Changes

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An '''archive''' of this digest is available [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|here]].

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An '''archive''' of this digest is available [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|here]].

=== Sugar Digest ===

I am sending out the Sugar Digest early this week in order to advertise the Sugar Labs meeting taking place in Milan tomorrow (Monday, 30 June 2008). We'll be reporting on the meeting on the #sugar-meeting channel of irc.freenode.net beginning at approximately 9:00 UTC+2. Please join in (Also, feel free to send any questions or comments beforehand to walter at sugarlabs.org).

1. Latest Sucrose: The new [[Sucrose]] 0.81.3 Development Release is now available. The release has some new features, including: Manual reordering of the Home view icons; a freeform layout of the Home view icons; improved feedback on activity startup; support for custom certificates in Browse; alt+tab activity switching; etc. We are now in feature freeze, so the short-term focus will be on testing, bug triaging and fixes. The community has done a great job in that we achieved practically all the features that we had targeted. Thanks to everyone that made this possible and special kudos to the Sugar release team.

The rough agenda is as follows:

Detailed release notes can be found in the wiki (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.3]]); a sugar-jhbuild branch for the release can be found here (http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=sugar-jhbuild;a=shortlog;h=sucrose-0.81.3).

: 9:00  Sugar Labs governance and the Software Freedom Conservancy: any outstanding issues

:14:00  Sugar Labs look and feel: a graphic design review

:17:00  Fund raising: how much, from whom, and for what purposes?

:18:00  Wrap up

2. Making the installation of Activities easier: Dave Farning is working on a web interface to managing activities based upon Mozilla's AMO codebase (addons.mozilla.org). He has successfully used AMO on a local server to install activities on an XO-1 laptop and to install Sugar on a conventional laptop. He has started submitting a series of patches upstream to Mozilla.org with the goal that SugarLabs will be able to use the AMO codebase as maintained by Moxilla. A few areas that require work: (a) Look and feel – applying the sugarlabs stylesheets; (b) Applications – currently, AMO hardcodes application data rather than handled dynamically; (c)  Addontypes – AMO can handle several addontypes such as extension, plugins, and and dictionaries, but they are not yet handled dynamically. By modularizing how AMO handles applications and add-on types, we should be able to drop in Sugar application  and and addontype code.

1. Software Freedom Conservancy: Bradley Kuhn has written to inform us that the Conservancy Board has provisionally approved Sugar's application to join the Conservancy. It is a timely decision in light of tomorrow's discussion.

The work flow for a developer would be:

2. Biofeedback: Tom Boonsiri has blogged about the experiences of children using the work he has been doing on integrating biofeedback into Sugar (Please see http://olpcgoldenstate.blogspot.com). "We've developed two very low cost ($10) and easy to use peripheral prototypes to carry across our lesson plan effectively."

* reviewer verifies new upload works correctly and publishes the upload.

From the user perspective, Activities would then be browseable and downloadable in a manner similar to any Firefox plugin, with very fast, secure, and scalable updates.

3. Immokalee: Timothy Falconer send links to a two-part NPR story on Waveplace's Sugar/XO and Etoys pilot in Immokalee, Florida (You can listen at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91891812 and see photos at http://waveplace.com/mu/waveplace/item/tp142).

Dave is looking for help (the code is being put in https://www.develer.com/gitweb/pub?p=users/dfarning/w.s.o.git;a=summary).

4. FLOSS Manuals: With some gentle prompting from Dave Farning, Anne Gentle has been leading a discussion community efforts to document Sugar. She is circulating some ideas for getting more energy behind some of the separate document deliverables FLOSS Manuals could target, including a Turtle Art "manual" (Please see http://en.flossmanuals.net/). If you would like to volunteer to do some writing, please join the discussions (http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net and http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project). We will be discussing how to prioritize efforts (perhaps in a manner similar to Trac). Suggestions welcome.

In parallel, there has also been a discussion on the Sugar list regarding development of an activity for updating Sugar and Sugar Activities.

5. Sugar talk in Brazil: There has been an interesting discussion about Sugar on the OLPC Brasil list (Por favor, consulte http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/brasil/2008-June/001697.html).

