Author: Tommy

It's been mounting over the past year or so, I'm finally starting to lose faith in Digg. Once upon a time, Digg was a great source of tech news that produced links and info faster than Slashdot. There was a time when I thought Digg was going to actually take over the Slashdot community. (Ha!)

I thought Digg's model would bury Slashdot because of the speed in which you could get tech news. (Comment systems aside - that's a whole other issue) One of my reasons for thinking this was the "democratic" style of moderation on digg - "only the news the people want will make the front page", I thought. Well it turns out that the vast majority of 'the people' are morons. (Now I understand why we have electoral votes in America!) I've seen things appear on CNN, Slashdot, Wall Street Journal and Fark before it gets to the front page on Digg - Yes, digg has been outpaced by even traditional news outlets.

Another huge problem for Digg is the mounting number of idiots that are posting content and getting "dugg" to the front page. They just want to get their story to the front page so they find some link about the iPhone, Ubuntu, AJAX or Ruby post it and it makes the front page - not that any news about such topics isn't wanted, but enough is enough! Another source of links for front-page-chasers is Reddit. Simply go to reddit, grab a link from their front page and repost it on digg, it'll go right to the front page - kewl!!1!

Unless Digg something to counter this problem, I'm probably going to jump ship. Thanks for the memories.

Well the wait for me is over, less than a month after getting the emulator running on my home computer - I got my hands on an actual XO laptop!

Last week I officially joined the OLPC developer network and told them I would be trying to get some ham radio software ported to the XO. Because the applications can be resource intensive, especially when dealing with a 433MHz Geode processor, the OLPC dev team saw fit to send me an actual machine to test on. Thanks guys!

As for a review of the machine, it really is an amazing machine. All of my friends here in Longview that have seen it were all equally impressed with its construction, feel and size. (It's very solid, even if it does look like the malformed offspring of an iMac and Fisher Price toy.) If you want to read more about the hardware specs you can check out the OLPC wiki, to read about the software being developed, you can start with the wiki page on Sugar. The screen is really amazing for it's size and cost. The "dark" mode (for use in the sun) is incredibly crisp and clear. I tried out the PDF reader with the screen turned around like a tablet PC in the sun and it was as nice (if not nicer) than reading on a nice LCD indoors.
I'll post a full review of it later as I learn more about the machine both inside and out. I also hope to let a few grade-school kids try it out for a day and get their thoughts.

For now, you can check out a couple other pics I have of it here and here.

And those of you that still haven't a clue what I'm talking about, you can read my other posts on the One Laptop Per Child project.

This one was just too cool to wait. For those of you that know, I'm quite pumped about the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

I've written about it in the past, as I write this I have a couple of links in the shoutbox. The most notable one is that prospect that the XO laptop will be commercially available for Christmas 2007. By who? How much? Nobody knows. I do know that I want one.

The XO Laptop uses a custom-rolled distribution of the GNU/Linux system with an overlay known as Sugar. Although Sugar is specialized for the XO hardware, you can install it over a linux setup, or try out a pre-configured virtual machine image (if you use VMware Player or the like). There's even a walk-thru to get you acquainted with Sugar's interface. It took me all of about a minute to point and click my way around before even looking for a guide.

UneasySilence has the links to the files needed to run an image of Sugar.

I just received a hot-off-the-presses copy of the new O'Reilly book, Beautiful Code. The book is a collection of some of the foundational blocks of code that has defined modern programming with each entry being discussed by one of 38 master coders in today's market. The expert takes into account the block of code, walks us through the code and explains the elegance of the code as well as the when/why of how rules were bent to make the code magic.

Believe it or not, it's not simply another boring textbook with a few comments written by experts. This is more of a commentary on programming by some of today's leaders. A great read that I'm going to enjoy.

It seems to me that there is a predictable life cycle of the ubiquitous email forward. Let's say you receive this "hilarious" email forward about how the mouse cursor moves around the screen, or how a power line worker inspects the distribution lines.

Email forward duplicates seem to be like ripples on a pond. At first they're closely spaced together. Then, as time passes, they become more spaced out. I'm sure there's some formula with the longevity of the cycle being directly related to the initial frequency of forwards you get for that message. Now if only I could find a formula to predict the span of time between each time the message is sent to me.

Also, this is not an invitation to send me any forwards. Only to see if you notice a pattern in your inbox.