Re: [Sugar-devel] RIT Math4Team PacMath Difficulties

2010-02-12 Thread Jim Simmons
Dennis, There is a project in Gitorious that sounds like it might be of use to you: http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugargame I haven't tried it myself, but the description sounds promising. James Simmons Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:42:15 -0500 From: Dennis Rodriguez (RIT Student)

[Sugar-devel] More new and revised chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-02-03 Thread Jim Simmons
In this latest draft I have added a not quite complete chapter on Making Shared Activities. The part that is missing is on using DBus Tubes to remotely call methods, and it's missing because I've never done it. I do plan to learn how to do this, come up with a decent example program (something

Re: [Sugar-devel] How to start the Browse activity from my own activity?

2010-02-03 Thread Jim Simmons
Thomas, You should be able to create your web page as a Journal entry with the MIME type of text/html, then use code like that described here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Almanac/sugar.datastore.datastore#How_do_I_resume_an_activity_from_the_datastore_programmatically.3F That

Re: [Sugar-devel] IMPORTANT: sugar-jhbuild run no longer starts sugar-emulator by default

2010-02-03 Thread Jim Simmons
Sascha, I'm not sure that what you're proposing is any less confusing than what we have now. In my opinion sugar-jhbuild IS an alternative to sugar-emulator, at least if you define sugar-emulator as what is provided as a Sugar environment by Fedora and other distros. You can run either one and

Re: [Sugar-devel] IMPORTANT: sugar-jhbuild run no longer starts sugar-emulator by default

2010-02-03 Thread Jim Simmons
Scott, In the Make Your Own sugar Activities! book I'm doing at Floss Manuals I do refer to sugar-emulator as something distinct from sugar-jhbuild. For instance, I'll say, If you're using sugar-jhbuild under Fedora 11 do this, if you're using sugar-jhbuild do that. Even though technically what

Re: [Sugar-devel] [support-gang] New and revised chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-02-02 Thread Jim Simmons
at 4:41 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 10:24:50AM -0600, Jim Simmons wrote: I just finished writing another chapter of the book, this one on adding Text to Speech to your Activities.  I've also made various additions and corrections to the rest

Re: [Sugar-devel] [support-gang] Collaboration woes

2010-01-27 Thread Jim Simmons
, Sascha Silbe sascha-ml-ui-sugar-de...@silbe.org wrote: On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 07:25:07PM -0600, Jim Simmons wrote: [CC'ing sugar-devel again for NetworkManager advice] It occured to me to check the logs of the SECOND Linux user I was runing sugar-emulator as (using su) and this time I DID

Re: [Sugar-devel] [support-gang] Collaboration woes

2010-01-25 Thread Jim Simmons
of us on the same schedule seems unlikely. I do have something working for now, and I'll document everything I've learned in the book. Thanks, James Simmons On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Sascha Silbe sascha-ml-reply-to-201...@silbe.org wrote: On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 07:49:34AM -0600, Jim

Re: [Sugar-devel] [support-gang] Collaboration woes

2010-01-25 Thread Jim Simmons
Thomas, I did notice this morning that most of the 20 users I was seeing in my Neighborhood has EXACTLY the same colors. They may well be the ghost users you speak of. I don't know if Gadget is the issue, but I do know that with .82 running on F10 I can't connect to JSLO, or rather I can but

Re: [Sugar-devel] [support-gang] Collaboration woes

2010-01-24 Thread Jim Simmons
in as her. I have no such problem in F10. I'm going to continue with the book as best I can under the circumstances. James Simmons On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 5:20 AM, Sascha Silbe sascha-ml-ui-sugar-de...@silbe.org wrote: On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 06:46:56PM -0600, Jim Simmons wrote: [F11, probably

[Sugar-devel] Collaboration woes

2010-01-23 Thread Jim Simmons
Last night I attempted to begin the chapter in my book on collaboration in Sugar. Some of my Activities do file transfers so I have had some experience with it before. It seems to me that setting up a test environment for collaboration has always been a source of frustration but I don't remember

