Category archives: Young Coders
Projects related to young people and computers, including young people learning to code and the One Laptop Per Child project.
OLPC on CityTV (News at 6 and "international" news program on the all-news channel)
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Young Coders.
Amber Mac (formerly of G4 TechTV, now at CityTV) did a piece on the OLPC that aired this evening. Introduction by the anchor and a minute or two of interview. I'm told it will eventually show up on the web for viewing (hope so, as I managed to crash MythTV just as it was on).
Now for the practical side (Setting up tools to do BitFrosted file-systems)
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Young Coders.
Amber Mac of CityTV came in and shot lots of footage of the laptop this afternoon. Spent the morning talking with a chap who wants the OLPC to roll out in Canada/US (first). This evening/late afternoon I've been continuing work to get my development environment sugar-jhbuilt (as well as updated via portage to latest stable ...
Unioned File Systems (Since the security list seems to be borked...)
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Young Coders.
Seems that posts to the security list neither got distributed nor showed up in the mailing list archives (last mail there was in March). So, below the jump is the text of my message sent to the security list this morning.
Unioning File Systems for Fun and Profit (Mostly fun...)
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Young Coders.
One of the specs for the laptop that's mentioned in BitFrost is that we're planning on using a unioned (Copy-on-Write (COW)) file system (likely AUFS) to produce a number of security effects (e.g. the core system software is on a r/o plane, with any changes happening only in a r/w plane above that software (and ...
Catching up on email (And OLPC stuff too...)
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Young Coders.
Quiet day today, when I haven't been sleeping I've been either plowing through the thousands of backed up emails or working on little bits and pieces for OLPC (e.g. following up on some contacts at U of T). I'm updating the laptop to the newest stable build. Probably also see about putting a few non-standard ...
OLPC Toronto Meetup this Thursday (News, discussions and the like...)
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Young Coders.
We're planning on doing a meetup at 7pm this Thursday at Linux Caffe (corner of Grace and Harbord). This will be a general information meeting, not a sprint (we found that trying to hold a sprint with 10 people just didn't work well, whereas having one with 4 of us the next day to work ...
Four most common questions (From a question at the talk yesterday...)
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Young Coders.
I mentioned the 4 most common questions I get about the laptop, here they are, simply pulled from my recollection, I haven't tried to count all the questions I receive these days:
1) What gives you the right/why aren't you feeding the children/why are you imposing western material culture on the children?
2) How can ...
Librarians Rule (Organised, efficient and effective...)
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Young Coders.
Rochelle I mentioned yesterday as having been instrumental in introducing me to people who went out of their way to introduce me to people who could make decisions about institutional commitment. One of those people who went out of their way was Simone.
She took me on a dizzying trip through the various departments and ...
First day of the conference goes very well (Despite being jet-lagged...)
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Young Coders.
I wound up having to drink about 6 coffees this morning at the conference just to keep from falling asleep. The trip from Albania took 14 hours yesterday, and I wound up waking up at 3am this morning.
Made a considerable number of great contacts, lots of people interested in helping. Probably the stand-out though ...
Global Warming isn't even on the radar here (And other little observations from Tirana...)
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Vindaloo,
Young Coders.
We've been in Tirana since Saturday afternoon. All in all it's about what I expected as an experience. Spent most of the time in "visits" with family. Really enjoyed having coffee with Soni's two doctor friends. Ilir's Physic's professor was nice too, though I'm afraid our discussions of how to address problems in the country ...
Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.