3. courses.sugarlabs.org: David Van Assche is setting up a Moodle installation at http://courses.sugarlabs.org to complement activities.sugarlabs.org.  It will house stable versions of activities, together with lesson plans, relevant reading materials, and related activities. The OLE Nepal team, with help from Bernie Innocenti, who is in Kathmandu for the summer, will be fleshing out the site. Please contribute.

6. Etoys and Debian: Another animated discussion has revolved around inclusion of Etoys in the Debian distribution. While we haven't yet reached consensus, the bottom line, as expressed by Yoshiki Ohshima, is the desire to work together "to empower children all over the world via computer technology and education." The greater the reach of Etoys, the more children (and others) can "exchange projects, share ideas, work together, and unite." 

4. Usability testing: Carlos Mauro Cárdenas Fernández has begun a pilot usability test of Sugar on the Intel Classmate PC (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/TestUsabilityOLPC for some details of his plans and initial findings).

7. Etoys documentation: Ted Kaehler reports that the PDF version of the Etoys QuickGuides has been updated to the latest guides (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/images/8/81/The_Etoys_Quick_Guides.pdf). Note that the QuickGuides are also available from the Help icon within Etoys itself and on the web (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Etoys_QuickGuides_Index). Kathleen Harness is the author of these excellent guides; editorial and technical assistance were provided by Kim Rose and Ted Kaehler.

=== Community jams and meetups ===

=== Community jams and meetups ===

5. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Juliano Bittencourt from Laboratório de Estudos Cognitivos reports that a GameJam was held at FISL 9.0, the largest Latin America free software conference. A short video made during the event is available on YouTube (Please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWKBdeZUtq0). A team from the Argentian PyGame group was the winner: a game called Falabranaman.

8. Libre Software: Hilaire Fernandes reports that the 9th Libre Software Meeting will be held at Mont de Marsan, Landes, in SW France, from the 1 to the 5 of July. This year, Squeak/Smalltalk will be largely represented with conferences and workshops (http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire/index.php?post/Squeak-Smalltalk-LSM-2008).

 

OLPC France is planning an Idea Contest (http://llaske.free.fr/olpcfrance/index.php?title=Concours_d'idées_OLPC_France) which will be announced at the meeting (http://2008.rmll.info/).

===Tech Talk===

===Tech Talk===

6. Infrastructure: Marco Pesenti Gritti has started a page on the wiki about infrastructure ([[Infrastructure Plan]]) and is seeking your feedback.

9. Patch reviews: Marco Pesenti Gritti has recommended that we go back to using Trac as the primary mechanism for patch reviews: "While it's good to have patches review on the list so that everyone can participate easily, it also makes it very difficult to track the status of each patch and it's easy to forget some of them." The new process ([[DevelopmentTeam/CodeReview#Patch_submission]]) is described in the wiki.

 

7. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso reports that a new version of the Journal activity has been released, with many translation updates and some visual fixes (Download it from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/journal-activity/journal-activity-92.tar.bz2). New features include:

* Fix appearance of "no preview" (Eben Eliason)

* Adapt object chooser to new designs. Some refactoring was needed (Tomeu)

 

8. Datastore: Tomeu also reports that a new version of the datastore has been released (http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar-datastore/sugar-datastore-0.8.2.tar.bz2). New features include a metadata copy outside the index.

 

Hint: ./make_usbstick.sh -h provides more detailed documentation. Please contact Wolfgang Rohrmoser if you have any questions (WolfgangRohrmoser at web.de).

10. Char 41: Morgan Collett has released Chat 41 (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/chat-activity/Chat-41.tar.bz2 and http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/bundles/Chat-41.xo). New features include:

10. Turtle Art: Arjun Sarwal reports progress on a modification of Turtle Art with sensors that uses python-alsaaudio, which makes getting samples much easier and more straightforward.

Morgan also updated the Presence Service with the changes required for non-Sugar Jabber clients to chat with OLPC XO-1 laptops.

