OLPC XO: Background and Review

OLPC XO: Background and Review

Image by robertogreco
As many of you are already aware, we created the Pudú mascot for the One Laptop Per Child campaign in Chile (Un computador por niño). While the Chilean initiative does not call specifically for the OLPC hardware developed by Nicholas Negroponte and his team at MIT, it was inspired by the work done there. So, for a lomg time we have been following news about the OLPC machine which is named the XO. Having now lived with an XO for about three weeks, this is our preliminary review of the software and hardware including the story of why we bought our children a computer and how we decided on the XO over other options. For a shorter version, just skip to the parts about the XO as an e-book reader and Scratch. I must apologize in advance for the poor writing, but I'd rather get this up now than later. More photos in the OLPC set.


----------- Background -----------

A few months ago I posted about our experience with programming. At the time we were staying at my parents house and had access to a total of three computers: ours (a Mac laptop), my father's laptop (running Vista) and my mother's desktop (running Windows Me). We actually had our old swing-arm-display iMac with us, but didn't bother setting it up for lack of space in addition to the fact that the other computerss were available for the kids to use.

Meanwhile we were gearing up for a six month trip overseas. Knowing that we would have limitations with regard to luggage weight and would unlikely have regular access to lending libraries, we decided that it would be a smart decision to find some sort of e-book reader for our travels. This was especially important after a summer and fall reading binge that amounted to having checked out at least five hundred books. Sophia alone was consuming a thousand pages per week. (We know this because in October she was curious about such. So we sat down with the receipts from the library, searched for the lengths of the book on Amazon, and plugged them all into a spreadsheet (including the URLs for each book) which spit out a total of 23,507 pages for the previous twenty-two weeks.)

OLPC had recently announced the Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada during the holiday season and the ASUS Eee PC was becoming available as well. We also looked at some handheld devices that would serve for e-book reading like the iPod Touch, the Nokia N800 or N810.

Considering that the price of the handhelds were either the same or not much lower and that they didn't offer the same chance to continue dabbling in programming, it seemed like a better option to get one of the two laptops that would allow them to further explore. We talked it over with Sophia and Enzo and they decided that one laptop for two children would be a great gift. The bonus was being able to have one sent to a child somewhere else in the world who wouldn't likely have a computer otherwise.

At the time we placed our order, the estimated delivery date was for mid January and that was to their grandparents home in Washington State. Of course, the G1G1 program was only shipping the computers to addresses in the participating countries meaning that my parents would have to send it to us in South America when it arrived, so the kids also had to agree to wait until as late as February to receive their XO.

We eventually left Washington, spent two and a half weeks in Argentina and on December 21 having just arrived in Chile, we received an email from OLPC (dated December 21) letting us know that the XO had shipped on the 19th. The message included a FedEx tracking number and when we plugged into the FedEx website it showed that the package had been left at my parents' front door. The good news was that it arrived much earlier than the anticipated delivery date. The bad news was that my parents had gone to visit my brother and were not planning to return home until the 27th.

Since they were also unlikely to be checking email, I sent off an email to all of my siblings asking for them to either contact my parents or if they knew anyone in the area to ask them to bring in the XO from the cold and possibly the rain as well. We quickly heard back from my sister and confirmed after a few days that someone had been able to give it shelter.

Eventually, my parents returned home, made arrangements to pick it up, tested it out, and got it in the mail around mid-January. It arrived here in Chile eleven days later and the kids have been loving it ever since.


----------- Review -----------

There have been plenty of reviews lauding the hardware. The XO is solidly built and includes a few technologies that are not found in other laptops. Everyone who has seen the kids' machine has marveled at what has been packed into it for such a low cost. (Yeah, we know it was supposed to be a 0 laptop, but if you consider inflation since that target was set, the current price of 8 is getting pretty close.) For example, not having a hard drive makes each minor and major jolt the machine takes much more bearable to someone who is used to handing computers with care. Speaking of handling, the handle is great for kids and the two smaller holes allow for them to add some sort of strap which we haven't gotten around to doing just yet. Finally, most people are not used to having a built-in webcam (although that is fast becoming standard issue on most laptops).

