Author: Tommy

It's been talked about in the media for a while now. If you're a regular visitor to Slashdot or Digg, you may have stumbled across the One Laptop Per Child project. It was featured last month in CPU Magazine and in MaximumPC before that. The project is really picking up steam now that it has a hands-on prototype available.

The goal of OLPC is to provide cheap laptops for free to children in poor countries. They are some of the most robust laptops available, water-resistant, splash- and dust-proof for the harsh environment found in many developing countries.

The project's official website is laptop.org and was most recently featured on 60 Minutes (mirror) in a 13 minute clip. For breaking news on all things OLPC, you can also visit OLPCNews.com which tracks OLPC developments.
It's an exciting move for the PC industry. By making cheap, relatively slow, linux-based laptops available to millions of children, the software market will begin producing applications to run on Sugar (the GUI for the laptop). This may just usher in, or at least broaden, the usage of online applications.

I posted this in the shoutbox the other day, but I can't get over how helpful and informative these are. Yahoo posted some tutorial/introduction videos called the Yahoo! UI Library. It's basically a collection of videos that were (mostly) shot at Yahoo internal workshops on the JavaScript language and using JavaScript tools with the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI).

The videos I've finished watching so far is the introduction on the ins-and-outs of the JavaScript language by Yahoo JS Architect Doug Crockford. With sites like Yahoo and Google using JavaScript to create great webapps and sites like Digg with it's great user interface, which is powered by AJAX, I knew it was high time I finally put a saddle on JavaScript. For much too long I thought JavaScript was a PHP wannabe and I poo-poo'd it for quite a while. After seeing the "big dogs" like Yahoo and Google put it to good use, I realized I was mistaken. I've tried to read and understand JavaScript syntax and structure before from different books, but I've found these videos to be super helpful in explaining the usage of JavaScript and the structure of the DOM.

So, if you're at all interested in learning more about JavaScript or what Yahoo's doing with it in the form of the YUI, check out these videos.

update: I found this interesting and pertinent enough to be added here. O'Reilly.net has a good article on migrating PHP applications to AJAX. It covers a bit of AJAX terminology and it's associated technologies (JSON, XMLHttpRequest, et al).

Since I got my Arrow Antenna, I've been trying to contact all 50 states by satellite (aka Worked All States). I know a few states are going to be tough (if they're even possible). I know Alaska and Hawaii will probably have to be a scheduled contact. Since the pass that will allow us to contact each other will be very low on the horizon. I have been getting about 2 passes a day from the satellite AO-27, one usually to the east then the second passing more to the west. I've been steadily adding states as I hear them. I'm also making contacts via Echo (AO-51) which is very busy on it's nightly passes.

If it weren't for the listing on Heavens Above, I'd prob be lost as to when to listen for a satellite. For those stations that have sent me a QSL card, I will send out a batch as soon as my new ones arrive. The map above is a listing of those states which I've contacted (yellow) and those that I've received a QSL card from (green).

As I write this, weird things are afoot over at Digg.
It all started with a post about the key the HD-DVD encoding. One of the guys over at the Doom9 forums found the key, and so, like the DeCSS number, it spread quickly. People were plastering it everywhere. It made it to digg and was dugg up to the front page.

The MPAA requested that the number be taken down and digg complied. Some users were not happy about this and re-posted the story, which got dugg to the front page once more. Again, the MPAA asked them to remove the post and Digg complied. Here's a story on Slashdot about the fiasco.

Well, now that Digg has pulled the 2nd post, a swarm of users from around the web banded together and filled Digg's queue with posts about the HD-DVD hex key and dugg all of the stories to the front page. Currently the front page of digg is nothing but posts about HD-DVD.

The question was raised by coandco: Is this whole thing a deliberate move on Digg's part to help disseminate the key? If you remember the whole buzz around DeCSS, the powers-that-be tried to squash the story and prevent it from spreading, which only made it much more fun to spread (funny thing about human behavior), so DeCSS got plastered everywhere. Now, the same thing is happening with HD-DVD but it is accelerated by the number of blogs and social-networking sites linking them. Slashdot and Reddit both have HD-DVD keys posted and they aren't scared (yet) of any legal backlash, so has Digg been the first to fold? Is it deliberate or not? It'll be neat to see it play out.

And for what it's worth, here's my little rebellion:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

update: It appears to have played out. With the Digg team bowing to the demands of their immense userbase. (Now we await the MPAA's reaction to Pandora's box being opened)

Okay, you know what? "Amazing" is being overused. It's become part of the hipster vernacular and I can't stand it. Amazing should only be used by sports broadcasters when reviewing highlight reels. (i.e. "an amazing catch" or "amazing hit") Amazing is not a word to be used to describe food, movies, music or any artistic expression.

When used to describe food, movies or music, I think "amazing" is right up there on the Scale of Gay with "fabulous". You would never call something fabulous unless you really wanted to sound gay, right? So why call something amazing?

Cool, awesome, sweet - these are all acceptable terms for describing something you've found to be pleasing. Not amazing. Very few things in life are truly amazing. To be amazed, according to dictionary.com, is "to overwhelm with surprise or sudden wonder". I seriously doubt you were overwhelmed with wonder by tasting some soft serve ice cream (if you were, you really need to get out once in a while; a whole world awaits you). Were you really astonished at the sound of that new indy rock album? If so, you must never listen to anything but the grass growing or the sound of ear wax collecting in your thick head.

All I'm trying to say is that unless gay, don't use the word amazing. Got it?