Global Nerdy

Really, the article is this out of touch with reality.

If you’re looking to both laugh and cry at the same time, looking no farther than an article written by Robert Graham in the Errata Security blog titled Why the OLPC Promotes Terrorism, which should be a contender for the most insane tech article of the year. It’s so filled with the type of over-the-top pronouncements that one normally sees on extreme right-wing blogs that I had to reread to make sure that it wasn’t parody, and even now I’m not 100% sure. (Next to this article, Zed’s rant sounds rather restrained.)

The article’s two main points is that the OLPC is evil because:

• The design of the OLPC reflects the needs of its creators rather than its users, which to rob third-world children of their dignity.
• It’s a tool to indoctrinate third-world children into the preferred ideology of its designers, which is rabidly communist.

The article has:

• Bizarro statements: “The processor is more than fast enough to run software written in capitalistic programming languages like C++, but the majority of the user interface is written in slow left-wing languages like Python.”
• Reasoning that would make Bill O’Reilly proud: Graham states that features like mesh networking feature are meant to reinforce the notion that individualism is bad and socialism is good.
• A pointless conclusion: “Yet, at its core, it’s still a computer than people can use to hack the United States. It is a weapon that can attack our nation’s infrastructure much more effectively than a gun would. Here is a picture of us installing Metasploit on it” — as if Metasploit only ran on the OLPC.

Graham’s preferred machine for the third world? Intel’s Classmate PC: “[It] runs the same Windows or Linux desktops that everyone else in the world uses. Intel’s computer has no enforced educational agenda. It doesn’t have communist software on it, yet the children collaborate with each other anyway without software forcing them to.”

Graham’s article has a couple of things I agree with:

• The OLPC is not without its problems and is not above criticism
• I don’t see anything wrong with Intel releasing a competing machine, in spite of Negroponte’s huffing and puffing to the contrary

…but for the most part, it’s FOX News-style insanity. If you’re a techie looking for a laugh, Graham’s article is the place to go today.

75 words every sci-fi fan should know: a list of terms that science fiction has invented or popularized. Among these is Whuffie, a key word at Cory Doctorow’s start-up, OpenCola, where I worked and had my “bubble” experience, including to move to and away from San Francisco.

“Someone who was a lot smarter than me figured out that ‘blog’ stood for ‘Best Listings On Google’.” — Will Pate in his presentation, Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for Online Publishers.

“If I had told you ten years ago that by the end of 2007 there would be an international network of wirelessly-connected computers throughout the developing world, you might well have said it wasn’t possible.

…it was created, and it continues to expand, not through Non-Governmental Organisations or charity or development grants but through the market, with much of it financed by some of the poorest people on the planet.

I am talking, of course, about the mobile phone network.“

Yesterday, TSOT engaged in a company-wide exercise which was supposed to teach us about teamwork and blitz planning. In the process, we got a couple of lessons that could be applied to the process of building software.

The Assignment

The people participating in the exercise were divided into three teams of four people. The assignment was to build a bridge across which a ball about the size and weight of a plum could be rolled.

The specs for the bridge were:

• It had to be free-standing; we were not allowed to secure it to anything
• It had to have a minimum span of 4 feet (about 1.2 metres)
• While travelling across the bridge, the ball’s minimum height off the ground cannot be less than 2 feet (about .6 metres)

The items with which each team was allowed to construct the bridge were:

• 8 sheets of easel pad paper (each sheet is about 36″ by 24″)
• 4 plastic beer cups
• 4 thick paper plates
• 1 roll of masking tape

We were given ten minutes to come up with a construction plan and twenty minutes to construct the bridge. We were given a stack of 3″ by 5″ index cards for writing out our plan. Each team had to pick a team leader, who would direct the activities and make notes of the plan on the card.

The Outcome

I’ll cut to the chase: the team I was on, Team 2, won. Not only did we build a bridge that met all the criteria, but we finished its construction in 10 minutes and had enough time to hang out in the lounge while the other teams kept working. Here’s the bridge that our team built:

Our team’s bridge.

Another team, Team 1, took all the allotted time. Their bridge met the “freestanding” and “4 foot span” criteria, but didn’t meet the “ball must be 2 feet off the ground throughout its travel across the bridge” criterion. Here’s the bridge they built:

Team 1’s bridge.

The last team, Team 3, weren’t able to complete their bridge in time.

The Design

The bridge we built, viewed from another angle.

The span of the bridge was made with 4 sheets of easel paper: 2 rolls, each one a 2-ply roll of paper, which were then joined together with a one-foot overlap in the middle for extra strength. The design was unconventional, but there wasn’t any rule that the bridge couldn’t be a covered bridge.

The pillars of the bridge were each made with a 2-ply roll of easel paper, with a plastic beer cup at the top and base. For extra stability, we attached one paper plate to the bottom of one pillar and two paper plates to the bottom of the other pillar. This gave the span a slight slope to ensure that the ball would travel from one end of the bridge to the other (there was no requirement that it had to be a two-way bridge).

The span design was my idea, so I was assigned to build it with the assistance of the team leader. The other two members designed and built the pillars. The pillars were mostly identical, so the guys building them consulted with each other throughout the building process.

Although we were given scissors, our design didn’t require any cutting. I’m certain that this cut down on the construction time significantly.

The Lessons

Our bridge, viewed from one end.

The exercise demonstrated the expected points about teamwork (a good leader, clear communication between team members and cooperation) and blitz planning (a simple plan, an iterative approach and adapting to real-world feedback). It also yielded some unexpected lessons about design:

• Build the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s an oft-repeated mantra in Agile Development, but it’s something that programmers sometimes forget — probably because we often erroneously equate “simple” with “stupid”.
• Go with the strengths of the material you’re given. The other teams built structures that took their inspiration from real-world bridges. This might be a good approach if the materials we were given were popsicle sticks, but since we were working with mostly paper and specific height and span requirements, we decided that a tubular design would be the best approach. It offered the advantages of strength and ease of construction.
• The corollary from the previous point is that the solution may look different from what you might expect. With the two previous points and the time constraints in mind, explore the possibilities.

Although the exercise is now over, we’re keeping our bridge around as a little reminder of the design lessons we learned — we plan to use them in building our software.

The toy companies Hasbro (who own the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada) and Mattel (who own the rights to Scrabble for everywhere else in the world) have asked Facebook to remove the “Scrabulous” application as it infringes on their copyright for the game.

Mathew Ingram has already said this but I’ll say it again: Mattel and Hasbro are making a mistake by giving in to the knee-jerk impulse to think “infringement!” and calling in the legal team. All that will do is generate ill will towards them. A far more profitable approach would be for them to simply buy the application from its creators — which they could easily do for a few hundred thousand dollars, mere pin money to them — and use it as a marketing tool for Scrabble as well as other games in their stable.

I wasn’t at the Steve Jobs keynote, but lots of other bloggers and journos were: see TechCrunch, Engadget, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Tech Trader Daily, MacWorld, Big Tech and the TV-B-Gone guys.