geek!daily

OLPC: You Know, For Kids ... Theirs *and* Yours.

I just tripped over this video:

... which leads to the OLPC Laptop Giving website. The gist of it is that for $400 you can get an XO laptop for your kids ... and give one to kids who'll use it to change the world.

I think Sam's going to have a very happy holiday.

Post-Leopard Checklist

I'm resettling into my laptop post-Leopard upgrade as a background task today and thought it might be useful (mostly to future-me) to note all the bits I'm twiddling:

• Uninstalled and reinstalled SpanningSync to get iCal and GoogleCal talking again
• Installed MacPorts 1.5 for 10.5; `sudo port selfupdate` yielded no changes.
• Started installing Ruby gems: rcov uuidtools ... I'm sure there are more coming.
  
• Installed QuickSilver for the first time. I've been watching folks like Evan speed along using it, so I thought I'd give it a try. I'll probably take time to watch the 10 minute tutorial on YouTube. Happily just discovered that this eliminates the need for  SizzlingKeys to control iTunes. Excellent. Installed a metric buttload of plugins for it. If I can achieve a graceful way of adding tasks and appointments, I'll be a happy camper.
• Kept Twitteriffic 2.1 rather than upgrading to 3.0. I keep hearing grief about 3.0 and ads, which is uninteresting to experience firsthand.
• Installed RMagick according to the usual instructions; however, rather than port install all the supporting libs, then compile the sources I just did `sudo port install imagemagick` which seems to have worked, so the sum of the instructions amounts to:
1. Install X11, Xcode, and X11 SDK (there are people who don't? ;)
2. install MacPorts
3. `sudo port selfupdate && sudo port install imagemagick`
4. `sudo gem install rmagick`

That's about it for now.

Update: Round 2 ... fight!

• Resubscribe to US Holidays and Movie release calendars. (I don't usually track the DVD releases, but you can if you like)
• Partitioned my drive with BootCamp Assistant and upgraded to latests Parallels in preparation for tonight's Vista installfest. Found it interesting/amusing that Bootcamp suggested that I could install Vista Home although this is against the MS Vista EULA.
• Try installing mysql5 from MacPorts and get it to start. Fail miserably. Oh well.
• Install the MySQL 5/Intel DMG from MySQL.com
• Install /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld as root, courtesy of Joannou Ng
• sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld
• Install the mysql gem. This was tricky (or I don't know how it's supposed to be done); the usual method failed while building the Makefile. In the end I had to read code to discover that I should install like so: sudo gem install -- --with-mysql-config ... and even so, it wanted to build a Universal bundle and kept failing due to '-arch ppc' compiler and linker flags. Ripped those out of the Makefile and did a make install ... and voila.
• More gems: parsetree capistrano feedtools fastercsv ferret flexmock mongrel piston rails_analyzer_tool rspec rubygrowl rubyprof sake tzinfo

Still need to work out the Address Book missing thing.

A Mild Leopard Hangover

I installed Leopard last night and, after a few hours, left it doing its TimeMachine thing. It was an overall good experience. Here's my quick notes:

• I did an old-style backup of my disk by rsyncing it to an external drive. This doesn't make the Migration Assistant a happy camper, so I got the joy of hand-copying the bits I wanted back over. I now know more about the contents of the Library than I ever wanted.
• My basic four apps (TextMate, Terminal, Firefox, and Thunderbird) all just picked up where they left off, prefs and all (see above). Yay!
• My calendar, tasks, and address book all reverted to some earlier time. I think I missed some Library things. Joy. Well, they're backed up (and on my Treo and Google Calendar). I'll work it out this week.
• I've finally got Spaces! Used to use You Control Desktops, which did one thing I can't seem to do in Spaces: different wallpaper per space. Someone's got to have figured this out.
• No iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, or iWeb? I must have missed something (maybe the memo)
• Had to be sure I got all my dotfiles over (I'm a pretty shell-oriented kinda guy)
• Changing my login shell to tcsh turned out to be long and painful, but it's done for now ... until next time ...
• My /etc/hosts is pretty heavily hacked, so that had to come, too
• MacPorts: copy or reinstall? I opted for the latter. I'll be refinding things for months, I'm sure, but I want to try to start with the Leopard Ruby I've heard such joy about and go from there.

