Changes

==What's new==

==What's new==

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 and blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|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 and blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An '''[[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|archive]]''' of this digest is available.

=== Sugar Digest ===

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Trisecting angles: The French mathematician Évariste Galois published three papers in 1830 that laid the foundations of an algebraic proof of why is it not possible to trisect ''every'' angle in a compass and straightedge construction, something the Ancient Greeks knew, but could not prove. However, what is often overlooked is that the Greeks could trisect angles, using a different set set of instruments. What does this history lesson have to do with Sugar Labs? Two separate but related discussions have dominated the OLPC-Sur list this past week: the Microsoft announcement regarding a Windows XP pilot in Peru and the lack of a square root function in Turtle Art, both of which can be seen through the lens of abstract algebra—apologies in advance for overreaching with this analogy.

First, an aside: I introduced the concept of peer editing in the Floss Manual on the Write Activity by referencing the late Don Murray, who taught generations of journalists how to write. He had three simple rules for great writing:

Let me summarize the Turtle Art discussion first. Some teachers in Uruguay are teaching the Pythagorean Theorem and were stymied by the lack of a square root function in Turtle Art. They wanted to demonstrate that the length of the diagonal of a square is equal to the square root of the sum of the square of each side. In psuedocode, they wanted to build the following construct:

  1. revise

  2. revise

  3. revise

Lots of alternatives were discussed, including using Dr. Geo. My favorite comment was from Pato Acevedo, who said:

While riding my bike into Cambridge yesterday, it occurred to me that a simple peer-editing exchange for bloggers would be easy to set up; it could make a world of difference in the quality of the writing, while not in any way impinging upon the freedom and spontaneity that characterizes the blogshpere. In deed, I am of the opinion that one of the biggest differences between blogging and the mainstream media is the strong editorial tradition of the latter.

But eventually—albeit with some intervention on my part—the discussion turned towards how to modify the Turtle Art activity. I put together a tutorial (See [[Patching_Turtle_Art|Patching Turtle Art]]) with the hope that not only would I be satisfying the immediate needs of the teachers, but also, showing them that in fact they could, themselves, make the necessary changes to the program to meet their needs. I am hoping that I didn't make it too easy for them and that some of them will risk making changes—creating new instruments. The beauty of FOSS is that if the permutation group doesn't allow you to "trisect an angle", you can always modify the group. A dialog between teachers and developers has begun. The next step is for some of the teachers to become developers.

So why doesn't someone set up a social-networking site—ideally integrated with the popular tools such as Word Press—to enable bloggers to find a willing peer to suggest revisions before the publish button is pressed (a "Send to editor" button)? Such an exchange need not be symmetric—some people prefer the role of critic to creator; it would be a simple, powerful enhancement to the blogsphere. (Or does such a site already exist?)

What is the connection the XP announcement? Simply that it is a real shame that Microsoft is not using their vast resources to expand the opportunities for children by reaching to places not already being serviced by OLPC. Regardless of the merits of XP, they could have immediate and lasting impact by covering a space outside of the range of the Peruvian permutation group. Pamela Jones and Sean Daly wrote a more thorough analysis of the XP story for Groklaw (See [http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080920181151638 Interview with Walter Bender from Sugar Labs]).

1. Open Minds: David Farning and I had the opportunity to attend the [http://www.k12openminds.org/ Open Minds] conference in Indianapolis this past weekend. It was refreshing to spend time with so many teachers passionate for learning and creating opportunities for their students. I tried to tune into discussions about the various roadblocks that inhibit the introduction of technology into schools and into classrooms. The list is pretty long and some of the items are formidable, but nonetheless, there are obvious needs and teachers and administrators who are fighting for change. There was lots of interest in Sugar—teachers and administrators are looking for an easy (and inexpensive) way to try it in their classrooms.

2. Oversight board: The Sugar Labs oversight board met on IRC this week. Highlights include a report that final agreement between Sugar Labs and the SFC has been approved; the creation of the BugSqaud; the creation of the deployment team pages; and the unveiling of a new Sugar Labs logo ([[Logo]]).  [[Sugar_Labs/OversightBoard/Meeting_Minutes-2008-09-19|Minutes can be found in the wiki]]. The next meeting is scheduled for Friday, 3 October at 14.00 (UTC).

A few specific outcomes from the conference: Nate Ridderman will be helping set up a Sugar classroom in an elementary school in Indianapolis that is doing a one-to-one laptop experiment; David and I will be helping set up a Sugar classroom in a Boston public school that trying to make use of some old Pentium IV desktop machines; we also discussed making Sugar available as part of the offerings from some hardware OEMs who focus on the education market, including [http://www.2gopc.com/ 2goPC] and [http://www.resara.com/ Resara] (who offer a thin-client solution).

