Posted on June 2nd, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: poetic justice, international, Glory, glory, glory.
Chris Ball, a Mad bio-savvy artisan, and Wade Brainerd all spent part of the past two weeks getting a disk-conserving wikireader onto the XO that supports browsing and simple searching over a 100-fold compressed set of articles.
The result :
There is also a short blacklist of pages and images that need improvement which will change over time. A whitelist of unpopular but crucial pages will surely build up, and the process will find a way to learn from the subject-specific wikireader efforts to produce smaller uncompressed collections. The same idea and scripts can provide a roughly Britannica-sized collection for every major language; or a multilingual cover of the 200 smallest languages; expect an English one soon for comparison.
While this reader (which has to unzip each page as it is requested) is slower than browsing html, it is still a pleasure to use. The real lack, shared with other readers to date, is that comments and editing don’t yet work…
Posted on May 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: international, Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized.
OLPC is having a flag day of sorts on Tuesday — a media event at the Media Lab with attendees from many countries where we are working, and presentations from a few of the government officials responsible for country deployments. It is unfortunately not open to the public, but I will do my best to publish summaries and link to any raw materials from the events on the blog; and to pass on any comments and questions you may have for country implementers and teachers.
Some of the country representatives will be in town for the rest of the week, for a project and learning workshop; stay tuned for points of interest for the community that come up. I am particularly looking forward to finalizing details of the educational blog project underway in Uruguay, with help from Greg Smith and Tarun Pondicherry, and the WebJournal project that Robson Mendonca will be working on this summer in Brazil with Juliano Bittencourt.
If you have projects you’d like to see pursued more actively, or data you would like to see from countries and schools, leave a comment here…
Posted on March 26th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: fly-by-wire, international, Glory, glory, glory.
Please come to the first US storytelling jam, at UNICEF HQ in Manhattan, this Fri-Sun. We begin Friday night at 6 with introductions and drinks, and continue through an intense schedule Saturday (10-10) and Sunday (10-6), wrapping up in the late afternoon. I hope to see all of you New Yorkers there, and folks from the region; there are a handful of us coming up from Boston in the afternoon if anyone from these parts wants to travel together.
Topics will include storytelling itself, storyboarding of great ideas, how to run a storyboarding session with children, thoughts on interviews by and of children, how to learn to interview others, capturing personal stories for the OurStories project, and code and designwork needed to improve the above.
Posted on February 23rd, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: poetic justice, indescribable, Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized.
Chinese philosophers debated for centuries whether one discovers the nature of the universe by investigating oneself or by investigating the outer world. I don’t have a dog in that fight (I might say both grant equal power of discovery when approached properly), but I do like poring through random selections to get a feel for an expansive whole (yes, I want a Special:Random for the universe).
Sometimes I do that reflexively while thinking, practiving a little Langerfulness. So it was that I found myself tonight seven pages into the discussion threads for the YouTube video “Why Chuck [Norris] endorsed Mike [Huckabee] - Episode One [of Five]“, where I ran across the following exchange between BuckDresser and jtm04d; those of you who know my favorite tests of familiarity with good scientific method may appreciate it… (more…)
Posted on December 24th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: international, Glory, glory, glory.
My friend Zdenek is creating a local gallery of knowledge and photographs of documents and buildings from his hometown of Češnovice. The result is a lovely collection of local history that any city would be proud to have.
It’s funny to think that none of my hometowns have something similarly simple and to the point. Perhaps they do, and I just don’t know about it?.Perhaps this is easier to do comprehensively, with a passion, for a small town. Of course I would settle with this sort of history for any of the blocks or neighborhoods I’ve lived in, but they tend not to have the same cohesive history as a town fending for itself against the vagaries of war and time.
At any rate, enjoy. I particularly like the photos of Hluboka and of this building — with what seems to be yellow steel sculpted girders on the outside. I wonder : are they structural?
Off to Berlin in a few days for the Sea of Chaos. I’ll try to document the trip properly.
Posted on December 9th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: metrics, Glory, glory, glory.
Kaltura.com does a dozen things right in one place; unusual for a modern creator/social-networking site, they focus heavily on creation. Most unusually, they do all of this with video, the black sheep of the collaborative family : small clips, visualized; smooth remix process, with interface on the client and reasonably response time on the server without redrawing a whole screen; the best memes of history and authorship transparency realized with large-font rounded-corners elegance.
Now who is using it ? where are the transclusions for mediawiki instances? I can’t wait to see the beta site develop.
Posted on October 26th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: chain-gang, Glory, glory, glory.
Wikijunior has been quietly developing a number of great books since its founding, and has branched out into many languages.
It needs more editors and commentators; unlike most of the rest of wikidom, its editors are a bit separate from its audience, and its audience is often not active online.
Posted on October 14th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: indescribable, Glory, glory, glory.
The cast behind the lavishly told story of Thamesis — a social and political intrigue set in a world of vivid colors and sound — are more fascinating than the cast within the story itself… they remind me of the early thirteen‘ers, and of Great Big Pants (before I even knew of Worldwide Pants Incorporated).
I can’t get enough. I want the crew responsible for character and clothing design, those responsible for sociology and scientific resarch, and those charged with spicing up the interwoven threads outside the flash but within the site (the brand incubation, the public relations crew, those who loaned outfits and music), in more than living color.
Posted on September 27th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory.
I walked through the Yard early this morning, with a bag in one hand (filled with breakfast remains) and a phone in the other (filled with digital desid.), holding onto each only by fingertips. There was a light breeze from the west. For three breaths I was filled with a primal joy in friction. Holding things felt particularly freeing.
It passed; in another minute I was trundling east at forty miles an hour; I jumped into conversation with Tariq Krim and a night’s century of mail and the rest of the world.
Posted on August 15th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: international, Glory, glory, glory.
Sophie and Philip from Quebec learn how to repair an XO. Joel Stanley, working at OLPC over the summer, showed them how to take one apart; when it was put back together, the keyboard wasn’t working… they took it apart again on their own and managed to reseat it.
Joel managed to catch some neat montage footage, mainly from the first time around, and asked them to introduce themselves in English and French. With a little help from Jamendo, the video was spliced into a cute short… enjoy.
