The Mandelbear's Musings

Booked my hotel room and flight for GAFilk this morning. Total of about an hour on the phone, but I was able to book the flights (complicated by the side trip to NC to visit my Mom) by talking to a real person at Wells Fargo's point-redemption center. Their website is incapable of booking a triangle flight, but their people know how to do it. It costs extra points because the middle leg has to be booked separately. Weird, but then it's not supposed to make sense to me, it's supposed to make more money for them.

If you haven't been hiding under a rock for the last two years you've probably heard of the One Laptop per Child project. But, like me, you probably haven't heard much about the software apart from the fact that it runs on Linux. That's too bad, because it's brilliant.

Go read this blog post as an introduction, then go read the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines. They're simply brilliant. They actually use all four edges and the corners. They bring the mesh network into the interface. They get rid of the stupid "Caps Lock" key and add "View Source". Most of the software is written in Python, one of the two best teaching languages in existance at the moment (the other is Smalltalk). They have a journal, for infinite undo and version tracking.

Go read it, and ask yourself what Microsoft and Apple have been doing for the last 15 years.