Chris Ball

Just back from the Massachusetts Go Association’s Spring tournament. I entered at 1-dan for the first time, and had a fun few games:

1. Against 1-dan, 7.5 komi, loss by 2.5 points.
2. Against 2-dan, 0.5 komi, win by 13.5 points.
3. Against 2-kyu, giving two stones, win.
4. Against 2-dan, 0.5 komi, loss by 0.5 points.

Having both losses be marginal was a shame, but I feel pretty good about the day. But, do I feel like shodan yet? Well, no, not really. The numbers suggest I can hold my own, but I still feel like a beginner to the game. In the last round, I even managed to misplay a 3-3 corner invasion (against hoshi-ogeima), dying completely instead of living in gote.

I’ll resume normal blogging service shortly. While I’m talking about non-computer stuff, though, I should add that I’ve been vegetarian for the last month or two. I’d rather be vegan, and Mad is managing to mostly do so, but for now cheese is just too good to say no to.

What better to go with an open-source laptop than an open-source phone? 😉 The Neo1973’s a great looking phone, with the sharpest screen I’ve seen for the form factor. Congratulations to the OpenMoko team!

We just had our first trans-atlantic (and trans-Cambridge) videoconference on the OLPC!

Don Marti has a thorough write-up of the cross-pollination happening between OLPC and a bunch of free software projects. I enjoyed the last paragraph of the article the most:

Just as the CM1’s software is getting an overhaul, so is the keyboard. “Nicholas Negroponte’s one absolute demand is to get rid of Caps Lock,” Gettys says.

And, Bender says, “There’s one new key they get that’s the important one and that’s the View Source key.”

Having “the freedom to view the source” can seem very abstract, and having a “View Source” key makes this feature of the machines clear to the users. Imagine one of these kids visiting an Apple Store¹ sometime in the future and innocently asking where the “View Source” key is. “Let you view the source? But that’s our property, it belongs to us, you can’t have it.”

For anyone wondering how the technical side to the key can work: almost all of the code the user runs is written in Python, and the system keeps precise track of what’s running where.

One of the inspirations for OLPC is the powerful ability children have to learn with minimal guidance; an ability which is consistently underestimated by adults. By providing free software in this way, the very structure of the machine reflects the potential for self-guided learning that originally motivated the creation of the device.

We’ve added many new features to the laptop since I started working with OLPC — a webcam, SD card reader and dedicated NAND flash controller are the latest — but it’s going to take something very special to supplant the “View Source” key as my favourite addition.

(¹: I don’t mean to pick on Apple; insert any such vendor here. I chose Apple ’cause they’re both a hardware and software manufacturer. In fact, as the article points out, Apple have helped us out significantly by agreeing to let the Squeak Foundation release the Squeak Smalltalk environment under an Apache-style license. Squeak will be one of the main programming languages used by the kids.)

It’s been a hectic few weeks. Two weeks ago I resigned from Netcraft, and on Monday I started work at One Laptop per Child. I’m loving it already; I’ll try to blog progress as I go. I’m going to be working on performance tuning for the laptop’s kernel drivers and userspace apps. This’ll certainly be the first time I’ve been able to measure performance improvements by “amount of time and energy saved by several million children who are charging their machines by hand”…

I’ve uploaded my first YouTube Video. YouTube is awesome for classical guitar — as well as seeing professionals play, you can watch other amateurs to get fingering ideas for a piece, or work out what you might like to learn next. Plenty of mistakes in my video, but it’s a first attempt.

The August edition of the GNOME Journal has been released, complete with an article on WSOP. We’re heading towards the finish line for the project, with just over two weeks left.

While I’m here, I’d like to thank Antonio Ognio for coming up with hackergotchis for everyone on Planet WSOP. Thanks, Antonio!

Allow me to enthuse about Gapminder a little, and this presentation.

Some interesting queries:

• fertility rate in Iran — Iran is the only country in the world to require couples to take a class on modern contraception before receiving a marriage license, in order to reduce the fertility rate, but they didn’t start doing that until 1986.
• GDP per capita and child survival in Malaysia and the US — they have the same child survival rate, even though the GDP per capita in Malaysia is $9k and in the US it’s $40k.
• fertility rate in Mexico — a drop from 6 children per woman in 1975 to 2.2 children per woman in 2004.
• life expectancy in Botswana — shows how massively HIV has hit.

There’s more on Gapminder’s website.

Looking forward to helping out with the One Laptop per Child project. I went over to Micro Center to pick up supplies yesterday, and they had USB hubs for $20, USB network adaptors for $30, and a combination three-port powered hub and network adaptor for $23. It’s a D-link DSB-H3ETX, and works fine in both the Fedora installer and OLPC image via the ‘pegasus’ driver.

I’m hoping to get Dasher up and running as an input method, and to look at alternate calibration techniques for the tablet — “tap these four points at the corners of the screen in order” isn’t easy to explain to a six year-old, but “play this game that happens to involve tracking an object with the stylus while it moves” might be.

We have a Planet for the WSOP students now — Planet WSOP.

Thrilled to see that two of our students, Maria Soler and Cecilia Gonzales, were reported on in El Pais, one of the biggest newspapers in Spain. Does anyone feel like coming up with an English translation of the article?