There is an email thread ([http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-September/001779.html|"Executive Director - some benefits and risks"]) for discussing the pros and cons of having an executive director. Please share your thoughts with the community.

2. LiveUSB: It seems that a LiveUSB offers the most simple way to experience Sugar on a preexisting hardware base, such as a school computer lab. (One advantage of a LiveUSB approach—where user data is stored in a disk partition—is that the same key can be used at school and at home, emulating the experience of a one-to-one laptop program, where the laptops go home with the children. The Fedora team has made progress on a LiveUSB this week (See Item 11 below) and we are also working to get "fresher" Sugar bits into the Ubuntu LiveUSB. However, there remains a problem in that many computers do not have boot-from-USB enabled in the BIOS. Steve Pomeroy suggested we look into U3, a proprietary method of launching applications from a USB key. This would provide a work-around for running Sugar on machines that are running Windows (alas, this accounts for the majority of hardware found in schools). Ben Schwartz pointed out that we could do the same thing using autorun.inf (See [http://www.exponetic.com/blog/blog/2006/07/07/autorun-an-executable-from-a-usb-key-in-windows-xp/ autorun an executable from a USB key in Windows XP]), launching an instance of Sugar in QEMU. Running Sugar in emulation requires a reasonably fast machine in order to give an acceptable experience. We need to do more testing in this arena, as it is a path of least resistance for teachers and parents who are interested in trying Sugar.

3. Roadmap: Marco Pesente Gritti and Simon Schampijer have been documenting the discussion of our 0.84 goals in the wiki ([[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84#Goals|here]]). They have assigned owners and peers to all groups and started to assign owners to each feature. You can find orphaned items under "Unassigned" in each section. Please give them a home.

3. Teachers/developers: There was a productive discussion on the IAEP list this week about how to better engage teachers in the Sugar developer community. Rob Costello pointed out that only a small percentage of teachers would participate in the actual development process, building bridges to even that small group would be worthwhile. It was pointed out that the [[Patching Turtle Art]] (which is still incomplete) is far from meeting the needs of a teacher (or anyone else new to the community). Bill Kerr wrote up some questions that I tried to answer in the wiki (See [[Talk:Patching Turtle Art]]):

4. Amazability: Kenneth Ingham is preparing to release Adept1, a natural-language speech-based product under a GPLv3 license (See [http://www.amazability.com/about.htm amazability.com]). He is looking for help; please contact him at ken AT amazability.com.

* Which things do what? How does one know which Python files have to be tweaked?

* How do you program more advanced stuff in Python, e.g., using lambda?

* What is FOSS etiquette, how do you go about learning to be a member of this community?

5. Minutes: Given the sudden plethora of Sugar meetings, I added a new category in the wiki for meeting minutes. Going to [[:Category:Meeting minutes]] is a one-stop page for finding all the meeting minutes in the wiki. (Going forward, please add the tag <nowiki>[[Category:Meeting minutes]]</nowiki> when posting minutes to the wiki.)

I repeat here my answer to Bill's last question:

6. Workshop of Telematics: Luis Michelena from the faculty of engineering at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, will be using Sugar as a central theme for the projects to be carried out by students. Project suggestions most welcome.

Bill also wrote more generally about what it means to join a community, summarizing James Gee from his book <em>What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy</em> (2003), drawing a distinction between knowledge and being part of a community of knowledge:

 

# we learn to experience the world in a new way: see, feel and operate on;

# we gain the potential to join a new social group, a new club;

# we gain the resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solving in a new domain and perhaps related domains.

 

=== Community jams, meetups, and meetings ===

 

6. Sugar meetings: The deployment team will be meeting on Wednesday at 14 UTC (10 EST) on irc.freenode.net (channel: #sugar-meeting). The oversight board will be meeting on Friday at 14 UTC (10 EST), also on #sugar-meeting.  

=== Tech Talk ===

=== Tech Talk ===

7. Sugar control panel: As a last-minute patch for 0.82, Simon Schampijer added a scrolled window to the Sugar control panel main view; Kim Quirk had pointed out that in some languages, not all of the icons fit on the fixed-sized panel. Thanks to Andrés Ambrois for his patch. The Sugar team has settled on a long-term solution using hippo for this issue. In the upcoming week, Simon plans to work on the first items in his 0.84 list (mainly control panel) and he will keep on working on the roadmap.

7. Release candidate: For those of you with OLPC-XOs, Michael Stone has released a candidate build (766) that incorporates Sugar .082. It is well worth the hassle of updating from 652 or 711.

 

8. Tricks: Michael also posted a list of "idioms" that he relies on in order to make his software-development efforts more predicable and robust (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Tricks Mstone Tricks]).

 

9. Sugar control panel: Simon Schampijer speed up control panel start up in 0.84. The next issues he want to tackle are better localizations in the panel for the available languages and switching to gconf (if tests show it is worth it).

