Dan Weinreb’s blog

The first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops just happened in Uruguay. They sent Ivan Krstic, the security architect of the project, partially so that he could make sure that the security arrangements would be done properly and really work (to avoid theft, mainly). Read about some of the story and some technical details here.

For more news, posted frequently, look here and here.

There is an interesting “Sixty Minutes” segment here.

Another good site here.

For the amazing adventures of famous Lisp hacker Luke Gorrie, living in Kathmandu, writing all kinds of code using the FORTH interpreter in the XO’s firmware look here and here.

Luke says: Forth on the XO is in the firmware instead of a BIOS. Its most basic task is to initialize the hardware and boot Linux, but it can do other things too: open a REPL, run hardware diagnostics (e.g. copy camera data into the frame buffer), join a wireless network and make HTTP requests, mount file systems and copy files, etc. A great little self-documenting extensible operating system in 500KB or so of object code you should check out these links when you get your XO: here and here.

Why does this remind me of the FEP (front-end processor) in the Symbolics 3600, which could boot over the net, operate a hierarchical file system, and otherwise act like a dancing bear?

For Ivan Krstic’s fascinating talk at Google, which is what got me so excited about the XO, look here.

For a nice XO technical overview, see M. Tim Jones’s paper, here.

To learn about the nonprofit “powerful ideas education” Viewpoints
Research Institute, run by Alan Kay, look here.

For Bill Clementson’s blog entry entitled “Why you should buy an OLPC XO Laptop”, look here.

The “Give One Get One” offer has been extended to the end of the year, so you can still buy one of your very own, or just donate to the project. Look here.

For PC Magazine’s review of the XO. This is before the war with Intel ended, so that little section at the end is obsolete. I think it has more than 6 to 12 months to get traction; people are so impatient! The note “sluggish flash performance” should not be taken too seriously; they were reviewing a beta version on which a lot of performance improvement work has since been done, and more is coming. Look here, and for wonderful Internet video, look here.

My friend Olin Sibert says: That’s the thing that makes me most dubious about the project: it’s revolutionary in so many areas, so they’re trusting an awful lot of things to work (and integrate) reliably without having much experience.

I ran this by Ivan Krstic, and he agrees completely. And adds “But there’s only one way to find out if it’ll work.” I applaud their bravery. It’s all quite a daunting undertaking.

In case you didn’t read all the comments to my last blog entry about the XO, here are some interesting points:

OLPC has given serious thought to the theft problem. One point they make is that if an adult has one, it’ll be pretty clear that it was stolen; but I don’t know whether or not that would be a strong deterrent in some of the cultures of the world. The main theft-prevention feature is that the user must get a wireless crypto-token periodically from the school server. The tokens are transmitted every day and expire after a month. No token, and the laptop stops working. In situations without appropriate networking, the tokens can come in via the USB ports. I presume that the XO’s distributed here from Give One Get One won’t have this enabled. Look here.

I hope it’ll be easy to get a Scheme and a Common Lisp running. After all, it’s just another Linux/x86 port. Most Common Lisp implementations already run on Linux/x86 (I don’t know the story with Scheme but presumably it’s similar). I wonder how easy/hard it would be to bring up a good Scheme learning environment like DrScheme. You need the X Window System but apparently it already has that. The issue may mostly be whether there is enough demand for the various Common Lisp implementors to direct their effort this way; those folks all have a lot of priorities.

Regarding the price of the XO: Jim Gettys says in his blog that they have always said “$100 in late 2008-2009, which seems to get lost in the press”. So that’s in line with the point I made in my earlier comment: the price will come down, as prices always do.

There is a review of the XO written by SG, a twelve-year-old who writes as well as anyone I’ve ever read (which is astonishing). The comments on the posting are also interesting. I is mainly about the improvements in the Beta 4 XO as compared to the Beta 2 XO, so it gives you some idea of how things have been changing. Look here.

For SG’s earlier review of the Beta 2, scroll down here.

My old friend Brian Silverman, whom I have not seen in years, has co-authored a paper that helps explain the kind of educational philosophy behind the OLPC project, althhough it is not specifically about OLPC. Look here.

There is something called Squeak eToys, described as follow: Based on LOGO, Parc’s Smalltalk, Hypercard, and starLOGO. It is a media-rich authoring environment with a simple, powerful scripted object model for many kinds of objects created by end-users that runs on many platforms, and it is free and open source. It includes 2D and 3D graphics, images, text, particles, presentations, web-pages, videos, sound and MIDI, etc. It includes the ability to share desktops with other Etoy users in real-time, so many forms of immersive mentoring and play can be done over the Internet. It is multilingual, runs on more than 20 platforms bit-identically, and has been successfully used in the USA, Europe, South America (Brazil, Colombia, Argentina), Asia (Japan, Korea, India, Nepal), and elsewhere.

There’s a general description of it here.

And there’s a paper from Viewpoints Research Institute, written by Alan Kay, here.

I had originally been under the impression that the OLPC would contain a complete Squeak, which is a modern (but not very fast) implementation of Smalltalk-80, but Henry Lieberman of the Media Lab says that it won’t. I think eToys is written in it. I wrote about it in one of the long comments on my previous blog entry about the XO. Look here.

I have lots of friends who have been pursuing Seymour Papert’s and Alan Kay’s ideas about education for decades. (See, e.g., Seymour’s “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas”, especially the powerful ideas.) There have been many successful projects based on these ideas, such as the Lego Mindstorms Kit, but they have not quite yet taken the world by storm (so to speak). I’m very much hoping that the OLPC project will do that. I don’t know if Seymour and Alan are right, but it would be so great if they are.

Tags: OLPC XO Gorrie Sibert Silverman Krstic Papert Kay

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under One Laptop Per Child. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.