Colin Charles Agenda

Some notes from Jim’s OLPC talk, which was full. I’ve added thoughts about (rural) Malaysia, because its naturally close to my heart. I’ve not had a similar opportunity to go around rural Australia (does it even exist?), and things are (I think) a lot better in Australia, than they are in Malaysia… I’m sure Jim’s talk video will be up soon, and his slides are worth going through – some interesting pictures there too.

Everybody wants the best for their kids. Most kids in the world, have no electricity at home :( Parents, themselves, might be illiterate or aware of the world. Teaching is not a valued profession by society, sometimes, and worse, books sometimes may not exist. Classrooms? You might not be so lucky.

So, what is the OLPC trying to achieve? A few hours of access in the computer lab every week, is not enough. Children lack opportunity, not capability. We should focus on high-quality education for all.

If schools exist in some places, there are insufficient classrooms. True, take Malaysia for example – there are two sessions to ensure folk get an education (morning, and afternoon sessions). This makes one get a fewer hours per day in school. Schools are often very crowded, so cables don’t really work.

The OLPC has a sunlight readable screen. This means classrooms can be outside. This won’t really affect Malaysians, seeing that there are actually classrooms. Electricity, might be hard to come by in some rural areas, but there are at least classrooms (or cabins, even).

In e-book mode, the OLPC runs for about 13 hours in B&W mode, and 8 hours in colour mode.

Parents tend to not be computer literate. Girls tend to have lower literacy than boys. Do we have fonts, for said languages? Does a computer interface (or even Sugar) apply, because we base our UI on metaphors?

Teachers, often only have 5-6 years of schooling themselves. Luckily in Malaysia, there are teacher training colleges, and you don’t become a teacher, unless you’ve gone through teacher training. However, teaching in Malaysia, does seem like an undesirable job (low paying, for example, might be an answer). One laptop/teacher? I honestly don’t even think this has been achieved in Malaysia.

What does one do about drop outs? Logistics, sometimes make it not feasible, for one to get to school, every day. Even in Malaysia, we know of people spending 2 hours to walk, to get to school. These stories move you, and you wonder, if its possible that they don’t have to go to school daily. People in the Klang Valley (read: Kuala Lumpur and surrounds) don’t even have electricity (or can’t afford it).

Regular laptops take about 10-20 watts, but the OLPC goal is 2W! They’re not there yet, but they’re getting there. 3-5W isn’t good enough.

A small child can generate 5-10 watts. Its a 21 watt battery. So the idea of hand cranking, too much is not good. Jim passed around a hand crank, and a solar panel. Both cost about the same, about USD$12-15. The solar panel does 5W, and costs about USD$12.

Mesh network, demands that the wireless is always on, otherwise, packets will not be forwarded.

Whats the CPU, on average, doing? Usually just refreshing the screen, and forwarding packets. Incidentally, the OLPC screens use LEDs – this makes them easy to recycle. The OLPC is an environmentally friendly laptop!

The OLPC actually turns off the CPU and most of the system – it just keeps the wireless and mostly, the display on. They use a DCON chip, and Marvell’s wireless chipset allows this to work well. During e-book reading, you’re only using 1.5-2.5 watts, depending on the screen and wireless use (so the 21 watt battery will do wonders).

Generators at schools, means that there’s a great cost, for fuel. And fuel prices are going up. So power for regular laptops, suck.

Jim highly recommends us to read Three Cups of Tea. Its been on the New York Times bestseller list for quite a while.

I noticed someone using the hand crank in the talk. The hand crank, can be mounted to a table, by the side, and then cranked. Very smart design. It however, does make noise. Imagine a classroom filled with folk, cranking their OLPCs? I don’t think the teacher will be very pleased.

The OLPC’s are hardy. You want to ensure they survive a rainstorm or a duststorm. Accidents happen, so allow kids to repair these things. A repair station can be very far away. The machine itself, can be assembled and disassembled, with a screwdriver. This could be interesting if its sent around Malaysia – rural areas in Sabah/Sarawak, and probably on the Peninsular, will definitely benefit from this.

Mountains are great for the network. Speaking to David Woodhouse earlier, and he mentioned that dry climates (like what we get in Melbourne, and generally the rest of Australia) is great for the mesh network. However, humidity, is generally not so good – this can affect Malaysia, especially during the monsoon season, the humidity goes up pretty high.

5 year life is aimed at. 2,000 battery cycles is the aim. Now, imagine replacing books? In Malaysia, 5 years means 5 years of either secondary education, or 5 years of primary education (well, its 6, but with the OLPC, I can imagine kids get to skip grades…) Books are really expensive, and while going to the schools are generally free, its not free to get books. Students going without books, is just silly. It realistically seems that the OLPC might be ideal to kids in primary school, rather than secondary school. I don’t actually know if its expandable for learning biology, chemistry, physics, etc.

The “Show Source” key exists. Learn, learning, by debugging!

The aim is to create children that will be both consumers, and creators. This I see benefiting not only Malaysia, but also Australia (ICT deficit in Australia is the largest in the budget, at something like $21 billion, and growing yearly).

