I finally received an XO! The laptop designed to be a medium for education in developing countries. I will take some time with the little guy before offering my impressions or even a review. I’m late to the party and great reviews are already out there. The XO took five months to find me but I’m happy to finally be able to have a look at it. When the Fedex guy arrived at my house with that small box, I thought OLPC had shipped me a battery pack. The laptop is much smaller than I expected but heavier than I thought it would be.

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So what is intuitivity anyway? There’s a lot of talking about intuitive interfaces, menus, etc. Mac users are always bragging about it anyway. When you think about it, intuitivity is a vague concept that we often use in the IT world. You know it has become a buzz word when it is used in the same sentence as Windows… Mobile or otherwise.

Microsoft demonstrated the “Touch Windows” this week and buzz words were flying all over the place: multi-touch, changing dramatically how you will interact with the system, touch-enabled, blah, bleh, blah. On this matter, I completely agree with James Kendrick who offered his thoughts on JKontherun. My laptop “Vista-Enabled” which I bought with tablet PC, sorry, “ink and pen gestures enabled with sideshow features, blah, blah, buzz, buzz” has not seen the outside of my bag in months. I wasted so much time trying to get friendly with Vista and the relationship failed so miserably that I swore to change platform. I just need more time and money (don’t we all, huh?).

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When I donated to OLPC last December, I knew it would take some time to receive an XO. OLPC had taken the care to explain they had problems getting the XO to ship due to delays in production. I was eager to try out the XO and provide a review, followed by a look at the learning and teaching community that was growing behind the laptop. We now know that OLPC has had more problems than production delays. There were management and deployment issues, internal visions and ideological conflicts, fierce competition from big manufacturers, etc. By March, I suspected there were managing difficulties in the Give-one, Get-one program and after five emails that never really answered my questions, I called them to have a shipping status update.

The phone conversation with someone from OLPC’s support was very confusing. Obviously, the person I was speaking with, a very nice lady by the way, had no idea what was going on and had very few answers for me. Basically, she said she had no way to verify if an XO had been sent to me or not. So I called FEDEX and they confirmed that they had a package sent for me. However, they had to return it to the sender after keeping it for two weeks. FEDEX told me they were missing information to clear customs with my package and finally deliver it to me. For two weeks, they tried to reach the sender, in this case, a company handling shipping stocks for OLPC, so I was told, without success. Nobody returned any calls or emails. FEDEX returned the package.

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This is definitely a moment in OLPC’s history of big changes as views are conflicting on what the mission should really be about. This week, we have two important announcements: Microsoft is officially pushing Windows XP into the XO and Sugar Labs is no longer dedicated to the XO but will now offer the possibilities of building a “learning ecosystem” on all platforms.

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If you own a Dell laptop and your warranty has expired you should take note of parts-people.com. I am working (and sometimes playing) on a Dell XPS M170. This beast has given me an outstanding performance so far until both system fans started to make a loud grinding noise. Over a few days, it got worse. Although you can give Dell a call and ask for parts, I decided to try parts-people. Their website is straight to the point with pictures of all the parts you might be looking for. It took me seconds to find what I needed for my specific model thanks to the well done categories. You click on the series and then the model for your laptop and you are taken to a parts list. You can then browse and look at the pictures of what you need. They provide very useful details to better identify what you need: a nice touch. In my case, I needed two system fans and they were clearly identified as the smaller and larger CPU fans with pictures.

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A team from the BBC successfully stole personal information from four Facebook users via a small application like those you can install on the popular website.
Facebook has grown to be a very popular social networking site and one of its interesting feature are small applications that can be games, quizzes, etc. The BBC team programed one such application to mine data aptly named Miner.

Spencer Kelly is a presenter for the BBC show Click and he explained that Miner “in the background, it is collecting personal details, and those of the users’ friends, and e-mailing them out of Facebook, to our inbox When you add an application, unless you say otherwise, it is given access to most of the information in your profile. That includes information you have on your friends even if they think they have tight security settings”

Apparently, Facebook reacted by saying they are always working to secure the site and are monitoring the applications. I guess whatever they are doing is just not cutting it.

Link: BBC Facebook ID Theft Video
Link: Identity “at risk” on Facebook

We have been talking a lot lately how the gaming industry is rapidly changing into a mainstream entertainment industry. The years of 2007 and 2008 are turning points for this industry as PC gaming is declining into old age and death and the consoles are rising to complete domination. The 360 and PS3, and to some extent the Wii (I have very mixed feelings about the Wii as a gaming console), are not only fantastic gaming consoles but they are media platforms on steroids too. They are important players in home entertainment and living room evolution.

Let’s just look at the sales as I think it’s really interesting. There were some pretty fantastic games in 2006-2007 like, Gears of War, Uncharted, Bioshock, the fabulous Orange Box, etc. However, the hype around the release of Halo 3 last September was really something else. In the 24 hours after its release, Halo 3 earned 170 million dollars. That never happened for an entertainment product, movie or music record. Halo 3 would go on earning 300 million dollars in the first week.

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According to Andy Walker, Apple is bringing the iPhone to Canada under the banner of Rogers Wireless next September. We all know how Canadian mobile Internet plans are horrible, but apparently the deal with the iPhone will bring plans comparable to those in the US.
This could mean “a true shift” (no pun intended to HTC) in the Canadian mobility market.

Hey everyone!

Last month, I moved across the planet from Australia to Canada. The fantastic Australian sunlight was replaced by something I was not entirely prepared to find: a cruel and brutal winter in the province of Quebec. I am ill equipped to face the challenge with a small plastic shovel which is starting to break and a spent back from shoveling last night’s arctic onslaught. I was just going to sit down at my desk with a coffee mug and try to get back to work when I saw this through my window…

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