Today was the same as every Thanksgiving since I was 4 years old: a great big meal at my grandparents’ house with cousins and other family and friends. As for the past few years, This year I had my brother Jeff, whom I don’t get to see often enough, so it was especially nice. I’m staying at Captain Jack’s Inn, as I have for the past few years. In fact, this might even be the second post I’ve written on the subject from an OLPC XO, since I brought two along last year. After monopolizing the party for two years running, maybe I’ll leave ‘em home next time.
For the past five years or more, our annual tradition has been to try to remember the password to the wireless network, which is only used for this one day every year. Usually we can’t remember and have to reset the access point. Last year, after a parade of faulty routers and endless signal strength problems, we finally gave up and had a new cable run so that the house’s main desktop could have a wired ethernet connection, and the wireless network could be discarded entirely.
That worked, until this thanksgiving, when we realized that this solution left us without a connection for anybody else’s devices, which now includes a profusion of iPhones, laptops, blackberries, and of course a few XOs. My brother solved the problem using Apple’s incredibly streamlined network-sharing system, which provided a beautiful three-click GUI interface to transform the iMac into a secure wireless AP, router and NAT. That’s pretty much what I did for my linux router machine, but it took days of compiling kernels and fighting with OpenAPd. The NetworkManager folks have a lot to learn from Apple.
These are contentious times, and we had at least as many opinionated people as usual, so we had quite a few good discussions over the course of the evening. One of them, and a very interesting one, was about intellectual property. The family business is shoes, which means fashion design, which means generating original designs and then fighting with copycats. My grandfather therfore has an understandable disdain for anyone who copies the designs of others without permission. For this crowd, I’m going to need a new approach if I’m going to have any success arguing against government enforcement of intellectual property rules.
I did sell two XOs, to two avid bridge players, on the condition that I get the American Championship Bridge League’s scoring software running on them, so that they can be used as table-side scoring computers. I’ve already got it tested under Wine, but there are a few details like ¿how do you print? and ¿how do you copy files to a usb stick? Hopefully that won’t be too hard to work out.