Archive/Current Events/2011-06-28

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Sugar Digest

“What we need are notions, not notations.” —Gauss

1. I gather that I am the only one who had never read the "Mathematician's Lament", but in case you haven't read it in a while and need a refresher on "notions" instead of "notations", see [1].

It is also always worth rereading Marvin Minksy's essays on learning math: [2]

2. One of the pleasures of working in the Sugar community is that you get thoughtful feedback on your work from a wide range of people. Last week I got a request from a teacher in Uruguay for some new features in Turtle Blocks. (I included one—coordinate grid marked in centimeters—in Version 109. I also got feedback from Alan Kay and Barry Newell about the merits of the inclusion of an Arc block, which motivated me to finally write a Sugar Activity based on Barry's book, Turtle Confusion: Logo Puzzles and Riddles. Check out [3]. Also, at this weekend's Design Team meeting, I got very helpful feedback from Sascha Silbe, Gary Martin, and Manuel Quiñones regarding the enhancements I have been proposing to View Source (See Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars/View-Source_Enhancements). Perhaps the most significant change is that I now put a copy of the cloned activity bundle into the Journal, thus maintaining equal status for the clone within the Sugar infrastructure. You can find the current patches here [4] and here [5].

In the community

3. There will be a Turtle Art Day in Costa Rica in July. We may hold simultaneous workshops at other deployments as well: stay tuned (See http://www.facultadeducacion.ucr.ac.cr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16&Itemid=23).

4. The TedxKids@Brussels talks are online at [youtube.com/playlist?p=PLA14C60FA101D1F4C].

Tech Talk

5. Peter Robinson is very close to releasing Sugar on a Stick Version 5. Please help us test: http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-x86_64.iso and http://fedora.roving-it.com/SoaSv5-20110612-i686.iso

6. I cooked up a patch to the Edit Activity—Sugar's plain-text editor—to enable editing files from outside of the Journal. I am waiting for Nate Theis, Edit maintainer, to accept the patches, but if you want to play with it, see my clone on Gitorious [6].

7. Martin Abente has implemented multiple-object select for the Sugar Journal. His patches are not quite ready for release—there is a performance-related issue with unnecessary list regeneration that Martin is working on, but having tried it, even in its current form, it is really nice.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

2011 June 4th–10th (80 emails)

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