Occasional Rants from the Fearless Leader

On Thursday, January 31^st 2008, I attended the OLPC DC Learning Club meeting at Greater DC Cares downtown. Over 50 people came, many with their XO laptops. A few parents, myself included, brought their children. Seeing so many people so excited about the potential of this technology made me happy.

Another attendee, Jesse Thomas and his friend Leslie Bradshaw took some photos that include a few of Patrick and me. The last one in the set shows Patrick using Mike Lee's Lego-based optical viewfinder for the XO laptop.

I'm still figuring out how to use the XO laptop, as are Patrick and Audrey. My plan is to explore the applications that come with it, figure out how to use them, and to observe my kids using the applications, to see what they are doing with it. The built-in Journal logs what kids do with the laptop, and lets you resume activities that they started to see exactly what they were doing. I'm particularly interested to see how my 6-year-old son experiments with constructivist learning activities Etoys, Pippy, and Turtle Art, since he is already familiar with some programming and design concepts due to our many experiments with Scratch. I am very interested in the port in progress of Scratch to the XO, though I haven't seen it myself yet.

Patrick really enjoys the calculator, the camera, the music applications, and Micropolis, a GPL port of the original SimCity code, the first program we added to the base set of activities.

I announced the Obscure Organization's new Scratch class, and several people, including an Arlington high school teacher, contacted me afterwards inquiring about the program.

Clearly I need to get out more, and talk to more people about stuff I'm doing.

I just ordered an XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child Project. They have a deal where you donate $399, and they use $200 of your donation to fund a laptop for a child in the developing world, and you get one of the laptops, too.

http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php

Linux Journal just published an article I wrote, Mambo Exploit Blocked By SELinux
in their July 2007 issue. This is my second professional sale as an author. You need to be a subscriber to see the article on the web today, but in a couple months, they will probably open the article to the public.

[Edit: see the freely available version.]

Today I got my review copies of the June 2006 issue of Linux Journal, in which my article, Recovery of RAID and LVM2 Volumes, appears on page 52. It's one of the lead articles mentioned on the cover.

This is my first professional writing sale.

The executive editor of Linux Journal just wrote me to say that they are accepting an article I submitted to them for publication in the June 2006 issue on Storage.

The title of the article is "Recovery of RAID and LVM2 Volumes."