OLPC

OLPC Big

I hope it doesn’t sound silly, but I’d really like to get my hands on an OLPC laptop. Why? I don’t know. The OLPC is a Big Idea made real, and I’d really like to be able to experiment (play) with the machine the OLPC group has created. I hope that “mere humans” and not just big governments will someday have the ability to purchase one…

At some level, I think I’d want it as a “field laptop.” This might be for working with mobile robotics platforms, deployed wireless sensors, or any of a host of other things that I do where a laptop is a useful/necessary thing. The OLPC could make a great platform for mobile updates to software, collection of data off motes, and other similar activities. On another level, it could be a great teaching resource… imagine an OS course where students all had to buy an OLPC machine (for around $100, about what a textbook costs), and they worked on implementing drivers, memory managers, filesystems… all for real hardware.

All that, and they’re so cute!

Right. I think I need to head home and relax a bit today. I’ve been spending a lot of time programming and writing these last few weeks, and should probably just enjoy some downtime.

20061118 | | Tags: , , | No Comments »

A few interesting finds

Selenium is a unit test framework for web-based applications. Open source.

VMWare Server is now free. I need to read up on it to understand why this is better, worse, or the same as VMWare Player. Either way, it follows from what Christian and I were saying yesterday about VMWare. Having recently put together a virtual machine for deployment to our students (more coming on the Transterpreter weblog shortly), it’s clear that VMWare is trying to establish a broader market share now. The reason isn’t 100% obvious, but they’re making the right moves.

We now have a convergence of all major and boutique PC manufacturers on one platform (Intel/x86). More importantly, Intel is incorporating support for multiple operating systems into their processors. This virtualization support means, in the crudest possible terms, that the days of dual-booting a machine are over. Once support is baked into (say) OSX and Linux, it will be possible to run these two operating systems on the same machine, side-by-side, and simply flip back and forth between them. Likewise with Windows.

This kind of support for virtualization on the end-user’s desktop spells death for VMWare. However, if you make the tools to play a virtual machine free, and charge $180 for the ability to create virtual machines, you’re on the road to establishing a broader user base. They might be a little too late, I’m not sure—but think about how ubiquitous Flash is. Macromedia has never charged for the player, just for the content creation tools.

Over at Brick Labs we have an article about operating systems for robotics; I’m curious what the competition looks like. In the same (robotic) breath, I’m curious about this project taking place in London regarding environmental sensing and “feral robotics”.

In vaguely related news, I liked the description of an attempt by a new Erlang programmer to tackle the three-body problem. I enjoy “peering into” people’s thought processes on problems like this.

Finally, there’s some discussion at LtU regarding Guido’s thoughts on language design. Also something to take a quick look at.

20060214 | | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

No Ping of Goodness?

Testing 1 2 3.

This should Ping the CSCS Planet aggregator…

20060206 | | Tags: | Comments Closed

LEGO Mindstorms NXT link roundup

It’s clear; I’ll need one, and more importantly, I really hope we can get one at Kent to port the Transterpreter to it early. It looks like there are so many absolutely cool things we can do with it as a substrate.

And, since our runtime should work perfectly well on both the original Mindstorms and the NXT, we’re in a good position to have a nice bridge between the two. Yummy!

20060106 | | Tags: , , | Comments Closed
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