Archive/Current Events/2008-12-15

Sugar Digest
1. SFC: Sugar Labs and the Software Freedom Conservancy have (finally) issued a joint press release regarding our joining the conservancy.

And Sugar is now listed on the Member Projects page at the conservancy. A tip of the hat to Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler for their hard work on behalf of Sugar Labs.

2. Sugar local: Rafael Ortiz and Sebastian Silva are making progress on Sugar Labs Colombia. They now have email addresses (@ co.sugarlabs.org) for their members and a new list (sugar-colombia AT co.sugarlabs.org). A wiki and a static landing site are being built.

3. Sugar style: It was remarked on one of the lists that there is no introduction to Sugar for people with preconceptions about computer user interfaces (e.g., Windows and GNU/Linux desktop users). I am reminded of Brian Harvey's classic, Computer Science Logo Style, that many of us C programmers used a guide to Logo-style thinking. Maybe someone could write a chapter for the Sugar FLOSS manual on the Sugar style?

4. Sugar look: Christian Schmidt has fleshed out the Marketing Team/Logo page in the wiki, adding more colors, SVGs, and some guidelines for use. Also, Jameson Quinn has been leading an "animated" discussion about using a Sugar Glider as our mascot. (A Sugar Glider is a "flying" marsupial from Australia.)

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings
5. FUDConF11 will be held at MIT (Cambridge, MA) 9–11 January.

6. There will be a Skolelinux/Debian-Edu developer gathering in Trondheim, Norway 23–25 January 2009 (See 2009-01 Trondheim).

7. There will be a Python for Teachers workshop at Pycon in Chicago in late March, 2009.

Tech Talk
8. SVG performance: When I made the transition from GIF to SVG rendering in Turtle Art, we took an unacceptable hit in performance. It has motivated a number of people have jumped in to the discussion about SVG rendering in Cairo and GTK. Stay tuned for recommendations on how to tune SVG rendering.

9. Michael Stone and Martin Dengler continue to plug away at C. Scott Ananian's Journal rebase. Follow the fun.

Sugar Labs
10. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).