Category Archives: Activities

Anton Peck Made Me Write This!

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Anton Peck did not really make me write this article, it was after reading his blog post the yesterday about “Beating Writer’s Block“ that got me thinking about my lack of writing blog posts too. Anton has been having trouble being able to write blog posts as of late. In his post he goes on to say how he was working to get around the problem. I like his analogy of blog post writing to taking a road trip. Sometimes when going on a road trip at first your not completely sure where your going, but all you know is you need to be going somewhere. Which means sometimes when writing you just have to start writing something and the idea or an article will come to you once you have begun.

My Problem

Part of my problem is not the same, as Anton’s with not knowing what to write. I seem to have the opposite problem in that I have some great blog posts and ideas for them, I just don’t have the drive or ambition to do them. I have about six to eight blog posts started, that I began last year. I usually create the article by coming up with subject (title) and then put a bunch of summary information about it into WordPress, that I go back to later create the post with.

My problem with getting my blog posts done is that normally they are more technical in nature and usually end up needing some kind of technical code example. These examples take time and I’m also trying to make sure the articles are written correctly, since I’m not an English major as I have always said, I’m a developer/coder.

The other thing that slows me down is once I get writing an post it tends to be long and verbose. I never seem to write short blog post like my friend Justin Thorp. He usually writes posts that are three to five paragraphs that get right to the point, with a few sentences in each one (his last few seem to be bit longer than normal). His are still much shorter than mine.

Mine on the other hand, end up having a dozen or so long paragraphs with really long sentences. I might have to work on being more succinct with my writing for the readers sake and my own.

I believe this is part of the same reason I have been fiddling with a few web application ideas/prototypes off and on for like almost two years. I tend to get them started and then find a better way to do them, by making them more accessible or more efficient from new techniques I have learned. I have even started to re-write one so I can start to learn PHP, being that I have been a classic ASP developer that uses XHTML, CSS, and bit of JavaScript for the first attempt at them.

My Burnout

Another thing that might be putting a damper on my blog post writing and enthusiasm for doing other web work after hours was also brought to my attention again from the A List Aparts article about “Burnout” by Scott Boms. Over the course of my technology career, I think I have been burned out or at least darn close, probably a good half dozen times. This is not something to be proud of at all. It first started while I was in college trying to finish large school projects while working 20 to 40 hours a week.

It also happened a few other times over the last 20+ years while working on projects for work and being responsible for making sure the production mainframe nightly jobs worked and ran smoothly. Because of this I now believe I try and spend more time away from the computer after work, besides checking e-mail and twitter, so I have a better life balance.

Life Balance

To have more life balance, I seem to spend more time watching mindless TV, keeping up with friends on Twitter, and just a lot of time reading others blog posts, instead of spending my time DOING real work and getting things done. As of late I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking about ways to help myself get over these issues so I can get back to building and creating more blog posts and finishing my web applications.

The sooner I can do this the more likely I will be able to help others with them and maybe if I’m lucky make some money to at least pay for themselves (hosting costs). And if they really get going I might be able to do one or all of them full time. My other big issue is which web application should I build first or at all, instead of trying to work on all of them and not making any real progress.

Conclusion

If you have any suggestions on ways to help me or others with any of these issues I would be glad to hear about them. Here’s hoping others will help you write that much needed blog post or build the next big thing.

Thanks, Anton Peck for making me write this blog post!

A Few Quick Things About the OLPC

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Yesterday I met Justin Thorp, Rodney DeGracia, Stewart, and Partica over at Murky Coffee in Arlington, VA with our One Laptop per Child machines (OLPCs). We had a good time talking about our new laptops. Stewart even mentioned that the OLPC he had brought with him was his daughters. He had purchased it for her and when he got to using it he like it so much that he did the Give 1 Get 1 again, before the dead line of December 31, 2007, so he could have one for himself.

We played the memorize game with each other over the mesh network. Justin and Stewart used the mesh network to collaborate on a document. It was fun watching Stewart type in his version of the document and then the changes happen on Justin’s in an instant.

There were three items that I had noticed before and wanted to re-test and look at with others there to make sure I was not imagining things.

The first thing was that if you have fixed width website that is greater than 800 pixels you will have to scroll your screen horizontally. The width might be slightly less than 800 pixels, I’m not sure the exact number. I know that my main website, which is 750 pixels wide fits in just fine. One of the OLPC websites does not fit on the screen has to be scrolled and I can’t remember which one right now. You would hope that their own website would fit on their machine. I figure they’re busy and have other things to do that are more important right now.

The second item was that when you fill out a form field or URL that you have done before it does not give you a list of what you have already typed before. This is not a big problem just a nuisance for someone that has used computers for years, but for someone that never has they will not know this information. It looks like the OLPC will let you save cookies, since I marked my Hotmail to remember me  on it and it did I will have to check this out more to make sure it is correct.

