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 and blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) 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 and blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) 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. Oversight: We had a meeting of the acting oversight board (minutes are available [[Sugar_Labs/OversightBoard/Minutes#Friday_July_18_2008_-_17.00_.28UTC.29|here]]).  

1. Award-winning: We can start referring to Sugar as "award-winning software." It earned a silver medal in the International Design Excellence Awards '08 and was undoubtedly one of the reasons the OLPC XO-1 laptop won the gold medal (Please see [http://www.idsa.org/IDEA_Awards/gallery/2008/award_details.asp?ID=772 IDEA_Awards]).

2. Infrastructure: Ivan Krstić and Bernie Innocenti have been moving the Sugar Labs back-end infrastructure to a new server hosted at MIT. Please report any problems you may have encountered post-move (One artifact to note: its.an.education.project@tema.lo-res.org '''will not work'''. It will bounce e-mails. Please change your address book to iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org).

2. Outreach: Dave Farning has been developing a road map for outreach to various communities (apparently we already have the attention of the design community; maybe our next award will be from the education community). Specifically, he suggests that we:

3. "Follow Through": Chris Leonard has created a wiki page ([[EducationTeam/Lesson Plan resources]]) to aggregate collections of lesson plans or curriculum development materials "posted in some dusty corners of the Internet"; they provide potentially useful modules of curricular content (constructionist and instructionist) that can either be adapted or at least serve as examples. Please contribute to the list with your own ideas and feedback on the postings.

* Engage the package maintainers for the various Linux distributions

** Make sure they are aware of Sugar;

** Help build a community within each distribution to packages Sugar and Sugar Activities;

** Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.

Another useful exercise would be to enhance these lesson plans through consideration of everything Sugar has to offer: journaling, collaboration, etc. A few detailed guides would go a long way towards opening the door to others, regardless of where the learning goals come from, generative or handed down from above.

** Make sure they are aware of the Sugar packaging efforts (either .deb or .rpm);

** Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.

4. From Blog of Project Ceibal: More resources for teachers and learners:

* [http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2008/07/on-june-th-27th-we-launched-book-ceibal.html on-june-th-27th-we-launched-book-ceibal.html]

** Make sure they are aware of Sugar;

* [http://www.ceibal.edu.uy/gobiernoelectronico/pdf_libro/Libro_CEIBAL_en_la_sociedad_del_siglo_XXI.pdf Libro_CEIBAL_en_la_sociedad_del_siglo_XXI.pdf]

** Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators;

* [http://swiki.agro.uba.ar/small_land/uploads/193/Libro_Completo.pdf Libro_Completo.pdf]

** Help expand the community to include development of pedagogy; models of use; etc.

The communities deploying Sugar are beginning to make their materials and learning publicly available. I look forward to seeing some of the wonderful materials created by the team at Inttelmex made public soon.

Dave reports our progress to date:

5. Help wanted: OLPC has a posted job opening for a Sugar UI coder (Please see [http://laptop.org/en/jobs.shtml#User%20Interface%20Developer%20for%20Sugar User Interface Developer for Sugar]). There is also interest expressed by numerous parties for help porting Sugar to a number of different Linux-based platforms. Please contact me (walter AT sugarlabs.org) if you have an interest in such work.

* We are working with Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu and are working towards a basic set of stable packages for their distributions;

* We are in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with eduction distributions (Please help us);

* Outside of the OLPC deployments, we are still in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with education communities (Again, your help is needed here--we want to establish a "bottom-up" approach to compliment the OLPC top-down efforts).

=== Community jams and meetups ===

3. "Congratulations! but Sugar sucks": As we near code freeze for Sucrose 8.2, Ben Schwartz has identified six areas in need of improvement. In a thread with a somewhat unfortunate subject field, these are discussed as candidate areas we should focus on for the next release (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007390.html). The discussion begs the question of how Sugar Labs can rise above day-to-day deployment headaches in order to ensure that there is a solid foundation being built. A model I have been advocating for Sugar Labs is as the place where the goals and architecture for Sugar are established. The community, of course, vets those goals, critiques the architecture, and provides the means of achieving those goals.

6. Teacher Jam Chicago: July 29, 2008 @ Google Chicago

4. "Kid contributions": John Gilmore started a discussion bemoaning the fact that as far as we know, there have not yet been any patches to Sugar submitted by a child (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007349.html). My response to John was:

* while the children have not yet been making modification to the Sugar codebase, there is evidence of a cultural shift in schools using Sugar that is synergistic with the ideals of appropriation of not just software, but of ideas. Not a bad start.

7. Especially for teachers Uruguayans: A round table and conference of the "Regional Forum Ceibal learn from Digital Content educational and Intelligence" will be held in Montevideo on July 23—25 and will be transmitted live on Gateway Ceibal.

