The Eclectic

Apparently IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo, and they are planning to sell ThinkPads with Linux preinstalled. SuSE Linux, to be precise. According to Linux Journal, Lenovo is a China-based company, so it sounds like selling a division was like a sort of fire-and-forget mass outsourcing committed by IBM. Thanks IBM, for moving thousands of jobs to a Communist East Asian company. That’s exactly what the global economy needs right now.

Politics aside, this laptop looks promising. LJ reports that Novell and Lenovo will be working together on the project. Hopefully designing the hardware and software to work together will result in high performance for the power users this solution is geared toward: with GBs of RAM and a price sticker over 3-grand, this is most definately a “portable workstation” for enterprise use, which, in my opinion is too bad. When Linux-based software companies sit down with hardware distributors to make ends meet, I’m always hoping that the product will appeal to the less-computer-savvy market where Linux is not in common use. Unfortunately, Lenovo and Novell aren’t planning on replacing the Dells and the Gateways any time soon.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Lenovo, Novell, portable workstation

TheHodge Podge Radio Podcast got a facelift tonight. I just modified an existing style set, but I like the randomized header image. For those who are new to HoPo Radio, be sure to tune in to find, your first ever, and your next to be, favourite song.

Might write more on how the update went tomorrow—-might not. For now, must sleep.

Technorati Tags: Hodge Podge Radio Podcast, HoPo Radio

In reflection to this article on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project.

I find this project interesting and scary both at once. The latter quality simply because I don’t think that force-feeding technology to kids at an early age is healthy for their development. As a result, I find the development being done (and how it’s being done) on this project more interesting than the project’s goals.

The struggle between over-optimization and interoperability is an interesting one. I am all for both paradigms, and I think the question of which road to take is highly circumstantial. That said, optimization is, to me, a much more interesting software development problem, and I think it fits this project perfectly because the goal is to develop a product for mass deployment at a relatively low cost. While I normally would be weary of highly optimized software that will probably be platform dependent (especially when the software targets children), I’m not worried about this project; it’s open source, so it’s unlikely to produce a new line of child-consumer-silos.

I’m also excited about how many project team members are reporting that other open source projects are reaping benefits of the development being done here. Often sponsored development such as this, although open source, will put pressure on the development team to focus on the sponsored project with no room for external community benefits.

Finally, I’m intrigued by the term “mesh network” being used to describe the wireless technology being developed for this project. I’m envisioning an ad-hoc style network for kids laptops only with secured Internet portals available in schools and at home. I’ve no idea if that’s anywhere close to reality, but it’s a though. I’ll have to look into this one further…

Technorati Tags: OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, technology, kids, optimization, child-consumer-silos, open source projects, mesh network

Check this out. Google now allows anyone (with a Google account) to create their own custom search engine. You can make Google search only sites you specify, or you can give it some sites as a starting point and let it choose related sites to index into your search. This one’s for all (public) sites hosted on the White Raven Network. I think the White Raven Network Archives will use this as well as (or instead of) Drupal’s painfully slow search engine. If I combine it with Google’s AJAX Search API, that could be really slick, as well.
Sorry Drupal, I love you, but searching’s not your strongest suit.

Technorati Tags: Google, custom search engine, White Raven Network