Jonathan Blocksom's Weblog

I'm somewhat involved with the OLPC project and am fortunate enough to have prototype units to develop software on. My main focus is on 3D graphics for the laptop, with the eventual goal of getting my children's 3D modeling software GollyGee Blocks running on the machine.

I saw Rob Pegoraro's column in the Washington Post on the Classmate PC a few weeks ago, and he mentioned OLPC but hadn't had the opportunity to see one. Rob's a great guy and I've corresponded with him before so I offered to bring my test unit down for a demo. We then got Wayan Vota of OLPC News involved, he knows a lot about the project and I thought it would be good to get his views on the machine.

We had a great stroke of luck that while all this was being organized OLPC contacted me to say they were sending me the latest B4 prototype. It arrived a few days before the meeting, I put the latest builds on the machines and brought them down to the Post office last Thursday. Rob brought along his loaner Classmate PC and we all geeked out for an hour.

Rob and Wayan get a lot more traffic to their sites than I do, and they've just linked to me, so hello everyone who's visiting from there. Here's a link to wayan's write up and here's Rob Pegoraro on our OLPC demo.

I think the OLPC is a great machine, the software is still coming along but has seen great strides. Regrettably I don't have a lot of time to spend working on it (I have a day job and two toddlers) but at least I've been able to do a little evangelism. I'd really like to thank the folks at OLPC for the prototypes, they've been key to my continued involvement.

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week I had a chance to see a Classmate PC, Intel's foray into the world of laptops for primary education. I was pleased to see that GollyGee Blocks ran without a hitch. The Classmate PC has this annoying screen scrolling thing that it does because it's resolution is too low (800x4800) to display a typical Windows desktop. But GGB by default sets the resolution to 640x480, which fit on the display fine although it was stretched horizontally. The end result was it looked really sharp.

Performance of GollyGee Blocks on the machine was excellent. The Classmate PC doesn't have 3D hardware but GGB was written to be able to work fine with only software rendering, and the 900MHz processor was more than enough for smoothly rotating scenes around.

So if anyone out there is buying a classmate PC, think about putting GollyGee Blocks on it!

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People complaining about how hard it is to find good programmers to hire these days has appeared on my radar three times in the last week from very different sources. When I hear about it that much it tells me it's a real problem. Apparently CS enrollments (and presumably engineering enrollments in general) and graduations are way down in the US.

The cost of going to college has also gotten a lot worse, increasing much faster than inflation. So let's solve both problems!

To increase competitiveness the US should start giving scholarships to all engineering majors. We should pick up 50% of the tuition or something like that -- make it 100% for women. Throw in a GI bill for good measure (those troops are coming home soon, right?) and we'll have more engineers in a decade than we know what to do with. Then we can get back to complaining about ageism and how all of us with mortgages are getting laid off in favor of the cheap college grads.

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well our online store is working again but I still haven't quite figured out what to do with our wiki. I put up a new empty wiki last night and it had two pieces of spam on it by this morning. I do have all the content from the wiki, so I think I am going to try and just convert it into a set of regular web pages and post those on our main site. If anyone has a mediawiki markup to HTML converter handy let me know...

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First our merchant account provider changes their security and I have to take down our online store to make it use the new methods. Unfortunately I don't find out about this until two customers try to order and have problems.

Now I go to update our wiki and discover it's full of spam. It looks like it started in mid-June. I think I'm going to have to delete the whole thing and repost our lessons. On top of it all I want everything to be spic and span for the folks we met at NECC, so I'm not sure if I should send them all the follow up email I was planning now or try to get it out after I've cleaned everything.

Posted by Jonathan Blocksom at 11:47 PM | Permalink