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Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)

Revision as of 10:11, 17 October 2010

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==Sugar Digest==
 
==Sugar Digest==
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1. Simon Schampijer (erikos) and the Release Team have made the Sucrose 0.90 tarballs available (See [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-September/027357.html 1]). The release notes are available at [[0.90/Notes]]. 0.90 represents a significant improvement over 0.88, most notably in regard to dozens of new learning activities; support for ad hoc networks and a more stable collaboration experience; a new Home view configuration able to display more activity icons; improved filtering options in the Journal; and additional key bindings for using Sugar on non-OLPC-XO hardware. None of these changes are dramatic: our goal is steady improvement, without requiring schools to make any major changes to their current Sugar processes. Kudos to the Design, Developer, and Testing teams for all their contributions.
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1. I work up this morning to an email from Andres Aguirre. Andres is part of a team in Montevideo working on a robotics interface to the OLPC XO. I saw an early version when I was in Montevideo in June.
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0.90 will be incorporated into the upcoming Sugar-on-a-Stick release. It undoubtedly has some bugs, so any testing you can provide would be appreciated. See...
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:Hi Walter, how are you?
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:I'm part of the Butiá team, maybe you remember us, in your last visit to Montevideo/Uruguay we show you an early prototype of the Butiá robot (a robot that integrates with the XO). We have released the 1.0 versión of the sources, which it has fully integration with tortugarte (http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/publicaciones.html). Last month we gave near of 30 Butiá robots in a robotic event organized by the University. This robots were given to secondary schools of all the country, in this event we gave some tutorials and exercises to do with our help. One of the schools did a great line follower in tortugarte ;) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szp0LWLyPIg  Then in the second day we give some tutorials and some childrens really enjoy the experience, like Pedro a 10 years old children who really has programming skills ! http://www.flickr.com/photos/butiarobot/5059177334/ http://www.youtube.com/aguirrea#p/u/7/p0y11iyhFko
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:In future months we will go to the schools which we give the robot to continue teaching and giving new challenges. If you like to see more about butiá, we have a flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/butiarobot/ and also a web page: http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia
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:See you in Clei2010!
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:Best regards
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:Andrés
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2. I've been spending way too much time in airplanes and airports of late: two trips to Europe in two weeks. I was on a review committee at KTK in Stockholm at the beginning of last week and gave a keynote at the Open World Forum in Paris at the end of this week. I head to Costa Rica to run a Sugar/OLPC workshop with Claudia Urrea next week.
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It is a great project and also great example of the Sugar community at its best: a local team working to solve a local problem by building upon community resources and enhancing those resources for everyone. This is a model for growth in the spirit of Free Software.
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The good news is that I get a lot of code written on the airplane. I have been working on some significant enhancements to Turtle Blocks, Sliderule, Abacus, and Visual Match (AKA, Dimensions).
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2. My seemingly non-stop travel continues. I am at the airport once again, on the way to Asunción. I'm giving a talk at CLEI (Conferencia Latinoamericana de Informática) on Monday. It wil be an opportunity to catch up with Educa Paraguay and visit Caacupé again -- I was really inspired by the teachers and children on my last visit.
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Turtle Blocks v99, which will be released this week, includes re-skinable turtles, which means you can use the turtle as a sprite to do animations. I also fixed up a number of small bugs, such as a problem with the upper bound of the Random block. The Set XY block now honors pen up and pen down. And most blocks that take two arguments will auto-expand to prevent overlapping. I also added locale support for the form of the decimal point when using number blocks, e.g., in German, a comma is used to designate the decimal point; in English, a period is used.
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Coming up in the next 6 weeks are trips to Miami, Lima, New York, Albany, Mexico DF, Montevideo, and Brussels.
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Sliderule v21 now supports copy/paste so that you can copy the results of your calculations to the clip board and paste numbers into the slide and reticule. It also has undergone a major refactoring with the intension of making it easier to create custom slides and to make further modifications to the code.
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3. I do spend most of my time on the plane writing code. I've been pushing more and more in the direction of making the various activities I maintain easier to modify with the intention that teachers and students will use them as a launching point for their own expression (Turtle Art Arduino being an extreme example). My approach is to both improve my coding practices -- I've gotten great feedback on my Python programming from the community -- I am trying to better isolate the various objects that I expect users will want to change -- and also to entice the users into making modifications by setting an expectation that the activities can be reshaped. I've been providing UI affordances for making customizations.
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Abacus v19 also supports copy/paste and, perhaps more interesting, when you switch between different abaci, the value propagates from one to the next, so you can see how the same value is represented on different abaci with a single button click. (Thanks to Tony Forester for coming up with that feature request. Also thanks to Shanjit Singh Jajmann for adding the copy/paste tool bar.)
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4. Ouch. In a moment of wishful thinking, I upgraded my laptop to Maverick, the latest Ubuntu release. Not only did my persisent audio problems not go away, I can no longer suspend. Worse, when I boot on battery, my GNOME session hangs querying the battery state. It really is time to switch.
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Visual Match v26 lets you load custom card sets from the Journal. You can create cards using Paint, Turtle Art, Record, Browse, etc. (Any tool that lets you find or create images.) The only requirement is that you number your images 1 to 9, or 27, or 81, depending upon how many dimensions you are rendering.
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===In the community===
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3. Reminder: we will be holding our mid-term election this month to fill three oversight board positions. Ballots will be issued to all Sugar Labs members. We have five great candidates – [[User:Cjb|Chris Ball]], [[User:Holt|Adam Holt]], [[User:SMParrish|Steven Parrish]], [http://www.blogedu-rosamel.blogspot.com/ Rosamel Norma Ramirez Mendez], and [http://web.me.com/geraldar/The_Shape_of_Disruption/Welcome.html/ Gerald Ardito] – who represent the breadth of the Sugar community: developers, teachers, packagers, and community outreach. No matter whom we elect, the community will be richer because of their participation.
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5. The OLPC/Sugar/Realness summit is next weekend (October 21 – 24) in San Francisco. The summit is being hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC community. More details are available at [http://olpcsf.org/CommunitySummit2010/].
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===In the community===
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4. There will be an OLPC/Sugar/Realness summit October 21 – 24 in San Francisco. The summit is being hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC community. More details are available at [http://olpcsf.org/CommunitySummit2010/].
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6. Waveplace is heading to Haiti again. Follow along by reading [http://waveplace.com/news/blog/ Tim Falconer's blog].
    
===Sugar Labs===
 
===Sugar Labs===
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Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.
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Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.
    
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File:2010-Sept-18-24-som.jpg|2010 Sept 18th-24th (32 emails)
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File:2010-Sept-25-Oct-1-som.jpg|2010 Sept 25th-Oct 1st (43 emails)
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File:2010-Sept-11-17-som.jpg|2010 Sept 11th-17th (56 emails)  
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File:2010-Oct-2-8-som.jpg|2010 Oct 2nd-8th (27 emails)
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File:2010-Oct-9-15-som.jpg|2010 Oct 9th-15th (30 emails)
 
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