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Ivan Krstić just posted an entry named "Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi".
Without commenting on the problems of the OLPC project, which - for some time - has seemed to be rapidly pushing itself into oblivion - I completely agree on Ivan's points on open source and frankly, everything else he says.
It's saddening that the project which thrilled me - due to the ideas outline by Ivan - now disgusts me and so many others.
Just a quick note - I've got 10 Evernote invites - if you don't know what Evernote is, check out the Ars review here. Post in the comments if you'd like to test drive it. I'm going to need an email address.
So far, I'm loving it - but I'm also someone with about 500+ bookmarks in Safari, a ton of "to read" stuff saved on my hard drive, and over 100 RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. So something to help me archive/save/search everything is key.
Now I just want PDF indexing support.
Ok, I have 10 more left!
(Via Ars) This is surprising given how much he's dedicated to the OLPC project. If this is a sign of things to come, I guess it's another marker for "bad management can bring down any project".
I missed the post on Ivan's own blog - I blame pycon-haze. I guess this may help "explain" why his keynote was "about OLPC" and not "on behalf of". It's saddening to see someone who believed in the project as strongly as he did brought low in this fashion.
Ok. So Sun has come out stating they're starting work based on the SDK released by Apple for the iPhone earlier this week to port the JDK over to the iPhone.
Quoting the sun rep:
"Now, the iPhone is open" as a target platform, Klein said. The free JVM would be made available via Apple's AppStore marketplace for third-party applications.
Now, as comments there and elsewhere have pointed out - there's a clause in the Agreement that comes with the SDK forbidding applications from being placed on the AppStore that can execute/interpret "other applications" - to whit:
3.3.2) An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s).
So - unless Sun plans on making a JDK that a) doesn't run anything or b) can be compiled into an application that is to be sold on the AppStore (providing the runtime for the app, like a self-standing .jar/.war) then I can't see this happening, and option a is about as useful as a toilet bowl filled with taco meat.
On the other hand, option b: Making a runtime they release outside of the app store for application developers to use to write an application in Java and then have it compile-down to an Objective-C runtime/bytecode binary - then it could work, but those would be some *fat* binaries without a lot of magic.
Now - could the same thing be done with Python? Perhaps. Right now we have the pyObjC bridge that ships with Leopard that allows you mostly unfettered access into the Objective-C/OSX programming environment. This means you can build "native" applications in Python.
I doubt these bindings will work/exist on the iPhone, which means you want some utility to take Python code and "interpret" it down into an Objective-C binary, i.e.: an embed-able environment ala what Sun may end up having to do where you write an app in pyObjC/Python and the app+runtime is compiled down into Objective-C.
Again, without a lot of trickery, these would be fatass binaries - probably fatter than the notion of the universal binaries most people ship nowadays for OS/X.
It's a thought - now I should get back to poking at Objective-C and other pre-pycon hackery. This is something people more versed in compilers, runtimes and with more free time than me will probably explore.
Because you, like me, are interested in writing some iPhone apps (and apple is only allowing objective-C stuff right now :sad:) - here is a free eBook I kept in my pocket for when I wanted to finally dive in.
It's call "BecomeAnXcoder" from CocoaLab
Microsoft just announced what has been rumored forever: a formal offer for Yahoo. Microsoft's proposal to Yahoo's board of directors represents $31 per share (a 62% premium over yesterday's closing price) or about $44.6 Billion. Steve Ballmer, CEO and big fan of developers, says, "We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market."
Whoa. This insane. But if it goes through it's good news for a few friends of mine. Makes me kick myself for not buying Yahoo stock :)
Ivan, of OLPC fame, made a post a few days ago about some issues he took with a post by Bruce Perens beleaguering some of the recent OLPC/Microsoft press. It's interesting for a few reasons - other than the back and forth between Ivan and Bruce, there's a gem of a quote that rang very true for me:
One commonly-forgotten truth about OLPC is that our commitment to open source and free software isn’t religious, but pragmatic — we believe Linux and Sugar constitute a better software platform and, much more importantly, a better learning platform.