 

10. Bugsquad: Simon had also setup the Sugarlabs Bugsquad, the quality assurance (QA) team for Sugar. The squad will triage bugs, set priorities, verify usability and test cases.  Furthermore it does coordinate testing, does testing itself and help setting up bug infrastructure, i.e., trac components (See [[BugSquad]]).

 

11. Sugar Live CDs: Greg Dekoenigsberg reports progress on a Fedora Live CD/USB  based on rawhide/F10. He has a LiveCD for Fedora 10 devel (Rawhide) that allows a Sugar 0.82 boot option via GDM. Activiites are still missing, but Greg says that we will close this gap quickly. There is also a kickstart file that can be used by any Fedora user to generate such an

image trivially (See [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart#Chapter_1._Introduction for some background on Fedora kickstarts Introduction for some background on Fedora kickstarts]). Also, see [https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator liveusb-creator] for help on making a Windows-bootable LiveUSB for Fedora.

 

Bryan Kearney built a virtual image for the Sugar rawhide package. To use it: (1) download [http://sugar.s3.amazonaws.com/sugar-rawhide.tgz sugar-rawhide.tgz]; (2) uncompress the .tgz file; and (3) run the command:

virt-image sugar-rawhide.xml

8. Developers meeting: The next Sugar developers meeting is scheduled for Thursday, 25 September at 14.00 (UTC). At this meeting, we want to form the Sugar Labs Bugsquad, a quality assurance (QA) team for Sugar. The squad will keep track of current bugs and try to make sure that major bugs do not go unnoticed by developers. You do not need any programming knowledge to be in the Bugsquad; in fact it is a great way to return something to the Sugar community if you cannot program. The Sugar Labs bugsquad is modeled on the [http://developer.gnome.org/projects/bugsquad GNOME bugsquad].

12. Telepathy goes upstream: In their newest release (2.24), GNOME announced "the inclusion of an instant messaging client based off the Telepathy communications framework." Whereas Sugar uses Telepathy, this means that there will likely be many non-Sugar users, adding to the community of support for the project. This is a big step towards longer-term stability, support, and general acceptance of all of our efforts. Congratulations!

9. Design meeting: Eben Eliason reports that the first design meeting was a bit more technical than anticipated, but we did make some progress on a visual clipboard API and icon reviews [[DesignTeam/Meetings#Thursday_September_18.2C_2008_-_15.30_.28UTC.29|Minutes can be found in the wiki]].

13. Activity updates: There are updates available for:

:Measure-21

10. API documentation: David Farning has been leading an effort to document the Sugar API. With help from Pauli Virtanen, Janet Swisher, and Marco Pesenti Gritti, we now have a wiki-based tool (See [http://sugarlabs1.xen.prgmr.com]). Follow the instructions at [http://sugarlabs1.xen.prgmr.com/pydocweb/wiki/getting_started/ getting started]. Don't worry about being perfect, someone will come along and clean up the docstrings before they are committed back to the git tree. (The patches are flowing into the git tree correctly, but if you find bugs, please let us know: this is the first time pydocweb has been used "in the wild.")

14. ImageViewer: Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote a new Activity to let you view images from the Journal. It supports zoom and rotation as well. Download it from [http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/bundles/imageviewer/ImageViewer-1.xo ImageViewer-1.xo]; the source is in git ([http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/sayamindu/imageviewer-activity;a=tree | imageviewer-activity;a=tree])

11. Activity updates: There are updates available for:

15. DrGeoII: Hilaire Fernandes announced a new DrGeoII release with macro-construction and Smalltalk scripting, plus tons of bugs fixes. The new DrGeoII distribution is based on an universal one-clic distribution for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OSX (Please visit [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/DrGeo DrGeo web page] to learn more). Hilaire is also discussing with the Etoys team the possibility of adding DrGeoII to the standard toolbox.

:playgo-4

:etoys-93

:turtleart-11

and some Sugar improvements in the latest joyride:

16. Etoys project sharing: Daniel Ajoy inquired about uploading Etoys projects to the Internet. While the "core" Etoys team doesn't have a world-writable project-sharing site, they do recommend tools for setting up regional sites. To set up your own server, the simplest thing is to set up the [http://swikis.ddo.jp/SuperSwiki2/3 SuperSwiki2 server].

:sugar-artwork 0.81.2

:sugar-toolkit 0.82.10

:sugar 0.82.8

17. Debian jhbuild: The Debian team has done a thorough job of documenting the process of building a Sugar environment on a Debian GNU/Linux distribution (See [[DevelopmentTeam/Jhbuild/Debian]]).

:telepathy-salut 0.3.5

:etoys-3.0.2153

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

12. 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-September-13-19-som.jpg]]). Deployment feedback was a major topic of discussion this week.

18. 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-September-20-26-som.jpg]]).

==Sugar in the news==

==Sugar in the news==