Into the Void

http://www.laptop.org/

It’s here, the ideal gift for early adopters.

We’ve been hearing about the $100 Laptop for months now. It seemed like a pipe dream. A laptop for children in third world countries? It would have to be an engineering marvel. The kids often live in houses with dirt floors. They often don’t have electricity. Internet infrastructure – or even telephone service – is non-existent in rural towns. They’ve probably never seen a computer before. They’ll have to learn the OS and the software without the a priori assumptions of a Westerner. Getting computer teachers trained has to be a logistical nightmare! How can this possibly work?

The answer is one that wouldn’t occur to most of us… Cooperation on a global scale!

It’s the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. This program attempted to design, build and distribute laptops for under $100 to children in third world countries.

In December OLPC had a promotion where if you donated a laptop you could buy a second laptop. PLUS you get a year of free Sprint wifi access at places like Barnes & Noble, St*rbucks, etc. that you can also use with any other wifi devices you may own – laptops and PDAs. The Sprint access alone is worth the price of the laptop.

The XO has totally new hardware with VERY low power consumption. The XO has a very cool GUI called “Sugar” that’s usuable even by kids who can’t read yet, much less read English. Sugar is based on a trimmed down Linux OS with programs written just for it. Programs like a music synthesizer, Turtle Graphics, word processing, a web browser and that’s just the START of it!

Since The XO is intended for third world countries, it has wifi – no ethernet infrastructure is necessary. They’ll automatically connect at power up to other XOs that they find. This enables the kids to work on collaborative projects. Not just chatrooms, but writing music together in the music workspace! Collaboration is the key to the future.

The XO has two antennas and uses them to triangulate and display a 2D map of surrounding XOs and wireless access points. It took a while and I had to change some of my router settings, but I was able to connect to the Internet with my XO.

There is an available hand crank to charge the XO if you don’t have electricity in your village. I think they said there’s a solar battery charger available too. They also have wireless teacher access points that enable the kids to get on the Internet and see what’s going on in the rest of the world. This is a really ambitious project. I did what I could.

I’ll post an update if the Give One – Get One program runs again. Your donation is partly tax deductible. And you’re doing something good for less fortunate kids. It’s a win-win game.

The Internet is big. No, really BIG. It is possible to look online for a recipe, follow a link to the history of the recipe and the culture of the people who created the recipe. Before you know it, dinnertime is a distant memory, bedtime is long past, and tomorrow morning is shining right into your tired, bloodshot eyes.

The problem is one of information overload. Information, you see, doesn’t create wisdom. Wisdom comes from choosing which information is useful for the task at hand, whether that task is cooking dinner or writing an essay on the funerary practices of the Fore tribe in New Guinea. Or both.

When I first had net access – and Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet – information was limited and it was sometimes difficult to locate it. There were several types of indexing, with special command-line programs to access them. Gopher was the very apt name of a commonly-used program used to dig into the information indexes. When you eventually found what you wanted, you’d then have to launch a separate application to handle the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

When I finally gained access again, a fledgling HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), in conjunction with the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the MAC and of Microsoft Windows, provided easy access to related information, and yes, I got lost surfing more times than I can count.

Here it is several years later, and I hardly ever surf aimlessly. I also have given up on wordy but rather content-sparse general news outlets, including TV, newspapers, radio and even the big online news portals. Frankly, most news articles can be absorbed from the title and first paragraph. So how do I surf for titles and first paragraphs?

Well, in the last couple of years it is becoming more common for on-line resources to provide Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. An RSS feed is a text file that contains, at minimum, titles and summaries of recent articles on the main site. RSS feeds play an important part driving traffic to the information provider.

In future articles I will be exploring new tools for presenting information on the web, and their attendant issues. It is my hope that in clarifying the issues for myself, I will help clarify them for others.

I’ve been dragging my feet as far as the soon-to-be Linux Laptop goes. There are a couple of issues that I haven’t quite resolved.

First, Knoppix came up in the GUI. It didn’t seem to support the wireless card. But it communicated with it, which is better than Windows 98 did.

I found what might be the ADM8211 chipset driver on SourceForge, then promptly lost the info again. I’m unclear on how to integrate a new driver. Do I have to recompile the kernal – which I’ve never done – or can I simply compile it as a stand-alone driver that I drop into place somewhere in the file system? Maybe a reference goes in what in uCLinux is called (I think) /etc/.rc? That file has startup info for things like ipconfig. I can prevent it from coming up in the GUI by entering a run-level command in /etc/inittab.

RH 5.2 used to come up with the command line and if I wanted to play with the GUI I’d type startx. I did it for my Senior Project, upgraded a trash computer and used it for software development from the command line. I have the notes here somewhere… The *first* gotcha was that I was trying to use an unsupported CD. You get the idea. But eventually it all cooperated.

Anyway, I’m told that Fedora changes too fast, still requires too much babysitting. Apparently Centos 4.2 uses the source code from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That might work.

The laptop has no way to cut a new CD. Oh, wait, that’s vinyl talk. *Burn* a new CD. So if an install CD is needed, I would have to transfer the image – a .iso maybe? – to a Windows computer to burn it. I would have to get to the other computer by dial-up modem through one of the free services. Egads!

I am aware that some OSs allow you to update the kernel on the fly. The name of the capability escapes me. Preemptible kernel, is it?

I’m going to attempt to upgrade the Windows 2000 computer to Windows XP this weekend. Believe me, Windows 2000 is solid as a rock, Which is probably why Microsoft is no longer selling it. In XP Home which I use at work (go figure), I had to disable a lot of unnecessary things to stop it from hanging when I opened a couple of windows. Who needs shadows under the cursor, 3D everything, and font smoothing? It made a big difference. The only reason I’m upgrading to XP Professional (not Home) – actually it’s a lateral move – is because I bought a USB printer with a card reader and it turns out I had already boffed up those drivers trying to install an internal 9-in-1 card reader. I removed some of the boffed-up stuff from the registry, but haven’t tried to reinstall the printer. Obviously I’m not particularly confident it will work. To that end, I have already backed up all the really necessary stuff, except email which I will backup last thing before I do the install.

I know what I have to do, the questions are mostly things I can work out through trial-and-error. I’m confident that I will eventually get the laptop running Linux AND this computer running Windows XP. I must make a couple of decisions and then “Just Do It”.