5. OEMs: Are we ready to start contacting OEMs? (There are a number of new products being announced in the low-cost laptop space. How do we ensure that Sugar is an option for these products?)

With some help from Marco Pesenti Gritti, I've been trying to get my xsession configured on Ubuntu to run from the Joyride build in my home directory (sugar-jhbuild) instead of the build installed from "apt-get sugar". Not quite working due to some pathname scrambling—hopefully I'll be able to post instructions soon.

7. Physics game jam: Brian Jordangi is organizing a physics game-jam competition in Boston, MA the weekend of August 29.

9. Browse: Simon Schampijer released a new xulrunner rpm (xulrunner-1.9-1.olpc3.2) that brings back Sugar- and OLPC-specific patches (e.g., permission patch to work with Bitfrost, no-native theme patch) that were lost when updating to the latest tarball. The layout on many sites were broken without these patches. It is available in Joyride >= 2155. Tomeu Vizoso solved the remaining issues that prevented Google Gears from running on the Browse activity.

8. FLOSS Manual sprint: Anne Gentile is organizing an OLPC/Sugar FLOSS Manuals book sprint in Austin, TX at the end of next month.

11. Geography: A team of students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have just finished developing a world-geography game (Please see [http://code.google.com/p/rpiolpcs08/ RPI Geography]). Gabriel Eirea is working on "Conozco Uruguay", an Uruguayan geography educational game. (There are also several GCompris geography games available, thanks to Bruno Coudoin; please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/GCompris GCompris Geography])

9. Sugar-jhbuild: I finally managed to get my xsessions configured so that I could run both Sugar as installed by apt-get sugar and the latest jpyride version I built by hand using sugar-jhbuild (Please see [[DevelopmentTeam/Jhbuild#Creating_an_xsession_for_Sugar-jhbuild|xsession]] for the details).

12. SMS: Ankur Verma has built an SMS Gateway that can be accessed by XO through web browser, enabling one to send and receive SMS messages from within Sugar (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SMS).

10. Sugar appliance: Bryan Kearney has built a Sugar appliance based upon the Thincrust toolkit (Please see [http://www.thincrust.net Thincrust] where you'll learn that "an appliance is a pre-configured application and operating system bundle"). The directions for using the appliance are:

# Download http://sugar.s3.amazonaws.com/sugarAppliance.tar.gz

# Run virt-image sugar.xml

13. Physics: Brian Jordan worked on fleshing out OLPC Physics portal page (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics). He continues to work on the physics activity, having collected advice from teachers and testers, including feedback from the OLPC-Sur list (many of whom are teachers using OLPC in Peru and Uruguay). Bobby Powers continued to work on his system-dynamics activity (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Model and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Model/Mockups).

11. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has made a new version of Develop (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Develop Develop]). Jameson recommends you use a recent Joyride (> 2170).

14. Play Go: Andrés Ambrois has been working on the PlayGo activity; he has made some patches and done some general cleaning up of the code. He is going to tackle collaboration next (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/PlayGo).

12. Road-map updates: Marco Pesenti Gritti announced that letting the code freeze for this release slip. "With the current speed of development of the OLPC release it would just be impractical." Marco has

started a tentative 0.84 schedule (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84]]).

15. Food Force: Manusheel Gupta reports progress on the Food Force game (Please see [http://code.google.com/p/foodforce/ food force]).

Marco is finally back working full time on OLPC. He spent this week fixing blocker bugs for the next release, doing a lot of triage and several patch reviews. He implemented an improved logic handling new windows in the Browse activity, which, while not yet ideal, should allow all the web sites that Uruguay has had problems with to work correctly. Marco also tracked down and fixed an infinite loop in the shell. Finally, with Tomeu Vizoso, he solved a problem with the web widget size allocation, which is likely to have caused several problems.

* The artwork better fits with the text display;

* A messaging system has been developed, making it a more interactive experience.

16. Sugar control panel: Simon added documentation for the graphical control panel (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Control_Panel#The_graphical_user_interface Sugar Control Panel GUI]) and fixed related control-panel bugs, such as [http://dev.laptop.org/tivcket/7510 Ticket #7510].

Simon has been implementing a mechanism for feedback from 'Register' process in the form of an alert that is displayed in the Home view.

17. Speech synthesis: Hemant Goyals's Google Summer of Code project, "Integration of Speech Synthesis in Sugar Environment", is making great progress, according to Simon, the project supervisor. You can follow the progress at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Hemant_goyal.

