The Hopeful Cynic

ITIL Tips

2006-12-11T22:18:00.000+10:00

So there's this thing, a set of work principles and practices, called ITIL -- IT Infrastructure Library. I did some ITIL training today, meaning I'm one third of the way toward a Foundation Certificate in ITIL, or something.

Luckily for you I've aleady got some tips to share:

Pass the buck after 11 minutes
Our instructor told us that in some ITIL implementations, when an Incident is passed from one department to another more than once within ten minutes, a "buck passing" alarm goes off. So if you want to bounce a tricky problem to someone else, make sure you keep it for 11 minutes before batting it on to the next sucker.
Pass the buck at 79% of allowed time
Another common alert is when a logged Incident gets to 80% of the alotted time to solve it. If your system gives you 24 hours to resolve an Incident, management get an alert if it goes to about 19hrs 12mins with no solution.

So, if an Incident you're working on gets to about 19hrs long, pass it on to someone else. Then when the alert email goes out, it's that sucker who gets the call from management.
Vendor = Time out
The countdown stops if you have to refer the Incident to a vendor. Need an extra day off to recover from your Sunday recovery party? Put your work on pause by "accidentally" referring all your Incidents to Microsoft for a day or two.

So, there's some ITIL hints. More tomorrow!

Helvetica, The Movie

2006-08-09T15:51:00.000+10:00

There is a movie about Helvetica -- the typeface.

I'm quite interested in seeing this. No more needs be said..

Trying Zooomr out..

2006-07-24T18:04:00.000+10:00

I don't know if Zooomr is good or bad. I'm experimenting with this image from my whiteboardkoala.com collection..

2005-01-ValentinesDay-big Hosted on Zooomr

TV is Good

2006-06-21T16:34:00.000+10:00

Almost every day Scott Adams -- the "Dilbert" guy -- posts something worthwhile on his blog. But I couldn't resist pointing out this post, because it's about a topic so close to my heart :)

"Recurrent Corneal Erosion Syndrome"

2006-06-12T19:53:00.000+10:00

It's 8pm -- well after dark, where I live -- and I'm typing this with my sunglasses on.

This is a story about my experience of Recurrent Corneal Erosion Syndrome.. it's a bit long and overly detailed, partly coz it's for my mum (hi Mum!) and partly in case some other poor bugger gets RCES and stumbles across this page. I'll try and put in good headings in so you can skip the bits you don't wanna read.

What It Is

Recurrent Corneal Erosion Syndrome means that a flap of the clear skin on my cornea was torn at some point in the past. Cornea skin can stick back down fairly quickly, but might take 6 or 8 weeks to become fully reconnected. If you're unlucky, then for some reason the flap of skin can attach to your eyelid overnight, and when your eye twitches the flap tears back off again.

The Wikipedia article has more info.

How It Started

About three years ago I woke one night with a bit of pain in my right eye. I'd been routing some MDF earlier that week and I guessed that I'd rubbed a bit of dust into my eye.

The soreness went away after an hour or two, just like it did a month or two later when it happened again, and again the month after that. I'd wake in the early hours, sit up for a hour, then go back to sleep. Sometimes it would still be bugging me the next morning, and sometimes it'd happen a few nights in a row.

I went to a few different GPs at varoius times; a couple had a look at the underside of my eyelid but couldn't see anything, and others guessed that my glasses prescription was wrong, or that I needed antibacterial drops, or whatever. It always went away, so in theory, all treatments (including doing nothing) were equally successful.

Getting Worse

Then, about six months ago, I had a full two days of continuous pain, and resolved to more seriously pursue a solution. I went onto some antibacterial drops and the problem went away again. Same thing happened next time. Then about a month ago it flared up again and I got another prescription of drops and cream.

Unlike doctors before him, this GP now made a confident diagnosis: he told me I had a stye deep under my eyelid, and that was occasionally releasing a bunch of infected gunk. I was pretty happy to get a clear diagnoisis, and the permanent cure, according to that GP, was just to not rub that eye, and the stye would go away.

Brilliant, I thought. I got back on the antibacterial drops and nightly cream, and started to religiously avoid touching my eye. It's harder than you think, especially since the nighttime antibacterial cream sticks in your eyelashes and you can't rub it out in the shower the next morning.

