A few weeks ago, Julie Bryce came up to OLPC from Red Hat in North Carolina and did a series of interviews with people inside of the OLPC organization that are doing the on the ground work to make the project successful. The first part of that story can be found here. You get to hear from Mary Lou Jepsen, Owen Williams, John Palmieri, David Woodhouse, Marcelo Tosatti, Walter Bender, and the wonderful Eben Eliason. It’s just a taste, of course, but a good one.

You don’t have to learn the entire RPM build system to be able to get an activity on the laptop. You don’t have to put random files all over the place on the file system nor do you have to know the details of %configure, or how the macro system works or how you need to re-run ldconfig if you happen to use a library. The cognitive load is shifted from learning everything about how we package software to actually writing the software itself. You also don’t need root access to install software and, holy crap, it’s trivial for me to give you a piece of software that I have on my machine.

The choice of Python + Gtk is a part of this story as well. Python and Gtk are about as close as we can get today in terms of being able to make something that’s super-easy to get started with. I think we could get better. It seems that squeak and tools of its ilk are on that path, but they march to a different beat in a lot of ways and aren’t integrated enough with our environment to be considered as of yet. But that’s not really the point. The point is, how low can we make the barrier to entry? How can we get people kicking ass as fast and early as possible?

Over the next few weeks we will be continuing to make it easier. We’ve gotten to the point where sugar is stable enough where other people might be able to hack against it and develop more activities. To that end, we’ll be releasing some livecd-like utilities on a regular basis so people can get some hacking done on top of it. It’s not just about sugar the environment anymore, now it’s about the ecosystem around it. Curious and adventurous folks (like Owen Williams, for example) have already been discovering what it’s like, with all its up and downs. But now we want to open it up even more.

More to come!

A few weeks ago, without knowledge that such a campaign was in production, Jesse and I were discussing such an ad and who would play that part. My choice? Christopher Lloyd. Wearing this for a hat during the commercial.

Also, that’s a pretty ugly kitten.

I have the plugins from Fluendo installed for windows media on Fedora Core 6. (Finally, a legal, if immoral solution.) We should have this nice level of integration out of the box using the codec buddy with the upcoming Fedora 7 and people using it will be in for a nice surprise.

We see a 4-door sports sedan pull out of a driveway onto a busy two lane road. It cuts across two lanes of traffic to get into a left turn lane and makes a u-turn into the other direction. On the corner where the u-turn takes place there is a gas station. The car continues past the station.

We see a woman and a man. The man is driving and the woman is in the passenger seat. The woman is about six months pregnant and is wearing a heavy winter coat. The man is also wearing a winter jacket and a floppy winter hat that needs replacement and does nothing to enhance his image.

Hey, you just missed that gas station. Why didn’t you stop? That gas light is still on.

Basically because I’m an idiot. We’ll stop at the next one. It’s just over the next hill.

20 seconds pass and they drive along in silence.

Image of the gauges on the inside of the car. It is picking up speed to about 45 miles an hour when all of a sudden all the engine lights come up – orange, red, everything. The tachometer drops to zero.

Camera on both of their faces from outside. Man is scowling, woman looks concerned as well.

Or, I could run out of gas right now.

Great.

The woman is rolling her eyes at the man.

Car pulls over, rolls to a stop and turns on its hazards.

I guess I’ll be right back.

Uh-huh.

Man gets out of car, crosses behind it with cars whizzing by, climbs over the girder and starts a walk of shame back to the gas station.

Note: I said “creepy” because it felt strange being in the middle of such an amazing group of people and trying to do something as amazing as this.  You spend a lot of time beside yourself when you’re working on this project.   It’s like watching some insane version of yourself from the outside.