Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-05 Thread John Gilmore
 I think that the addition of a new property in the activity.info file
 would be logical here.  Make it an integer indicating the maximum
 number of supported participants.  Unshared activities would report
 '1', activities like video chat (with technical limitations) or chess
 (with obvious player limits) might specify 2, and others could specify
 another cap based on resource requirements and/or a constant to
 indicate an unbounded number.

If robust activity sharing is ever going to make it past the Sugar GUI
barrier, adding sharing properties to a Sugar-specific config file
will just create an issue that needs cleaning up later.  Wouldn't it
be better to add a function or argument to the sharing API, that an
application can use to limit the number of participants sharing the
application?

The world and the kids would be better off with e.g. a GNU Chess/
XBoard that's able to share on any platform, rather than a Chess
Activity that only shares under Sugar.

John

http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html
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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-05 Thread Walter Bender
On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 3:17 PM, John Gilmore g...@toad.com wrote:
 I think that the addition of a new property in the activity.info file
 would be logical here.  Make it an integer indicating the maximum
 number of supported participants.  Unshared activities would report
 '1', activities like video chat (with technical limitations) or chess
 (with obvious player limits) might specify 2, and others could specify
 another cap based on resource requirements and/or a constant to
 indicate an unbounded number.

 If robust activity sharing is ever going to make it past the Sugar GUI
 barrier, adding sharing properties to a Sugar-specific config file
 will just create an issue that needs cleaning up later.  Wouldn't it
 be better to add a function or argument to the sharing API, that an
 application can use to limit the number of participants sharing the
 application?

 The world and the kids would be better off with e.g. a GNU Chess/
 XBoard that's able to share on any platform, rather than a Chess
 Activity that only shares under Sugar.

+1. And if and when sharing is maintained upstream from Sugar, we all
win... until then, we need to keep pounding away at the Sugar bits.

John

 http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-03 Thread Morgan Collett
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 01:21, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote:
 There might be something in the Sugar Almanac,
 see http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.
 Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:
 http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75
 Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
 collaboration not supported.

Another method of removing the sharing control:
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/terminal/repos/mainline/blobs/master/terminal.py#line61

Regards
Morgan
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-03 Thread James Simmons

Morgan,

This is *exactly* what I was looking for, thanks.  As a bonus I can get 
rid of the keep button as well, which is of no use to me.


James Simmons


Morgan Collett wrote:

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 01:21, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote:
  

There might be something in the Sugar Almanac,
see http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.
Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75
Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
collaboration not supported.



Another method of removing the sharing control:
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/terminal/repos/mainline/blobs/master/terminal.py#line61

Regards
Morgan
  


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Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread James Simmons
First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for 
Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on 
openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems 
to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting 
over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu 
box eventually.

Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two 
Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced 
that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip 
archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm 
thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only 
the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The 
master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow 
along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.

While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a 
version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would 
mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports 
collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with 
collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go 
about doing it?

Thanks,

James Simmons


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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Wade Brainerd
There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.

Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75

Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
collaboration not supported.

Best,
Wade

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote:

 First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for
 Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on
 openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems
 to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting
 over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu
 box eventually.

 Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two
 Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced
 that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip
 archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm
 thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only
 the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The
 master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow
 along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.

 While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a
 version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would
 mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports
 collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with
 collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go
 about doing it?

 Thanks,

 James Simmons


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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Carol Farlow Lerche
I'm guessing someone has already suggested this on some list or other, but
in my experience kids like to watch over each other's shoulder, and a
default collaboration of everyone watches, one person types vnc would in
my opinion be the 80 of a collaboration 80-20 rule.  I think this ought to
be implemented in the sugar infrastructure, and then let activities that
have an obvious extended collaboration (such as two person games or shared
authorship documents) do something more.

2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

 There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
 http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.

 Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:


 http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75

 Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
 collaboration not supported.

 Best,
 Wade

 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons 
 jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote:

 First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for
 Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on
 openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems
 to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting
 over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu
 box eventually.

 Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two
 Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced
 that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip
 archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm
 thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only
 the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The
 master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow
 along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.

 While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a
 version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would
 mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports
 collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with
 collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go
 about doing it?

