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Last month in Technology Review there was an article on the HDL, or hundred dollar laptop. This is a project by Nicholas Negroponte from the MIT Media lab to create a low price laptop for children in developing countries. It is a very neat idea. In this month's edition included a couple of letters to the editor that provide some good insight into some of the limitations of the project.

While an HDL would be a boon to our world, simply making the Internet available to the masses is a far cry form actually educating them. I worked with my children's local school district through two technology tax levies to help ensure that money wasn't thrown at a problem without a plan to use it intelligently. Getting information to the children is only part of the solution. Providing guidance and structure to learning is every bit as important, if not more important. Providing teachers with education on how to use the technology for teaching was and is as important as providing the computers and Internet access. Also, will providing the technology instruction actually prepare these youth for the world that they live in?
Keith L. Breinholt, Letters to the Editor, Technology Review, Vol. 108, No. 10

It's more important to address the issue of content analysis than offering inexpensive laptop computers. What good is the Internet for kids who can barely read, and therefore can't discriminate between authoritative information and trash? Without such discernment, all this effort will be lost to chat rooms, porn, and games. I'm Mexican, and I've seen which sites Mexican kids surf in cybercafes - and it's not ones like Project Gutenberg.
Rosina Bucio, Letters to the Editor, Technology Review, Vol. 108, No. 10

Of course, with any project with volunteers you have to go where the people are willing to take you. It's probably easier to get donors excited about cheap laptops and Internet access than more teachers for reading. American schools definitely have that problem. Grants for computers, but there are still 45 kids in the classroom! Really, we need both.

Update: Now on Slashdot, so you know it's real!

posted on Thu, 29 Sep 2005 at 18:03 | permanent link | 0 Comments

Well, peer pressure works, so gather round kids for story time. I'm going to take you back long long ago...

After graduating from college I was burnt out, really burnt out. Basically I did nothing for at least a year, probably longer. I can't remember what I did really, but I can't find any evidence of something productive from that time. After being forced to take a week off of work, and having nothing to do, I realized that I needed a hobby. I wanted to help out with an open source project, but I didn't know how or where, so I started looking.

First project that I did anything for was Tenes Empanadas Graciela, which is a game similar to Risk for Linux. I didn't help out that much, mostly a just made RPM packages for PowerPC. I really like the game and still play it today. Though, the AI is getting better faster than I am.

I had, at one point, thought about writing a vector illustration program. I had a design, and a logo, and even if I knew where all that was I wouldn't show it to you. I decided to try and help the Sodipodi project by reading the mailing list and finding a bug to fix. Here is my first Sodipodi patch. This happened in the middle of a summer vacation from computers that Lauris was taking. I started out frustrated with the progress of Sodipodi. I plugged along, and started working on a plug-in system for Sodipodi. When Lauris wasn't getting around to including my patches, I figured it would be better to document them, and that started the Doxygen documentation that we have today on Inkscape. Much of my plug-in work did eventually get included in Sodipodi, but not without long delays and a large amount of effort.

I was getting frustrated with Sodipodi, and I was still looking for a project to call home. I'd also started lurking on the GStreamer mailing lists as it was similar to parts of my senior project (I still lurk there today). Iain announced that he was looking for a new GNOME-media maintainer; I volunteered and became the GNOME-media maintainer.

I was a horrible maintainer. Well, maybe not horrible. The package didn't digress, but it didn't progress the way it should have either. There were several patches that people had written and put into Bugzilla that I never got to in my tenure. This was for a variety of reasons including family issues, an underpowered laptop and in the end because Inkscape was being born. Eventually, I found new maintainers and gave up GNOME-media.

The reason that this back story is important is based on how GNOME CVS works. When you get an account for GNOME CVS, you can edit any project on the server even though it is bad form to edit any where the maintainer hadn't given you permission. So, when I was GNOME-media maintainer I got a CVS account, which allowed me to modify Sodipodi's repository also. I never committed any of my patches to the mainline branch, but it came in useful as the hydra branch got started.

I think it is important to reiterate why the hydra branch was created. The goal was to provide a staging area for patches to Sodipodi, this way Lauris could approve them as a bunch, hopefully making it easier on him. The model was similar to the -ac and -mm branches on the Linux kernel. Since I was the one with CVS access, I became the bottleneck integrator of the patches. There were quite a few, but at this time I was much more familiar with reading diff's and using autotools. I can't say that I read them all though, and I understood very little of the Sodipodi codebase, that's what teamwork is for.

As the hydra branch matured we wanted to see the code get used, we even considered releasing it as a separate branch. Lauris didn't seem to be interested in the code or the branch. And, well, we started Inkscape from that branch. To his credit, Lauris did integrate most of the changes in the hydra branch into the Sodipodi mainline and made a release with those changes after the fork. But, at that time it was too late; Inkscape was born.

