Scott Lemon shows off his XO Laptop (click to enlarge)

We started off this morning discussing AsteriskNow, an easy install of the Asterisk VoIP system. Scott Lemon and I talked to Jared Smith a while back on that. Apparently it's pretty easy to set up and get working. Scott claims 3 hours start to finish.

I brought up ProQuo, a service that aims to stop junk mail. I signed up on Halloween and I've got to say I've noticed a real drop in the amount of junk mail I get. Score one for us!

Scott brought his XO laptop and so did Bruce. This was the first time either one had had their laptop near another one. They found each other and established a mesh network that we could see from other Wi-Fi devices. We experimented with seeing whether they'd see each other or not. They're little, light, and pretty cute.

XO Laptop (click to enlarge)

There's a 1Gb solid state drive. The keyboard is too small for my large hands. The software seems a little crude. With software updates available, getting the hardware right seems like the highest priority.

We got into a discussion of the impact that putting lots of these into developing countries is likely to have. The Hole in the Wall PC has some lessons. I think it will pull gappers into the core. That's good.

I brought up my Christmas hacking project of building a family information center from an old iMac. It's gone well. The kids have taken to it and use it all the time. One of the things we like best on it is FlickrFan.

I'd asked Scott to give a short demo on writing Facebook applications. The whole thing is based on Facebook making Restful callbacks to an application you write. There are tons of configuration options and FBML (Facebook markup language) let's you give your applications a Facebook look and feel. The development libraries Facebook provides (in various language flavors) provide good interfaces to their data and services. It was a good demo and writing FB apps seems quite easy.