 Thanks,

 James Simmons


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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Carol Farlow Lerche
I think this project often makes the perfect into the enemy of the good.
Consequently we end up having less collaboration than, e.g., any system in
the last 10 years that could install vnc server, while claiming that
collaboration is a principal focus of the project.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote:

 I think some simplistic automatic collaboration being built into Sugar, has
 been discussed, possibly even prototyped.
 Just a matter of engineering motivation/time perhaps.
 -Wade


 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.comwrote:

 I'm guessing someone has already suggested this on some list or other, but
 in my experience kids like to watch over each other's shoulder, and a
 default collaboration of everyone watches, one person types vnc would in
 my opinion be the 80 of a collaboration 80-20 rule.  I think this ought to
 be implemented in the sugar infrastructure, and then let activities that
 have an obvious extended collaboration (such as two person games or shared
 authorship documents) do something more.

 2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

 There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
 http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.

 Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:


 http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75

 Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
 collaboration not supported.

 Best,
 Wade

 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.com
  wrote:

 First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for
 Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on
 openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems
 to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting
 over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu
 box eventually.

 Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two
 Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced
 that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip
 archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm
 thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only
 the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The
 master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow
 along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.

 While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a
 version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would
 mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports
 collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with
 collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go
 about doing it?

 Thanks,

 James Simmons


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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Eben Eliason
I think that the addition of a new property in the activity.info file
would be logical here.  Make it an integer indicating the maximum
number of supported participants.  Unshared activities would report
'1', activities like video chat (with technical limitations) or chess
(with obvious player limits) might specify 2, and others could specify
another cap based on resource requirements and/or a constant to
indicate an unbounded number.

That number could be used both to show/hide the sharing controls (in
the activity or elsewhere) for that activity, and also help keep the
participants list at a manageable size for the given activity.
Limitations are natural, and activity specific; it's not reasonable to
expect all collaborative activities to scale in the same way.

Scott (CC'd) has already come up with some really nice proposals for
adding VNC as an alternate colaboration mechanism for all activities.
In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
in that manner.  Scott, could you point to any materials you've
already written up on the matter?  Would you have time and/or desire
to assist others who are interested in taking on such a feature?  I'd
love to see this happen, myself, and have given some preliminary
thought to the UI already.

- Eben



2009/2/2 Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com:
 I'm guessing someone has already suggested this on some list or other, but
 in my experience kids like to watch over each other's shoulder, and a
 default collaboration of everyone watches, one person types vnc would in
 my opinion be the 80 of a collaboration 80-20 rule.  I think this ought to
 be implemented in the sugar infrastructure, and then let activities that
 have an obvious extended collaboration (such as two person games or shared
 authorship documents) do something more.

 2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

 There might be something in the Sugar Almanac,
 see http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.
 Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:

 http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75
 Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
 collaboration not supported.
 Best,
 Wade
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.com
 wrote:

 First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for
 Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on
 openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems
 to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting
 over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu
 box eventually.

 Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two
 Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced
 that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip
 archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm
 thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only
 the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The
 master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow
 along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.

 While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a
 version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would
 mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports
 collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with
 collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go
 about doing it?

 Thanks,

 James Simmons


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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Andrés Ambrois
On Monday 02 February 2009 21:30:46 Carol Farlow Lerche wrote:
 I'm guessing someone has already suggested this on some list or other, but
 in my experience kids like to watch over each other's shoulder, and a
 default collaboration of everyone watches, one person types vnc would in
 my opinion be the 80 of a collaboration 80-20 rule.  I think this ought to
 be implemented in the sugar infrastructure, and then let activities that
 have an obvious extended collaboration (such as two person games or shared
 authorship documents) do something more.

Please take a look at Chris Ball's recent work on MPX over VNC: 
http://blog.printf.net/articles/2009/01/26/multi-pointer-remote-desktop

 2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

  There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
  http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.
 
  Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:
 
 
  http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathac
 tivity.py#line75
 
  Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
  collaboration not supported.
 
  Best,
  Wade
 
  On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons 
jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote:
  First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for
  Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on
  openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems
  to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting
  over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu
  box eventually.
 
  Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two
  Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced
  that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip
  archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm
  thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only
  the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The
  master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow
  along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.
 
  While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a
  version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would
  mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports
  collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with
  collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go
  about doing it?
 
