Anyone else at GUADEC having this wonderful experience with a cold? I know Luis is affected. And I hear others at the conference are also getting their butts kicked.
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We’ve moving the OLPC BOF that’s scheduled at GUADEC from Thursday at 5pm to Thursday at high noon. We’re replacing Miguel’s Gtk# & Mono Q&A.
Tell your friends!
Turns out that, yes, this place is pretty good. Real chunks of fruit in the ice cream.
Red Hat and the One Laptop per Child folks have been slowly iterating on both putting together a working operating system and taking the first baby steps in figuring out how to build an envionment for kids. A few weeks ago we had a pretty successful demo of the software for countries that are most committed to deploying the laptops. We got some great feedback and got to show off our initial design ideas and talk about the future.
Last week there was a design review. Bryan, Diana, Marco and Dan all got together to talk about what the next steps should be and what we should be working on. The notes from that meeting can be seen on that design review page that Marco put together. Diana put together some mockups that show what we could possibly do.
I’d like to take some time to talk about what those mockups mean. Out of context, they might seem strange, or fail to deliver the full story.
This image describes what we’re thinking about presence. I talked briefly about this in a previous posting but this is the first time that we’ve really taken a step to make it part of the environment. In today’s desktops, “chat” is a program. It stands alone. You can talk to your friends, you can paste text, you can even video conference, but as a program it is completely separated from the rest of the programs that you use on a day to day basis. In fact, if you go and download one of our daily images, chat is still trapped in a tab of its own.
Once of our stated goals is to create a social environment for the kids. So what we’re trying to do is to turn the idea of presence and who is around into a basic element of the environment. Other programs that are also being used in the environment can assume that there’s a method to find other people and what they can do. We hope that this will create an entire application environment that encourages collaboration and sharing.
So at an implementation level, what we’re going to do is make the presence pane something that’s always around. To save screen real estate it will probably slide in and out from the side of the screen, but if you want to choose how to share a document with a friend or send a message to someone that slide pane will pop up and let you pick which one of your friends you want to send it to.
Another issue is “where to start?” I’ll bet that if you start up your computer today, whether or not it’s a mac, windows or linux machine, that you end up starting with the desktop. It’s where you start programs, manipulate files, etc. But since we’re not using a desktop metaphor the question is an interesting one.
So knowing that we’re building an environment around sharing and creating documents, talking to other people and expressing ourselves, one possible option is to just create a personalized home page that shows what you’ve done recently, what your friends have done recently and offer an easy way to see what’s going on around you.
Of the screenshots, this is the one that’s most likely to change over time. It’s strictly an experiment and we’re hoping to get a bunch more ideas of what might work. We’re happy to try and fail often. That way you know you’re making progress.
On another note, I did mention above that we have daily images available. One Laptop also has a developer board program in place. If you’re interested in helping with the laptop and you want to feel the full environment you might want to sign up to have one of the boards sent to you. We have about 500 boards available right now.
Everyone is posting about this, but I need to do so as well. There’s an excellent piece in the Washington Post from Lawerence Lessig about the importance of net neutrality.
I’ve worked at Red Hat for a long time, so I still remember when a new Red Hat release was an Internet Event. Routers would melt, the entire Internet would be slow because we just made a release. I’m told for a while we were the largest bandwith user on the east coast.
But imagine a world where that wouldn’t have been posible. That a small upstart company would have to pay whatever the cable companies required in order to have access to their networks. Not your networks. Not the networks you depend on to delivery whatever people can dream up. There’s been an explosion of technology over the last 10 years or so which is the direct result of anyone being able to participate on equal ground.
Back to my example. What if Comcast had a relationship with Microsoft? What if Microsoft said “you know, we don’t like these guys, so why don’t we pay Comcast to cut them off or make them slow?” It might sound like I’m just using a scare tactic but if I were Microsoft and Comcast it’s a deal I would make. As companies they will leverage everything they have, and this kind of raw deal is the lever. If you stand for freedom and innovation there’s no way you can allow this to go forward.
Eben Moglen’s keynote is now up. It’s insanely great.
“It is, of course, a revolution. That’s the first thing. It’s a friendly revolution. You know. You’re the beneficiaries of it.”
I just wanted to echo what I just read in Bob Lord’s entry about the summit. The kinds of keynotes that we see at this corporate event are different than I’ve ever seen at a conference. Yes, but we talked about new products and projects. But always in the context of freedom, transparency, improving the fabric of society and lifting up the developing world. A great week, all told.
Corey Doctorow’s Keynote from the Red Hat Summit is up. It’s great. Download it. Give it to your friends.
It’s pretty cool to actually see people using mugshot in the real world and how they use it. People always end up using it for things you didn’t expect. Here are a few things I’ve observed:
Red Hat Summit 2006
I walked around the back of the audience during Eben’s talk and watched people playing with mugshot. First, someone sent out a BIO on Eben and everyone joined the chat. They chatted about the talk as it went on and then once it was done, they left. A purely topical chat, something that we don’t see except on forums on the web. Except that this was live.
Event Planning
There’s an Arlington, MA group. It was kind of neat to see someone send out a link and then talk about what who might go to it, previous years, etc. And then leave once it was over. There’s no IRC-Guilt where you feel like you should hang out in a channel once a discussion is over.
Neat stuff.
Yesterday I spent a few hours down at the One Laptop per Child office and got sound working on the laptop. Marcelo had to make a patch to the ac97 codec and once I ran the maze to find the source for the kernel, apply the patch and load the module, sound worked! David Woodhouse helped with teaching me how to get the module loaded. It’s been years since I had to build anything kernel related.
We haven’t tried the input side yet, but odds are that it works as well. We’ll know more over the next week or so.
For the record, the first .ogg file that was played on the laptop was a remix of Depeche Mode’s Stripped.
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