Category Archives: sugar

The Diamond Age

In Sugar/OLPC circles, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age is a major touchstone, to the point that I thought I knew most of the plot before I even started, just by diffusion … and maybe I did, but a half-overheard story … Continue reading

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It’s Google

I’m normally reticent to talk about the future; most of my posts are in the past tense. But now the plane tickets are purchased, apartment booked, and my room is gradually emptying itself of my furniture and belongings. The point … Continue reading

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Existence

A message on the OLPC mailing list today said uno de los primeros impactos sociales del Plan Ceibal fue que aparecieron niños que técnicamente no existían, no tenían cédula de identidad “One of the primary social impacts of Plan Ceibal … Continue reading

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Barbeque

I went to a barbeque with some OLPC/Sugar folks, and spent most of the evening chatting with the good old boys about the good old days. I learned that one of them designed this album cover for the Talking Heads … Continue reading

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Education, Geek to Geek

Monty of Xiph.Org just put out a new video on the fundamentals of digital multimedia, hopefully the first of many. It’s a fun intro for anyone who’d like to know more about the foundations of modern audio/video technology, especially students. … Continue reading

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Board

This evening the Sugar Labs Oversight Board held an open dinner-meeting in Cambridge. After dinner, we went back to 1CC for some more civilized discussion in a quieter venue. It was supposed to be a contentious meeting, something about trademark … Continue reading

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Beauty

This afternoon I took a stroll around Harvard with some friends. I can recommend without reservation Harvard Square on a sunny summer Sunday afternoon and Herrell’s Mudpie flavor. I spent much of the weekend building a generic monoid-annotated self-balancing binary … Continue reading

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To fix the network

(for context, see a review of OLPC’s networking troubles) A group of OLPC engineers, especially C. Scott Ananian and Michael Stone, were dissatisfied with the the behavior of the current collaboration stack, and decided to start from scratch, laying out … Continue reading

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A very brief and extremely selective history of OLPC and collaboration technology, performed entirely from memory

OLPC’s founders wanted to improve education, and in their vision, education requires communication. They envisioned a computer system in which students, and teachers, could easily work together on projects, and share all kinds of documents and media. To describe this … Continue reading

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Worthwhile

I sometimes wonder if I am doing the right thing by spending time on projects for OLPC and Sugar Labs. I do my best to work on it only during free time, but then, some graduate students spend their whole … Continue reading

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