It is nearly midnight on the East coast of the Unites States and with that, the end of the Give 1 Get 1 donation program from the OLPC Foundation.

I was curious how successful the donation program had been - with my definition of “success” being the number of donation.

A laptop Magazine interview with Nicholas Negroponte gives a clue …

L: How many laptops have been donated through the G1, G1 program?

NN: It is hard to count, because some people gave many. Birmingham, Alabama ordered 15,000 for its kids, because of G1G1, but I really cannot count those 15,000. The final number will be between 150,000 and 170,000 laptops, without counting the very big ones like Birmingham.

The Birmingham progrma is very cool - as is the 150,000 + laptops going to the intended children.

1. Drink Red Wine
2. Eat Dark Chocolate
3. Smile
4. Have More Sex
5. Relax
6. Make Exercise Play
7. Sleep
8. Spend Time With Loved Ones
9. Solve Puzzles and Play Brain Games
10. Be Positive

Care to join me in a New Year’s Resolution ?

The emergence of Amazon S2 & AWS , Force.com, Facebook, and Google Apps & Gmail demonstrate the viability of software applications - corporate and personal - being served via the world wide web. Before I continue, I acknowledge the evolution of software from local installations to web based services assumed high speed internet and that is not a ubiquitous fact today.

These technologies have replaced personal computer software with web versions and provide the large data center infrastructure for building the complex custom applications traditionally relegated to corporate mainframes.

So, what does this mean for the personal computer and for the corporate software vendors ? I think there are currently two answers and they divide along the lines eluded to above - “corporate applications” and “consumer software”. Let’s look at these in reverse order.

Consumer software will evolve to take advantage of web applications. While Gmail, Microsoft Live, and Google Apps can function completely from a web browser, consumers have pushed for integration rather than replacement of their existing applications. The most anticipated features of 2007 were IMAP support for GMail and mobile sync for Calendars. The web solutions for spreadsheets and word processors were integrated with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. The evolution of desktop applications as “front ends” to web applications is likely to be with us for a number of years with the separation of the two becoming harder and harder to distinguish.

I expect the PC software evolution to take on a “mergers and acquisitions” model for the next few years where the lines are drawn along four primary lines - communicating with (1) words, (2) numbers, (3) images, and music/video. “Mashups” will provide for the the areas between these. An example of what I mean can bee seen in the “words” category. There is little difference between the high priority features of a word processor, email client, and web page design tool. There is little reason for them to be separate solutions, rather, they just have separate “inputs” and “outputs”.

Corporate applications are another story. The human resource applications, payroll, compliance, and sales applications have long been heavily biased toward the server with very light - end users would say too lite - client experiences. This is a good characteristic for evolving to web solutions. The challenge to these systems has been dealing with growth, administration, and the fact they are “necessary evils” of business rather than the purpose of it. Every company - whether it be building and selling cars or books or ideas - needs the basic tools for managing the business. The only exception is the business that is “in business” to provide HR tools, or Sale trackign tools, or inventory and supply line tools. These companies are becoming the suppliers of the web solutions or they are partnering with those who are already web solution suppliers. Rather than let the business management necessities be a drag on the corporation, pushing them out to the web makes good sense.

In the “dot com” era, it is easy for startups to use web solutions because they had no legacy data or processes to contend with. They wanted to hit the ground running in their respective “hot markets” and not be bogged down by infrastructure. The old iron horses were not as nimble. But eventually all tools wear out and need to be replaced or upgraded and when they do, they are prime candidates for moving to the web. The “iron horses” are learning where and when to change.

This post is in some ways my “prediction” for 2008. I look forward to seeing how much of it comes true and how quickly. In thinking through some of the players in the “web applications” space I hit upon an interesting question of a statistical nature.

Which company uses more computer processing power every single second of each day on behalf of it’s customers - Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Google, IBM, Apply, Sun, Facebook, or someone else ? For extra credit, what is the ordering - from most MIPS to least MIPS -for this group ?

Are you now saying “HUH ?”