14. Computer vision: Nirav Patel is soliciting feedback regarding what computer vision should it be in regard to "gaming, input, accessibility, education, or anything else" (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/games/2008-July/000664.html). He gives some examples at http://eclecti.cc/olpc.

18. Creative Commons: The addition of a Creative Commons (CC) licensing functionality in the Journal was discussed at this week's Sugar developers meeting (Please see [[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#Creative_commons_licensing_functionality_in_the_journal|Creative Commons licensing functionality in the Journal]]).  

15. Etoys: Takashi Yamamiya reports that there is new release of Etoys, which includes Tubes, a Pango speed-up, and a fix to the clipboard.

# Eben Eliason will make mock-up by August 15 ([http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7551 Ticket 7551]);

* [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2059.tar.gz etoys-3.0.2059.tar.gz]

* [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-85.tar.gz etoys-activity-85.tar.gz]

19. Collaboration: Morgan Collett tested a fix for blocker [http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7444 Ticket #7444] ("cannot close a shared activity when the initiator has disconnected"). Elliot Fairweather work on the BuddyInfo interface for telepathy-synapse; he has Cerebro/Synapse enabled buddies appearing in the mesh view (Please see [http://people.collabora.co.uk/~elliot/synapse_buddy.png synapse_buddy.png]).  Guillaume Desmottes made some improvements on "Gadget" integration into Sugar (Gadget is an XMPP server component being developed to scale Jabber-server-based collaborative activities). The presence-service is now able to properly manage buddies and activities from gadget views and update them according Gadget events.

=== Sugar Labs ===

20. Translations: Sayamindu Dasgupta is testing a new language-pack generation system. New features include:

16. Infrastructure: Bernie Innocenti reports that on Monday, the following services were moved to Solarsail:

* wiki.sugarlabs.org

* Support for activity.linfo files, which will support the translation of the names of activities;

* Support for rollback and uninstallation of individual language packs;

* Support for branches, which will enable support for the various branches within Joyride, e.g., 8.1.x, 8.2.x, and eventually, 9.1.x

* the sugar@ mailing list

* wiki pages related to Sugar

* pootle

21. Sugar Almanac: Faisal Anwar continues his work on the Sugar developer documentation. He has some sample code and instructions on using Pango to render fonts in your Sugar activities as well as an updated set of steps to internationalize your activity (based on the instructions at [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Internationalization_in_Sugar Internationalization in Sugar]) and his own experience getting text to translate (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac Sugar Almanac]).

We decided to wait moving these until we get the full backups running and the machine racked in its final home.

22. Tinderbox: Edward Cherlin contacted Luke Crawford, who runs a colocation center in California; Luke has offered Sugar Labs Xen virtual machines for use as tinderboxes. The first test machine, running CentOS, is at sugarlabs1.xen.prgmr.com. Luke is building a Fedora 9 image for us, which should be ready some time this week. Depending on our needs and his excess capacity, it will be possible to

Services still hosted by develer.com include:

add more machines. Marco offered to take the lead on setting up the tinderboxes.

* api.sugarlabs.org

* courses.sugrlabs.org

* user drop box for downloads.sugarlabs.org

23. Activity updates: Eben Eliason has been working on tickets relevant to the pending 8.2 release, including new mockups for a software update system. Eben has been leading the discussion about activity versioning, which will probably not be resolved until release 9.1 Tomeu Vizoso added the ability to delete activities from the Home View. C. Scott Ananian worked an activity update control panel ([http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4951 Ticket #4951]) inspired by OLPC Austria's XO-get activity and Bert Freudenberg's script. Scott requests that activity authors consider adding "update_url" fields to their activity.info files (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles). Brian Jordan wrote a script for pulling activities from git repositories and creating symlinks to them from the Activities folder; this enables you to "git pull" the newest version of an activity from a repository directly in a running Sugar environment (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_co-op Activity Coop]).

The above services will go on our second machine as soon if we get it racked. Develer is glad to keep them as long as needed.

Thanks to Bernie and Ivan Krstić.

 

 

 

25. Release process: Marco Pesenti Gritti, back from vacation, has been spending time thinking about the interaction of the OLPC and Sugar Labs release processes; progress is being made, but there is more work to do. We'd like to get this right, as it will only get more complicated as we are working with more vendors and more distributions.

 

26. 8.2.0 bug fixing: Marco has been busy triaging and diagnosing tickets and reviewing patches for the upcoming 8.2.0 release. (One collection of bugs he dispatched were related to problems with the zoom-level logic in Joyride.)

 

27. 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-July-12-18-som.jpg]]). A prominent theme is mathematics education.

17. 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-July-19-25-som.jpg]]). The verbs are prominent: doing; programming; learning; and education; math; etc.

==Sugar in the news==

==Sugar in the news==