Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

I have at various times edited the about:config sections of my Mozilla Firefox.  I’ve generally done so willy-nilly and simply followed any instructions I came upon at lifehacker or elsewhere.  These days I’m much more familiar with Mozilla’s documentation on about:config entries so I will use this post to document:

1.) What entries I am changing in about:config

2.) What these changes are really doing

I plan to eat my own head.  Details at 11…

And many many many more photos (and videos) to come.  It was a great event and I look forward to visiting NYC again next weekend.

The amazing Mel Chua has wrangled together another Grassroots event .  This time I’m traveling to *her* event rather than the opposite.  I’m going to be at the Grassroots Jam working on community structures, facilitating any content volunteers and doing a little hardware hacking with the XO+Arduino .

I have arrived in Boston safely! I have been taking photos avidly and I’m working on processing them all and telling you all about how I’m doing :)  I having a lot of fun here!

Does anyone remember that christmas tree that I ended up totaling my auto to avoid?  Well to all of you back seat drivers who told me I should have it the stupid tree:

http://failblog.org/2008/05/28/fail-jeep-fails-at-nature/

I’ve had a very screwed up sleeping schedule the past few nights.  And I doubt I’ll be sleeping much tonight due to coffee and (second-hand) nicotine.  So I’ve been working on my blog a little bit, making sure my avatar (and gravatar) is up to date on a few sites and thinking of a project for the rest of the night.

A couple days ago I wrote a Community Membership proposal for OLPC.  This was merely a draft and I’ve gotten a few good responses from Mel and Cjl .  Tonight I am going to flesh out the proposal some more, and take their comments into account.  I will also be doing some work on speex-for-olpc which is more complicated than it sounds.  I will make updates here and via twitter as they happen.

Multi user wordpress is an amazingly awesome and powerful package.  It lets you run a blog hosting service like wordpress.com on your own.  Pretty cool tool for a community.

I’ve run into only one error tonight when setting up MU wordpress.  When I try to login the domain tries to redirect me to "cgi-system/wp-login.php" when it should just be "/wp-login.php".  Apparently this crops up (at Dreamhost in all examples) when you’re running PHP4 instead of PHP5 like you should be.

Move over to PHP5 and you should be ok.

Also, I must mention again that Dreamhost is the coolest web hosting company on the planet.  It was something like 4 AM where I and they are located when I asked them for a wildcard DNS mask.  They replied and had everything setup in ~20 minutes.

They also have a kick-ass referall program where I could make bank if I were link you to them right now.  But I’m not.  I’m just honestly really really in love with Dreamhost.

I finally found an email I’ve been searching for.  This email marks my first interaction with OLPC and my first attempt to get involved with OLPC Content.

Hello,
I work with the <snip>; a non-profit organization that
does history presentations on the middle ages for schools, libraries
and museums in the Pacific Northwest.  We do demonstrations and
lectures on historical arms, armor and combat of the middle ages and
renaissance (Western Martial Arts).

I have been hearing about the concept of a sub $200 laptop for
education for quite a while (Ballmer among others) and I find if a
fascinating concept.  So first of all kudos to your group at MIT.

I was wondering if you were planning on having any sort of educational
materials already loaded on the laptops.  Our organization has in the
past been asked to be part of educational materials, and we are
working towards publishing classroom materials of our own in the next
two years.

If your group were interested in a few sample history lessons as
demonstrations of what your laptop could do; perhaps we could supply
you with something both historical and visually interesting.

If you have some interest I can be contacted at <snip>

According to the OLPC Timeline, this email dates to before the XO was announced with Nicholas Negreponte and Kofi Annan Unfortunately, OLPC didn’t have Sj yet, so their response was less than thrilling.

Red Hat is our partner and is working on software. The participating
countries will also provide their own software.

Best wishes,

<snip (name removed)>

I could understand brushing me off at such an early phase in OLPC’s development.  But the reply was a bit silly all the same. :)

Rice Boy is a beautifully drawn webcomic about the adventure of it’s eponymous character, Rice-boy.  Or at least it was.  The final pages of this 411 page epic were posted last week.

Rice Boy is borderline childlike and simplistic, but it’s worthy all the same.  I will be buying the printed books when they are all available.

Goodbye Rice-boy, I’ve enjoyed your journey.