Screen
I have not a single complaint to report about the screen. The low power setting works like a charm for reading outside with strong sunlight as we have been experiencing just that with the clear skies and long summer days here in Viña.The fact that it swivels around and folds flat is another plus that can only be found in tablet computers at this time, the Eee PC did not offer this and that too helped make our decision.

Keyboard
This is perhaps the major hardware drawback, but I am really the only one complaining and not much at that. The sealed keyboard is designed for a purpose and meets the goal. The kids are hunt-and-peck typists (as am I) with petite fingers (here's my problem), so they haven't had much problem as they go about inputing text and keyboard commands.

Wifi
The wifi reception has been walking all over our Mac and has given us a pretty impressive picture of the wifi penetration here in Viña del Mar. We would love to try the mesh networking features built into the XO software, but will have to wait until we find some other XO users to do that.

Expansion
We added a 16MB SD card (that came with our camera) to it which is primarily used for transferring files from our Mac and for save the most important files that the kids create, a sort of backup system.

Software
There are too many activities to touch on each one as this review is much longer than it was intended to be, so here I'm mostly mentioning some of the kids' favorites and giving some more information on those that they've used the most.

Sugar Interface (XO's GUI)
First off, the user needs to be willing to adjust to a new way of considering the operating system. Sugar has been criticized and laughed at by many, but the kids have picked it up without delay and even I have come to appreciate many of its charms. Do note that they had played with the interface previously when I let them run it off a CD on an old Dell laptop from work that was headed for the trash. There is room for Sugar to improve, but when you consider the true target audience is going to work with these computers without much (if any) prior experience on any computer, the readjustment pain is instantly removed from the equation.

Draw and Write (pre-installed)
There are no frills in either of these activities. They serve exactly the purpose that their names imply. When the kids want to write a story or other document, Write (which I believe is a version if AbiWord) steps in swiftly and does the job. If they need an illustration for said story or some other purpose, Draw works more or less just like Paint in Windows.

Browser (pre-installed)
The kids have few complaints, especially after upgrading from system 650 to 653 which appeared to deliver considerable speed improvements in the browser, although that may have been the result of something else - no definitive proof there. I created a little web launch pad we call Soen - Nose for the kids (a text-only page so that it loads quickly) that contains links to many of the sites that they frequent on the web. A somewhat clunky version of the Adobe Flash plugin can be installed and we did at first, but as we upgraded the system software we didn't install flash again.

XO as an e-book reader (pre-installed)
One of the reasons we chose an XO over other options like the Asus Eee PC, was it's ability to work as an e-book reader.

Before leaving on our trip, Sophia had read H.G. Wells's The Time Machine which I had recommended to feed her science fiction addiction. So, after the XO arrived we immediately downloaded several science fiction classics from H.G. Wells and Jules Verne as e-books in different formats (.pdf, .txt, .html). So far our favorite sources are manybooks.net and Project Gutenberg. The kids' launch pad has links to several other sites as well.

Many Books is especially nice as it offers many different formats for each book including HTML, large print PDFs, PDFs formatted for the iPhone (which Sophia likes on the XO) and even better (in my opinion) an option to create custom PDF and HTML files. The XO can handle both. While the Reader icon does not appear at the the bottom of the screen like the other activities, it is pre-installed and launches when a PDF file is opened. HTML files open in the Browser. TXT files

Here are some of the books we've got loaded on the XO at the moment:
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, The Mysterious Island, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man.

eToys (pre-installed)
I'm not sure how to describe eToys. For the kids it wasn't exactly new having already played with Squeakland (on which eToys is based) using both Mac and Windows machines. The activity allows them to play with and combine a variety of media.

TamTam (pre-installed)
Both of the kids enjoy the four TamTam activities which allow them to create music in different ways.

Turtle Art, Pippy and Turtle Art with Sensors (first two pre-installed, last one add-on)
Turtle Art is an XO version of Seymour Papert's Logo which allows students to write programs (series of instructions) directing a turtle around the screen and leaving a trail (the drawing). Pippy is a version of the Python programming language for the XO. Turtle Art with Sensors allows for the turtle to be controlled with sound level and pitch and (through a connected device) resistance an voltage.

