Couric: “Are you disappointed with the tone of the campaign? The ‘lipstick on the pig’ stuff, and some of the ads - you guys haven’t been completely guilt-free making fun of John McCain’s inability to use a computer.”

Biden: “I thought that was terrible by the way”

Couric: “Why did you do it then?”

Biden: “I didn’t know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we would have never done it. And I don’t think Barack, you know. I just think that was …”

Couric: “Did Obama approve that ad?”

Biden: “The answer is I don’t think there was anything intentional about that. They were trying to make another point. That’s very different than deliberately taking a vote [quote] Barack Obama had to teach children about how to deal with child-predators and saying he was teaching them sex education in kindergarten. Very different in degree.”

Update: Late Monday, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton released the following statement

Biden: “I was asked about an ad I’d never seen, reacting merely to press reports. As I said right then, I knew there was nothing intentionally personal in the criticism of Senator McCain’s views which look backwards not forwards and are out of touch with the new economic challenges we face today. Having now reviewed the ad, it is even more clear to me that given the disgraceful tenor of Senator McCain’s ads and their persistent falsehoods, his campaign is in no position to criticize, especially when they continue to distort Barack’s votes on an issue as personal as keeping kids safe from sexual predators.”

I can’t say as I follow his train of thought. Perhaps it derailed in the yard before leaving the station. It proves that coherent thoughts must be in short supply.

To his credit, on at least one ocassion, Biden made his point with a “coherent thought” …

Williams: Senator Biden, words have, in the past, gotten you in trouble, words that were borrowed and words that some found hateful.An editorial in the Los Angeles Times said, “In addition to his uncontrolled verbosity, Biden is a gaff machine.”Can you reassure voters in this country that you would have the discipline you would need on the world stage, Senator?

Biden: Yes.

(Laughter)

Williams: Thank you, Senator Biden.

Couric: And when it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?

Palin: I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

Couric: What, specifically?

Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.

Couric: Can you name a few?

Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, “Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?” Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

If I were asked what news papers I read, I would have no trouble explaining I read very few papers in paper form. I read posts from the BBC, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, and others as well as blogs and links to on-line content such as CNET, AP, etc. Is that overly difficult ?

Another exchange took place around “the morning after pill”. I don’t wish to stir up a debate about pro-life and pro-choice, but someone missed an important bit of timing - which I will get to shortly. First, here is the exchange …

Couric: Some people have credited the morning-after pill for decreasing the number of abortions. How do you feel about the morning-after pill?

Palin: Well, I am all for contraception. And I am all for preventative measures that are legal and save, and should be taken, but Katie, again, I am one to believe that life starts at the moment of conception. And I would like to see …

Couric: And so you don’t believe in the morning-after pill?

Palin: … I would like to see fewer and fewer abortions in this world. And again, I haven’t spoken with anyone who disagrees with my position on that.

Couric: I’m sorry, I just want to ask you again. Do you not support or do you condone or condemn the morning-after pill.

Palin: Personally, and this isn’t McCain-Palin policy …

Couric: No, that’s OK, I’m just asking you.

Palin: But personally, I would not choose to participate in that kind of contraception.

So, a strait forward question took multiple attempts to get a less than strait forward answer. Now, to that bit about “timing”. It may be inconsequential to most (unless it directly effect you) but “conception” does not start at orgasm and the natural introduction of the male sperm into the female. There is some debate as to how long it takes for fertilization and it could be as short as a few hours and as long as a couple of days. It is not, however, instantaneous so by definition, there is a window of time for the morning after pill which does not contradict the statement; “life starts at conception”.

You can read the rest of the transcript, just don’t expect too many strait answers. Of, if I were to channel ambiguity of the likes in the interview, here is what might happen …

Journalist: I want to be sure you have a chance to answer my question directly - do you agree with congress’s actions ?

Polititian: You want a strait answer ? Well, I do not judge people as strait or I mean I know a homosexual and I don’t think of them as “not strait” and they are just people I have met so they are no less important. I answer as my own person and with my running mate. Congress is a collection of many different people all who represent America and they are many different people and some are homosexual and I do not think that is important for what we are talking about now. So, yes, I agree with my running mate and the change he is trying to accomplish. He is not one of them, congress, he is here to change the established partisan ways. He has the experience to accomplish change.