Hurting Hurting Hurting

Four weeks later, and no real improvement. On Wednesday my regular morning scratchiness stuck around for longer that usual, so my daughter and I were late for our Wednesday morning preschool. At work that afternoon my eye hurt continuously, and just after making it home that day, the pain got so bad my eyes just cranked themselves shut.

I managed to force them open that night to jam in some drops and cream, but didn't get any sleep. The only thing stopping me from doing a midnight run to the hospital's emergency room was the current Australian government (whose policies don't include well-funded hospitals).. I expected that I'd be kept waiting around the whole night anyway.

The next morning my wife took me to the first GP we could get an appointment at, which happened to be across the road from the hospital. With pain jamming my eyes shut I was completely blind and M--- had to lead me around. The GP basically just called the hospital's eye clinic and booked us in there, then we borrowed a wheelchair and wheeled over. A hour or so later a nurse gave me a few drops of local anaesthetic and I could open my eyes again.

Another hour later and the opthalmology registrar was looking at my eye with a Big Machine With A Bright Light (BiMWABL, I'll call it), and I was diagnosed with "recurrent erosion syndrome". The registrar taped a pad against my eye, very firmly, gave me an appointment the next day, and sent me home.

Anyway, once the local anaesthetic wore off the terrible blades of pain started whirling in my eye again, but having an actual diagnosis (from an actual expert) was surprisingly buoying. The night went very slowly -- it hurt too much to lie my head back, so I dozed through much of the night sitting in a chair at my kitchen table, slumping forward onto my pillow on the table.

Into Hospital

The next day was Friday and again some local anaesthetic mercifully took away the pain for a few hours, long enough for the opthalmology consultant and registrar to confirm the diagnosis. The treatment for recurrent erosion is some eye drops, and spending several days not moving your eye or eyelid while having a pressure pad on it, so they booked me into a hospital bed.

We waited in the eye clinic about 6 hours. Once the local wore off, opening or moving my good eye moved the bad eye to make me yell with pain, so I was effectively blind the whole time. We moved up to some couches in a ward and waited another hour or two. M--- left to pick our children up from daycare and I was eventually led to a bed and settled in.

Around midnight (I guess) I was moved from that bed to another, which was great, as the first bed was in a room with several other people including one poor guy who I think was recovering from a heart bypass, who had dementia and spent most of the night calling out stuff like "Where am I? Can somebody help me? I feel awful sick.". The new bed was in a room on its own. I kept waiting to get booted in favour of a private patient but it never happened.

Visions and No Sleep

If you're paying any attention to what is around you, it's really hard not to flick your eyes in the direction of some new sound, even when your eyes are shut, so I had to really zone out from the environment to keep my eyes from twitching around.

The pain made it impossible to sleep. If I could keep my eyes still for a while, I could doze off, but the instant I started slipping into REM sleep my eyes would move and the slashing pain would wake me again.

The combination of zoning out, no sight, and no proper sleep led to some really weird visions. I spent long minutes looking at a tree trunk, or watching a big boat pass by. I guess I knew they were hallucinations the whole time. On Saturday M--- dropped in a music player my brother had loaded up for me, and I spent a lot of that evening watching crazy new music clips playing against my eyelids.

Food

I was on a "soft" diet, which is soft veges etc, but I found that chewing at all was moving my eye too much. Changing hospital diets seems a bit like changing the address on your bank account -- you have to ask a few times before it sticks -- but I eventually got changed to a pureed diet. Unfortunately it wasaround the time my eye started getting better, and I wasn't able to change it back before checking out. Oh well.

Getting Better

By Sunday afternoon the slashing neon knives of pain had receded to a rouch scratchiness and occasional spikes. The opthalmologist wheelchaired me down to the eye clinic for another look with his BiMWABL, and said it was looking much better, and I might be getting home the next day.

Another BiMWABL inspection Monday, and I was released.

Home Now

So I'm home now, writing this (I started on Monday, but now it's Tuesday afternoon, because I can only look at the computer screen for short stints).

My right pupil is still gigantic, and it feels a little weird but doesn't hurt at all. I still need sunglasses everywhere and in bright sunlight I can't open my eyes at all, but I expect that to pass over the next couple of days. I'm using regular lubricating eye drops and I guess I'll use them nightly for the rest of my life, but that's a tiny price to pay for avoiding any recurrence of this pain.

So that's it, up til now. Told you it was long and boring :)

Attention, ECHELON

It occured to me that the CIA should look into corneal scraping as a torture. You need a BiMWABL to see it, so the pesky inspectors from the Red Cross or whoever will never know. Just a thought; my ECHELON readers might like to pass it on to their Egyptian friends.

