Sugar Labs

Archive/Current Events/2016-05-25

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Sugar Digest 2016-05

1. One of my favorite Marvin Minsky stories took place in the mid 1990s. Marvin and I had to meet someone at the bar at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in downtown Boston. Marvin, as was his habit, was wearing a vest—one with large, useful pockets. As we started to walk into the bar, we were stopped and told that we needed neckties in order to enter. Marvin told the doorman that we had to go in for a meeting, but that we did not have neckties. The doorman very graciously offered to lend us neckties. He momentarily stepped into the cloakroom and returned with two ties; he offered one to each of us. Marvin took a tie, said "thank you", wrapped it around his waist, and walked into the bar.

2. Help me in welcoming our six summer interns from the Google Summer of Code program: Yash Agarwal, Vikram Ahuja, Abhijit Patel, Hemant Kasat, Jeremie Amsellem, and Utkarsh Tiwari. Yash will be working on a Font Editor Activity under the mentorship of Dave Crossland and Eli Heuer. Vikram is working with Tymon Radzik and me on a GIT Backend for activities. Abhijit is working with Sam Parkinson on a "Journal Rethink". Hemant is working with Devin Ulibarri on adding some new widgets to Music Blocks. Jeremie is working with Lionel Laské and Michaël Ohayon on Sugarizer. Utkarsh is working with Tony Anderson and Sebastian Silva on "Sugar on the Ground", a series of enhancements to Sugar in support of small and off-line deployments.

We'll be meeting as a group on Fridays at 12:00 UTC beginning in late May on irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting. Feel free to join us.

We had many more quality proposals than slots. I'd like thank everyone who applied this year and hope that even if you were not among the selected projects, you will continue to contribute to the Sugar Labs community.

In the Community

3. We have a Sugar Labs oversight board meeting on Friday, 6 May, at 16:00 UTC.

The agenda includes:

Please join us on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting.

4. I was busy with Music Blocks workshops in April: at the Boston Coding Camp; the Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester (with Mariah Noelle Villarreal) and the Walsh Middle School in Framingham, MA (with Pascal Chesnais).

5. Dave Crossland has organized a WIKI gardening party for the weekend of May 14-15. Those who are in the Boston area will meet together at my office at MIT, W31-302. We'll see more of you on line as well as we attempt to prune deprecated pages and ensure the content is up to date. We'll also be migrating some content to www.sugarlabs.org.

Tech Talk

6. Sebastian Silva announced last week some progress on running Sugar Activities from the GNU/Linux desktop. He patched sugar-toolkit-gtk3 to enable activities to run using sugar-activity script (tested in Gnome, XFCE and Sugar itself).

Sebastian also created a notification-tray applet that allows one to start activities and even invoke journal items (See [2]). More details are available at Features/FreeDesktop integration.

Sugar Labs

7. Please visit our planet.

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