You may or may not have been the recipient of a recall letter for your laptop battery. You may or may not enjoy air travel. Now the two collide …

New US DOT Hazmat Safety Rule to Place Lithium Battery Limits in Carry-on Baggage on Passenger Aircraft Effective January 1, 2008. Passengers will no longer be able to pack loose lithium batteries in checked luggage … to reduce the risk of lithium battery fires.

What does this have to do with the OLPC ? Well, the laptop designed for the OLPC Foundation needed to handle some pretty harsh environments, including operating in very hot, desert conditions - even being tested to 140 degrees while *running* !

Traditional laptop batters are not designed for high temperature environments but the OLPC XO’s battery is. The new LiFePO4 battery and more temperature tolerant that previous batter technologies. They don’t have as good a weight:energy ratio as Lithium ion cells and hopefully that will change too.

So, could you pack a dozen of these batteries in your checked baggage ? Legally “yes” but unless the NTSB airport security crews have degrees in metallurgy and chemistry, I doubt you will get away with it.

Easy blogging from Linux is no longer an illusion. Now that I have found a good interface for using email, I can get back to regular blogging.

My new workflow is to start writing my blog; decide what picture or artwork complements the subject; launching the image in GIMP to size it and then with a single click, border it, shadow it, and save it. “Yes”, a single click. Thanks to Kevin Galligan over at bigheadco, I have a tweaked a macro to just “click and save”. My next trick is to make it work directly from Nautilus folder so I can just right-click an image and bingo-presto have a nicely sized / bordered / drop-shadow image for my post.

To get the right look, I format my email using “paragraph spacing”. This may not be necessary but it generates the most appropriate HTML. I have also added my blogging email address to my address book in Thunderbird and designated “HTML” as the preferred sending format. It may sound like a bunch of different steps but it is about 90% as easy as sending emails - and I send *lots* of emails !

If you want to see what the pre-post email looks like, click here.

GIMP has the drop shadow tool built in plus there is a large library of other scripts  (aka macros aka plugins) available as well. So it is easy to support your favorite workflow for photo retouching, graphic arts, or other artistic expression.

The drop shadow feature is located under “Filters -> Light and Shadow -> Drop Shadow”. For my small pics, I use and offset of 6 and 6 with a radius of 8 and then choose a medium gray for the color (the default black was too harsh). The results work well for my desire.

Before:       After:

The only feature I miss is the simplicity with which WLW took a big picture, made a thumbnail, added a nice drop shadow, and then placed the thumb in my blog and linked to the bigger picture.

Postie does almost all of that with the exception of the drop shadow. It is also having a bit of an issue with the placement of pictures when it automates the thumbnail task for me. If I am placing small pics, Postie handles that fine because there is not “generation” of the needed HTML.

So, for now, I will blog using Thunderbird and you will likely see fewer big pics (and no drop shadows). I think it is a small price to pay since now I can blog more quickly and more often.

Google Reader has some quirky features but one thing is does well is keep your blog reading in check across multiple machines. I tend to have at least three different computers I use regularly and when traveling on short 1 or 2 day trips I try to go without a computer and use what every I can get my hands on if I need to send a quick email or check the news. For these reasons, Google Reader is great.

I collaborate with a number of like minded groups. Mind you, each group is “like minded” but there is not much overlap between the groups. Within each group, we have common topics of interest but very few common sources of information. Sharing blog entries that are informative or of interest has been relegated to either emailing links or cut/paste links into chat windows. Both of these methods escalates blogs to a higher priority which is precisely what we don’t want to do. Blogs and blog reading is a low priority task that should be set aside for prescribed amounts of time and not serve as an interrupt - but I am way off topic at this point so back to Google Reader and sharing information. Let me pull all the important info together now …

1. Google Reader lets you tag entries and you can tag an entry with more than one tag
2. Google Reader lets you see a page with all entries of a given tag
3. Google Reader lets you give any tag-page public address
4. You get to choose who gets the public address
5. Recipients of the public address get a “feed” they can add to their blog reader (Google reader not required)

Google has seen the light and written up the instructions here.

I would love to find a similar solution that was “reader independent” because not everyone I collaborate with uses Google Reader.