One hundred million new computers

2006-06-06T10:19:00.000+10:00

My first ever post on this blog was about the "$100 laptop".

In case you missed it, there's a project out there that plans on producing a really really cheap laptop, and selling it in massive quantities to developing countries so that each school age child has one (hence the project name: "One Laptop Per Child").

That project has been progressing (there are some more concept shots, and even pictures of actual hardware, now) and I've seen some stories about how Intel and Microsoft are pissed off at the project for using AMD processors and Linux software -- in this story the project leader said:

"AMD is our partner, which means Intel is pissing on me. Bill Gates is not pleased either, but if I am annoying Microsoft and Intel then I figure I am doing something right."

Apparently Microsoft even offered to let the project use Windows on the laptops for nothing (and it was rumoured that Microsoft would even PAY to have Windows on these machines).

Up until today, I couldn't work out why Microsoft would care so much. I mean, the quantities are enormous (the project is talking about 100 million laptops), but selling something for $0 means you make a total of $0, even on 100 million units.

Then today I finally realised. These are all new computers.

I mean, they're new computers not just in the sense that they're fresh from the factory; they're new in the sense that they are not replacing old computers.

I figure at least 95% of computers sold are replacing old computers. Imagine a guy with a computer running Windows. He buys a new computer with Windows. That theoretically makes two computers running Windows, but really, there's still just one person using Windows.

On the other hand, 100 million new users, who previously didn't have a computer at all, using Linux. That's a huge change in the landscape -- I can see why Microsoft are so anxious.

Apache, Firefox, OpenOffice, Linux.. I wonder if, in Microsoft's head office, those words are starting to sound like marching feet?

iTunes filled up my hard drive ..and not with music

2006-05-30T09:59:00.000+10:00

Sorry about the two software posts in a row..

I'm doing a bit of housekeeping on my hard drive in preparation for a long-overdue backup, and I noticed that the iTunes folder on my C:\ drive was holding many gigabytes of data.

I've set iTunes to store music on my D:\ drive, but I assumed that at some point in the past iTunes had lost track of that setting and started putting stuff back in the default folder.

It was surprising to discover that the multi-gigabyte folder was holding about 3,400 files called "Temp File 1", "Temp File 2" .. "Temp File 3483". Well, my theory is if a file has "temp" in its name, it's fair game -- so my computer is currently deleting 3.72Gb of temp files.

While it was happening I found this page:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93043
..which says it's okay to delete them.

It's gonna be nice to have that space back. Check your iTunes folder for temp files!

Resizing Partitions

2006-05-22T14:04:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I reorganised my crazy arrangement of hard drive partitions (three 10Gb Windows partitions, and a big Linux partition) into one huuge Windows partition and a spare 10Gb partition for Linux installs or whatever.

Given that my Windows partitions were quite full, I knew I needed to shuffle stuff around. I expected it would take at least the whole weekend, and I'd probably lose some data doing it.

But! Thanks to a brilliant LiveCD release of GParted, I was able to do it in an hour or two (and was really only at the keyboard for 10 or 15 minutes in total).

I used Nero Express to burn the ISO to a CD, but Lifehacker pointed to a freeware ISO recorder if you can't find the cd burning program that originally came with your drive.

GParted booted in about 30 seconds, then I had to select my keyboard, preferred XWindows, video driver, preferred resolution, and some other barely-relevant stuff, but basically it just meant hitting enter five or six times to accept the defaults. Ideally these settings would all be listed on a single "Accept these defaults?" screen, so the 97% of people who want the defaults can get by hitting Enter just once, but , y'know -- it's Linux. Config before usability :)

Aside from that little quibble it was freakin' great. Next time you're re-organising your hard drive, get the latest GParted live CD.

sketch up your house

2006-04-28T12:53:00.000+10:00

This tool is freaking amazing. It lets you draw 3D objects so easily it really does feel like sketching with a pencil.

Good ol' Google, finding stuff like this.

English (UK) means no Google Talk for you!

2006-04-27T12:34:00.000+10:00

Like everyone, I use Gmail and Google Talk, and was looking forward to the latter being intergrated into the former.

