Last Monday I rejoined One Laptop Per Child as Director, New Technologies. My mandate is hardware and software for the XO-3, OLPC's upcoming ARM-based tablet computer for education in the developing world. The new machine should be lower cost, lower power, more indestructible, more powerful, and potentially more expandable than ever. There are ( Read more... )

There's been a lot of discussion about publishing and sharing the software that Mystery Hunt teams use to collaborate to solve puzzles. This is mostly misguided, IMO: teams are very different, and they organically grow solutions to fit their unique processes. On the other hand, an increasing number of teams (including my team, Codex), are ( Read more... )

Warning: heavy geek content.

Google recently rolled out a new Gmail feature: if you pop open a new little compose or chat window, and then close your main window, the small child window doesn't go away.

This is a pretty esoteric little tweak, but the underlying functionality is quite profound: in order to make this feature work, the entire ( Read more... )

Well, Google just announced Chrome OS, to be available next Christmas. Some parts of it are very similar to what you can already put under the tree this Christmas from litl (actually, you can buy one right now) - and other parts are familiar from my time at OLPC. For example, the legacy-free BIOS and signed bootloader are what OLPC shipped two ( Read more... )

While I was abroad, it seems that Google released their wave server/federation code. So you can now get started tackling some of the projects I outlined in my previous post on Waves and Sugar: getting a basic federation server running on the school server and/or writing a server running locally on the XO which exports the content of the Journal/ ( Read more... )

So, yesterday I posted a entry discussing how Google Wave actually implements the collaborative vision Sugar (and OLPC) were working towards. (It's a shame we didn't have better contacts with Google while I was at OLPC; Google was actually on OLPC's board, and beta-ing Waves would have been a very fruitful partnership.)

If you agree with the ( Read more... )

Well, the "Google NDA" post has been at the top of this page for a while, and it looks like it's not exactly going to be tomorrow that I get to post about (a) the fact that I've gotten my thesis receipt and am totally done with this PhD (that will be next week), or (b) what exciting thing I'm going to do next (that's waiting on the results of the ( Read more... )

Tomorrow I am going to interview over at Google. Before I do so, I need to sign an NDA which states, among other things, that I'm not allowed to tell anyone I'm interviewing over there, or indeed, to mention the name of Google at all. So I'm going to do all that now and get it out of my system, so I'm not tempted to violate the agreement after I' ( Read more... )