X Windows on the XO Laptop

The XO laptop is a fun toy much appreciated Christmas present and a nice donation to a good cause. Thank you very much also to T-Mobile for the free year of Hotspot that comes with it – in itself a $240 value.

The system has a different operating paradigm – oriented towards children it hinges on a task-based journal with a single display frame, rather than the concurrently visible windows to which we are all accustomed. One can hot-key between the concurrent sessions using Alt-N or Alt-P.

It seems to be popular among XO hackers to install a windowing environment on the XO. Not such a bad idea, at least for fun. This can be done with the yum utility, but it is necessary first to edit the configuration that controls the repository access. This is stored in file /etc/yum.repos.d/olpc-koji-ship2.repo  exactly as described in that post.

Enterprise and Consumer software products

The as been a lot of talk about enterprise software and how it differs from consumer software. Bill Gates apparently bemoans that enterprise software is not sexy.

This dichotomy has been with us since Windows became ubiquitous. Microsoft is just one of its exponents.

Enterprise software:

• Feature-rich
• Requires training to use or implement
• Requires customising before use
• High price
• Maximises overall revenue from corporate customers by generating training and consulting markets

Examples: Windows NT, 2000, Server. Major ERP suites.

Consumer software

• Features adequate for the domestic consumer
• Without key features enabling use in corporate environment, such as networking aspects
• Designed for out-of-the box usability
• User interface has higher priority

Examples: Windows 98, Me, XP Home, Quicken, MS Works

Consumer software is purchased for the direct value to be obtained from its use. Enterprise software has direct benefits too, but is often implemented to obtain a second-order effect. For example, standardization of business processes throughout a corporation, or among newly merged parts of a corporation. Business benefits may arise from the performance of the software in its specific functions, but equally or even more important may be the reworking of business processes that an implementation project can generate.

Requiring customisation is not new. A senior systems programmer colleague advised me his rule of thumb a few decades ago: If any of IBM’s default parameter values is unchanged the system is probably working suboptimally.

The Policemans Blog

Here is a blog post about a video of two Midlands police making idiots of themselves. The cameraman was acting completely legally. (Here is a summary of the law).

Browsing Wikipedia as OPML

Well, it’s done – at least a working prototype is done.

The idea was to browse Wikipedia using Grazr.

This can be done by representing the main categories of Wikipages in an OPML file. Using the Grazr GUI, a user can drill down through any subcategories, similarly represented. Expanding a category provides an OPML file for each subcategory and an RSS file for the directly-contained wikipages. A PHP script builds the OPML and RSS files from a cache of Wikipedia.

I also encapsulated it as a Facebook application. You can try the Facebook prototype or the prototype without Facebook, but it is only a prototype so I am not yet publishing it as a fully fledged application. If you notice any bugs, please leave a comment.

Building a Facebook application with PHP

I was playing around and decided to embed my Grazr podcast list in a Facebook application using PHP. Obviously with a simple lookup database to translate Facebook id to Podcast.com id this could be extended to a personal feed for any user. But I was just playing.

First register the application with Facebook, by adding their developer application to your profile. Then click the button and follow through the settings dialog. However note that all the many Facebook code samples and example programs contain errors.

You may, but need not, initially enter URLs for some or all of ToS, Post-Add, Post-Remove, Edit, Side-Nav, Privacy, and Help. You must enter URLs for callback and canvas page. The canvas page is the main application that the user sees embedded in Facebook. Mine is simply a static page, but preceded by the Facebook login script and application identifiers. They recommend to create a simple include for that part and it was easy to do so. Less clear is how to turn this page into a fully-fledged Facebook application. There is a submission procedure, but I am only in a test environment, so I’ll hold off for now.

Perhaps I’ll try the Ruby approach next…

Facebook vs. Twitter

So, one can tweet from Twitter, or one can tweet from the Twitter application within Facebook’s shell. It may be only a limited time before one can access LinkedIn from within Facebook shell. If so, Facebook will have won the laurel as the next operating-system-like platform. With Microsoft behind them, who would bet the other way?

The opportunities are clearly vast if applications have only a little information about the user, they can still be greatly informative. For example perhaps there will soon (if not already) be a widget that shows users’ current home-town weather and time of day pictorially in their profile pages.

What fun!

The Combined Community Codec Pack

Yes, I am running Windows, for all its faults and despite the “evil” impulses attributed to Micro$oft it gives me what I need and it came with my PC. So I go with the flow and use what was given to me.

However of course it has shortcomings and one of those is the limited range of video formats that it will play. For those podcast files The Combined Community Codec Pack seems to support most formats. It includes a couple of small players and will play MP4 no sweat. I right clicked an M4V file and chose to use one of the provided players to run it. Voila! Problem solved.

Genki

Wow! From a position of absolutely zero knowledge I had a lot of fun and learned a slew of Japanese words and sentences from Genki Japanese in a couple of hours on Sunday.
This was the first success for social networking from Podcast.com, a site of which I have high hopes. Now I’ll look for Japanese podcasts…
“Suki na … Japanese learning web site … wa nan desu ka? It must be Genki Japanese!

Testing a Grazr widget from a podcast.com OPML

I have been playing around with the beta of the new podcast.com site. Impressive stuff, and I’ll have things to say about it later. Meanwhile, here is a link to a Grazr tree. Nice!

This blog strips out embedded Javascript, so I can’t actually embed the generated widget. Here is a link to a demo page with the embedded widget.

UX280P – Using DC power

Sony does not seem to offer a 12v DC power adaptor for the UX280P. I use it all the time on planes and cars to play music and podcasts, and maybe in future with my USB GPS device for navigation. I have also been able to stream 32kbps audio over EDGE to my car, though I mainly listen to pre-recorded material. This needs power, so I bought an inverter. This one was $27.99 and rates up to 120W. The UX280P AC adaptor draws about 80W.

I wonder if battery life’s any better on the flash memory-based UX390P without the physical activity of the hard disk.