Soon after hearing that it was happening, people I know started seeing GTalk come up in their Gmail window. After a couple of days I get this question when I log on to Gmail: "Do you want to see chat histories in your Gmail window?" or something. Hell yeah, I answer.. but still no chat stuff in my Gmail.

I wait and wait. Weeks later, I'm still not seeing any GTalk integration -- there is a page somewhere on Google's site saying that they're rolling out the update gradually. Hmm.

More weeks pass. Everyone I know has GTalk on their Gmail page except me, and my brother. Eventually, I really need to see history for a particular chat. I write to Google's help address.

After a bit to-and-fro-ing with boilerplate questions ("When does the problem occur?" Err, when ever I desire to see a chat history. "What firewalls are you running?" Err.. doesn't matter?) I get this:

1. Are you logging in from a supported browser? [snip]

2. Did you click 'standard without chat' at the bottom of your Gmail
account? If so.. [snip]

3. Did you select an interface language other than 'English (US)'? [snip]

Amazingly, it was the third thing that fixed it for me. I had my language set to English (UK), because americans for some reason can't spell colour properly.

I have to say that I'm somewhat surprised that English (UK) isn't supported by the chat-integrated version of Gmail. But there it is.. hope this helps someone else wondering when they're gonna get Google Talk in their Gmail window.

Video of Microsoft Office's new interface

2006-04-13T09:34:00.000+10:00

In case you've been living in your bunker for the last year (or perhaps you just aren't as interested in the world of user interface design as certain Cynics you know..) you may not have heard that the next version of MS Office has forsaken menus and toolbars in favour of a sort of super-toolbar they call "The Ribbon".

Our Microsoft overlords have provided a nice video of it at their website. Sweet.

Death to Long Grass

2006-04-03T11:53:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I used my new trimmer for the first time. I think it's a Troy-Bilt TB20CS, cost me A$189 or something, from Bunnings.

Holy crap! I've previously used an anaemic electric one that I bought for $29 or so, some years ago. This new one is a freakin' monster! It's like an invisible but lethal disk of cyclonic death on the end of a stick. I was worried for the trees I was trimming around.

It feels aggressive too. The engine noise has a real snarl to it, and when I put it on the ground with the engine running, it jiggers around a bit, like a caged animal.

It rained a bit while I was using it, and I started seeing what I thought was smoke coming from the business end. After a second I realised the grass my trimmer was butchering to death had some rainwater on it, and the trimmer end was turning it into mist fine enough to float up into the air.

I can replace the trimmer end with various other attachments too.. can't wait to try this chainsaw one.

I propose Troy-Bilt change the name "line trimmer" to something like "brutal grass anihilator".

A tumultuous story about my dogs

2006-03-02T13:12:00.000+10:00

Recently a sad thing happened. We found our white toy poodle, Jemimah Jean, dead in our garage on Thursday night a week ago (the 23rd of Feb).

She had been a bit subdued for maybe the last week, but we don't know what she was sick with. A few days previous I'd given her a pat and remember thinking she had a lot of fleas; we'd planned to give the dogs a bath that weekend and give them their flea treatment after. Both dogs were being kept outside coz they were overdue for a wash.

Mimah had been an outside dog for the last few years, so my 4-year-old and 2-year-old were pretty much alright with it, but my wife and I can remember when she was a gorgeous puppy galloping around our old rental house. She was a big part of our lives back then.

Then on Sunday we went to give my other dog a bath -- he's a black toy poodle called Berry. We discovered he was smothered in ticks! They were clustered all over him. I'd trimmed him maybe a month before, and only found a few ticks then, but our grass has been pretty long lately and I think perhaps he'd picked up whatever ticks had been on Jemimah as well.

My wife went out and bought a can of an acaricide called Nucidol to wash Berry in. When I read the how-to instructions, they told me I had to wear a long sleeved cotton shirt and cotton pants, a washable hat, waterproof gloves to the elbow, and if a drop got on me I had to go and scrub down in the shower with soap. I decided it was a job for a professional, and booked a mobile dog wash to come by around 11am Monday to do Berry's tick bath.

On Monday morning, my wife was watching Berry through the window and thought he looked a bit woozy. We decided to bring him in to a vet for a quick checkup, so I drove him down the road to a nearby vets and had him checked over.

The vet was amazed at the number of ticks on him but said the Nucidol bath he was booked in for was the right way to go. Otherwise his heartbeat was good, his temp was good, and he seemed fine. I bought some Frontline tick spray to use after Berry's tick wash, dropped him back home and went off to work.