Re: [Sugar-devel] [support-gang] Collaboration woes

2010-01-23 Thread Jim Simmons
AM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 23.01.2010, at 17:31, Jim Simmons wrote: Last night I attempted to begin the chapter in my book on collaboration in Sugar.  Some of my Activities do file transfers so I have had some experience with it before.  It seems to me that setting up

Re: [Sugar-devel] New and revised chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-22 Thread Jim Simmons
this book is out the door some more qualified person will do an advanced book covering all the stuff I could not. James Simmons On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 4:41 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 10:24:50AM -0600, Jim Simmons wrote: I just finished writing another

Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] New and revised chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-22 Thread Jim Simmons
at L'Atelier (http://www.atelier.fr/usages/3/07012010/one-laptop-per-child-ordinateur-veritable-revolution-pedagogique-39192-.html) Thanks. Sean On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: I just finished writing another chapter of the book, this one on adding

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar Activities and Permission Errors

2010-01-22 Thread Jim Simmons
Francis, Activities cannot be made to run as root. However, there should be no need whatsoever to do this. You can download files from a website using code like that in the Get Internet Archive Books activity. That Activity uses http to download books from the Internet Archive website. The

Re: [Sugar-devel] Development

2010-01-22 Thread Jim Simmons
Fran, The book I referred to in my previous email to you recommends what I use. It is a book for beginning Activity developers and may be of use to you, even though it isn't finished. I would appreciate any feedback you could give me on it. James Simmons Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:42:14

Re: [Sugar-devel] New and revised chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-21 Thread Jim Simmons
fully understanding it. Your work has made speech easy to add to an Activity, so maybe after the book is out we'll start seeing more Activities that use it. James Simmons On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 4:41 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 10:24:50AM -0600, Jim

Re: [Sugar-devel] New and revised chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-21 Thread Jim Simmons
Aleksey, I did consider mentioning the word tracking feature you put in your example. However, when I tried your example with actual book text rather than letting it speak the source code of the program it seemed to actually skip speaking some of the words. The markup version was more robust.

[Sugar-devel] Assistance needed to debug Sugar Activities book examples for TTS

2010-01-16 Thread Jim Simmons
Aleksey, I'm writing a beginner's book on creating Sugar Activities over at Floss Manuals. The URL is: http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/ActivitiesGuideSugar/WebHome I'm doing a chapter on adding Text To Speech to your Activity. I'm using simplified versions of Read Etexts as sample code

Re: [Sugar-devel] [support-gang] Several chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-14 Thread Jim Simmons
common use of Sugar in most homes and classrooms, and still far from obvious. I would love to see some data that backs up that assertion. -walter SJ On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Samuel, I agree that in addition to the beginner's manual I'm putting

Re: [Sugar-devel] Several chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-12 Thread Jim Simmons
As many of you know, I've been working on a handbook for creating Sugar Activities and I have added another couple of chapters to it (on Pootle and distributing your Activity) and made numerous corrections to earlier chapters, many of them based on suggestions you made. Stuff still to do: Text To

Re: [Sugar-devel] Several chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-12 Thread Jim Simmons
...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 12.01.2010, at 16:43, Jim Simmons wrote: http://objavi.flossmanuals.net/books/ActivitiesGuideSugar-en-2010.01.11-23.05.32.pdf Very nice, Jim! It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Sugar activity should be written in Python. However, there are other means

Re: [Sugar-devel] SOAS 2 problems

2010-01-11 Thread Jim Simmons
Tomeu and David, I experienced exactly the same problem with the Blueberry Boot Helper CD that Dave has. The message is exactly the same. I reported it at bugs.sugarlabs.org. I would be surprised if the problem was an incomplete download. I have had good success booting Blueberry directly

Re: [Sugar-devel] SoaS with Sugar 0.87.2 coming to a system near you

2010-01-11 Thread Jim Simmons
Simon, Get IA Books does allow you to change the format of the book from the default of DjVu. That drop down is disabled until you actually have a book selected for downloading. Once you have selected a book from the list it should enable itself and you can change the download format before