  Thanks,
 
  James Simmons
 
 
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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Wade Brainerd
I think some simplistic automatic collaboration being built into Sugar, has
been discussed, possibly even prototyped.
Just a matter of engineering motivation/time perhaps.
-Wade

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote:

 I'm guessing someone has already suggested this on some list or other, but
 in my experience kids like to watch over each other's shoulder, and a
 default collaboration of everyone watches, one person types vnc would in
 my opinion be the 80 of a collaboration 80-20 rule.  I think this ought to
 be implemented in the sugar infrastructure, and then let activities that
 have an obvious extended collaboration (such as two person games or shared
 authorship documents) do something more.

 2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

 There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
 http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.

 Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:


 http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75

 Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
 collaboration not supported.

 Best,
 Wade

 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons 
 jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote:

 First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for
 Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on
 openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems
 to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting
 over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu
 box eventually.

 Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two
 Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced
 that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip
 archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm
 thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only
 the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The
 master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow
 along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.

 While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a
 version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would
 mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports
 collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with
 collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go
 about doing it?

 Thanks,

 James Simmons


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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Benjamin M. Schwartz
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Eben Eliason wrote:
 I think that the addition of a new property in the activity.info file
 would be logical here.  Make it an integer indicating the maximum
 number of supported participants.

OK, but as an Activity author I might like to specify that cap at runtime,
depending on many things, such as the size of the document.  I might even
want to let the initiator choose the number of participants.  I think we
should also have a runtime API, so that the cap that can be varied at any
time.

In fact, it might be nice to have a a generic solution for defining config
variables that can be controlled either statically or at runtime.  We have
mentioned a wide variety of such variables, including things like whether
screen rotation is supported.

 Scott (CC'd) has already come up with some really nice proposals for
 adding VNC as an alternate colaboration mechanism for all activities.
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
 in that manner. 

I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC sharing,
regardless of max_participants.

- --Ben
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)

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=BI5d
-END PGP SIGNATURE-
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Eben Eliason
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Eben Eliason wrote:
 I think that the addition of a new property in the activity.info file
 would be logical here.  Make it an integer indicating the maximum
 number of supported participants.

 OK, but as an Activity author I might like to specify that cap at runtime,
 depending on many things, such as the size of the document.  I might even
 want to let the initiator choose the number of participants.  I think we
 should also have a runtime API, so that the cap that can be varied at any
 time.

That's a good observation.  You're right; I was seeing hard limits,
but soft limits could certainly be implemented via some API that Sugar
could call into to retrieve the info.  The static declaration could be
used as the fallback.

 In fact, it might be nice to have a a generic solution for defining config
 variables that can be controlled either statically or at runtime.  We have
 mentioned a wide variety of such variables, including things like whether
 screen rotation is supported.

Right.

 Scott (CC'd) has already come up with some really nice proposals for
 adding VNC as an alternate colaboration mechanism for all activities.
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
 in that manner.

 I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC sharing,
 regardless of max_participants.

Of course not.  I didn't mean to imply such a limitation; only that
the VNC solution would be the /only/ option after some participants
limit was reached.  That is, you could either Join or Watch any
shared activity, but the Join option would disappear once
full...Watch would remain. It's possible we'd have an upper bound
on the number of people who could watch as well, but I don't think
that's an activity-specific parameter.

- Eben

 - --Ben
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
 Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)

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 UpAAniXtXxWRQuM8o8iqtiyJ0uB4o05Z
 =BI5d
 -END PGP SIGNATURE-

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Benjamin M. Schwartz
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Eben Eliason wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
 bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
 in that manner.
 I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC sharing,
 regardless of max_participants.
 
 Of course not.  I didn't mean to imply such a limitation; only that
 the VNC solution would be the /only/ option after some participants
 limit was reached.  That is, you could either Join or Watch any
 shared activity, but the Join option would disappear once
 full...Watch would remain. It's possible we'd have an upper bound
 on the number of people who could watch as well, but I don't think
 that's an activity-specific parameter.

Oh! That's beautiful.

Let's do that.

- --Ben
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Martin Langhoff
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
 OK, but as an Activity author I might like to specify that cap at runtime,
 depending on many things, such as the size of the document.

... start collaborating on an empty Write.xo doc, and shed
participants dynamically as the document grows ;-)



m
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Gary C Martin
On 3 Feb 2009, at 01:02, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:

 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Eben Eliason wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
 bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme,  
 whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be  
 viewed
 in that manner.
 I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC  
 sharing,
 regardless of max_participants.

