OLPC has a developers program for people who want to hack on the actual hardware, and not just an emulator of the same. Please send in requests if you are interested in working on software designed for the machine’s profile, either tools or educational software, or have other burning reasons to try out a board.
As long as I’m procrastinating with updates, I should explain to the Ms. Dewey fans who have written in that Janina Gavankar is not actually a librarian.
In other news… Ms. Dewey comes to town …
The last available dump of the entire English Wikipedia is 10 weeks old. Many dumps have been attempted since then, all have failed. There is currently no way for an individual to sign up for incremental updates from the site, so the only option for updating one’s local dump/mirror/archive/testing-ground is to retrieve the entire thing from download.wikimedia.org.
XML dumps are not available from Wikimedia servers; you have to get a massive tarball — even though many people and most researchers will convert this to xml before doing anything further with it. Other useful but unavailable dumps include: randomized subsets of en:wp and other languages, a dump of all commons images, a dump of all images used on en:wp or other language wp’s, whether on commons or not, a dump of any media uploaded in the past 11 months (latest dump here). Worth noting: the images/ subdirectory on download.wikimedia.org isn’t officially linked to from anywhere.
There are limits to use of information. One is free copyright, one is free format, but before all of those is discovery and access to any version at all. I hope these oversights are remedied soon.
Wikipedia content *sometimes* available …
YouTube and Libya compared for value, brought up by a thoughtful Italian blog on next-media and society.
Borat’s Friend Space:
Borat has 257073 friends.
Update: now slowed down to 484286 friends, 16 months later. talk about pan-flashes.
Welcome to my country. The country of Internets.
Why social networking matters. …
There’s some serious style embedded into the latest test boards down on the One Laptop range: one of the finest board-based cams anywhere.
Here’s the camera, on board, during a minor “earthquake”:
Here’s the video output at the time, care of Gstreamer, totally steady:
Tell me that isn’t awe-inspiring.
Super Sexy Cam On : One WebCam Per Com …
Bad Behavior has blocked 199 access attempts in the last 7 days.