Not only do I agree with the first part of that quote, namely my philosophy to using open and free software runs towards the pragmatic, and not religious, but that the OLPC is a learning platform.
This quote also reenforces this idea.
Read his post here: ivan krstić · code culture: The paradox of choice
NetNewWire, my favorite feed reader ever has gone totally free: Brent Simmons on NetNewsWire 3.1’s Release as Freeware. I highly recommend NetNewWire for feed management on OS/X especially for the clipping/blogging features. I've never quite been able to "get into" online readers (much like my continued need to use an offline mail clients) but NNW also syncs with NewGator's online systems - which means you can browse your feeds with their online apps as well.
The cross-synchronization and the iPhone optimized version of the online client is what keeps me hooked (also the cold fact that without it, I'd have to prune my list of 117 feeds (including 6 planets and reddit/dzone)).
Yeah, it happened a few days ago, I'm still wading through a backlog of posts.
Some of you might remember, coming out of the last PyCon I was (and have been) jazzed about the OLPC project's potential.
Being exposed to technology changed my life, and taught me a new way to learn, expand and grow. I've seen it happen to many other people, in many other walks of life. While it is true that many of the countries the OLPC targets need "other" supplies than computers - it is also true that from a technologist standpoint - the OLPC project offers a way for those of us who have more technical skills to give back.
Donating money to large intangible organizations - or to the people you see parading the same pictures of starving children on TV is the simple route. Going to those countries and helping directly - while infinitely more concrete - is not reasonable in most cases. The OLPC stands out in the middle - something I, as a programmer can contribute my most important asset (my brain (I hope)) to and hope to make a difference.
Like all projects, the OLPC has had it's share of political issues - and I can't say I agree with everything that's come from the less technical arm of the project, but for the greater good, I'm willing to set that aside.
Unfortunately, I was not able to take advantage of the buy one-give one campaign they did last year, it just was not feasible given what was going on. I know, and encouraged many other people to do so however.
This weekend though - a post by someone I highly respect entitled "The OLPC nightmare" made me dig a little bit more. You can tell - by that post - that he's a little miffed at having bought what seems to be a Beta version of a laptop:
In fact just about the only thing you can do well with the laptop is drop it— which is good because I promise that after a couple of hours with it, you'll want to test its resilience to impact.
In that post, he also links to a review done by the Economist (also one of my favorite reads) entitled "One Clunky Laptop Per Child" they too make some of the same assertions Antonio does.
Yes - I do not have one of these laptops - I am stuck only playing with the system via virtual images on a sickly powerful MacBook Pro, but I do remember playing with the prototype at PyCon last year, and based off of these articles and others, it feels like what got shipped was not terribly far from the prototype I played with early last year. That's unfortunate for many reasons - not the least of which is something the Economist wisely points out:
Ultimately the OLPC initiative will be remembered less for what it produced than the products it spawned. The initiative is like running the four-minute mile: no one could do it, until someone actually did it. Then many people did.
The OLPC has spawned a lot of knock-offs, competitors, etc. None of those have goals as lofty and "pure" as those of the OLPC, but the landscape has changed. Shipping a Beta labeled as "GA" never works out well (as commercial software vendors know, but many open source projects never learn).
I'll be interested to see the opinions of others, especially those I know who bought the laptop excited at the prospects and that have no moral or political collateral invested in the project except as technologists.
This is an excellent post from yesterday - the author outlines how, using 10.5 PyObjC bindings and the Leopard Automator, you can add a "run python script" automator action.
I particularly like his followup post on where he outlines how to use the new 'run in python' action to ship files off to Amazon's S3 storage.
The latter of the two posts actually hooked me up with the "boto" python module - which looks like an excellent module for interacting with Amazon's web services, something I've been examining recently for a side-project.
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