Re: [Sugar-devel] Several chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-06 Thread Jim Simmons
wrote: Is Sugar on a Stick a suitable test environment for you? That is 0.86. -walter On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Walter, I've used the import exception method myself.  It looks like this will be a bit more complicated than I had planned on, because

Re: [Sugar-devel] Several chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-06 Thread Jim Simmons
Gary, I don't have a Mac. My brother has one but lives in another state. I know the latest Macs run a kind of Unix on Intel chips, but can they run sugar-jhbuild? Or do you run Sugar in a VM of some kind? If you browse through my chapters you'll see my way of doing things and maybe you can

Re: [Sugar-devel] Several chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-06 Thread Jim Simmons
Thomas, In the chapter Adding Refinements I have some sample code for creating, listing, and reading from Journal entries. I'll probably add an example of deleting a Journal entry as well. And while I am no expert in collaboration *yet* I will definitely be covering that in a future chapter. I

[Sugar-devel] Several chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-05 Thread Jim Simmons
I've been working on a Floss Manual that should be a beginner's guide to creating Sugar Activities. I've got 64 page's worth (in the PDF version) written and I feel confident that I will finish this book eventually. What I have now may be good enough to criticize. It contains some pretty good

Re: [Sugar-devel] Several chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback

2010-01-05 Thread Jim Simmons
I can figure out the rest. I could probably figure out the PyGame stuff too. It's the developing on a Mac topic that has me stumped. Thanks, James Simmons On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Jim Simmons nices

Re: [Sugar-devel] Religious/Spiritual Text

2009-12-17 Thread Jim Simmons
Art, I don't think your revised version is necessarily an improvement over the original. It sounds new-agey to me and would probably offend more people than the original. While I am against *governments* endorsing specific religions *individuals* certainly ought to be able to do that. If the

Re: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] GetBooks version 4

2009-12-02 Thread Jim Simmons
Sayamindu, Last night I ran the same test on the same XO, no changes to anything, and I was able to find every word I searched for and download PDFs successfully. I can't account for why the other test failed. There was nothing in the log to suggest anything. I *did* notice some odd search

Re: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] GetBooks version 4

2009-11-30 Thread Jim Simmons
Sayamindu, I tried out your new Get Books on my XO running the latest Fedora 12 install that came out last week. For comparison I ran the same tests on the first version of Get Books which I got from the git clone of Get IA Books that you made. I ran the old one on my Sugar test environment on

Re: [Sugar-devel] New F11 for the XO-1 Build 9

2009-11-26 Thread Jim Simmons
Steven, I tried out build 9. It works for me, but has the following issues: 1). You MUST hold down the check button to get it to boot. If you don't it goes to the pretty boot image with one dot and just hangs there. 2). The gstreamer espeak plugin does not appear to be installed. The

Re: [Sugar-devel] Non sugar activities on ASLO

2009-11-23 Thread Jim Simmons
Aleksey, It would be helpful to have a way to distribute things like the gstreamer espeak plugin you wrote. Fedora doesn't currently include it. It would be even better if you could distribute versions that work on the XO running .82, as well as versions for current Fedora. Don't know if that

Re: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Get Books Activity 3, now with SneakerNet/ChappalNet support

2009-11-09 Thread Jim Simmons
Sayamindu, I followed your instructions to test Get Books on my XO. I had a USB drive with the unzipped data you provided such that the XML file and the books directory were in the root directory of the drive. I also used the thumb drive to copy the Activity from the drive to the Journal.