Sugar: GTK+/Pango/ATK/Cairo. Python is what is used to tie it all together. Presence, allows you to build collaborative applications with each other. Take pictures, and share with people all around you. That’s what the “Share” activity in the UI is for.

How do you deal with parents who are suspicious with the OLPC, due to illiteracy? Involve them in the process. Do it upfront, don’t wait till later.

I’m actually highly moved by the OLPC. My recent travels to Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, India, China, and of course Malaysia, has made me think hard about what we need to do for spreading education and FLOSS. I’m sure I’ll talk about this more, later…

While I ducked out of Giuseppe’s miniconf talk, on MySQL Proxy (a great session, might I add – it takes up 2 slots right up until lunch), I went over to the LinuxChix miniconf, to attend a talk about memcache, by Brenda Wallace. Brenda, works at Catalyst IT, in New Zealand – they use a lot of memcache, in the telco business.

Memcache: volatile cache for keeping data in. Its a daemon. The code, can connect to memcache, put values in, read values, delete values. An example of how to use memcache, is given in PHP5.

A killer feature, is the setting of expiry. You can tell it to cache for 30 seconds, and then forget about it, no worries there.

What do you store? Database, generated content (front page of a website, just like a blog even), web service lookups (useful in telco, or say, if you’re playing with the Flickr API), LDAP, things that are far away (from the other side of the pond, etc.).

Wikipedia made memcache famous, Twitter uses it a lot, and there are probably heaps more.

Many APIs, and there’s a postgres client too. There’s a memcache storage engine for MySQL as well.

Code should be written such that if its in memcache, use that, otherwise, get it from the database and put it in memcache.

Another nifty feature, is incrementing a value – increment functions $memc->inc(‘name’);. You can also read stats, to see a cache hit or miss.

Memcache doesn’t have locks. Memcache is not atomic. There are other libraries out there to do locking, there is a known Perl library for this.

What not to store? Remember, its completely volatile. Don’t store anything you’d be sad to lose, and make sure the real copy is safe elsewhere. There is no method to get list of keys in store. There is a 1MB limit per item, so if data is larger than that, you’re in trouble.

Where do you run it? Remember, it is memory hungry, but CPU lite. Running memcache on the webserver is the recommended method, so beware of the security.

There is no authentication. You just connect (no username, no password). So, when running on the web server, you probably want a firewall. In shared hosting, everyone on that host can read/write to your memcache instance.

No check for validity. No referential integrity, its not a database.

There is transparent failover! So if one fails, the client just automatically connects it to another.

Usage ideas? Communicate between layers (talk to a PHP app, from Java). Instead of squid, you can store stuff in memcache, if you want.

Some competing technologies: Tugela – same concept, but its saved to disk, so it will survive a reboot. This is the Wikipedia fork, of memcached. Couch DB is mention, but its not really a competitor, seeing that its a document database. Lucene is another competitor, but remember, its a fast indexer, and its non-volatile.

I haven’t looked into memcached much, but its quite clear, its a great technology to look at. Now the fact that you can use the MySQL storage engine, it might actually be really, interesting.

Technorati Tags: linux.conf.au, lca08, linuxchix, memcached

I wanted to have an RSS feed be returned, for a specific tag or search item in WordPress. Hopping on to IRC, and speaking with Dossy, we realised that there was no plugin to do this. However, after a short amount of poking around (circa under 2 minutes?), the way was clear:

?feed=rss2&s=STRING

Now I can have a specific lca08 feed. Or one for the eeepc. And the list can go on…

FWIW, feed= can be rss, atom; basically anything WordPress supports.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, rss, search

I bit the bullet, and picked up an Asus Eee PC today, while I failed at an attempt to get a rack. Its a 4GB model, with the webcam, and its on its 3rd run, i.e. I’ve got a model without a mini-PCIe connector. The slot is there, but the connector itself is missing – really, silly of them (can you actually save that much money, on a connector?). This batch arrived at OfficeWorks around 27/12/2007 from what I can tell (that’s whats written on the box), and its a 7C model (basically, the only model you get the mini-PCIe connector was the 7A one).

For what it’s worth, OfficeWorks and The Good Guys are price-matched for the Eee PC, while JB-HiFi comes next, with Myer holding the top retail price. Of course, all this is pending you actually getting to a store with stock of the item – I picked mine up from OfficeWorks, in Prahan (South Melbourne for instance, was out of stock).

Now, on to the machine.

Pros:

• You pop the battery in, and the boot-up process is near instantaneous, because its booting from a SSD.
• Standard applications ship with it: Pidgin for IM, Skype for
  video-chat, OpenOffice.org for all your office needs, Acrobat Reader
  for PDFs (why not just evince?) and a whole bunch more.
• The trackpad works perfectly, and even though
  there is only “one” mouse button, it provides a 2-button interface.
• Its nice to have a laptop where suspend and resume work out of
  the box.
• The external display, just works (adjusting to the size
  of the external display, as opposed to mirroring for instance).
• The power supply is very smart. You can remove the Australian plug, and
  see a US-based plug beneath. Either way, it can be used on most modern
  airlines now, even in economy (if you’re on a quality airline, like
  Singapore Airlines, for instance).
• There’s a carrying case that comes in the box, which I’m sure will be handy when I’m about to throw it into my backpack.