Maybe an hour later, my wife was calling Berry and when he didn't come, went looking for him. She found him down the side of the house, lying against the fence. He was twitching a bit but basically floppy and couldn't lift his head to look at her. She bundled him up and drove him back down to the vet.

The vet apparently shoved some other dog they had right off of surgery table, and started checking Berry over. He was massively anaemic and perhaps he'd had a sudden serum response to tick saliva or something. They told my wife they'd work on him and she went home and called me.

I got to the vets around 10:30am I think. Berry was on the surgery table breathing oxygen through a nose cone. He was getting fluid from an IV and they were shaving him down and spraying his ticks with Frontline tick spray. With the rehydration he was stirring a bit, but his blood test results came back and he was really low in red cells -- he needed a blood transfusion.

So the vet assistant went off in her car and brought back this huge dog. I think it might have been her sister's dog or something, but I'm not sure the sister got asked.. anyway the vet and dog went into another room and ten minutes later the vet came back with a big bag of blood -- it looked like maybe three-quarters of a litre or more. Berry weighed just over 3 kgs, so it was maybe a quarter of his body weight.

They hooked the blood up to Berry's IV. Soon he was stirring a bit more and actually recognising me. The vet and assistant started to relax a bit around then. About 15 minutes after his transfusion started he was doing obviously better and they could move him (with blood IV still going) off the table into a cage. I went home and filled my wife in, and finally went back to work.

On the way home that afternoon I stopped in to see him. He was subdued but looking around. They told me they'd move him to a differnet vet surgery to keep him overnight (where I think someone comes in during the night to check the animals). He spent Tuesday and Wednesday there, with occasional visits from my wife and I. On Tuesday they stopped the blood drip came out but he had a fluid IV the whole time.

Last night (Wednesday) I brought him home. He seems pretty much ok now -- he's been a bit quieter than usual but I expect that's mostly from being a bit overwhelmed with all the stuff that happened. And the total bill was something like $530 -- about half what I expected.

So, that's the story of my last week or so. We've said goodbye to a pet we loved, and worked to save the life of another. And I'm much more familiar with the lifecycle of Brown Dog Tick now than I ever wanted to be.

Mind Control

2006-02-06T11:12:00.000+10:00

I found this story on Slashdot, so it might not be news to one of my two readers. But I know Mum doesn't read Slashdot.. anyway, check out this freaky wasp. It slides it's stinger around in a cockroach's brain to find the right spot to inject venom to disable the roach's "escape" reflex.

Urgh. Freaky freaky freaky.

A Song About Operating Systems

2006-01-09T16:59:00.000+10:00

This admittedly geeky little song thing has a certain charm to it. Here's a little snipped of lyrics..

.."It's free!" they say -- if you can get it to run
The geeks say "Hey, that's half the fun"
Yeah well I gotta girlfriend, and things to get done
The Linux O. S. sux..

..but don't worry, every OS gets a serve.

Really, Really Hot

2006-01-03T22:10:00.000+10:00

It's been really, really hot here.. up to 41 degrees Celcius, which is about 106 degrees F.

I've seens a couple of traffic islands where the concrete slabs have been pushed up by heat expansion. Check this out..

When I first saw this one the apex was 6 to 8 inches above where it should be. I took this photo about a week later; the white grinding traces in this photo is where the city has ground down the ends of the slab to stop it from standing up, which is why it's not as high here as I remembered it.

These next two pics are another one I happened to drive past with my camera.

Amazing huh.

Daniel

It's not true!

2006-01-03T13:30:00.000+10:00

A few weeks ago I heard that Joss Whedon had given up on the Firefly/Serenity universe and wouldn't be making any more stories with those characters. Well now Slashdot pointed me to this comment where Joss says that's crap.

All right, now I have to jump in and set the record straight. EW is a fine rag, but they do take things out of context. Obviously when I said I had 'closure', what I meant was "I hate Serenity, I hated Firefly, I think my fans are stupid and Nathan Fillion smells like turnips."

I hate to sound like a huge geek, but.. woohoo!

Powerade Challenge

2005-12-21T21:48:00.000+10:00

It's been really, really hot this year, so whilst on my traditional fruitless search through the shops for good Christmas presents, I've been buying more drinks than usual.

A few days ago I wanted a drink and all there was to choose from was some juice selling for about $375 per fancy glass bottle, or Powerade.

