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For anyone just tuning in, the XO is a laptop designed to cost so little to build that 3rd world countries would want to buy One Laptop Per Child (hence OLPC) in their country. Originally intended for sale to only 3rd World countries, NGOs, and domestic government bodies, the OLPC non-profit decided to sell XO’s to us in the 1st world, for just a few months, late last year. The only catch was that you had to pay for two at $200 each–one would go to a 3rd world kid and the other, to you. Pretty cool, really.

My XO was delivered on December 22 and for quite a while I was very excited to have it. However, over the following months I found myself becoming more and more disappointed with it. The hardware is brilliant–it’s got the features of a full-sized laptop from about seven or eight years ago, but costs a fraction of a similarly-sized (9×9.5″) laptop. When I thought back to what I could do on my old laptop from 1998, I thought "and it’ll fit in a small bag? SWEET! I’d love one!"

Mind you, I’d not have even paid attention were it not for the charity aspect of the project.

The hardware also contained features that no other laptop has, even now. Mainly, these are power saving features that allow for a much lower power consumption. I remember reading that a regular laptop pulls something like 50 or 60 watts but the XO pulls 6. Plus there’s a backlight to the LCD you can turn off and still use the display in a black-and-white mode that is completely visible in direct sunlight. Another cool feature in the XO that you won’t find in any other lappie is the Mesh networking capabilities–each XO can connect to other XOs within a kilometer away and share activities and an Internet connection. Pretty damn clever, if you ask me.

Sadly, the hardware is about all the XO has going for it. The OS is a stupified version of Linux and actually seems to hobble the hardware. Despite that old laptop of mine from 1998 having crappier specs than the XO, I can do more on it than I can on the XO. The XO won’t let me novel have my manuscript open and surf the web at the same time (I don’t like to close my word processor just so I can research something on the web). In fact, once my latest manuscript got beyond about 350 pages, the XO’s word processor would crash. I installed a full word processor and it didn’t always crash–but inconsistent crashes are worse than consistent ones, if you ask me.

While the XO does make a passable media player (command line-comfy users only, please), e-book reader and hobby computer (installing other OSes is possible, but pretty challenging), I wanted a cheap, low-end UMPC–which is just not what SugarOS, the current operating system, will let it be. Until a later version of Sugar can handle memory better, the XO is simply not ready for prime-time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely behind the concepts of OLPC and providing cheap computers so everyone can have better access to education (and yes, porn). However, I think the software guys are trying to reconstruct the culture of computing by teaching kids NOT to multitask. While I think having kids learn about computers differently from the way we learned about them is a good idea, hobbling the machine so only one or two things (max) can be done at once I think ill-prepares kids of any country. The world multitasks and teaching any kid to do one thing at a time hobbles them, in my opinion.

Obviously, kids need to learn to do one thing at a time, first, but when they’re ready to do two or three things at once, what do they do? Buy a new computer? Can they do that easily (or at all) if they live in the 3rd world or the inner city? Maybe these kids would be better at hacking the XO than me, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to expect this–I’m no slouch and it took me forever to get Xubuntu installed. Besides, how are they supposed to learn to instal another OS if they’re only familiar with the XO’s OS?

I’m not saying SugarOS has to be windows-based, I’m just saying it needs to be able to do more. If kids need truly dumb computers Radio Shack and Toys "R" Us has them for like $30. Those machines are much better suited to kids who have no experience with computers.

Again, don’t get me wrong, I think where the software engineers were coming from was a good place–I just question their choices. Of course, a lot has changed since I stopped using my XO a couple of months back.

For one, Ivan Krstic resigned. He was the main guy behind XO security. OLPCNews.com quoted (here: http://www.olpcnews.com/…_olpc.html ) Krstic saying in a blog post (here: http://radian.org/…ng-clarity ) that:

OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project.