Haven't yet gone through the fun of BootCamp, though I'm oddly looking forward to it. I'm going to see if that plus Parallels can cope with Vista on a partition yet (and how bloaty it'll be to have an Office install on the Vista partition).

The Next Big Thing

If you've ever talked with Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations), you've likely watched him strew the conversation with priceless observations pithily dressed so they'll cling to your grey matter like Paris Hilton somehow clings to her celebrity. I don't know that he's read "Made To Stick," but he's certainly tuned in to its message.

The one he dropped on the table today which made my brain explode, quoted as closely as I can manage:

"Computers lack common sense. [...] Integrating common sense with computing power [is the next big thing]."

This immediately rings true. The rise of social media, of crowdsourcing, of online communities are all based on finding ways to integrate common sense into the system. It's the thing people continually bring to the party that no amount of engineering will ever conquer (with apologies to Jeff Hawkins, many of whose aims I share).

All the better that PublicSquare fully embraces this; it's how I know we're on the right track.

Confessions of a RambleGeek

Random thoughts after a month of being a caffeinated technomad: An iPod at appropriate volume and a ballcap at the right down-angle work as a limited sensory deprivation chamber. That is, until the baby shows up. The Alameda Public Library is heaven to a mobile office person. The study rooms are particularly lovely. I used to like StumbleUpon a lot. I still do. But I'm way deeper into del.icio.us than I ever was before.

An EVDO rev A card, while it sucks battery, lets you choose the less crowded cafe with no wifi but good coffee/art/treats.

Restaurants that close between lunch and dinner yet still let you camp out in their shaded outdoor seating are things of rare beauty. Treasure them by not abusing their kindness.

A decent computer microphone/headset combo and Skype put together are pretty dang awesome. Even better if you pony up for SkypePro, SkypeIn, and SkypeUltimate -- $78/year for all the incoming, outgoing, and portability you need.

Sir Tony Hoare The Elegant

I'm in Portland for RailsConf where I met Matt Smith with Semantra. Some of the things we talked about put me in mind of some papers Prof. C.A.R. "Tony" Hoare did a while back and, while attempting to find them online, I ran across his 1980 Turing Award acceptance speech, "The Emperor's Old Clothes" [pdf] in which he says,

"I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed."

That ties in nicely with the belief I heard expressed years ago that complexity and beauty are intertwined such that over-complex things are generally not perceived as beautiful.

Incidentally, the search wandered me in and through Wikipedia's List of Important Publications in Computer Science. A feast for the thinking geek.

Bring Your Own Laptop To Work?

Don Marti blogged an idea that's been floating around for a while: what if, instead of corporate IT supplying you a desktop which is largely underutilized, the company paid you a "laptop allowance" of some sort and you brought/brought your own? While it's less feasible in the CG industry (those desktops are makin' pixels, so we need 'em around and all ;), it makes great sense in all sorts of other contexts -- and was something I was begging for ca. 2000 when I was a "pre-sales technical consultant."

 

There's heated discussion in the comments of Don's post which largely divides into "Right On!" and "IT's Worst Nightmare." Most of the latter seem to miss Don's point: the user owns the laptop; IT supplies and supports only the services (network connection, DHCP for IP address and pointers to directory services such as DNS and LDAP, etc.) Users get some amount of free tech support per year (Don suggests "two major incidents" where I'd suggest one hour per week which accumulates with a 16 hour cap); after that, some sort of billing kicks in, either to the user or to their department.

In the end you have positive motivation ("I get to choose!") and negative motivation ("That's gonna cost me ..."). Sounds like a good closed system to me.

Link: Don Marti business/byol.html.