Scratch (add-on, must download separately)
When a version of Scratch for the XO appeared for downloading about a week and a half ago, the kids were elated. Scratch is by far their favorite programming environment and while they enjoyed playing with Turtle Art and Pippy, nothing could compare to Scratch. They have not been disappointed as they have spent countless hours working on a variety of projects either alone or as a team. I might go as far to say that if the XO was no more than a portable Scratch machine it would be worth the price, but of course it is much more, so that stretch doesn't need to be made.

Sim City (add-on)
SimCity is a classic. The version available for the XO is the original release and aside from the small text which can be a bit difficult to read, it works wonderfully. Since loading it on the XO, the kids have spent many hours learning the ins and outs of the game.

Guido van Robot, Ruler, Stopwatch (add-ons)
These are some of the other activities that we've downloaded and installed. The ruler and stopwatch are practical for exactly what you would expect them to be. Guido van Robot is another programming type activity which we've tinker with a bit.

Acoustic Tape Measure and Chat (pre-installed)
These are two activities that we'd love to try out but, like the mesh networking, we'll need to wait until we have some more XO owners around to do so.

Warnings
Not all has been perfect with the XO, but we knew going in that the software was still in something of a beta state. Although our first attempt to get online was an easy success, we subsequently had a few snafus connecting to wifi which have since been resolved. We also have met with some frustration regarding some of the additional software (none of the items mentioned above) that can be added. Finally, we had some issues with the volume being set to zero and not being able to readjust it. All that said, we have successfully upgraded the system from the version 650 with which it shipped to 653 the day after receiving it and eventually version 656 which is currently the latest stable version released. At this point everything is working well.


----------- Conclusion -----------

The XO is not for everyone. If you can afford a full-blown laptop, if you are looking to do extensive touch typing, if you have no interest in experimenting with a new interface, or if you are unwilling to deal with beta-ish software, it's most likely not the machine for you and you should look elsewhere. The target audience for this machine is a child who is eager to experiment and learn. The XO fits that bill splendidly. It also serves as a great, albeit a little heavy, e-book reader.


UPDATE
One important point I forgot to make was that the kids are asking for a USB mouse because the built-in trackpad seems to be too sensitive to make drawing on the XO a pleasurable experience.

The Mysterious Places of Paris

Image by Stuck in Customs
Isn’t this room amazing? It’s not in the main part of the Paris Opera House, but it had the most ornate and Inception-esque room I’ve seen in a while. I took this photo while in the middle of experimenting with the Nikon fisheye lens. It seemed to fit the bill for these ornate grand locations that are still in a relatively confined space.

- Trey Ratcliff

Click here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

MaxiDAS DS708 Scanner

Image by obdchina.com
www.obdchina.com/maxidas-ds708-scanner-p-6.html
MaxiDAS DS708 Scanner

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Controlling IT Costs; Enterprise Architecture (EA) strategy, a shared lexicon, and enforced change

Image by Wonderlane
To control Information Technology (IT) costs we think about and act within the enterprise as a whole, in part because we sell enterprise and mid-level solutions. We apply an Enterprise Architecture (EA) strategy which at the top level is comprised of infrastructure and communication considerations. This is not just about technical infrastructure, defined or designed by IT, because it is highly likely that such individual solutions (one offs) will not align to core business strategies (vertical needs verses horizontal needs spanning the whole company).

It is not really possible to do this, that is consider the entire company's needs, without significant participation by the business for which we use terms such as Solution Delivery or Product Management. Product and program managers from a solution delivery framework gather information, report back to the business, and return to apply the business strategies to align with short, medium, and especially long term business goals.

This business and implementation strategy focus is a change agent, to reduce siloed thinking, and achieve more horizontal capability across units. We reduce multiple applications, which take time to manage and maintain, and where it makes sense, fold them into one. Because we take security and privacy of our customers very seriously, any applications which may be at risk have been identified and are brought up into our standards. The process of combining risk management goals, application and data reduction streams saves money, although the process of so much change at once can be stressful at the unit, project, and personal levels.

We seek to empower self-service among our partners, customers and employees, for access to all kinds of information they need, and internally reduce redundant data stores, for example referring to customers by one identifier if possible. This is especially challenging in our partner relationships with multiple data stores that contain similar information about customers which are identified in completely different ways. This is the reason for serious data modeling and tight or loose coupling where needed – to retrieve and move information back to the partner systems. We leverage Microsoft software, and then buy, build, minimize or reuse existing systems.