When it was decided to start Inkscape, things started going really fast, and we never looked back. One of my favorite memories from that time was when Bryce said that he'd consider the project very successful if we had 100 downloads a day. Bryce, we're very successful. But, that can't be attributed to just those who started Inkscape, more developers, testers and users come on board everyday to make Inkscape better. I may be attributed as a founder, but Inkscape isn't about individuals.

posted on Wed, 28 Sep 2005 at 02:24 | permanent link | 0 Comments

The hosting company that I use had a major hard drive failure, which resulted in me loosing some blog entries. I've been able to recover those using the cache at Bloglines. The following posts are now back:

• Parental Filters
• Namespace discussion
• Look at me I'm on TV!
• What is an SVG?
• Firefox 1.5 beta 1
• Letters from Katrina
• Microsoft marketing

Sorry to all those who have a reader which is going to show all these as new entries again. I realize they were painful enough the first time <smile>.

posted on Mon, 26 Sep 2005 at 16:17 | permanent link | 0 Comments

Today I took a trip where I ended up in a grocery store in Orange County. Orange County is an area to the south and east of LA which is stereotyped as being conservative. Conservatives are definitely the minority in California, so they get harassed. But, I was in this grocery store, and I looked at the magazine rack next to the register. On that rack was the latest issue of "Vanity Fair" with Paris Hilton on the front, covered. There was a little plastic insert over the front of the magazine so all you could read was the title and see Paris' face. Yeah, it's a touch risque, but nothing I'd worry about covering. I guess that's just how you know you're in The OC.

posted on Mon, 26 Sep 2005 at 02:20 | permanent link | 0 Comments

O'Reilly did an interview with Richard Stallman where he talked about the GPL version 3. I was originally apprehensive about the upcoming change to the license, I was worried that the FSF would take it too far. I've heard rumors that the new version would deal with patents, and I disagree with the stance that the FSF has taken on patents. These questions eased my fears:

You said also that GPL 3 "will probably give very simple permission for using the contributors' patents." Does this mean every patent of the contributor, or only those that cover features already in the software?

The implicit license, we believe, only covers techniques used in the code as the distributor distributes it. We're not sure exactly what GPL 3 will say about this, but it won't be greatly different.

I thought about this, and came to the conclusion that as soon as a company releases a piece of code under GPL 3 that uses one of its patents, everyone will be able to use that patent freely, provided that he respect GPL 3 terms.

Not quite. It means that everyone will be able to use the same patented technique that the released code uses, by using that code under the GPL terms.

I think that is a very reasonable way to look at the license. Basically saying that if you distribute code under the GPL you can't attack users for patent violations later. I was much more worried about what they would do with version 3.

My fears are largely derived from the changing the name of the LGPL from the Library GNU Public License to the Lesser GNU Public License. At this time the FSF also recommended not using the LGPL except in special situations. If all libraries were changed, then proprietary applications could not build on open source libraries, effectively removing proprietary applications from free software platforms.

I like the idea of proprietary applications being allowed on free software platforms. I feel that allowing that is saying: "We think our way is better, but we'll let you try yours. I hope you'll join us when you're ready." I would rather people make free software because they think it is a better way to do development, rather than being forced to because a library they need is under a particular license. I would like companies participating in Open Source to be willing participants.

Even if copyright holders will cross license a GPL'd library, a particular piece of software would have to have the library statically linked as it couldn't dynamically link in the GPL version of the library. Thus removing many of the security benefits of dynamically loaded libraries, increasing memory requirements as multiple version of the library have to be loaded in RAM, and making the application immune to distribution specific optimizations of the library. All of these are bad things, which are promoted by libraries being GPL instead of LGPL.

I also feel that the demotion of the LGPL was a power grab by the Free Software Foundation. It was done at a time when Linux was gaining popularity, and I think the were angry at proprietary applications using their free OS. They were, in essence, trying to lock proprietary software companies out of Linux. Free software to me is about removing lock out of any kind, not just supporting the people I like.