Re: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Get Books Activity 3, now with SneakerNet/ChappalNet support

2009-11-08 Thread Jim Simmons
IA. I would prefer not to hard-code anything (since I'm handling a number of sources, hardcoding for a particular source will lead to a lot of messy code) Let me know what you think. Thanks, Sayamindu On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 2:15 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Sayamindu

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 13, Issue 19

2009-11-05 Thread Jim Simmons
Art, I have been able to host .xo files on a web server in my home. It was an Apache web server provided with my Linux distro and I did nothing whatever to configure it for .xo files. I used this web server on my development box so I could copy my Activities from my development box to my XO

[Sugar-devel] Problems with Read Activity on XO

2009-11-04 Thread Jim Simmons
Sayamindu, I've been having an odd problem with the Read activity on my XO lately. I'd report it as a bug but I don't know how to recreate it or give enough information to see where the problem is coming from. I'm hoping you can help me diagnose what's happening. You might remember giving me a

Re: [Sugar-devel] Problems with Read Activity on XO

2009-11-04 Thread Jim Simmons
Sayamindu, Didn't see any evidence of segfault in dmesg or shell.log. However, I tried out: sugar-launch org.laptop.sugar.ReadActivity and it worked beautifully. Read gave me that ugly dialog that lets you select a document from the Journal, I selected one of the PDFs, and it loaded right up.

Re: [Sugar-devel] Problems with Read Activity on XO

2009-11-04 Thread Jim Simmons
Sayamindu, FYI, Read can't be launched from my Activity Ring either. The only thing that works is the sugar-launch from the Terminal. James Simmons On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Sayamindu, Didn't see any evidence of segfault in dmesg or shell.log

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 12, Issue 90

2009-10-30 Thread Jim Simmons
Samuel, Read Etexts originally used speech-dispatcher and technically it still can. However, Aleksey Lim wrote a plugin for using espeak with gstreamer which works better than speech-dispatcher and does not require the configuration that speech-dispatcher needs. He also rewrote the TTS code in

Re: [Sugar-devel] Strings missing in 0.86 r. 04_10_2009 ReadEtext

2009-10-12 Thread Jim Simmons
Carlo (and anyone else), I want to do everything possible to help my Activities get properly translated. Problem is, I'm not sure if there's something I should be doing that I'm not doing. I have my Activities in pootle. I run python setup.py genpot when I add new Strings to the Activities.

Re: [Sugar-devel] [olpc-nz] Test results from Fabiana

2009-10-01 Thread Jim Simmons
Thanks for your feedback. Get Internet Archive Books has been submitted for Pootle translation. I haven't done a git pull on it in awhile, so it is possible that translation is already done and I should release a new version. Read Etexts has been in Pootle awhile and at least some of the menus

Re: [Sugar-devel] High School Programmer Volunteer?

2009-10-01 Thread Jim Simmons
Caroline, We've seen a lot of student volunteers come and go, but I might be willing to help this kid. One thing I need to know is what is meant by Remote programming type task? James Simmons Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:48:03 -0400 From: Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com Subject:

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 94

2009-09-18 Thread Jim Simmons
Tomeu, You can put me down as an XO owner that is willing to try new images and file bug reports. I don't have any immediate plans to enhance my three Activities so I should have time for other work. James Simmons I personally think that making possible for XO-1 owners to upgrade to recent

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 89

2009-09-16 Thread Jim Simmons
Art, Being a frugal person I do all my home computing on legacy machines like the ones you've tested with. As far as SoaS is concerned, I agree with your conclusions. I got better results than you did with my Pentium III because I've installed a USB 2.0 expansion card on it. I haven't tried a

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 89 (SoaS performance/hard drive swapping)

2009-09-16 Thread Jim Simmons
Art, Sugar on the XO does not have a swap partition because swapping to disk would quickly wear out the solid state drive. You'd have the same problem on a thumb drive, plus swapping to a drive connected to a USB 1.0 port would not be fast. Now the other idea of checking to see if the computer

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 94

2009-09-16 Thread Jim Simmons
/plain; charset=us-ascii Hi Jim, On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 09:31:19AM -0500, Jim Simmons wrote: I have a similar question.  What I want to know is, when I am finally able to upgrade my XO from .82 to something better, will I use SoaS to do it?  Or will I be able to do upgrades over the network

Re: [Sugar-devel] Pulse audio on Fedora 11

2009-09-08 Thread Jim Simmons
My own two cents on Pulse Audio on Fedora 11: it doesn't work. I recently upgraded my Freevo box to Fedora 11 and had MANY sound related issues that were directly or indirectly caused by pulse audio. Freevo of course uses mplayer to play movies. It needs to sync the audio and the video to do

Re: [Sugar-devel] Read-only access to thumb drive forbidden by Rainbow?

