Lonely Lion

I posted some pictures from yesterday’s OLPC hack-a-thon. All in all, it was a pretty productive day. Although no real code was written, we did get everyone set up with a reasonable development environment, which is half the battle, as well as a general plan for how we’re going to implement the initial run of the choose your own adventure app. We also set up a Google code project, for the work (that hasn’t been done yet), you can find it here.

We had a good meeting last night, a handful of good talks. The Skinnycorp offices were pretty cool. Just a great big warehouse with some really impressive decoration. Neat stuff. Presentations were good, Peter Fein gave a talk on setuptools, Atul Varma talked about ZVM, and Johhhhhn Melesky gave an overview of Bayes Theorem. All in all, good talks. We had a quick rap session about scheduling the first chicago-olpc hack-a-thon, and decided June 2nd at Skinnycorp works for everyone.

_why opened up the Hackety Blog, apparently shutting down his redhanded blog. So far, he’s taken a look at a handful of potential programming as education tools. I’m glad that talented programmers are evaluating education tools. We have a little boy due this August, so programming as education is on my mind.

In other news, Ian came up with a good first olpc-chicago project.

Just some eye candy. This is the very easy to use Redhat livecd version of Sugar:

And this is a terminal session ssh’d into the running image:

Based on this working pretty well, any fiddling I do with Sugar, for the time being, will most likely be done with this livecd image. I’m going to burn it and boot off of it to see if that works as easily. For now though, I got it up on Vmware, with networking working right away. After that, I alt-zero’d into the developer console, found my ip with ‘ifconfig’, changed the root passwd with ‘passwd’ and ssh’d into the image as root from my terminal. I’m not sure what I need to do to get a nfs share exported on OSX, so I haven’t tried that yet.

Once that’s working, I think a good easy way to work would be to edit files in a local filesystem, and share it to the olpc image for testing.

Ian Bicking announced a OLPC Chicago Interest List a few days ago. If you’re interested in the OLPC project, and want to chat at some like-minded people in Chicago, it’s a good place to do so.

Another article on developing software for Sugar, this time from IBM.

…so says Wired.

Photo linked to without permission from cnet.com.

I missed the first one on compiling Sugar. It’s a good write up on the step by step process necessary to get Sugar up and running. A follow up article came out recently on building Sugar activities. Both are good articles. I’m a fan of wiki documentation, but sometimes a concise article just makes things clearer to me.

Found this write up about Romania rejecting the OLPC via Grig’s blog. The Romanian parliament rejected an OLPC proposal because the XO “lacks MS Word.” Clearly they don’t understand the project, which is a shame. I worked for the Chicago Public School system for a few months. I know that education isn’t safe from the influence of large technology companies. I’m assuming these companies are responsible for propagating these kinds of anti-OLPC arguments. The OLPC project isn’t about laptops, it’s about education. Unfortunately, in the eyes of many of these technology companies, it is about laptops. That story is very disappointing.