Adding insult to injury, I was asked to stop working with Walter Bender, without a doubt one of the most stunningly thoughtful and competent people I’ve ever worked with. Following Walter’s demotion from OLPC presidency, I was to report instead to a manager with no technical or engineering background who was put in charge of all OLPC technology.

I cannot subscribe to the organization’s new aims or structure in good faith, nor can I reconcile them with my personal ethic.

Wow.

That’s some seriously heavy stuff.

Then, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC, said he would be changing his position in a way that made it sound like he was quitting OLPC entirely. It turned out he just wanted someone else to be CEO. So far, no one has officially taken over the spot. Still, when the CEO decides he’s no longer the right guy for the job, you have to wonder.

Then, just today, I learned that Walter Bender, the president of Software and Content, has quit. OLPCNews.com reported it here: http://www.olpcnews.com/…_olpc.html and Engadget.com here: http://www.engadget.com/…r-transit/

The theory is that Negroponte’s interest in becoming more like Micro$oft and using a version of Windows XP on the XO is at the core of Bender wanting to leave. Who knows, this might have been the real reason Krstic wanted to leave, as well.

So, things don’t look so good for OLPC and the XO. Personally, I don’t mind XP for or on the XO. I absolutely despise Windows XP and Micro$oft, but would welcome an OS that doesn’t hobble the XO. I had hoped to see what the guys behind the SugarOS would come up with, but when two of the most visible guys behind the OS bail, you wonder who is next to leave the Good Ship OLPC and if said ship is sinking.

I really hope OLPC can correct its course and get back on track to helping get computers into the hands of kids. I have no idea what to suggest to get them back on that track aside from making Sugar handle memory better. The last I heard they were planning on retooling the graphics. I’m thinking they should get the code right, first. Then worry about what it looks like.

Back in the mid-twentieth century, a bunch of well-meaning educators thought it would be a good idea to try to teach kids practical life lessons by shooting short films that would be shown in classrooms around the country. I’m old enough to remember being subjected to some of them and even as a kid I remember finding them rather patronizing. As an adult, I realize that the people behind the movies meant well and truly thought they were doing a good thing. I’m concerned the XO will end up in a similar place in our culture. I hope I’m wrong, of course.

I do plan on using my XO again once I’m through with my current manuscript. I do want to keep my books a little shorter, anyway. ^_^
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The UI is very Twitter-like, which is good–your friend’s posts show up in chronological order, unlike FriendFeed which posts everything in clumps based on socnet or user. I find this a little confusing. However, a good way SocialThing is like FF is by allowing you to follow multiple services. FF simply imports feeds, but SocialThing seems to be doing things differently behind the scenes. They only have a handful of services available and if adding them were as easy as just adding feeds, the one problem I have with SocialThing would not exist.

I simply can’t follow enough of my friends, so I have to stick with FriendFeed.

Now, both FF and ST allow you to post to any of the networks you have listed, but I like the way ST handles this better than FF. It’s just cleaner and more simple.

I’m really hoping they add more services soon. They say delicious, digg, last.fm, MySpace and YouTube are next in line. I’ve voted for plenty of other sites like Utterz and (ironically) FriendFeed to be added, too. If only they’d just allow RSS feeds (like FriendFeed does) they would cover a LOT of bases.
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Here’s an excerpt from the March 27, 2008 Reuters.com article the above screencap came from (see the whole thing here: http://www.iht.com/…/drone.php ):

"The Miami police could soon use cutting-edge flying drones to help fight crime.

A small pilotless vehicle manufactured by Honeywell International, capable of hovering and "staring" using electro-optic or infrared sensors, is expected to be introduced soon in the skies over the Florida Everglades.

If use of the drone wins U.S. Federal Aviation Administration approval after tests, the Miami-Dade Police Department will start flying the 14 pound, or 6.35 kilogram, drone over urban areas with an eye toward full-fledged employment in crime fighting.

"Our intentions are to use it only in tactical situations as an extra set of eyes," said Detective Juan Villalba, a police department spokesman."