2009-08-30 Thread Jim Simmons
Tomeu, Your suggestion was right on the money. When I run a simple program from Terminal that prints out the files it finds it goes through my SD card (also mounted on /media) and seems to stall in the depths of the .olpc_store directory. What I think I need to do is write my own walk-like

Re: [Sugar-devel] Read-only access to thumb drive forbidden by Rainbow?

2009-08-30 Thread Jim Simmons
Tomeu, It turned out that fixing the problem with .olpc.store was pretty simple and I now have an Activity that is functional. The next problem is, it works differently in .82 and .84. In .82 every file on the thumb drive and SD card is treated as a Journal entry and listed out by the datastore

Re: [Sugar-devel] Read-only access to thumb drive forbidden by Rainbow?

2009-08-29 Thread Jim Simmons
Walter, I tried deleting /etc/olpc-security but that had no effect, Even rebooting after deleting olpc-security had no effect. I managed to copy the log messages from my previous efforts to the clipboard and save them to a thumb drive: reserved credentials (10002, 10005) adding group:

[Sugar-devel] Read-only access to thumb drive forbidden by Rainbow?

2009-08-28 Thread Jim Simmons
As I have mentioned in this list before, I am trying to make View Slides able to get pictures that may or may not be in the Journal and add them to a slide presentation. Under .82 objects in thumb drives can be listed using the Data Store API, which was fine. In .84 you cannot do that any more,

Re: [Sugar-devel] Accessing external media from within an activity (was: Re: Problem listing journal objects)

2009-08-27 Thread Jim Simmons
Tomeu, What you're saying seems to contradict what others have told me. I have three places I run Sugar: 1). My XO, running .82. Files on removable media are listed using the datastore API as if they were Journal entries. 2). A linux box running Fedora 10, using the Sugar environment that

Re: [Sugar-devel] RFH - Journal corruption reports fom 8.2.1

2009-08-20 Thread Jim Simmons
Martin, For what it's worth, I've experienced this running the Sugar test environment in both Fedora 10 and 11. It would not seem to be specific to .82. The way to reproduce the problem is to run the Sugar environment in Xephyr (sugar-emulator). Do some stuff, then instead of shutting down

Re: [Sugar-devel] Problem listing journal objects

2009-08-19 Thread Jim Simmons
Michael, What it sounds like to me is that I will get read-only access to /proc/mounts and to files and directories on removable media connected to the USB ports. I can use ordinary Python IO to list directories and read files and find out what is mounted. I can continue to use the datastore

Re: [Sugar-devel] Accessing external media from within an activity (was: Re: Problem listing journal objects)

2009-08-19 Thread Jim Simmons
Sascha, To clarify, the Journal entry for View Slides contains a Zip file with image files in it. I want to be able to create and update this Zip file. I want to add images to it, either from the Journal or from thumb drives. In .82 I could use one API for both. I will also rename and delete

Re: [Sugar-devel] Problem listing journal objects

2009-08-17 Thread Jim Simmons
At lunch today I tried out my latest View Slides on my XO for the first time and found that I *could* see all of the images with the code I was using. So it would seem to be an issue with the Sugar test environment that ships with Fedora 11 and 10, and not an issue with Sugar itself. I think.