See? Clear as mud. Any can answer a question like a politician. Go ahead, try it for your self.

It’s also sad, to a great extent because, today’s logo was created on March 31st. Sad because the fatality rate for pancreatic cancer is so high and so quick, the logo was nearly destined to get used. I had planned for it to appear on September 18th, the 1-year anniversary of his lecture with the hope he would still be talking about the illness and bringing his own form of inspiration to the cause.

I have never met the man. I did start using Alice as a direct result of seeing his lecture. I am also trying to get the local college to adopt it to promote more technical education opportunities and exposure. It proves one again that with the right exposure people can make a difference quickly and one that lasts.

Caregie Mellon has a page highlighting his “Enduring Legacy“.

The reason is clear - resources. It takes a lot of developers and testers to write good software. The OLPC uses a custom version of Fedora. The “custom” part of that is the issue. There were significant design decisions made that require significant development to accomplish. The “journal” storage mechanism, the Sugar interface, the chipset power management features, and the rotating screen.

In a “for profit” environment, there would be a cost/revenue analysis. The XO hardware warrants the investment but OLPC is not a “for profit” organization so there is no “revenue” in the equation since the organization is avoiding passing the development costs along to the consumer. While this is a laudable goal, it has created shackles that have jailed progress.

Microsoft has more than a 1000 times the resources available to apply to these types of challenges. It also has the money to “spend now and reap rewards later”. This is exactly what they have done. To their credit, they appear to have done a pretty good job. They made business centric choices. They developed support for the chipset power management and the screen but did not consider the “journal” or the Sugar interface. The resulting lean Windows XP doesn’t fit on the internal 1GB solid state drive so it goes on an SD card in the one available slot.

The video is compelling. I have two XOs and if given the chance, I will run one with XP.

Note: I shouldn’t detract from the topic of this post but I can’t avoid the realization that when “XP4XO” is released, there will definitely be a flood of hacking of drivers to make it a generally usable on many different hardware.

Stephen over at techosystems listed “recordMyDesktop” in one of his recent “links posts“. I’ve tried most of the other options for recording my screen while running through a demo. Most had serious problems with the 1400×1050 screen on my Thinkpad T60p. recordMyDesktop actually handles it pretty well.

The program is a command-line tool and there are a couple of GUI front-ends to it. I didn’t find the GUIs so I just did a little trial and error and used the command line interface. It turns out it is very easy so I just made a few BASH scripts and will likely never install a GUI. Here are two of my command lines - the first is “full screen” and the second is an example of a portion of the screen.

recordmydesktop –no-sound -o ~/Videos/screen-recording.ogg
- or -
recordmydesktop -x 2 -y 51 -width 1000 -height 698 –no-sound -o ~/Videos/screen-recording

If you want to record a single application window, you can just type “xwininfo” in a command window and then click on the window you want to record. It will spit back the coordinates of the upper left corner and the window’s width and height. Then you just plug those into the command line above.

Recording will start as soon as you hit “ENTER” after the recordmydesktop command. You finish recording by returning to the command window and hitting “CTRL-C”. It’s not elegant but is simple enough. Again, the GUI improves the user experience.

The recording is in ogg format - an open source video container format that is very very efficient. Unfortunately, it is not very common outside the Linux world. Fortunately there is ffmpeg - a very good tool for converting video and audio files from one format to another. Here again, I have a couple simple BASH script to run the command line tool - the first converts the video to an AVI file with xvid coding and the second does the same but scales down the video and the third converts to FLASH video which works with YouTube.

ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/screen-recording.ogg -vcodec xvid -b 100k ~/Videos/screen-recording.avi
- or -
ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/screen-recording.ogg -s 700×525 -vcodec xvid -b 100k ~/Videos/screen-recording.avi
- or -
ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/screen-recording.ogg -vcodec flv -b 100k ~/Videos/screen-recording.flv

So, with two command line tools and a couple of BASH scripts, I now have a reasonable solution for creating video recording of demos *and* given some recent disasters I’ve seen at computer conferences where networking was down, having a video recording of the demo as backup is paramount !

