JD over at The UI Thread approached me months ago about interviewing me about my experience redesigning the AbiWord word processor for the OLPC educational laptop as part of Google’s Summer of Code program. I took my sweet time actually responding to his questions, but the the interview finally went up today..
Archive for the 'Summer of Code' Category
State of the Code
05Sep06My official time is up for Google’s Summer of Code. I didn’t get as far as I would have liked, but I think I made a good start, and I had a hell of a summer.
Design
What’s been done…
A decent bit of user research: writeup of related projects in history, who are the users?, [...]
Progress
31Jul06Yesterday I did, in fact, manage to get my “final” mockups finished, and I figured out what was holding my code back (I had to add the header file I created to the makefile template thingy). And I finished before midnight, so… two snaps for transparency.
I also got a lot of great advice from [...]
Transparency
30Jul06I haven’t been very good about hitting my Summer of Code milestones over the last few weeks, so I’m going to try to be a little more transparent, and put daily goals on my blog. That way, if I fall short of those goals, anyone who reads this thing will know it. [...]
Programming for everyone
29Jul06Most people, if you tell them things like “math is fun!” or “being able to program computers is awesome,” will look at you like you’re wearing your underwear on your head.
“Sure,” they say, “if you like sitting in front of a computer screen for 18 hours a day, talking about megabytes and googlewatts and not [...]
India backs away from OLPC
27Jul06A variety of sources are
First Code
05Jul06I still have a lot of design work to do, but given that this is Summer of Code, I need to be coding too. So, I’ve been picking at the Sugar codebase and got a “Hello World” activity working:
It’s not much, but my Summer of Code mentor, Robert Staudinger, knows a thing or two [...]
Sugar in action!
30Jun06I finally got Sugar (the front-end for the OLPC) running on my laptop. I say finally not because it was particularly difficult (it’s just a few steps to get it running on ubuntu) but because I thought it made sense to do a bunch of other things first: buy an external hard drive, backup [...]
I’m back in Connecticut, and getting slowly settled in. I don’t have a desk, but I’ve got two boxes next to my bed that I can put my laptop on, so at least I have somewhere to work. And I’m starting to get a good sense of the constraints, goals, and problems that [...]
Education in Nigeria
12Jun06One of the great things about being at the University is that there are knowledgeable people in almost every area of inquiry you could think of within a 1 mile radius, and there doors are almost always open.
Today I met Dr. Shittu R. Akinola, who is visiting IU as part of the Workshop for Political [...]