After a lot of soul searching I opted for the Powerade. As I took my first swallow, an idea for a research project leaped into my mind. I resolved to seek an answer to the question: is there any flavour of Powerade that doesn't taste like a sweaty armpit?

So far I've ruled out blue, yellow, and red. I'm not sure how many more "flavours" there are.. hopefully not many.

Indulging in Typography

2005-12-09T12:47:00.000+10:00

I'd embarassed to admit that I'm quite excited about the six new Microsoft fonts.

I use Trebuchet a lot because it's clean and friendly; it hard to tell with such a small sample, but the new font Calibri might be able to replace Trebuchet as my favourite.

I have always had a soft spot for Georgia too, especially in bold, but it's a bit too spotchy for my liking, and the loony hanging numerals always bugged me. Perhaps Cambria can do what Georgia doesn't quite achieve.

Ok, I feel better for having indulged. If you follow the link above be sure to scroll down to the 6th comment, about the way the font descriptions are written:

The font descriptions remind me of some wine reviews... "it has an open, friendly design with just a hint of broccoli. The T's are assertive, while the I's are impetuous.."

Funny.

MiniPutt

2005-12-06T16:20:00.000+10:00

A brief break from the insanity of XSLT this afternoon has allowed me to recover my position as the Emperor of MiniPutt.

My MiniPutt minions:

Blogger has trouble with images

2005-10-19T17:07:00.000+10:00

Hmm, it looks like Blogger is having occasional trouble with the images I'm posting. I'll fix them all up soon.
Update: I've moved the blog to my danielbaird.com server, so now I can put images where I want them. So now it's all good.

Name popularity since 1880

2005-10-17T12:16:00.000+10:00

I found a great interactive (java) charty, mappy thing that shows the popularity of given names. It's hard to explain.. go there a give it a go. Don't miss the bit where you can type the first few letters of a name to see just those that match.
http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

Rounded corners better than Nifty Corners

2005-10-14T15:52:00.000+10:00

The well known Nifty Corners can be used to apply rounded corners to page elements. Nifty and similar tools add a bunch of elements of varying heights to simulate a rounded corner. I've realised that there's a cool way to do corners in HTML documents that uses lots fewer inserted elements than Nifty Corners.

The trick is, that when borders meet, browsers draw a nice diagonal chamfer. Like in this picture.. see how the browser's rendering of the borders makes a nice neat diagonal line where the borders meet.

Nothing special yet, right? Next, we'll see what happens when there's differently sized borders, and no content.

Ok, this is the same div with zero width and height, wide bottom and right borders, and narrow top and left borders. The 'content' of the div woulld normally be the bit between the four borders, but because the content is zero sized, the borders are triangles that meet in the centre; of off-centre, in this case. Hmm, interesting. Next we'll try less colours..

Now the top and left borders are coloured white, like the background. The bottom and right borders are blue.. and you can see the effect I've been going for here: a two-line approximation of a curve. Shiny.

This example is quite large, but at 10 pixels across instead of 40, it's quite a nice looking corner. Position this one div over the boring square corner of a blue box, and you've got a nice curvy looking corner.

It gets even cooler.. if you put a second div inside the first, you can have four lines to approximate the curve. Like this:
I've coloured the inner div lighter than the outer so you can see where they happen.

Ok that's as much as I can write today -- I'll come back to this later and maybe whip up a function to apply this rounding to your corners.

Boy meets Python

2005-10-14T14:09:00.000+10:00

This great set of posts are from a dad whose six year old wanted to make a computer game. Not exactly sure why I liked reading them so much.. maybe I'm hoping I'll have to handle a situation like that in a couple of years (my eldest is 4).

I want this megacheap laptop for schoolkids

2005-10-10T15:38:00.000+10:00

MIT have this great design for a laptop.. small, rugged, super-portable. The keyboard and screen rotate individually around the handle, and inside the handle is the power unit -- including a hand crank for manual recharging.

The total cost is supposed to be US$100. The idea is to mass manufacture (minimum order is 1 million) and sold to governments in poorer countries to provide to schoolchildren. Lauch date is 2006 or 2007.

Glorious pics and diagrams-of-use here, including the integrated carry strap / power cord and other great ideas.

This whole design is sweeet, and I want one in a way which I am sure is quite unhealthy. Hopefully there will be a retail release so I won't be reduced to mugging some poor Cambodian kid (told you it was unhealthy).