In order to be more successful in our efforts to control IT costs we strive to increase flexibility among existing staff and provide rewards for strategic thinking – this strategic thinking aligns along company-wide goals. We need people with the right skills who work in efficient methods, only including the people who need to be included to make decisions or act. In fact we need to change confrontational and passive aggressive behaviors internally to collaborative personality styles – changing the organizations culture is doable but difficult. For more information I recommend reading "The Heart of Change" by Kotter and Cohen.

The technologies we invest in to help control IT costs are our own. We custom write stuff served up on Microsoft servers and plan to use SharePoint as the UI for our new change request tool. We are substantially reducing and eliminating the number of different applications (SQL stored procedures or XML Blobs mostly) we use and maintain on a daily basis. We are moving from C++ to C#/.NET (C Sharp and .Net technologies).

We use Microsoft software as our strategy to control IT costs - it is easy to manage, and has great support. Some team members keep an eye on relevant Open Source software as competitive analysis.

Our company is getting the maximum value from its data center investment because we have not invested to the level we need for our infrastructure. We expect to remediate this lack of investment after deploying skilled, thoughtful product managers with the right combination of education and practical experience to assist in this effort through the next couple of years.

What is our organization doing to maximize the value from its data center investment? In addition to the other things mentioned we outsource development and support to India, Israel, and developing countries, etc. We also are making use of tax advantaged locations for large savings in transactions.

We are adding metrics and measurements by which we evaluate not just personal progress but internal and external customer satisfaction with our IT initiatives on a project by project basis to self-improve.

The practices which enable us to maximize value from our IT investment are varied and multifaceted. To maximize ongoing investment we are adding solution delivery strategies, planning ahead, and aligning IT with company-wide goals. Of course in our space we have some unique issues, and as a public company even more so. One thing that may surprise you is some of our projects we do end to end locally because of how critical success is. We leverage our best, most successful local managers to produce projects and design larger scale solutions if we determine it is the best strategy – so in this way we are flexible – we don't just out source everything.

We are in the process of reducing the number of applications we need to maintain, and where it is appropriate fold one into another so long as the user interface or back ends do not become unmanageable. We are making over our change request platform from top to bottom which we feel will enable quicker turnarounds on change requests – it is both loosely and tightly coupled where it needs to be. For the presentation layer we choose Microsoft SharePoint.

Conversely, what factors are inhibiting our organization from reaping the maximum value from its data center investments? The factors inhibiting the maximum value include a lack of foresight in strategic planning for long term goals –

1. Putting temporary things together to just meet immediate needs.

2. Focusing on small details and not seeing the big picture.

3. Lack of metrics to evaluate progress, process, and client / customer / partner success.

4. Unwillingness of team members to change or promote change even when it is in their and the companies' best interest.

5. Having too many data centers, identifying customers in too many ways.

How important is productivity within the IT function in our efforts to control IT costs and maximize our data center investment? Functionality, capacity, and reliability far outstrip productivity, but that is only because we have already hit very high productivity goals and exceeded them. Here are some of the metrics we examine:

Metrics

Percentage of project budgeted costs
Scope requirements
Total cost of ownership
Traceability
Defects rate (sev1, sev2, sev3 bugs - zero tolerance for sev1)
Completed requirements
Customer satisfaction scores (cust sats)
Schedule slippage
Flexibility of management styles
End-to-end throughput time per client-side user request
System extensibility
Scalability
Maintainability
Defects per thousand lines of code (KLOC or by function)
Support functionality and documentation availability, and completeness prior to launch
Rates of failure
Restoration (emergency)
Availability
Test effectiveness
Business acceptance
System acceptance (signoff)
Average turn around time for service and change requests
Number of security or privacy defects (last two should be zero tolerance in launch candidates)
Number of post freeze change requests
Among the mandatory metrics used are peer review effectiveness of code, and post mortems and overall customer satisfaction. In other words we do not consider just ontime delivery of products, enhancements, or new functionality.

