Scott's Blog

The One Laptop Per Child project has been going ahead steadily. There are sample boards and people are working on getting all the applications to behave properly so that it can go to sleep when idle. Lots of programs, including Python+ GLib , wake up every 100 milliseconds making it difficult for the laptop to go to sleep and thus use less power. Fixes are in so that the programs that are installed on the laptop behave properly. The project is also creating it's own BIOS which doesn't use ACPI to suspend/resume, they want something even faster. There a tickless patch to the kernel by RedHat which should bring the laptop to less than 3 watts of power when idle. In other news , India says they are going to make a $10.00 laptop, in three years! Yeah, right. By that time the OLPC laptop should cost around $50.00 anyway. My take is that India is still sore about their flopped attempt of a cheap laptop - the simputer , and their previous experience with the MIT media lab. ...

Version 8.2 of PostgreSQL is in beta now and is said to be 20% faster overall. It has a new Generalized Inverted Index which works well for text searches terabytes in size, and is the only open source database of it's kind which has this feature.

It's been a while since I posted about my diet progress, probably because I haven't been doing as well. I had two colds in a row and I found that I ate a little more during this period. I also missed a few days here and there because of weekends or other activities. Now working at Google I need to find a new routine. The least-squares fit line show's that I'm loosing about 1 pound a week which is pretty slow. I've started weight training twice a week so this might increase my weight a little bit (since muscle is heavier than fat). I'm still quite happy with the quality of the food I'm eating (although it's easy here in Brazil). Once I'm over this cold and into my new routine I hope to be back on track with this diet.

Since I'm working at Google, I need to eat my own dogfood - and I've moved over to the beta version of blogger.com. I've also changed the style which becomes wider if your browser window is wider, which I much prefer. The new version of blogger appears to be faster and nicer to use. I especially like the ability to add labels to each post - very nice.

This post has some problems with the Wii launch information. Scanning the comments below it shows that a lot of other people have issues with Nintendo as well. Here's my take on the whole issue: $250.00 should include two remotes with nunchucks partly because the Wii is supposed to be a family console and a family has more than one person! The remotes are probably very expensive: Bluetooth wireless, 3D motion detection, 3D spacial coordinates, speaker, and memory. Yet $60.00 for the pair is expensive. They should sell these things at a loss if it comes to it. November 19th launch. It's very odd that they are launching after the Sony PS3 (although only by a few days). It may be a brilliant move since Sony will spend tons of money for advertising and perhaps all the parents remember is that there's a new gaming console coming out. Also as it they both come out the press will be all over it comparing and contrasting the two (more free advertising). The article complains...

I just listened to Winning the Oil Endgame given by Amory Lovins. You may also want to download the PDF which goes into much more detail and was written in 2005. Here's two snippets from the executive summary: ...The cornerstone of the next industrial revolution is therefore winning the Oil Endgame. And surprisingly, it will cost less to displace all of the oil that the United States now uses than it will cost to buy that oil.... ...Investing $180 billion over the next decade to eliminate oil dependence and revitalize strategic industries can save $130 billion gross, or $70 billion net, every year by 2025.... In his talk he shows how nearly all oil dependance can be removed and no draconian policies or taxes need to be implemented. In addition saving oil by being more efficient makes you more profitable, we just need to make companies see the light. His talk, amazingly, doesn't even cover wind-farms, nuclear energy or anything really exotic. The only 'cutting edge...

Since I'm going to be working for Google I though I would help their (our) bottom line by adding AdSense to my blog. I'm not sure if it's working or not, there's a blank space at the top my blog and sometimes there appears an ad (and sometimes not). Could be that the firefox addblock extension is blocking it sometimes, or that adsense hasn't decided what to put on my blog yet.