Occasional Rants from the Fearless Leader

Obscure.org was down for about 4 hours yesterday morning. We lost the previous 6 hours of data due to a fatal failure of the disk array. I restored from backup onto borrowed hardware. We are still mulling our options regarding repair, replacement, or other choices regarding what hardware we will be able to use over the long term.

The RAID array on Obscure's main server failed (again) this morning, so I'm restoring from last night's backup onto borrowed hardware. It may be this evening before the system is operational again.

I'm afraid that we're going to need some new hardware or a different hosting arrangement once the immediate crisis is resolved.

Recently I've been involved with the One Laptop Per Child Learning Club D.C.. I've met some interesting people there, including Mike Lee, Wayan Vota, Leslie Bradshaw, and ffm (Firefoxman).

At the March 2008 meeting, I made a presentation about the class I've been teaching, Creative Computer Exploration with Scratch. Scratch is one of the activities available on the XO. After the presentation, Mike Lee took a short video of Patrick and I demonstrating a couple Scratch projects, including the Dragon Swirl project. Here's the video:



Mike Lee also wrote a summary of that meeting and the presentation.

At the April meeting, I announced that The Obscure Organization had made available a public Jabber server for the D.C. OLPC community.

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.