Jason Sares is a Giant Dork

One of the best things about living in the Silicon Valley is all the meetups cool companies host where you get to hear straight from the developers and get free food.  Even if you don’t know anything about their projects you can just show up and freeload some carbs.

Just in the last week I’ve went to Mozilla and TWIKI.NET meetups and if I had to compare the two companies on hospitality TWIKI.NET is the superior project (sorry Mozilla).

TWIKI.NET is the commercial support company for the crazy popular TWiki project. Peter Thoeny, Rod Beckström, and Amir Shobeiri hosted a great meetup at the PlugAndPlayTechCenter and served some gourmet pizza and beer.  The turnout was really good and the presentation solid.

Mozilla gave a talk on Firefox 3 (which rocks BTW) and did give me some cool stickers but the pizza wasn’t the best and worst of all no beer.  That might have been because it was at lunch but still, I need beer.  The room was packed and Mike Schroepfer the VP of engineering gave a great presentation.

So thanks Open Source, for all the free pizza and beer, oh yeah and the code!

If you’d like to get some free food for yourself checkout Meetup, Upcoming, and Lunch20.

Asus has corrected the error it made in not releasing the code it used for ACPI. This is a great sign that when companies are called out they will support the GPL.

I was just setting up some services on the giantdorks server and I forgot which distro (doh) we’re running. uname -a wasn’t very helpful so I looked at /etc/issue and found it was openSUSE 10.2 (i586). Anyone know which distros this works for, or any other ways to find which distro you’re logged on to?

Edit:

I found an additional way is to use lsb_ release -a

Here’s the email I received from OLPC. Since I took part in the G1G1 on the first day I’ll get my XO between December 14th (my Birthday) and December 24th.

Welcome to the OLPC community!

Thank you for being one of the first to participate
in Give One Get One.

All of us at One Laptop per Child were inspired by the number of people who joined our Give One Get One program on its very first day! Your participation makes you part of the growing community of people working to give children all over the world new opportunities to grow, explore, learn and express themselves.

Your XO laptop is on the way.

Your donated XO laptop will soon be delivered into the hands of a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. In one of our recipient children’s own words, “I want to thank you people because you had given us the laptop and I love it so much.” Your generosity will make a world of difference in these children’s lives, and in the future of their respective countries.

Thanks to your early action, your XO laptop is scheduled to be delivered between December 14 and December 24. Our “first day” donors are our highest priority and we are making every effort to deliver your XO laptop(s) as soon as possible. We will send you an update upon shipment.

Share and play with friends.

Once you receive your XO laptop, you will begin to discover all the features that make it so remarkable. One of the most ingenious features of the XO laptop is its ability to create a “mesh” network. The little green antennae “ears” serve to automatically connect the XO with other XO laptops in the vicinity. What this means is that if your child has friends nearby that also have XO laptops, the children can chat, play and share information freely and safely, with or without an internet connection. If you would like to let other parents know about the XO laptop and Give One Get One, you can not only greatly increase your child’s enjoyment of the XO laptop, but also help us further our mission.
Send To A Friend

You are part of something big.

As a participant in Give One Get One, you have become a member of an international educational movement. Our goal is to create a web-based learning environment built around the XO laptop that will allow children in the U.S. and Canada to use their XOs to learn about the lives and experiences of children using XOs in the developing world, and vice versa. We also hope to bring together the world’s educators and software developers into a volunteer, global community that will provide essential feedback about how to improve the XO, as well as help create dynamic, open-source educational content that will engage and inspire children all over the world.

We will be creating an OLPC Community section on our website that will provide more information. We hope to see you there!

Once again, from all of us at One Laptop per Child, thank you for helping us bring education and connection to children in even the most remote regions of the globe.

Asus has modified parts of ACPI and not released the source code.  This could just be an oversight but it still violates the GPL.

For end users this means installing another version of Linux on the EEE will give you lower battery life.  If/when Asus  releases the source you (or your favorite distribution) would be able to compile the Asus ACPI code and get the same battery life as you did with the default OS that ships on the EEE.

ACPI has been a major problem on Linux for sometime.  Microsoft  has made ACPI more difficult than it needs to be in order to slow the adoption of Linux.

Let’s hope Asus releases the code ASAP and we can write a HOWTO on installing in under different distros.

The Jonney Machine

Intel signed on in February. Then, having committed money and manpower to the project, Intel told Shih and Shen that it wanted to see a prototype in one month. “When I heard that,” laughs Shen, “I told Jonney, ‘We’ve got nothing yet!’” Designers and engineers endured sleepless nights and long weekends and managed to put together the basics of the machine in time. Folks at Intel started calling it the Jonney machine.

A bigger hurdle was designing the user interface, the first thing people see when they turn on the machine, and the screens that lead to the programs. Asustek decided that the Windows operating system was out of the question. The licensing costs would have been the most expensive part of the computer. So it decided to use Linux and build its own user interface, and that became the most time-consuming part of the project.

I just got the Asus EEE PC and my co-dork Alain helped me unbox it!

[GALLERY=0]

My favorite tech site ars technica reviews the Asus EEE PC. Bottom line, the keyboard sucks but overall it’s great.

The Eee PC is a stunning example of what a hardware maker can accomplish when mixing a highly compact form factor with a custom open-source Linux platform. With the Eee PC, consumers can get a taste of the future today.

The One Laptop Per Child XO laptop is a Linux/Flash based ultra portable.

I’m comparing it to the other Linux/Flash based laptop on the market the Asus EEE PC.

The are both pretty small with the EEE being quite a bit smaller and lighter. The EEE also has twice the speed, RAM, and storage but for $399 you get two XO laptops. One for yourself and one that is sent to a child in the developing world. The XO also has a lot of interesting technology including dual screens that make it usable outdoors, a variety of input methods, and mesh networking.

These laptops are game changing singularities. The combination of Linux and flash storage has brought the price of ultra portable laptops to affordable levels. You can find deals on 15″ PC laptops running Windows for $400 but they don’t offer the portability or ruggedness these laptops offer.

I just ordered one of the OLPCs and when I have shipping confirmation I’ll order one of the Asus EEE PCs and do a proper comparison.