 Of course not.  I didn't mean to imply such a limitation; only that
 the VNC solution would be the /only/ option after some participants
 limit was reached.  That is, you could either Join or Watch any
 shared activity, but the Join option would disappear once
 full...Watch would remain. It's possible we'd have an upper  
 bound
 on the number of people who could watch as well, but I don't think
 that's an activity-specific parameter.

 Oh! That's beautiful.

 Let's do that.

I don't mean to rain on the parade here, but am I the only one who  
finds VNC slow even on high spec equipment over a dedicated broadband  
connection? I do use it occasionally for remote support, so it does  
have its uses – but a handful of XOs in the same wireless spectrum?  
Ouch. From a technical stand point VNC is going to be almost always  
more memory hungry, more cpu hungry, and more bandwidth hungry than  
most activity collaborations, seems to be an overly hopeful  
collaboration method to fallback on.

Happy to be proven wrong, and I guess it could be a Sugar feature not  
really intended for XOs.

Regards,
--Gary

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Carol Farlow Lerche
Gary, I've used it for many years on machines much less powerful than the
XO, often for an sshable net meeting with multiple participants, and I think
you might need to do a few simple things to speed it up for yourself.
(Remove fancy graphic backdrop, try for a smaller palette).  These things
are pretty congruent with the normal state of the desktop on the XO.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:26 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote:

 On 3 Feb 2009, at 01:02, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:

  -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
  Hash: SHA1
 
  Eben Eliason wrote:
  On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
  bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
  In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme,
  whereby
  any activity that already has max_participants in it could be
  viewed
  in that manner.
  I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC
  sharing,
  regardless of max_participants.
 
  Of course not.  I didn't mean to imply such a limitation; only that
  the VNC solution would be the /only/ option after some participants
  limit was reached.  That is, you could either Join or Watch any
  shared activity, but the Join option would disappear once
  full...Watch would remain. It's possible we'd have an upper
  bound
  on the number of people who could watch as well, but I don't think
  that's an activity-specific parameter.
 
  Oh! That's beautiful.
 
  Let's do that.

 I don't mean to rain on the parade here, but am I the only one who
 finds VNC slow even on high spec equipment over a dedicated broadband
 connection? I do use it occasionally for remote support, so it does
 have its uses – but a handful of XOs in the same wireless spectrum?
 Ouch. From a technical stand point VNC is going to be almost always
 more memory hungry, more cpu hungry, and more bandwidth hungry than
 most activity collaborations, seems to be an overly hopeful
 collaboration method to fallback on.

 Happy to be proven wrong, and I guess it could be a Sugar feature not
 really intended for XOs.

 Regards,
 --Gary

  - --Ben
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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Eben Eliason e...@laptop.org wrote:
 Scott (CC'd) has already come up with some really nice proposals for
 adding VNC as an alternate colaboration mechanism for all activities.
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
 in that manner.  Scott, could you point to any materials you've
 already written up on the matter?  Would you have time and/or desire
 to assist others who are interested in taking on such a feature?  I'd
 love to see this happen, myself, and have given some preliminary
 thought to the UI already.

Chris Ball has actually started to implement this:
  http://cananian.livejournal.com/54002.html
  http://blog.printf.net/articles/2009/01/26/multi-pointer-remote-desktop

Written up in http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/sugarcamp-collab.pdf
(video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7Ei2fp4Iww ).
 --scott

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:26 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote:
 Happy to be proven wrong, and I guess it could be a Sugar feature not really
 intended for XOs.

Let's let the flowers bloom: I don't doubt that there are many ways to
make *better* collaboration, on an activity-by-activity basis.  But
VNC is something that can be created as a common baseline.  Let's
start by doing that, and improve it on a case-by-case basis, instead
of having *no collaboration* as our baseline.

FWIW, I second Carol's comments: VNC works quite nicely on fast local
networks, such as direction connections between XOs, and I've used it
on clients as simple as a Palm Pilot and a Mac SE/30.  Reducing
graphic busy-ness and palette size helps a lot!  Also: don't run
xvncviewer remotely: VNC is network efficient, but the way its X
client uses the network between it and the X server is definitely
*not*!
 --scott

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