In the end, I'm very happy with the way it looks like they're going with GPL version 3. It seems my worries were unfounded.

posted on Sun, 25 Sep 2005 at 20:49 | permanent link | 0 Comments

This is an excellent case of "Good idea; bad idea." This is a design for a toothbrush to help kids brush. It has lights to tell the kid when he is pressing too hard or soft, and also glows when the time is up. Sounds like a good idea. Then it gets weird. It also is connected by RF to a silicone crocodile which makes lifelike breathing motions. If you stop brushing, the breathing slows down, and then stops. You know some kid will be traumatized after killing his crocodile, scared to ever brush his teeth again. It's hard to brush and cry.

posted on Fri, 23 Sep 2005 at 18:48 | permanent link | 0 Comments

While I'm much more in favor of parents doing it over the government, I'm still not a huge fan of parental filters of the Internet. They're unlikely to keep out everything, and I'm not sure that it really makes your child a better person. The really nasty sides of the web are people who prey on children, and they're just as likely to be in the Disney chatroom as anywhere else. When the discussion came up on the PLUG mailing list I enjoyed this post by Craig White:

My own personal view is that it is a big bad world out there and unless they are home schooled, no cable tv, and pretty much sheltered, you can't prevent them from being exposed to the real world and thus, I would never try to do that - I ended up with culturally savvy but nice, well mannered kids.

One of the best things about being a parent was being asked to explain those hard things.

posted on Thu, 15 Sep 2005 at 22:05 | permanent link | 0 Comments

The discussion on whether the namespaces should be required on SVG documents in Firefox is well underway. The discussion is in this bug. It is an interesting discussion, and I think both sides have laid down their points. I still believe that Firefox should be more tolerant, to help in the adoption of SVG. I hope, in the end, that the Firefox developers agree.

posted on Thu, 15 Sep 2005 at 14:49 | permanent link | 0 Comments

Okay, it isn't television, but I did get quoted by C|Net. It is kinda fun, insubstantial, but fun. I'm sad that it is on a post that was so negative, and one that I didn't proofread my grammar well enough, but you can't have everything. I guess now you can search blogs to find people who are saying what you want, and put quotes in stories as "man on the street" type interviews. Not that it is making things worse, I can say stupid things as well as those other people! It is just sad that most people who read that don't know that I'm likely to be a touch pickier about SVG features than most.

posted on Wed, 14 Sep 2005 at 16:38 | permanent link | 0 Comments

I mentioned earlier that I was disappointed with the Firefox 1.5 beta. It didn't have some of the SVG functionality that I use, and so I couldn't recommend it to people over the Adobe plug-in on IE. It is said that much of that functionality is already written, hopefully it will be in future betas.

But I'm even more disappointed with the response of the Firefox community to the bug I submitted on some files not rendering. Basically, the Firefox SVG renderer will not render the SVG without a proper namespace. Including the DOCTYPE or any other specification will not work, it requires the namespace. While I would entirely agree that namespaces are better, especially for compound documents, I don't put them in all my documents. When I write an SVG in VIM, I don't put in namespaces. They still render in Inkscape and the Adobe SVG plug-in.

I think what this argument generally boils down to is a choice between being more correct or being more useful. It looks like the Firefox team is looking to be more correct. Perl is popular partially because it doesn't require you to declare all your variables, allowing you to generate some pretty ugly but quick scripts. SVG will have a difficult time becoming popular if you always have to declare your namespace.

posted on Wed, 14 Sep 2005 at 15:27 | permanent link | 0 Comments

Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is out today, with the most interesting feature (at least to me) being native SVG support. So I downloaded and installed it.

The first SVG that I went to look at I noticed two omissions, text on a path and that the <image> tag doesn't support SVG. While I understand that text on a path can be complex (in this case it was only lines, but it can include complex curves) the recursive image call is not good. Then I went to look at this SVG which is the demo file on GPS Visualizer. I can not get Firefox to believe that is an SVG file. It wants to open another application, specifically the Adobe SVG viewer. I'm not sure what the issue is, but Inkscape does open it.

Here are the bugs: SVG Image tag and the misdetected file. I hope that all of these can be fixed for the final release, I would hate to see a disabled SVG renderer be used 10% of web users. In searching through Bugzilla, there seems to be a lot of SVG bugs.

The last thing that I noticed as odd is that the menus seem to not be the Windows native ones. It looks like Firefox may be drawing them itself. I thought that the point of Firefox was to use native widgets for performance, perhaps they're heading back to Mozilla.

posted on Fri, 09 Sep 2005 at 17:02 | permanent link | 0 Comments

As interesting as I find the idea of blogs being the new media, I think that most reports are overblown. They're just looking for conflict and demise, and trying to turn that into news. But, we are seeing a new era of personal communication, or small group communication. There are now very effective ways for individuals get their message out, and have people find it using search engines. To date, nothing has shown this more than Hurricane Katrina.

Technology review has an interesting article claiming the legitimacy of blogs has increased with the disaster. Cicero has a nice article asking whether the increase in virtual communities has damaged physical ones, thus making us less robust in dealing with physical tragedies (though, I doubt most of the people seriously hurt by Katrina were surfing the web instead of evacuating). And there is a rather chilling letter posted on World Changing. A huge part of me wants that letter to be a big hoax, though I'm not sure that it is.

