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 ===

=== Sugar Digest ===

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 the discussion on 30 June.

1. Milan update: Minutes of the Sugar Labs meeting are posted in the wiki (Please see [[Sugar_Labs/Meeting_Minutes-30-06-2008]]). Topics covered in the meeting included:

* Governance and the Software Freedom Conservancy

* Sugar distributions: what are the issues?

* Sugar on mobile phones: is it possible? does it make sense?

* Sugar Labs: models of support

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."

One byproduct of the meeting was further refinement of the Sugar Labs governance pages in the wiki (Please see [[Sugar_Labs/Governance]]) and the accumulation of an initial membership list for Sugar Labs (Please see [[Sugar_Labs/initial_members_list]]).

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).

2. Intercambio de experiencias (Exchange of experiences): There is starting to be a nice exchange of classroom experiences among teachers on the olpc-sur mailing list (in Spanish). Teachers helping teachers.

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.

3. Regional efforts: There are a number of people discussing regional programs for Sugar development and support. Such programs are in line with the Sugar Labs vision. It is extremely important to push development and support into the hands of local organizations because: (1) it scales; (2) the detailed knowledge is local; (3) it helps the local economy; (4) it sets in motion independent agencies with a common goal and yet autonomy of action, which leads to innovation. Please bring these discussions to the Education mailing list so that we can leverage each other's ideas.

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).

4. What works? What doesn't?: Roy Zimmermann is working in collaboration with the World Bank on a USAID-funded project to analyze the role of ICT on education in developing countries (If you have examples you think should be included in his survey, please upload them to http://www.ictimpact.org).

 

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." 

 

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 ===

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).

5. India Day: There will be an OLPC Day in India on 4 August in a venue to be determined. On the agenda is a discussion on learning by David Cavallo.

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===

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.

:[[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Glucose_Modules]]

:[[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Fructose_Modules]]

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.

And to please announce them as explained here:

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.

:[[ReleaseTeam#Module_release]]

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/).

7. SocialCalc: KS Preeti has done a thorough review of the latest release of SocialCalc. Such feedback is enormously helpful to developers. Please help us by reviewing your favorite Activities and filing detailed reports either to the wiki or the Sugar list.

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:

8. Gears: David Van Assche continues to make progress on getting Google Gears running under Sugar.

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

  LANG=C xterm -fa "DejaVu LGC Sans Mono" -fs 8 +sb

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

10. Etoys Quickguides: Ted Kaehler reports that the PDF file containing all of the Etoys QuickGuides is now only 4MB (instead of 22MB) thanks to a suggestion by Tim Falconer (See

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.

11. ReviewBoard: Sayamindu Dasgupta has set up an instance of ReviewBoard at http://xenguest1.laptop.org/ for exploring. A basic workflow for using ReviewBoard is available online ([http://code.google.com/p/reviewboard/wiki/UserBasics]).  

15. Tomeu Vizoso's busy week:

12. Misc: Tomeu Vizoso reviewed and pushed out patches this week and has begun working on Journal object transfer. Marco Pesenti Gritti is taking a well-deserved vacation. Daniel Drake addressed issues associated with the Fedora 9 rebase and has some code that brings the Record activity back into a somewhat usable state.

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

* Clean up the Trac mess along with Marco;

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

* Fix alignment of icons in the frame.

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

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.

13. 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-28-July-4-som.jpg]]).

==Sugar in the news==

==Sugar in the news==