A few months ago, a number of stories came out covering the iPad's remarkable-seeming ability to share the GPS of a tethered iPhone. Apple's latest location database FAQ confirms the suspicions I voiced at the time: there's no actual GPS sharing involved. Instead, Apple is using the simultaneous GPS and Wifi radios on your iPhone to "crowd-source ( Read more... )

Last week I described a four-week plan to survey key technologies for One Laptop Per Child's forthcoming XO-3 tablet computer. Here I'll describe the results of the first week of work, which dove into Google's Android operating system. Warning: technical content ahead...
Basic design of Sugar-on-Android

1. Cross-compile gobject/GTK/gobject- ( Read more... )

Last Monday I rejoined One Laptop Per Child as Director, New Technologies. My mandate is hardware and software for the XO-3, OLPC's upcoming ARM-based tablet computer for education in the developing world. The new machine should be lower cost, lower power, more indestructible, more powerful, and potentially more expandable than ever. There are ( Read more... )

A recent article on Nokia's internal culture contained this interesting quote:
Designers are also, by training and predilection, inclined to design for the usual, where engineers are taught a kind of rigor that compels them to account for, and overweight, low-probability events.

This does seem to me to often be a fundamental problem in not only ( Read more... )

There's been a lot of discussion about publishing and sharing the software that Mystery Hunt teams use to collaborate to solve puzzles. This is mostly misguided, IMO: teams are very different, and they organically grow solutions to fit their unique processes. On the other hand, an increasing number of teams (including my team, Codex), are ( Read more... )

A recent article in the Economist points out that Wikileaks is not unique: modern network tools have made anonymous communication ubiquitous. You can't stop "wikileaks" by attacking Julian Assange alone. The article is incorrect, however, in claiming that anonymity is easy - in some sense anonymous leafleteers in Colonial America were better off ( Read more... )

For the record, my personal bugbear is the privacy implications of the new "advanced imaging" machines appearing at airports. But then again, I've distrusted supermarket loyalty cards and freeway FastLane programs, too -- my experience is that data which is collected will eventually escape your control (if you had any to begin with), and that no ( Read more... )

I've caught the Words With Friends bug. Worse: the Words With Pirates subtype. (It's all the tile-placement and strategy fun of Words with less of the tedious racking your brain for obscure words; a more relaxing variant for when I don't want to think so hard.)

Today I discovered that I didn't actually understand the full word-creation rules for ( Read more... )

Via reports on the OSCON 2010 Emerging Languages Camp, I recently discovered CoffeeScript, a very interesting "dialect" of JavaScript. The original idea for CoffeeScript seems to be to clean up the syntax of JavaScript, while preserving direct correspondence as much as possible. Over time, it seems to have grown more and more "neat features" ( Read more... )

Warning: heavy geek content.

Google recently rolled out a new Gmail feature: if you pop open a new little compose or chat window, and then close your main window, the small child window doesn't go away.

This is a pretty esoteric little tweak, but the underlying functionality is quite profound: in order to make this feature work, the entire ( Read more... )