The Eclectic

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

It’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to post on this blog. My latest projects, WRNA and RSPP, have demanded some more thorough organization than I used to bother with freelance work. At my job, I’ve been learning to use CVS and VIM, two tools that are no stranger to most software developers. I’ve decided that I like VIM (though I’m far from efficient with hjkl and its many other “shortcuts”), but after doing some research, CVS seems downright archaic (yes, stable, but still archaic).

After researching some alternatives, I decided to install SubVersion on the White Raven Network this week. This installation did not go without headache, but I’m impressed with the results. Once I got SVN working, I installed VIM and Eclipse on both the Arch Linux and WIndows XP partitions of my hard drive, as well as TortoiseSVN for Windows only. I was extatic when I discovered that Eclipse plugins are available for PHP, SVN and Doxygen (all necessities for the Drupal-based WRNA poject). With SVN and Eclipse working together, I can FINALLY get work done with either operating system on my laptop without waiting half the day to reboot or re-copy files again and again. That plus the obvious benefits of version control for when my coding starts to get out of control.

All in all, things are looking up for a good term of independent development, and it’s not even November yet. I’m told that ECE-UW term 2A is less taxing than 1A and 1B, too, maybe I’ll even have a life outside of school for more than 4 months.

Technorati Tags: WRNA, RSPP, CVS, VIM, SubVersion, SVN, Eclipse, TortoiseSVN, Drupal, version control

While bored today I remembered another service that I signed for but haven’t check up on in a while, ClaimID. When I got ClaimID I looked around at some other all-in-one online identity attempts, the other “big” one at the time wasOpenID. Turns out, during my latest 4-month schooling exile ClaimID got onboard to fund OpenID and they are now nicely integrated.

ClaimID also gave me a bunch of ways to post my ID on blogs and websites. Here are a few:

• The Badge
  
• The Links List
  Refuses to work in WordPress
  
• The HCard
  
  Mark Dittmer
• The WordPress “Widget”
  Doesn’t work anymore

I can’t wait for this WordPress plugin to be released. As more and more sites catch on, I’m hoping OpenID will turn into the all-in-one authentication that it’s creators dream it to be.

Technorati Tags: ClaimID, OpenID, ID, WordPress, authentication

Let me begin by saying that I, for one, have wasted AT LEAST six hours of my life just getting AJAX to happen in different browsers or more. I’ve even written code to create the missing XMLHttpRequest object for IE that contained work-arounds for Microsoft’s stupid ActiveX objects.

While it means that I’ll probably throw out a lot of code that took a long time to make, I can’t express how overjoyed I am by my discovery of GWT: theGoogle Web Toolkit, the first structured solution (that I’ve seen) to the grossly malsupported concept of AJAX. I would also like to say, IT’S ABOUT F*CKING TIME! It seems to be an uphill battle to convince many facets of the computer development community that simple is good; standards are good; making something more complicated than it needs to be makes things, well, more complicated (not more 1337). So when Google stepped up to horde of browser developers who can’t see eye-to-eye, AND released the fruits of their labour for free use, I practically jumped for joy. One software sector down 2^n to go.

Thank you Google and your developers for this much-needed tool!

Technorati Tags: AJAX, browsers, XMLHttpRequest, Google Web Toolkit, standards, Google, developers