1) Arrived with a problem to solve. It can be real or made up but it should be something that the collective attendance could solve if they were working together on the problem. You now have something real to be thinking about as you choose sessions to attend,. The problem will also help your attention to the speakers and their content. It will also help you form good questions for the Q&A session. A real world problem to discuss will also make you memorable when you talk to product vendors and technical professionals. You might even end up with one of the coveted chachkies for vendors.

2) Have a professional goal to achieve or agenda to present. You will want to have a well rehearsed elevator pitch of not more than 30 seconds. You want a more in depth answer but only if your recipient shows interest. You want to seek out decision makers. The environment of a professional conference provides a captive audience and a much higher than normal concentration of prime candidates.

To start a conversation when you meet a candidate to pitch your idea, you will also want a good answer to the question of “what do you do” or if you are renewing a contact, “what are you doing now”. It should be interesting, truthful, and if you are lucky, it will lead to a conversation. Professional conferences are a great opportunity to network, build professional relationships, investigate job opportunities, etc. The conference is not the place to close deals. The goal is to build interest in you or your idea. Remember to establish a follow-up plan. Don’t for get to say “thank you” - regardless of how the meeting went.

3) Pace your self. You want to last the entire conference. You also don’t want to appear to “force your idea” or “yourself” onto others. Remember, you want to impress your target audience not alienate them. You also may run into a key contact later in the conference or have a request for a follow-up. You want to be able to deliver your idea as crisp and fresh as at the start of the conference.

The above will make your experience much more enjoyable and more productive - both positive results!

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.

This has been both good and not so good. The challenge to all the press is that it has focused on two things - (1) the execution of the G1G1 program and (2) the OLPC software - specifically it’s Sugar interface - and how foreign it is to users of Windows and Mac OS X. I will leave the first along and make a few observations about the second.

The OLPC is designed for your children whom have never seen computers and whom have very little technology in school - probably have very little at all in school for learning beyond the teacher. Compare that with parents who have computers at work *and* home and children who have been around computers literally since birth and you have two very different landscapes. I would agree that kids who start with an OLPC and some day grow up to adults using other computers will need to learn the difference along the way. However, The purpose of the Sugar interface and storing everything via the Journal is that it takes the emphasis off learning the computer and puts it on *learning*. Further, the inherent focus of the OLPC on nature of “constructionist” education means that collaboration will be central to everything the child does with the OLPC does. Further, that collaboration needs consistent metaphors in the software and ways for the teacher to interject class activities with the OLPC and its collaborative capabilities.

A good example of this collaboration took place over Christmas day with the G1G1 owners. One OLPC owner started the “Record” activity and took a picture of themselves and shared the application. This meant everyone in the “class” (defined by being connected to part of an XO School server [1]) could join the activity and see and post their own pictures. At first it was some random photos of owners but it quickly became an exchange of information about who the G1G1 people are and what is important to them - some showed the child in their life who received the XO, some showed greetings, pictures of pets, outdoor shots so you knew what climate they were from, even a “green” picture of an XO running off of a flexible solar panel. What was happening was that users were leaning about the XO and the other XO users through experience rather than rote learning.If this had been a real classroom exercise, those same pictures could have become the basis for cultural and environmental education.

So, the OLPC XO is not at all like a Mac or a PC (sorry guys). It is note meant to be. If you want a Mac, buy a Mac. If you want a PC, buy a PC. If you want to contribute to education in undeveloped countries, donate an OLPC XO. Note, I did not say buy one. And perhaps that is the whole misunderstanding. Some of the G1G1 people “donated” because they wanted an OLPC computer to use as their computer [2].

Eventually, I am guessing the geeks will wipe the OLPC XO software from the machine and replace it with something “more familiar”. Time will tell. But when they do, it will not be a bad thing nor will it be going against the OLPC Foundation mission. I suspect it will prove the OLPC XO device is flexible and able to do more than originally thought. After all, that is what we hope for the children too !

[1] Part of an XO School computer is an enhanced Jabber / XMPP server. This server allows OLPC XOs to be connected over the internet in addition to connection over a Mesh Network.
[2] Personally, I’d be fibbing if I didn’t admit a part of my motivaiton for donating was becuase I thought the OLPC XO is cool and wanted one.