Chasing Nuts

That was the e-mail I received into my inbox this morning, the e-mail gave me some great information on my order. This is the part that got me really excited:

Your XO laptop is on the way.
Your donated XO laptop will soon be delivered into the hands of a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. In one of our recipient children’s own words, “I want to thank you people because you had given us the laptop and I love it so much.” Your generosity will make a world of difference in these children’s lives, and in the future of their respective countries.

Thanks to your early action, your XO laptop is scheduled to be delivered between December 14 and December 24. Our “first day” donors are our highest priority and we are making every effort to deliver your XO laptop(s) as soon as possible. We will send you an update upon shipment.

It will be a great Christmas present to myself if I get this before the holiday. It will not be wrapped but I but I will be tearing unto the UPS box with the excitement of a little child on Christmas morning.

On a Penguicon note this years GoH lighup is reallying kicking it!

Tech Guest of Honor: Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager for Canonical
Tech Guest of Honor: Benjamin Mako Hill - Debian/GNU, MIT Media Lab, Free Software Foundation, Ubuntu, Wikimedia
Author Guest of Honor: Vernor Vinge, Multiple Hugo winning science fiction author, computing visionary
Author Guest of Honor: Tamora Pierce, fantasy author, co-founder of Sheroes Central
Webcomics Guest of Honor: Randall Munroe of xkcd
Gaming Guest of Honor: Keith Baker, creator of Ebberon world for Dungeons and Dragons
Hack of Honor: The Giant Singing Tesla Coils

I Learned a many cool things at the MUG meeting last night where Ivan Krstić presented on OLPC.

He gave some background and started talking about to technology. First the rotating antennas are more then just a marketing gimic, you get a 3db gain by getting them up and away from the electronics. Also in testing they are getting 2km range in the out doors.
The system only uses a scant 1-2 watts running and 4-5 watts peak. The display adapter/screen sits on a separate power rale so that the machine can go to sleep and keep the frame on the screen locked. DCON is the magic hardware frame buffer that makes this all happen. The systems goes to sleep and wakes up in ~100ms. The project is not all the way there yet with the suspend/awake time but hope to get there soon. The screen is a dual mode screen: 1200×900 mono (no back light), 692×520 color (back light on), 200 dpi dual-mode, 7.5 screen. You can charge the OLPC with just about anything as it takes 8-32 volts DC will power it. The camera on the system is very good it can do 30 fps VGA and Ivan thinks the OLPC camera is better then a MacBook camera. The system has a SD card for more memory, the OLPC project helped drive large SD card support in Linux. The system has a way cool battery: LiFePO4 technology, half the weight it LioN and a lot safer. You can use the audio input to watch just DC voltage, I wonder if there is a oscilloscope application? Last there is social network and presence built in to the OS, developers use a simple API to use it. The tools to make this happen are avahi, NM, XMPP, Jabber and mesh extrusion.

Next Ivan talked about the development tools and code. To help make it open they wanted to avoid the normal hell that can often be such a joy in development. The hell of of trying to get libs, compilers, and all the other fun versions of the right stuff. This is why the project chose to do as much as they could in Python. There is a really cool ‘gear’ key to show code and it is context sensitive so in a web browser it shows HTML source and in a application it can bring up the pyton. Everything that can be resonably be done in python will be done in python. There are some exceptions X.org, mDNS, sound daemon and a few others.

Security Requirements

• prevent hardware damaged by software
• provide recoverability and openess
• prevent user data loss
• protect the user’s privacy
• prevent the laptops from being a platform for attacks
• keep the laptop under control of its owner

Goals that go along with security

• no user passwords
• can’t assume the user can read
• out of the box security
• open design
• no lockdown

Ivan built a new platform called bitfrost to do all this. With bitfrost the theory is instead of keeping the system from executing bad code, protect the system while is runs untrusted code.

Some challenges with the project other then security

• python is memory hungry
• more python edit/reload in the core
• even more python: more standardized plugins, plugin security?

To learn more

• http://dev.laptop.org
• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar
• http://ln-s.net/ctF
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitfrost

After seeing this presentation I am WAY excited to get my hands on my OLPC! Now I just need to wait a month or two.

I am pretty excited about the OLPC project. I order my OLPC XO from the Give One Get One program yesterday as soon as I had a free moment. The Give One Get One Program only lasts till November 26 so better not hold off if you want one. When I get my XO in I will be sure to post more, it will likely get a whole photo set on my flickr account.

To get me more excited about my new OLPC XO tonight Ivan Krstić is going to be talking at MUG about the OLPC project. I hope to see everyone there!

I think I will have to plan to bring my OLPC XO to Penguicon and set it up in the computer room for everyone to use and experience.

Last night was a bit more exciting then my usual dinner. I went to Buffalo Wild Wings with some folks from the local Ubunto Loco group and MUG. We where there to have some beers with Mako. It turns out that Mako was not alone, he was joined by a cool dude named Ken and Chris DiBona.

We talked about OLPC the Google phone initiative and Ken is working on some totally sweet stuff to try and make people more savvy and educated consumers. Mako was talking about mobile computing and that the user interface to thousands of application is going to have to be revamped for mobile computing.

Chris DiBona is a busy guy and it would seem a good thing he has people like Leslie Hawthorn to help keep his schedule planned. When I mentioned that he was coming to Penguicon again he had no idea.