Scott's Blog

I just discovered Google Notebook that I knew existed but had never tried it, I heard it referred to as a post-it note type tool, but it's more useful than that (I'm not a big Post-it™ fan). If you install the extension, you can quickly select and gather snippets from a web page and throw it in your notebook . It automatically keeps track of the originating link and the date you clipped it. The notebook supports rich text and images, in that sense it's quite complete. The only thing missing is the ability to take an entire notebook and make a blog entry for it. Maybe I could make it my 20% project .

Professor José Antonio Meira da Rocha has done some number crunching and found that the OLPC XO laptop will cost about R$0.59 per child per hour (about 27 cents US). This includes the cost of the laptop, electricity, training, OLPC servers, and internet connection. In comparison having Computer labs where 5 or more students share one computer would cost R$9.90 per hour. His numbers show that the total cost of ownership (TCO) OLPC will be R$94.07 per year (vs. a computer lab's TCO of $R586.00). The problem with computer labs is that the child doesn't feel any ownership of the shared computer, he or she can't just pick it up any time and start using it. Also kids don't like sitting in chairs for hours at a time. On top of that the OLPC has a better display than a typical computer and so is better for reading. Having just spent R$300.00 on books, pencils and paper for my son for school this year, $94.07 looks like a steal.

It's always fun to make some predictions so you can make a fool of yourself in 12 months time. So here it goes: The Nintendo Wii will outsell the XBox 360, although it may take all year. Most XBox 360 owners will also have a Wii. The US economy will do worse in 2007 than in 2006. A part of the reason will be because of lowered housing prices. Brazil will do marginally better in 2007 than 2006. The OLPC will have a rough start mostly because of political reasons and an extended smear campaign but will be an utter success as 2008 rolls around. We'll start seeing more machines with Linux pre-installed on it instead of Windows in 2007 or with a sticker saying "linux ready" or some such. We'll slowly start seeing companies putting Linux on their employees desktops instead of windows because it is easier to administer and catches less viruses. People will start understanding that DRM is evil and will actively try to avoid it, despite the lack of legal choices. Some s...

There's 3D sudoku

For fun I wasted some time creating diagrams using the dot language. It's pretty fast to get a diagram out, except that there are a lot of things you can't do, like make shadows or rounded and filled rectangles. With this dot code: digraph "User Clicks" { node [ shape="rectangle" style="filled" ] server [label="Server"] java [shape="ellipse" label="Java\nCode"] provider [label="Service\nProvider"] browser [label="Firefox"] browser->server[label= ]; server->java[label= ]; java->provider[label= ]; provider->java[label= ]; java->server[label= ]; server->browser[label= ]; } You can click on the image to see the SVG rendered in Firefox, if you use that. I wrote a little python program to call the dot command outputting the diagram as an SVG file. Then I used the batik-rasterizer to convert SVG into PNG . Unfortunately, dot doesn't do an excellent job on the SVG that it outp...

On the way to and from work, I pass three English, one Japanese and one Mandarin Chinese school. If I drive one block off my regular route I can also pass infront of Portuguese, French, German, Spanish and Italian schools (although some do double duty). These little schools are more common in Brazil than Starbucks are in the US. It reminded me when I was working at my previous job, there was this new guy who started working next to me. He wanted to learn 4 languages. I didn't know what to say. I mentioned that I speak four languages, but it never really helped me get a job. Even in Brazil where knowing English can really be an asset (and thus all the English schools), I hardly ever had a chance to speak it at work. For a while, I was even working for an American company in São Paulo (Convergys) and the only time I got to speak English was when I went out to a bar with the Americans. I just didn't have the heart to tell him that he should really learn another computer langua...

I've not been having great luck with Ubuntu recently. Two weeks ago I tried an upgrade and failed miserably (see thread ). I was able to backup and essentially reinstall from CD and start all over (which isn't all that hard with Synaptic, it's just click and install and rsync to recover my 45 gig backup). You'll notice that there are no window borders and the console is actually on top of the panel at the top of the screen. Then this week I was playing with vnc2swf and somehow I killed my window manager. Basically, my machine would start up but had no borders around the window, they are unmovable and I can't Alt-Tab to different programs. I 'knew' the problem was with the window manager, but what is that called, and how do I set it up properly? At first I thought it was GDM (the GNOME Display Manager) , but after fiddling with that for a bit I realized (eventually) that I was wrong. Some more surfing and I realized that it is probably metacity (althou...