[Sugar-devel] Problem listing journal objects

2009-08-14 Thread Jim Simmons
In View Slides I have some code that lists out what image files it finds in the Journal and puts the results in a table, with the idea that these images may be added to a slide show. Until now I have been just putting image files in the root directory of a thumb drive and have been using the code

Re: [Sugar-devel] code review guidelines updated

2009-08-11 Thread Jim Simmons
Tomeu, When Aleksey made changes to Read Etexts to support the gstreamer espeak plugin he had written he made a clone of the Activity in gitorious, and later this clone was merged back into the mainline. I thought this worked pretty well from my standpoint because I could look at his code before

Re: [Sugar-devel] SoaS-for-XO-1 image

2009-08-10 Thread Jim Simmons
Joshua, Before you upgrade an Activity you need to remove the existing one from the Journal. There is no way to overlay an old Activity with a new one. Activities are self contained, so this is not as traumatic as it would be with other popular desktop environments. Read Etexts only does text

Re: [Sugar-devel] SoaS-for-XO-1 image

2009-08-10 Thread Jim Simmons
some of the books in the results table have invalid addresses, for reasons that I have no good way to deal with. James Simmons On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 9:39 AM, Joshua N Pritikinjpriti...@pobox.com wrote: On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 09:15:08AM -0500, Jim Simmons wrote: Read Etexts only does text

Re: [Sugar-devel] Need Help: usb drive not visible in the journal

2009-08-01 Thread Jim Simmons
Sumit, I've experienced this on my own XO. One thing I've found that helps in this situation is to remove the hidden file that Sugar puts on the drive. I think it's named .olpc, but in any case it begins with a period. Sometimes if this file is present the thumb drive will not appear to be

[Sugar-devel] Scaling options for sugar-emulator?

2009-07-30 Thread Jim Simmons
I'm wondering if the options for sugar-emulator are documented somewhere. I couldn't find anything. This is what I'm trying to do: I need to do a desktop recording of Sugar in action. When I try to do this with sugar-emulator running with no options the window size is much too large to record

Re: [Sugar-devel] Datastore DBus API (was: Re: TuxPaint and saving to journal)

2009-07-28 Thread Jim Simmons
Sascha, With regards to Get Internet Archive Books and Read Etexts and View Slides which create Journal entries, it wouldn't be that painful for *me* but it might cause problems for our users. I don't mind updating my own Activities for .86, but I'd like the users who download the latest version

Re: [Sugar-devel] Bundle Activity

2009-07-28 Thread Jim Simmons
Eben, I tried out this Bundle Activity just now. It isn't fully functional and throws Keep errors. The concept of it seems sound though. If I was to create a version of this I'd try to implement a subset of View Slides, the part which enables a user to take images in the Journal and add them

Re: [Sugar-devel] Improving Reading Experience

2009-07-27 Thread Jim Simmons
instead. All IA books should be available in that format as well. Thanks, James Simmons On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 11:17 PM, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com writes: What might be more suited to Caroline's purposes is a demo of Get Internet Archive Books

Re: [Sugar-devel] Improving Reading Experience

2009-07-27 Thread Jim Simmons
Caroline and Bastien, What might work to show how many books are available is to do a search on the word boy and another on the word girl, then maybe oz and jules verne. Any one of these should return lots of titles. You might also try lincoln or washington to show a bunch of non fiction

Re: [Sugar-devel] Duplication of effort

2009-07-27 Thread Jim Simmons
Benjamin, I would agree on not having QT in Sugar. I use both QT and GTK programs under Linux and while some QT programs are superior to their GTK counterparts it isn't the toolkit that makes them superior. I too don't see much future in sugarizing existing QT or GTK apps. Running something

Re: [Sugar-devel] Duplication of effort

2009-07-27 Thread Jim Simmons
, Jul 27, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Luke Faraonel...@faraone.cc wrote: On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 15:36, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote:  I too don't see much future in sugarizing existing QT or GTK apps.  Running something like that is a bit like buying Windows 3.1 and using it to multitask MS-DOS

Re: [Sugar-devel] Why am I so popular?

2009-07-27 Thread Jim Simmons
Aleksey, If I was responsible for this I'd cover my tracks better. I would make Bastien's video insanely popular too. I was paying at least some attention to these numbers and it bugs me that I can't trust them. Oh, well. James Simmons $ zcat data/access-2009072{0..6}.gz | grep -i

Re: [Sugar-devel] Improving Reading Experience

2009-07-27 Thread Jim Simmons
want to download a color PDF you just need to change the option in the combo box. Thanks, James Simmons On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 4:29 PM, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: Hi Jim, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com writes: To open a djvu file in evince you need a plugin.  This plugin

Re: [Sugar-devel] Improving Reading Experience

2009-07-27 Thread Jim Simmons
Bastien, I'll try to do something on my own, time permitting. Thanks for your efforts. James Simmons On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com writes: Sounds like you guys are on the right track. I won't be

[Sugar-devel] Why am I so popular?