What is our organization doing to improve productivity within its IT function?
Getting the right people – some people grew with us or came to us with deep knowledge from the school of hard knocks – work experience – we seek to capture the most knowledgeable and either increase their education or find those with both practical work experience and advanced degrees. Good thing this is Seattle with its heavily educated population. New programs at the university level such as Informatics and Information Management are producing the people we need – not just MBAs or Master of Comp Sci - because so much of our development work we outsource to India and developing countries, and IT is not traditionally closely aligned with marketing or sales. We do outsource much of the development work as is possible.

The undergrad Informatics and Master of Science in Information Management programs at the University of Washington are housed in Mary Gates' Hall, renovated and named in honor of Bill Gate's late mother, it's headed by Mike Crandall (Dublin Core, Microsoft, Boeing). So you can see this is the direction we are going regionally, because that is where the spend is. Another great information school is at the University of California at Berkeley, housed in one of the oldest and most architecturally beautiful collegiate buildings on the west coast, South Hall. On the physical level all Berkeley had to do is add wireless. Excellent academics such as the seminal thinker Dr Michael Buckland are there at Berkeley, and business leaders such as Mitch Kapor. Industry wide I think iSchools are having an effect, adding a more well rounded, even playful culture to high tech operations.

Improving and opening the culture is important. Having a shared lexicon is one of the benefits of educated people; those with MSIM (master of science in information management), Informatics, technical MBA degrees can comunicate effectively with highly technical people - this can produce enormous savings and long term cost benefits. Increased, clear, enthusiastic communication saves IT costs.

In strategy meetings, for example, we often include Enterprise Architects to assist in stack ranking program and project development, because this helps reduce redundant systems.

Our organization's ability to measure the return on investment (ROI) or success of its IT investments is “Fair but mixed,” we want ROI to be easily measureable and this means evaluating the correct things, asking the right questions in the first place, not following other organizations techniques, although we examine them as examples.

We are adding ways to evaluate our ROI – we do use business analysis methods. There is always an identifiable way to analyze and measure the relationship of what something costs even if it appears intangible such as Brand protection.

Considering the strategic and tactical stuff we are doing, at the core, creativity is what drives our success. Creativity is always a very difficult thing to measure. In fact it could be said that if you try, you are barking up the wrong tree. However creative thinking around practical goals has provided us success. This is where the ideas around flexibility and being very responsive come to play.

We have found very very high ROI around outsourced projects because they must be clearly defined within the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) compliance.

Those people who actually think out of the box are oftentimes not recognized by co-workers and management. Change is perceived as negative among full time staff. We seek to show support for both full time employees and consultants, and change this view and enhance their ability to communicate ideas. That is why our management keeps an open door policy. Unfortunately like any other policies the hazard is that individual managers must believe in our policies around openness and creativity; such self-selecting polices are impossible to enforce.

Our organization uses balanced scorecards, Six Sigma and other types of internally derived quantitative value measurement methods to measure the ROI or success of our IT investments.

The continued use of these methods we expect will substantially improve the management and measurement of our IT investments. Some of the metrics are at the discretion of the product or program manager, others are mandatory. In part we have some success- at issue is adopting metrics and measurement as well as Enterprise Architecture and engaging with open arms increased strategic thinking and planning.

Senior management must come together and present a unified strategy for the entire company – which is a top down management style but it must be embraced from the bottom up. This is within a framework of enforced change as we seek to achieve excellence in all of our business units, especially in core infrastructure – those units which either produce money, or cost money. Some of our key investments we know are lost leaders, but other research will more than make up for those. Enforced change in this context means business units receive minimum budget until they comply.

We are still feeling the effects of the changes the Web brings in enterprise directly and for our customers; we continue to learn from the effects of communities and communication via the Web. The opportunities for growth are so enormous that it is all the more important that we curb spending where it is not required and apply it as much as possible to grow in creative arenas which still have huge untapped profit potential. It is not just about money, among hard core technologists – those who really love it – money is secondary in many ways - it’s about the fun stuff technology can bring as well as the benefit to serve humanity that technology brings.

High tech, information technology, and software development have made some strides to maturity but we are still learning new things; it will be a learning industry, discovering and inventing stuff for a long time to come.

p.s.
Enforced Change is a radically different challenge, and promises different ways of looking at human-to-human, individual-to-corporation, corporate-to-corporate, human-to- computer interactions, etc, which I plan to cover in future articles, so stay tuned!