Changes

=== Sugar Digest ===

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Yesterday was Day One of Linux Conference Australia (LCA), being held in Hobart, Tasmania. I mostly hung out in the sessions on the business side of free and open source. David Rowe did a nice job advocating for open hardware--something we never were quite able to achieve when I was at OLPC. Most of the speakers delivered pragmatic talks: how to engage with government (Pia Waugh), with large companies (Bdale Garbee), marketing (Joe Brokmeier), etc. The last speaker of the day, Lawrence Crumpton, talked about Microsoft's embracing of open source; his talk was titled ''Did Hell Freeze Over?'' Alas, the title was the highlight of the talk. The efforts he described as successes were all shallow and clumbsy efforts at engagement with lots of strings attached. I don't think he once mentioned "free as in speech" and he essentially delegated FOSS efforts to the non-commercial sector. I, for one, remain skeptical. Actions will speak louder than words.

1. Yesterday was Day One of Linux Conference Australia (LCA), being held in Hobart, Tasmania. I mostly hung out in the sessions on the business side of free and open source. David Rowe did a nice job advocating for open hardware--something we never were quite able to achieve when I was at OLPC. Most of the speakers delivered pragmatic talks: how to engage with government (Pia Waugh), with large companies (Bdale Garbee), marketing (Joe Brokmeier), etc. The last speaker of the day, Lawrence Crumpton, talked about Microsoft's embracing of open source; his talk was titled ''Did Hell Freeze Over?'' Alas, the title was the highlight of the talk. The efforts he described as successes were all shallow and clumsy efforts at engagement with lots of strings attached. I don't think he once mentioned "free as in speech" and he essentially delegated FOSS efforts to the non-commercial sector. I, for one, remain skeptical. Actions will speak louder than words.

Pia and I did get started on a disucssion about how best to move forward with one laptop per child in the region. She is rightly still enamoured with the OLPC-XO-1 hardware, as it meets the needs imposed by the harsh environmental conditions faced in many of her potential deployment sites. We discussed strategies for building sustainable local support and the need for global cooperation in order to increase efficiency. We'll keep brainstorming. We've got a Birds of a Feather session at the end of the week that promises to bring more minds to the table as well.

Pia and I did get started on a discussion about how best to move forward with one laptop per child in the region. She is rightly still enamored with the OLPC-XO-1 hardware, as it meets the needs imposed by the harsh environmental conditions faced in many of her potential deployment sites. We discussed strategies for building sustainable local support and the need for global cooperation in order to increase efficiency. We'll keep brainstorming. We've got a Birds of a Feather session at the end of the week that promises to bring more minds to the table as well.

I had dinner last night with Rob Savoye, among others. Rob continues to make progress on Gnash. He has some very nice results on the XO hardware—yes you can play Youtube videos and ys you can run a stand-alone SWF player for which we talked about putting together a simple Sugar wrapper. Rob's other big project right now involves finding workarounds to the plethora of proprietary codecs that encumber FOSS projects.

I had dinner last night with Rob Savoye, among others. Rob continues to make progress on Gnash. He has some very nice results on the XO hardware—yes you can play Youtube videos and ys you can run a stand-alone SWF player for which we talked about putting together a simple Sugar wrapper. Rob's other big project right now involves finding workarounds to the plethora of proprietary codecs that encumber FOSS projects.

2. Occassionally my tendency towards addictive behavior emerges. I haven't been able to kick the habit of coding. I started working on the portfolio fork of Turtle Art last week during XO Camp and I wrote Python across the Pacific and I stayed up much to late last night after visiting some pubs coding. In the spirit of "eat your own dogfood", my goal is to get things into sufficient shape so as to be able to give my LCA talk using Turtle Art. I am close, but my Python and GTK skills are still pretty lacking. You can track my prgress in gitorious—I am making frequent commits—and feel free to submit patches!! And my apologies to everyone for lack of eye contact.

2. Occassionally my tendency towards addictive behavior emerges. I haven't been able to kick the habit of coding. I started working on the portfolio fork of Turtle Art last week during XO Camp and I wrote Python across the Pacific and I stayed up much to late last night after visiting some pubs coding. In the spirit of "eat your own dogfood", my goal is to get things into sufficient shape so as to be able to give my LCA talk using Turtle Art. I am close, but my Python and GTK skills are still pretty lacking. You can track my progress in gitorious—I am making frequent commits—and feel free to submit patches!! And my apologies to everyone for lack of eye contact.

3. Gary Martin has being doing some great work in the wiki on our Getting Involved page (See http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/GettingInvolved). Anyone want to tackle our About page, which is not very helpful.

3. Gary Martin has being doing some great work in the wiki on our Getting Involved page (See http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/GettingInvolved). Anyone want to tackle our About page, which is not very helpful.