2009-07-26 Thread Jim Simmons
I checked ASLO recently and discovered the following statistics: Read Etexts: 3,383 weekly downloads 7,124 total View Slides: 3,048 weekly downloads 6,734 total I can think of only two possible explanations: 1). Bastien's Read Etexts video became an Internet sensation. Hey, he did a nice

Re: [Sugar-devel] Improving Reading Experience

2009-07-26 Thread Jim Simmons
Caroline, I still haven't heard from Dave C. I have downloaded the application that Bastien used, haven't tried it yet but it looks straightforward to use. It produces files using open formats, which can be converted to the more popular non open formats. I should be able to create some

Re: [Sugar-devel] Improving Reading Experience

2009-07-26 Thread Jim Simmons
Bastien, What might be more suited to Caroline's purposes is a demo of Get Internet Archive Books, followed by demoing reading the downloaded book in Read. In Fedora 11 I can use the Read Activity (I couldn't in any other Sugar test environment I ever had). The advantage of doing this is the

Re: [Sugar-devel] Improving Reading Experience

2009-07-25 Thread Jim Simmons
Bastien, Nice video. Caroline was interested in creating a video about reading in general in Sugar, so I am copying her on this because it might be of interest. Glad you like the Activity. I should be releasing a new version that fully supports annotations and highlighting soon. Thanks again,

Re: [Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

2009-07-25 Thread Jim Simmons
All, In my own emails when I refer to content bundles I am not referring to anything that Sugar Labs has proposed as a standard. I was just thinking about how to deal with the Children's Book Library project, how would I deal with the problem of distributing 2,000 books to children without

Re: [Sugar-devel] Improving Reading Experience

2009-07-25 Thread Jim Simmons
Bastien, What software do you use to create a video like this? Thanks, James Simmons On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 5:11 PM, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com writes: Nice video.  Caroline was interested in creating a video about reading in general in Sugar

Re: [Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

2009-07-24 Thread Jim Simmons
Gary, I was thinking myself that enhancing Get Internet Archive Books to deal with local zip files of books as well as the Internet would be a possible approach. Currently GIAB produces and can be resumed from a Journal entry but does nothing with it. I might change that so it can be resumed

Re: [Sugar-devel] Improving Reading Experience

2009-07-24 Thread Jim Simmons
Gary, I have no great love for .82, but at the moment there is no good way to put .84 on an XO. .84 solves a lot of reading-related problems: 1). Useable support for Deja Vu in Read. 2). Custom Journal metadata that persists across a reboot (so the Read Activity can remember what page I

Re: [Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

2009-07-23 Thread Jim Simmons
Yesterday I had an email exchange with Scotty Auble of the Rural Design Collective project who have a list of 2,000 some odd books they want to distribute to Sugar users without requiring them to have Internet access. The thought I had was Zip archives with a catalog file, perhaps in Dublin Core

Re: [Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

2009-07-23 Thread Jim Simmons
Gary, What Scotty wants is a listing that can be easily browsed, and which shows image files for book covers. The problem I have with USB devices on the Journal is that they are listed in descending order by the date and time they were created. Even a few hundred books on a USB stick isn't all

Re: [Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

2009-07-23 Thread Jim Simmons
of life. You would have a bunch of zip files for different topics. These files would be distributed on USB sticks. Everything I have described could be made to work in .82. James Simmons On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: On 23 Jul 2009, at 21:36, Jim Simmons

Re: [Sugar-devel] Correct use of leading underscores in Python?

2009-07-21 Thread Jim Simmons
Martin, The comparison to Java is a good one. I program in Java for a living and find that I tend to think of my Activity logic in Java terms then translate the concept to Python. I do the same thing with pygtk and Java Swing. Last night I removed most of the leading underscores from my code.

