First of all, I thought there already was one laptop per child, at least when they are sitting down.

Nicholas Negroponte’s ‘One Laptop per Child‘ (OLPC) program has had some delivery problems with their Give One/Get One program launched at the end of 2007. But who cares? His idea has been to design a useful, portable, low cost (ballpark $200) computer than can be given on a large scale to communities worldwide. As an enlightened, liberal American enamored with high tech, this is the charity I naturally gravitated to (which is another way of saying that my friends Reg and Julie kept sending me links about the campaign until I signed up).

I’m more than happy to wait for mine as long as they keep sending me pictures of towns and villages getting their computers. Like these from Ulaanbatar in Mongolia. The expressions on the faces of these kids tells the whole story for why this is a worthwhile effort.

Reg got his OLPC laptop … I am still waiting for mine … and loaned me his to check out. It is a solid machine that I think will readily appeal to kids. It’s not what I’d use for an everyday mobile machine (I’m holding out for the MacBook Pro), but it is just the thing that would aid a kid interested in images or music or programming or games or writing or community.

Lots of ways to participate … check it out.

Much to the chagrin of my teen-age daughter, I’ve been looking at FaceBook and trying to learn a little bit of how their applications platform works. For that I created a FaceBook Jumble application from the page found on this site.

In doing that I had the first chance in a long time to clean up the code, so I also modified the Renaissance version in two ways. First, I improved the output display, and second, I put it back in its own page. The experiment of putting it in a WordPress blog page made no difference in the page rankings and was a little brittle anyway. I had to use runPHP to make it work inside of WordPress, and that would get shut down anytime someone entered a comment for reasons I could never fathom.

Certain phenomena have a gradual, long-term toxic effect. Like George Bush’s voice or mercury poisoning. Add to my personal list Microsoft operating systems. I’ve had long exposure to these through their entire evolution, but instead of an evolving technological marvel, they always remind me more of a bloated and stagnant bureaucracy.

The prospect of Vista filled me with all the enthusiasm of a visit to the DMV. I’d catch myself on the Apple web site, choosing a MacBook Pro in the online store, selecting all the options, getting a little sick looking at the $4,200 price tag, but still thinking “Wouldn’t that be great?”

Then, deliverance, and from two quarters: First, in an attempt to either exorcise or kill my flawed and temperamental Dell laptop, I wiped the hard disk and installed the free Ubuntu Linux distribution, and it was like drinking a mugful of Felix Felicis. Suddenly my laptop Just Works and is Fast and doesn’t take 10 minutes and jumper cables to boot up.

But the big change was an iMac 24″, a gift from my Mom. As with any Apple product these days, the design just makes you smile. It is fast and works the way you think it should.

Just a few links today. At lunch Wednesday, however these things come up, I found myself talking about the Chudnovsky Brothers, featured in the New Yorker magazine profile, “The Mountains of Pi“, about the parallel processing computer built in Gregory Chudnovsky’s West Side apartment (from spare parts and Home Depot supplies) to calculate digits of Pi.

The article I was referring to, however, was the more recent project they took on knitting together high-resolution digital photographs of the Unicorn tapestries at The Cloisters. There is an excellent multimedia resource on the Nova site that discusses this project and the brothers themselves. The 10-minute Quicktime segment is really well done. The New Yorker piece was well done too, but as usual, the entry has vanished off their rather densely commercialized site, and I can’t find a copy anywhere.