Archive/Current Events/2010-06-01

Sugar Digest
1. I heard a Sugar story today from a school in Oaxaca, Mexico. At a ceremony for the governor to celebrate the laptop program a young girl gave a speech in Spanish. At the end of her speech, she launched the Speak activity and proceeded to have Sugar give the same speech in her native language, one of the indigenous languages of the region.

2. Futbol: I probably shouldn't say this on a public list, but I am not a fan of Italian Football. I prefer the "beautiful game" played in the South.

Even in the United States we know that the FIFA World Cup is coming soon – June 11–July 11. Gonzalo Odiard from Sugar Labs Argentina has suggested we use it as an excuse to organize a Sugar World Cup. Beginning with the observation that many of the open bugs on the Sugar [bugs.sugarlabs.org] and OLPC [dev.laptop.org] Trac systems are relatively simple (most could be resolved in just a couple of hours effort), Gonzalo is proposing we establish country-based teams that compete to close as many tickets as we can during the same time frame as the football tournament. For each bug fixed, a "goal" is scored. (A bug is considered fixed when a patch is approved on the Sugar-devel list.) Note that, like Maradona, you are allowed to use your hands. At the end of the tournament, after Ghana wins the FIFA cup, the Sugar Bowl will be awarded to the team that fixed the most bugs. Not only will we fix a lot of bugs, but we will be strengthening local development/deployment teams.

3. Congratulations to ceibalJAM for winning honorable mention in the international Cyberart competition (Prix Ars) at Ars Electronica.

4. Congratulations of Gerald A., who defended his thesis last week. Gerald studied the impact of Sugar on the culture of five fifth-grade classrooms in a NY public school.

5. John Maloney has led an effort to "Sugarize" Scratch v13 (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Scratch#Download). Notably, thanks to Bert Freudenberg, there is now support for the Journal. (I'll have to update my review on ASLO.) In addition, Scratch reads data from the camera and resistive sensors plugged into the microphone jack on OLPC XO computers. A tip of the hat to Claudia Urea whose persistence kept the effort moving forward.

6. Last summer at the Desktop Summit I was asked by Linux Magazine Espaniol to write an article about Sugar. It appeared in their print edition in October and is finally available on line at http://www.linux-magazine.es/issue/54/078-083_SugarLM54.pdf (in Spanish).

In the community
7. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés reports that there will be a Sugar Workshop at the National University of Asunción. See http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org/index.php/Curso_Sugar_FPUNA for details.

8. Claudia has been organizing IRC discussions on learning (in Spanish) on Wednesdays at 10:00 EST (14:00 UTC) at forum.laptop.org. The English-language learning chats organized by Joy Riach are on Thursdays at 10:00 EST.

Tech talk
9. Mirabelle has landed. The Fedora Sugar-on-a-Stick (SoaS) team, which includes Sebastian Dziallas, Peter Robinson, and Mel Chua, has released a new version based on Fedora 13 and Sugar 0.88. The goal of this release was to integrate SoaS more completely into the Fedora "Spin" process, provide a structure for longer-term maintenance and stability. While there are only ten Sugar activities bundled with Mirabelle, Tom Gilliard has put together a collection of activities that can be loaded onto a separate USB key from which they can be installed locally. For information about further customizations, please contact the SoaS team at soas AT sugarlabs.org.

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

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