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 9, Issue 136

2009-07-21 Thread Jim Simmons
Albert, It is possible to work with the Journal entries in the way you want to. I've only done this in Python, in the View Slides Activity, but it could be done other ways too I'm sure. In View Slides I open a table that lists out all of the image files in the Journal (which includes the

[Sugar-devel] Correct use of leading underscores in Python?

2009-07-20 Thread Jim Simmons
I don't want to start a religious war here, but I could use some guidance. In writing my Activities I have often copied and pasted bits of code from other Activities. For instance, the toolbars from Read and Speak. As a result of this I have code in which leading underscores are used in both

Re: [Sugar-devel] Correct use of leading underscores in Python?

2009-07-20 Thread Jim Simmons
Tomeu, Your answer makes sense. I'm creating another release of Read Etexts and I'll try to rename everything consistent with those principles as part of that, and eventually will do the same for my other Activities. Thanks, James Simmons On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Tomeu

Re: [Sugar-devel] proper use of self.set_canvas function

2009-07-19 Thread Jim Simmons
Sumit, I don't see anything wrong with what you are proposing. Another option you have, not necessarily better, is to define a VBox holding the two different views of your Activity: the one where the game is played and the one where you set up options. By hiding one and showing the other you

Re: [Sugar-devel] Latest release of Read Etexts, some questions

2009-07-14 Thread Jim Simmons
Aleksey, I downloaded and installed the RPM last night and it seems to work OK. Thanks. James Simmons (not sure) you can attach soas repo and insall gstreamer-plugins-espeak http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/repositories/2 or just download rpm

Re: [Sugar-devel] Latest release of Read Etexts, some questions

2009-07-13 Thread Jim Simmons
Tomeu, By sharing I mean pretty much what the core Read Activity does when it shares a book. The person doing the sharing either uses the drop-down on the Activity toolbar to share the book with the whole neighborhood or goes to the neighborhood view and invites an individual to share the book.

Re: [Sugar-devel] Latest release of Read Etexts, some questions

2009-07-13 Thread Jim Simmons
Aleksey, Thanks, I'll try this tonight. James Simmons (not sure) you can attach soas repo and insall gstreamer-plugins-espeak http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/repositories/2 or just download rpm

Re: [Sugar-devel] Latest release of Read Etexts, some questions

2009-07-13 Thread Jim Simmons
13, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Aleksey Limalsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 09:38:50AM -0500, Jim Simmons wrote: Tomeu, By sharing I mean pretty much what the core Read Activity does when it shares a book.  The person doing the sharing either uses the drop-down on the Activity

[Sugar-devel] Latest release of Read Etexts, some questions

2009-07-11 Thread Jim Simmons
I took the week off and spent a great deal of it in my basement working on an improvement to Read Etexts which should be available soon on ASLO. The new feature is annotations, where I let you add notes to individual pages of a book, plus make as many bookmarks as you like, using a UI modelled on

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 9, Issue 72

2009-07-11 Thread Jim Simmons
In Read Etexts I had to deal with backwards compatibility because I wanted to support text to speech for those that had speech-dispatcher installed without making it impossible to use the Activity until speech-dispatcher was a standard part of Sugar. I check for the existence of a python package

Re: [Sugar-devel] Gitorious problems

2009-07-03 Thread Jim Simmons
Bastien, For what it's worth, here is my config file for read etexts: [core] repositoryformatversion = 0 filemode = true bare = false logallrefupdates = true [remote origin] url = gitori...@git.sugarlabs.org:readetexts/mainline.git fetch =

[Sugar-devel] Get Internet Archive Books Activity source code

2009-07-03 Thread Jim Simmons
Version 2 of Get Internet Archive Books was released this morning. I like this one a lot better than my first effort; it should be good enough to use, not just criticize. I have put the source code tar.bz on shell.sugarlabs.org in /upload/honey/GetIABooks, for anyone wanting to package it up for