In the end, we all know that history will be remembered by the mini-series that tells it (or the thriller in Dan Brown's case). Will Katrina's mini-series be one of the Government coming and saving the family or will they have to fight on their own? We won't really know until a year from now.

posted on Fri, 09 Sep 2005 at 16:09 | permanent link | 0 Comments

In an interesting turn of events Massachusetts has decided to use open formats for all of their documents. As expected, Microsoft responded, but in a very angry tone. Which I don't get, they are making millions a year, and they're angry? It seems that their sales and PR groups aren't helping the situation, no one wants to be around someone who is angry all the time.

What they should be doing is selling Windows on the benefits that it does provide users. In case they need help, I'm going to list some here.

1. Hardware compatibility -- Do you know what hardware you're going to need in the future? Neither does anyone else. But, I can tell you that in the foreseeable future there is very likely to be a Windows driver written for it.
2. Applications -- The applications that you use, your customer uses, and your family uses all run on Windows. In fact, most applications produced today run on Windows.
3. Local help -- Chances are that your neighbor runs Windows, your kid's school runs Windows, and your work buddies run Windows. When you need help, or want to see what solutions other people have used for common problems, Windows provides a common means of talking with almost everyone in your world.

These are all very real issues for businesses and users alike. Talking about the details are important, but getting angry about what people choose is ridiculous.

I think that what will probably change in the application world is that Microsoft will switch to a model more like games are developed today. For additional money and benefits a program will be an 'exclusive' for a particular platform. This is somewhere that Linux would have trouble competing. The benefits of choice would be turned on their side, as much as end users can choose a particular distribution to meet their needs, there is no one place to focus the Linux efforts. Novell is unlikely to push hard for Linux exclusive, and neither is Redhat. They'd want exclusives for their distros.

Is it too late though? Adobe and Oracle already make Linux software. Neither is likely to switch to an exclusive licensing model. Application developers seem to have Linux on their road maps, are they willing to shut down the possibility of making a Linux version of their application?

It will be interesting to see what Microsoft does. The chances are that they have enough of a war chest to make changes in order to compete without the company being destroyed, but how is anyone's guess. IBM had to change to a new business model, Microsoft might have to do the same. Being angry about it doesn't help you get there.

posted on Wed, 07 Sep 2005 at 15:19 | permanent link | 0 Comments

Mental makes a good point about how much of the damage from Katrina could have been limited by better land management. I won't disagree with that. What I will say is that we need to realize that there are two issues here: how did Katrina get so powerful, and how did she destroy so much. I would say that global warming helped to make her more powerful, that with the fact that the defense was damaged made the totality of the destruction as significant as it is. I hope that we, as a race, learn from both sides of the event.

posted on Sat, 03 Sep 2005 at 18:53 | permanent link | 0 Comments

I've updated my photos, but not with what most people want, just a new version of BINS. Now it has search! Which is very cool, especially because it does it all without CGIs. It creates a JavaScript array, and then downloads that to the host computer, which does the searching itself. Try it, here is a search for "emma cat". Which of these is not like the others?

  

posted on Sat, 03 Sep 2005 at 18:42 | permanent link | 0 Comments

While Mental is trying to stop the meme, I'm not sure that saying global warming has nothing to do with Katrina is correct. Of course, you can not draw a one-to-one conclusion between global warming and a specific event like Katrina. But, we can look at statistical trends. There is an article on Real Climate showing some of the research connecting the two. Global warming is unlikely to be a direct cause of Katrina; that doesn't mean we shouldn't use Katrina as motivation to change our habits.

posted on Fri, 02 Sep 2005 at 12:44 | permanent link | 0 Comments

It is definitely sad what has happened to the people living on the Mississippi and Louisiana coast lines. The power of something as simple as water and wind is amazing. Many people are in the situation of rebuilding a significant portion of their lives. That being said, I don't understand why people didn't open the windows.

As the news has shown film looking through downtown New Orleans one thing you notice is that the buildings have a large percentage of the windows blown out. Shouldn't this be expected? Hurricanes have a large (very large in Katrina's case) low pressure region. The pressure drastically changes as the hurricane moves through, the buildings can't adjust and there is high pressure stuck on the inside. Thus, the windows blow out to equalize the pressure. Wouldn't opening the windows, allowing the pressure inside to be release faster, cause significantly less damage?

I'm curious what would happen if a stadium with an air-supported fabric roof was in the same situation. These use air pressure to keep the roof up creating an even higher pressure inside. Would it just pop like a giant pimple?

posted on Thu, 01 Sep 2005 at 18:04 | permanent link | 0 Comments