Archive/Current Events/2011-06-28

Sugar Digest
“What we need are notions, not notations.” —Gauss

1. I gather that I am the only one who had never read the "Mathematician's Lament", but in case you haven't read it in a while and need a refresher on "notions" instead of "notations", see.

It is also always worth rereading Marvin Minksy's essays on learning math:

2. One of the pleasures of working in the Sugar community is that you get thoughtful feedback on your work from a wide range of people. Last week I got a request from a teacher in Uruguay for some new features in Turtle Blocks. (I included one—coordinate grid marked in centimeters—in Version 109. I also got feedback from Alan Kay and Barry Newell about the merits of the inclusion of an Arc block, which motivated me to finally write a Sugar Activity based on Barry's book, Turtle Confusion: Logo Puzzles and Riddles. Check out . Also, at this weekend's Design Team meeting, I got very helpful feedback from Sascha Silbe, Gary Martin, and Manuel Quiñones regarding the enhancements I have been proposing to View Source (See Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars/View-Source_Enhancements). Perhaps the most significant change is that I now put a copy of the cloned activity bundle into the Journal, thus maintaining equal status for the clone within the Sugar infrastructure. You can find the current patches here and here.

In the community
3. There will be a Turtle Art Day in Costa Rica in July. We may hold simultaneous workshops at other deployments as well: stay tuned (See http://www.facultadeducacion.ucr.ac.cr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16&Itemid=23).

4. The TedxKids@Brussels talks are online at [youtube.com/playlist?p=PLA14C60FA101D1F4C].

Tech Talk
5. Peter Robinson is very close to releasing Sugar on a Stick Version 5. Please help us test: http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-x86_64.iso and http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-i686.iso

6. I cooked up a patch to the Edit Activity—Sugar's plain-text editor—to enable editing files from outside of the Journal. I am waiting for Nate Theis, Edit maintainer, to accept the patches, but if you want to play with it, see my clone on Gitorious.

7. Martin Abente has implemented multiple-object select for the Sugar Journal. His patches are not quite ready for release—there is a performance-related issue with unnecessary list regeneration that Martin is working on, but having tried it, even in its current form, it is really nice.

Sugar Labs
Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

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