Re: Teachers and researchers (miniconference?)
Relax teachers! No laptop will ever replace the good a good teacher can do for a student. What a laptop / activity / software / internet can do is make available to a student information / resources / experience that any particular teacher does not have / know / have-access. What I have been told by good-intentioned / over-worked / bigoted / dumb / ignorant teachers is don't-think-about-it / no-one-knows-about-it / we-don't-do-that / learning-about-it-is-dangerous / etc. / etc. / etc. What I believe a laptop / activity / software / internet can do is facilitate empowerment. empowerment. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 30 Mar. 2008. Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/empowerment. To equip or supply with an ability; enable: Computers ... empower students to become intellectual explorers (Edward B. Fiske)., ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
MANIFEST and .xo bundles
Since Develop now relies on bundlebuilder to create its journal entries (.xo files), I have become familiar with the fragility of the activity bundle format. The original sin is that, if you have a bundle of files, you shouln't need a separate list of those files in MANIFEST. The various symptoms all flow from this: mistyped files (doesn't save), including the root directory in the paths (ditto), adding a file with cp but forgetting to add it to MANIFEST (deleted on next activity update), including MANIFEST itself in the manifest (no effect, a random source of variation) What is the MANIFEST supposed to accomplish in the first place? 1. Something like .gitignore problems: because it's a whitelist instead of a blacklist, there is always the possibility that, even if Develop carefully maintains the integrity, someone will add an important file behind Develop's back. This file would tend to be deleted on the next update. suggested solution: just use a file named .gitignore - follow the standard (though for simplicity's sake it would be OK to only obey the top-level gitignore). Moreover, we could have an implicit global .gitignore which would ignore (at least) .pyc files. 2. Give a clear ordering of the files for cryptographic signing purposes. problems: obvious solution: obviously just use a well-defined and documented ordering algorithm So, my suggestion would be to abandon the MANIFEST and use .gitignore, with an implicit global default. If not, I will have to rewrite Develop to take care of the MANIFEST automatically, and not show it for manual editing. Problems ensue: if the MANIFEST is absent or missing files, Develop will have to use a modal dialog box to ask what to do. This solution seems ugly to me. . While I'm writing an email on this stuff, I should include a brief discussion of activity auto-updates. Currently, an activity is reinstalled iff it is currently installed in Activities/ and the user runs a bundle with a different version in activity/activity.info . This means that in Develop, you have to change the version for every debugging cycle - pretty annoying. It also means that downgrades are treated identically to upgrades, and of course there is no security. I suggest that: -when running the same or previous versions (or, in the future, versions signed by someone you don't recognize as a developer for that activity), a modal dialog box should come up for a few seconds with the default option to not reinstall (which, if attempting to join a shared activity with a newer version, would mean not joining. Backwards compatibility, on the other hand, would be assumed, and graceful failure would be the activity's responsibility) -develop a two level system of signing activity bundles: maintainers would have to sign/revoke maintainers and developers, and developers would sign specific versions of the activity bundle; credentials would be chained and kept, so that missing intermediate versions would not be a problem. Ideally the signature would be valid for the unpacked directory with the same ignores as .gitignore, not just for the specific compressed version of it, so that activity bundles could be recreated on the fly for sharing purposes. (I forget who's idea this is based on, apologies). (This may be overdesign, but the good part is that it keeps simple I sign this bundle separate from the whole maintainer/developer chain, so the simple part could be implemented first and remain unchanged later.) -Any activity signed by the current user is reinstalled always (allows easy debug cycle and reverts) -For now, develop would create its own key pair. When bitfrost's P_IDENT is implemented, it would use that. (it may be that even when P_IDENT is implemented, it requires activities to include their own hash in all signed data: signed by me using Develop activity instead of just signed by me. I suspect that this would not require any backwards-incompatible change to the signature format used) Jameson ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Update.1 RC3: candidate-703 Published!