Hm, right after they say "it’s for your own good" they always add something like: "it’s just an extra set of eyes."

As though having "an extra set of eyes" on us is supposed to make us feel safer and not at all paranoid.

Way to make us all feel like criminals.

Hey and don’t forget about "mission creep" which is just a more accurate, literal way of saying "watch out for that slippery slope!"

You can read more about this at PalmBeachPost.com by going here: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/…_0327.html
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I don’t get web services that forget to make their sites, not only easy to navigate, but easy to understand. You shouldn’t need to know jack about a service before hitting it. You should get to the site and know exactly what it’s about and how to work it. Twitter, Utterz, Seesmic and how many others all understand this.

And on top of this, Favorit chokes on one of my "identities," whatever the heck that even means.

Thanks muchly, guys… I suppose that’s why they call it a beta.
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The Slingshot is a water purifier which uses vapor compression distillation to pull water out of anything remotely wet. It does this using just 2% of the power of alternatives, and can supply 1,000 liters of fresh water a day from nothing more than ditchwater and piss.

The article goes on to say that the device gets it’s power from a generator that can run on anything that burns, including cow dung.

And to think most of the news has been worried about Obama’s pastor, or Hillary lying about being under sniper-fire with Sinbad.

Meanwhile, Dean Kamen has unveiled a device that could save millions of lives–possibly hundreds of millions of lives around the world.

When I first saw this story on "Colbert" it literally brought tears to my eyes, thinking of all the good it could do. I wonder what other stories like this the media is effectively burying.
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Back in 2004, I was looking for a new way to present all of the content on my site. It had been six years since I started blogging, though only three or four of those years did I actually use an official blogging tool. Up until 2004, I had been using GreyMatter which was an amazingly versatile flat-file system that I liked quite a bit. However, after several years of using it, it began to slow down. It was painfully noticeable that the entire site was slow to load thanks to all of the HTML posts being served on my site. So, I began to look for an alternative.

At first, I thought a wiki would be a good way to go. Instead of doing something like a blog, I’d have a something that would be a bit more like a reference, as opposed to something like the front page of a newspaper. But then, while Googling the term "wiki" I came across the wiki at WordPress.org. I quickly realized that their wiki was only for their documentation and not something they offered, but I was intrigued by what they did offer–WordPress a blogging tool so easy it takes just 5 minutes to install. So I explored the site.

It turns out that loads of folks used WP and there was a robust community of developers and users who help one another on the forums. I thought this would be perfect, so I switched.

Of course, WP runs on MySQL, a free database system that my host does offer. I found WP to be easy to use and once I worked out how temperamental MySQL (pronounced either My Skyool or My Sequel, depending on who you talk to) was, I had everything up and running in no time (5 minutes, in fact!).

Within a day or two, I suddenly noticed comment spam–a LOT of it. I started looking around for solutions on the forums and while there were plenty of folks who had trouble, like me, there weren’t too many solutions that worked for everyone. Still, I tried a few and finally found some that worked. However, with every WP upgrade, I ran into massive spam issues. After one upgrade, I got hit so bad, my web host charged me $120 in bandwidth-overage fees.

I was inches from giving up WP and going back to (cringe) Blogspot. To a control-freak like me, using a blog host is like trusting a daycare center to raise your child to college-age. So, I stuck with WP vowing never to upgrade again. However, newer plugins came along, offering me the ability to crosspost to places like Blogspot, LiveJournal, Twitter and more. These plugins would help me advertise my site and take part in a larger community on the web. So, I caved and upgraded.

This happened again recently with the release of a Pownce plugin. Of course, the Pownce plugin requires PHP5 and my host still had me on PHP4, so I requested an upgrade. They happily complied, free of charge, setting me up on a new server with more space and features, etc. I figured "What better time to upgrade to a new version of WP?"