Cons:

• The child-like interface, that is almost comparable to, if not worse, than what Sugar will offer you.
• You might be tempted to then say, “Computer Web”, to then hear the voice of a lady then say “Web” fairly softly, and launch Firefox. Not too impressive – for example, I had the Red Hot Chilli Peppers playing in the background, and in my limited use of voice control, I managed to even open up the Clock when I wanted the web browser.
• I tried the dictionary. Its nice to know there actually is an offline dictionary, but its really not too usable. The Longman dictionary is probably ideal if you were speaking/reading/writing Chinese, but I’d have taken an Oxford, or even a Webster’s anyday.
• The keyboard itself, is a tad small, but one will be able to get used
  to it. The positioning of the right Shift key, is not optimal, and I’ve
  seen hacks of people replacing the keys (physically!) and then making
  use of Xmodmap to fix it.
• 800×480 is a tough resolution to get used to. Sure, you’ve got a 7″ screen, but its an odd resolution, and some websites tend not to render properly at this resolution any longer (which is sad).

I wanted a lot more than Xandros could offer me. About the only time I felt at home, was when I hit Ctrl+Alt+T (for the Terminal). At this point, I thought of either installing Ubuntu or Fedora; naturally, I went with the latter, something called Eeedora. More about this, in another post.

What do I think of the machine? Overall, I like it. Its a great sub-notebook. Haven’t tried the battery out yet, but I hear I’ll get about 3 hours of juice from it.

I definitely need to upgrade the RAM – 512MB just doesn’t cut it in this modern world, and a 2GB chip is pretty affordable these days. While I’m there, I might as well get a nice big USB thumb drive, as well as a huge SD card (the slot does SDHC, so maybe some 8GB will be nice?).

Happy to have supported yet another vendor, doing good things with Linux. Go Asus! (similarly, go Nokia for all your beta-quality tablet devices, Dell for Linux laptops [that still haven’t reached the APAC region], and I’m sure I’m missing some vendors, but I’ve not purchased from them.)

Technorati Tags: asus, eeepc, eee, asus eee pc, review, 7c, linux

When buying my Dell Inspiron 640m, I wanted to ensure I was getting a good warranty. It turns out, I finally had to use it, and all I can say is that its been a pretty great experience!

The left mouse button on my touchpad decided to give up the ghost, and just stayed depressed all the time. It worked fine, but not getting tactile feedback was annoying. So I submitted a problem report at 4.20am on the 23/01/2008. I got a phone call back at about 6pm, on the 23rd, asking me when would be a good time for Dell to come over. I stated Friday, and made a note that the LCD hinge on the right hand side felt loose, and maybe it deserved a replacement. They made a note of that.

On the 24th, I was called, to confirm that I’d be available on the 25th, and it would be great to choose a booking time. I chose 11am-2pm. On the 25th, at about 12.10pm, I get a call saying the technician will be around soon, and he’ll call when he’s about a half hour away. I say thats great, and head out for some lunch at Soda Rock.

Back by 1pm, the technician comes at 1.30pm, and starts working. He’s done by 2.15pm, having basically taken out my laptop to bits, and reassembling it. I got the palmrest changed, seeing that the entire thing had to be replaced to fix the mouse. The LCD hinge alone can’t be replaced, so the whole casing itself got replaced (save for the LCD, of course). This meant that all my stickers disappeared!

The laptop looks like new now. It even got a clean (all the dust inside, removed). Surprisingly, the keyboard hasn’t given up the ghost or anything, but the technician told me that it probably will give way in time, and they’ll be around to fix it ;)

How do I feel? Thrilled with Dell, I am. No regrets with their warranty service, and I probably will now only buy Dell hardware for machines that I care about.

Technorati Tags: dell, warranty, inspiron 640m

Doing a bit of procrastinating while packing, I found some notes from an old MODM talk that I thought I’d transcribe. Its the differences between a manager or a leader…

• Manager… responds to change, is reactive. Leader… creates and shapes change, is proactive
• Manager… future-taker, path-taker. Leader… future-maker, path-maker
• Manager… cautious about risk. Leader… careful about risk
• Manager… does the thing right. Leader… does the right thing
• Manager… guided by fate. Leader… guided by destiny
• Manager… controls actions and events. Leader… facilitates actions and events
• Manager… works in the organisation. Leader… works on the organisation
• Manager… prophet: informed and motivated by understanding and predicting trends; asking why? Leader… visionary: informed and motivated by imagining the future and the future self; asking why not?
• Manager… probable-futurist: asks what will the future be like? Leader… preferred-futurist: asks what should/could the future be like
• Manager… problem-centered strategist. Leader… mission-directed strategist

The above is worth mulling over. What do you want 2008 to be for you?

I for one, don’t normally spend time writing goals for the year. Today morning, I found myself doing just that. Now, its time to get off my butt, and get things done.