The final item and the one I find more interesting and troublesome is that if you have an application that puts up an alert box up it never comes up. I found this out by trying to delete a Twitter message that I had typed wrong on my Twitter account while using the OLPC. On Twitter when you request to delete a message it puts up an alert box that says “Sure you want to delete this update. There is NO undo!”. If you are using a normal machine it comes up fine and give you the option to hit “OK” or “Cancel”. Well when using the OLPC browser this message never came  up. You click the trash can to get the delete function to work and the little circle just spins for awhile, stops, and then nothing happens.

I know that most of the web forms and applications that I have built or maintain now have alert boxes that come up to show errors in the page, etc.. Time to test this out on a few other pages first to make sure I’m correct on this assumption. This could be a problem that makes it difficult for people with these machines to accomplish different tasks that include forms. This puts a barrier up and makes it an accessibility issue to those people using the OLPC. Hopefully it is only a temporary thing until they get it fixed. I know of a lot of web applications will show you a list of errors by putting them in an alert box. By using web standards for your websites I think you will keep away from problems that the OLPC can not handle.

Have any of you noticed either of these problems with your OLPCs or is there any other things I might have missed using my machine. This information would be helpful to me and others for when we are building web pages ad applications to make sure they work on as many devices as possible. If things go well there will be millions of these out in the world in a short time.

More General Information about the OLPC

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There are a few things that I have noticed over the course of the day using the OLPC, the XO Laptop, or the $100 Laptop. One of the big ones is that if you take it to a coffee shop people will look at you and then the laptop and look at the laptop some more.

I had a lot of people come up to me and ask if it really worked. I said “Yes, it does and you can get one for yourself even” and went into how they can order the OLPC themselves from OLPCs Give 1 Get 1 website.

I had a lot of people ask “Is that one of those green laptops”, or “Is that one of those $100 laptop”.  I got the most questions from older people asking “Isn’t that the laptop we saw them talking about one CBS”? I assume they saw the “60 Minutes” piece on the OLPC. Each time I would stop reading about the laptop and offered them a chance to use it.

One lady I guess was going to order one for someone or she already had, so she wanted to see it and touch it. She had a young girl who was eleven if I remember correctly use it. The young girl said it was easy for her to type on. Of course she tried to go to one of the Disney websites, which asked for the latest Flash plug-in to see most of the website, not that accessible of a website. A Disney website is probably not the first place someone from third world country would go or at least it shouldn’t be.

Another gentleman asked what kind of software you could put on it, since someone he knew or he was going to a third world country and wanted get a few to let people there use it if it could do a bunch of activities.

One women I know asked if you could look up porn on the laptop. I told I figured you could, since I had not heard that they had software to stop it. Really wanted to know if kids could look up porn. So when she got hold of the OLPC she went to the Playboy website and started laughing when she got to their home page. I grab the OLPC back from her to get rid of it, since we were sitting the middle of the coffee shop with a lot of little kids and older adults.

I did get some reading done about the OLPC on how to get started, how it works, and what activities the OLPC has on it. They even have a wiki, which contains information about hardware, software, content, testing, educators, developers, and a whole lot more. They have some cool rollovers explaining what certain parts of the machine are for. One of the ones I just found was the page that has information on what the keyboard does. They also have a page that shows which features the OLPC has.

With all the question and people playing with it I did not get to do as much as I wanted today on learning about the activities on the OLPC. It was like three different “Tam Tam” activities. They are:

  • “Tam Tam mini” – an application that allows for people to perform music and play instruments.
  • “Tam Tam Edit” – an application allows you to generate music using a colorful and intuitive graphical interface.
  • “TamTam Jam” – the music performance activity. Sounds are played by striking individual keys on the keyboard. This is designed more for younger children.

Other activities that the OLPC has are: (this information was mostly taken from the activities webpage)

  • “Chat“ -simple environment for discussion, whether it is between two individuals or an entire classroom.
  • “Memorize“ – is the classic memory game of finding and matching pairs with a twist: a pair can consist of any multimedia object, such as images, sounds,and text.
  • “Record” – provides a simple way for children to take pictures, view slideshows, and record video and audio all content that can be shared via the mesh network.
  • “Journal“ – is an automated diary of everything a child does with his or her laptop.
  • “Draw“ – provides a canvas for a child or a group of children to express themselves creatively.
  • “Pippy“ – a simple and fun introduction to programming in Python, the dynamic programming language underlying much of the software on the laptop.
  • and a whole lot more

The final cool thing on the activities page is the last item, which  is the part about downloads for the OLPC. The download page has like 50+ items to download and use like (some is games others is source code):

  • “Domino“ – classic space game
  • “Image Quiz“ – a simple concept: one question, one image, one click
  • “3D Pong“ – three dimensional wireframe arcade game
  • “SimCity“ – construct and maintain your own city
  • “Block Party“ – Tetris-inspired game
  • and a whole bunch of other things

The woman across the table from me at Murky Coffee in Arlington said, “I should bring the OLPC out with me, it might actually be better than having a puppy or a baby with me for getting people to stop and talk to me”.

Hopefully this blog post is usefully for those that do not have their OLPCs yet, are waiting until Christmas to open with their kids, want to read up on what it has, what is being developed, or what you can do with it.