So, I did. Everything was cool for about a day. Then, everything exploded. My site was and is getting slammed by SOME sort of spam attacks. A few got through to the Akismet antispam plugin but got caught–however one got past Akismet and ended up in my Pownce stream, ironically, thanks to that Pownce plugin. :\

I have installed Bad Behavior, WP-Morph and Akismet, all of which protected my site just fine on my old server, that was still live just days ago. I added WP-Spamfree as suggested by a friend. I also use WP-Cache to allow each page on my site to get stored as a static file so the next person that tries to access it can still see it. Of course, this doesn’t help me administer the site since the admin pages don’t cache.

So, the only way I have found to stop the site from going down is to rename the wp-config.php file. This is the file that contains the login info for my MySQL database. Essentially, I’m hiding the key for the lock on my db. Of course, doing this brings the site down. After a few minutes I return the wp-config file to it’s original name and everything is cool for a good few minutes–then the attacker(s) return and I start the dance all over again.

I’ve got a ticket open with my web host, but I’m not sure what they’ll be able to do.

What is literally happening is this: The MySQL system can only take X amount of accesses before it begins to slow down access-time for every other db on the same server. On my old server this limit was 15 simultaneous accesses. This may not seem like a lot, but it wasn’t so bad most of the time.

So, now I’m waiting for tech support to get back to me. The service I get from my web host ranges from the "meh" to the amazing, so I tend to be pretty patient with them. Still, my website represents ten years of my life and it’s hard to see it messed with by some greedy assholes with no morals or better things to do with their lives.

In times like this, I wonder if I’d have been better off just sticking with GreyMatter… or even (cringe) Blogspot… O_O
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While it’s great that Trent Reznor (the guy behind NIN) has made so much money in cutting out the middleman (the distributor) a couple of things are worth noting:

1) The $1.6 million includes sales of the highly expensive $300 version of the "Ghosts" album with loads of tactile extras (things you can touch). Mashable commenter Preston theorizes that this set comes with so many things the profit margin probably isn’t so high. Regardless, this proves that if you’ve got name recognition and a website, you can sell a lot of stuff!

2) Speaking of name recognition, the Mashable commenter calling himself "SoloProgrammer.com" points out that this will be more impressive when a noname band can do these kinds of sales.

As a self-publisher, myself, I agree with that second point.

There’s a "gatekeeper" mentality out there where some people think your work needs to be vetted before anyone should be allowed to buy it. I think this is crap because I’ve pitched a couple of different projects around Hollywood only to get turned down because they weren’t obvious money-makers. However, I’d rather let the public decide.

South American author Alberto Manguel gave a great lecture that TVO (in Canada) broadcast earlier this year about this kind of thing. If memory serves, he wondered what Jack London’s books would have been like if his editor hadn’t made changes things. Check out that lecture at the "Big Ideas" lecture series site on TVO.org here: http://snipurl.com/21sev

So, let’s hear it for NIN’s million+!

Oh and since a lot of us DIY folks (Distribute It Yourself) don’t have the same name recognition as Trent, we should all remember that word of mouth is the best kind of advertising and often the only kind of advertising some artists can afford. If you listen to music, watch a video or read a book (like mine: http://snurl.com/thekeybook ^_^) that you like, please tell people about it. Besides, if someone tells you a book is good, aren’t you more likely to believe them than some advertisement you saw in the paper?
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As someone who fully believes the age of cheap oil is over with, this is one way (of many) we can reduce our use of fossil fuels. After all, there won’t be just one replacement for oil, but many. Finding new ways to use some of the already-existing alternative energy sources is a great thing and the Benkatine Turbine from Leviathan Energy (official website: http://leviathanenergy.com/ ) does exactly that.

Now, there won’t be much pooptricity (as one green blog called it: http://www.inhabitat.com/…ur-toilet/ ) created by this little guy, but every little bit counts in a world where a barrel of oil will run you $110. If enough people start using these the environment would benefit, too.

And just think about how good it’ll feel to give a crap for the environment. LITERALLY!
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