11. Fedora 9: Daniel Drake reports that the following packages may make the Fedora-9 build experience a little more bearable:

11. Measure: Arjun has also been reorganizing the wiki pages associated with Measure Activity and sensors with the aim that there should be more easily accessible information on the page (A very rough outline here http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure/New_temp). Arjun hopes to release a new Measure Activity in a week or so that is more readily extensible.

* a NetworkManager that can actually connect to networks (http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/NetworkManager-0.6.5-0.11.svn3246.olpc3.i386.rpm);

* fixed keyboard – arrow keys, Alt-Gr and other functionality (http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.4.99.901-29.20080415.fc9.i386.rpm)

12. Alt-Tab: Benjamin Berg submitted a number of patches to update Alt-Tab behavior for switching between activities.

12. Logo: Brian Harvey is looking for help "sugarizing" Berkeley Logo, an interpreter for the Logo programming language licenced under GPL. It currently runs under Linux from an xterm window and a separate X11 window for graphics. (The source code is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html). There is also an experimental version using wxWidgets that is about 90% working. Brian thinks it may be relevant because that version knows about creating and managing windows, including an interactive text window, so it might be an easier starting point for a Sugar version (Please see http://sourceforge.net/projects/ucblogo/).

13. Measure activity: Arjun Sarwal has been working upon 'Sound' and 'Sensor' contexts within Measure and also, adding a textbox at the bottom that mentions details about the signal/sound input (Please view a screenshot at http://crank.laptop.org/~arjs/sound_sensors.png). Arjun has also been working on a new re-organized wiki page for Measure (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure/New_temp). Suggestions and contributions are very welcome.

13. Vision processing: Nirav Patel is working on a library of computer vision tools for pygame (Please see http://git.n0r.org/?p=pygame-nrp;a=summary). There is currently a pygame version 1.8.1 with the addition of a camera module that supports v4l2 cameras that use MMAP and have pixel formats of RGB24, RGB444, YUYV, SBGGR8, or YUV420. Basic usage is as follows:

15. Patches: Marco Pesenti Gritti reviewed patches and more patches. He also packaged xulrunner 1.9 final and adapted the Browse activity to it. Finally he coordinated the Sugar 0.81.3 release and made big progresses on a Fedora 9 based Sugar liveCD. (Note that xulrunner 1.9 final is the version used in Firefox 3, which provides much better memory use than previous versions.)

cam = camera.Camera("/dev/video0", (640, 480), "RGB")  # the third argument can be YUV or HSV too.

cam.start()

frame = cam.get_image() # the frame returned is a 24bit pygame Surface

16. Sugar Almanac: Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications has made progress on an online "Sugar Almanac" of best practices and working code snippets (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar.activity.activity).

See http://eclecti.cc/bytes/living-pointillism-a-pygame-webcam-script and http://eclecti.cc/files/centroid.py for more examples.

17. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg reports a new etoys release (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2029.tar.gz and http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-83.tar.gz ; the bundled versions cab be found at http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm and http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-83.xo). Improvements include: Pango fixes (tested with Nepalese), new DBus bindings, updated QuickGuides, a few more strings made translatable.

14. Sugar almanac: Faisal Anwar continues to make progress (with community contributions) on the Sugar almanac (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar-api-doc). He asks that you please keep the feedback coming. Among many other additions, the Sugar Almanac now has a section on using the datastore.

18. Statistics: ohloh also has some statistics on the Sugar software:

15. Tomeu Vizoso's busy week:

* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/9605/analyses/latest

* Talked with Dennis Gilmore about making a new release of Gnash for the XO;

* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11601/analyses/latest

* Clean up the Trac mess along with Marco;

* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/sugar-presence-service/analyses/latest

* Use the correct activity icon for drag and drop; and

* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11526/analyses/latest

* Fix alignment of icons in the frame.

* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11636/analyses/latest

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

19. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-June-14-20-som.jpg]]). The list was relatively quite this week, considering all of the progress, so the map is not very informative – the data being sparse.

16. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-June-21-27-som.jpg]]). List activity picked up this week; the ongoing Smalltallk/Debian drama is featured.

==Sugar in the news==

==Sugar in the news==