a 100% markup or more. I walked down to Stonestown mall, which is next to SF State and has a Apple Store.

The line of people waiting to get in was long. It winded past the doors to the outside of the mall. Inside, they had a security guy from Apple (he sported a polo shirt with “security” on it. I smiled at him and said “Your shirt should really read iSecurity”. He broke out into a toothy grin).

I found a bench right outside the store, so I bought some ice cream and settled down to watch the show. A blogger walked by. Quietly sat down beside me. Opened his backpack and pulled out his MacBook Pro. Powered it up, typed something frantically, and took a few shots using the built-in camera. Then he shutdown his laptop and walked away. I presumed he bolgged away and posted a pic or two.

Soon, I heard chanting of a countdown (5, 4, 3, 2, 1…cheers) and the Apple Store opened, with large mockups of the phone in the glass windows. Security ran around. There was the pot-bellied security guy who just shifted his belly around and tried to look calm. Eventually, the line started to move. I finished my ice cream and walked away. I figured, iPhone? Perhaps iWait. Or maybe iWon’t. I’m eyeing another vice. The Neo from OpenMoko.

Sharing slides

Slideshare.net is a Web 2.0 portal that allows you to share your slides via a web-based frontend. No need for viewers, Powerpoint, etc.

Here’s my slideshow on Voice over IP which I did for SVLUG.

404: dream not found

April 4 (4/04) is Not Found Day.

A haiku by Tom Digby in honor of the occasion:

Clock glows 4:04
As I wake in the darkness
Thinking “Dream Not Found”

id:entity

I am teaching a multimedia course this semester. Towards that effort, I am trying to stick with free and open source software for this course so that the students don’t have to buy/pirate expensive graphics packages.

There is, of course, the question of how good the software really is, but take a look at Elephant’s Dream and judge for yourself. Its made entirely using free and open source software.

I was playing around with Inkscape, an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

One thing led to the other and before you know, I had this graphic. Looks interesting, so I’m posting it. The actual SVG file is here.