Friends, At long last, we have a new Update.1 Release Candidate, signed and waiting for your attention at http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/candidate/703/jffs2/ Release notes continue to develop at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Update.1_Software_Release_Notes with more technical commentary being stored at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SW-ECO_4 Enjoy, Michael ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Teachers and researchers (miniconference?)
Of COURSE you need to empower students. What I'm saying is that the program will be more successful if you also empower teachers. A lot of the needs are the same - access to materials for learning - but one of them is different - tools for keeping track of learning. Actually, to be honest, good tools for tracking learning could be used to keep track of one's own progress too. On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Kent Loobey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Relax teachers! No laptop will ever replace the good a good teacher can do for a student. What a laptop / activity / software / internet can do is make available to a student information / resources / experience that any particular teacher does not have / know / have-access. What I have been told by good-intentioned / over-worked / bigoted / dumb / ignorant teachers is don't-think-about-it / no-one-knows-about-it / we-don't-do-that / learning-about-it-is-dangerous / etc. / etc. / etc. What I believe a laptop / activity / software / internet can do is facilitate empowerment. empowerment. The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 30 Mar. 2008. Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/empowerment. To equip or supply with an ability; enable: Computers ... empower students to become intellectual explorers (Edward B. Fiske)., ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Update.1 RC3: candidate-703 Published!
Michael Stone wrote: Friends, At long last, we have a new Update.1 Release Candidate, signed and waiting for your attention at http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/candidate/703/jffs2/ Release notes continue to develop at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Update.1_Software_Release_Notes with more technical commentary being stored at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SW-ECO_4 Enjoy, Michael ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel OK ... I installed it on my G1G1 XO (via the GamePad / USB method). It boots up into Sugar, and I can see the frame, but not icons to start up any activities. Is there something I need to do?? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Update.1 RC3: candidate-703 Published!
Hi Ed, OK ... I installed it on my G1G1 XO (via the GamePad / USB method). It boots up into Sugar, and I can see the frame, but not icons to start up any activities. Is there something I need to do?? Yes: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Testing_Update.1 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/G1G1_Activity_Pack .. or you can use Bert's script: wget dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py python update-activities.py - Chris. -- Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Update.1 RC3: candidate-703 Published!
Chris Ball wrote: Hi Ed, OK ... I installed it on my G1G1 XO (via the GamePad / USB method). It boots up into Sugar, and I can see the frame, but not icons to start up any activities. Is there something I need to do?? Yes: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Testing_Update.1 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/G1G1_Activity_Pack .. or you can use Bert's script: wget dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py python update-activities.py - Chris. OK ... got it working now. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
New joyride build 1815
http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build1815 Changes in build 1815 from build: 1811 Size delta: 0.00M -Terminal 9 +Terminal 10 --- Changes for Terminal 10 from 9 --- + Do auto-scroll to the bottom when there is input #6662 -- This mail was automatically generated See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/joyride-pkgs.html for aggregate logs See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/joyride_vs_update1.html for a comparison ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
New faster build 1815
http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/faster/build1815 Changes in build 1815 from build: 1811 Size delta: 0.00M -Terminal 9 +Terminal 10 --- Changes for Terminal 10 from 9 --- + Do auto-scroll to the bottom when there is input #6662 -- This mail was automatically generated See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/faster-pkgs.html for aggregate logs See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/joyride_vs_update1.html for a comparison ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Connecting a non python activity to sugar
Any foreign application - say opera or program I write in Java has two entried as an avtivity - one with the SVG and a second anonymous window which is the real application I have been trying to figure out how a smart application capable of talking to the D-BUS and with access to the bindle and application ids can integrate with sugar in the same ways that a python application can Can anyone give me pointers -- Steven M. Lewis PhD 4221 105th Ave NE Kirkland, WA 98033 425-889-2694 206-384-1340 (cell) Skype lordjoe_com AIM LordJoe2000 ICQ 127138272 email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (permanent) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
