Re: [IAEP] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists
Hi Martin, On 20 Mar 2010, at 15:54, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Mel Chua m...@melchua.com wrote: The short version is that instead of include all Activites by default, we're thinking of shipping very few (6) Activities by default - the ones that help users get further Activities and help I read Sebastian's post... and is less drastic than that. He seems to say: include only the well tested, known to work, actively maintained activities, with an eye towards activitries that serve as a good intro to the platform and that demo well. But you say only 6... Which one is it? This is what I see in the kickstart file: http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/soas/repos/mainline/blobs/master/fedora-livecd-soas.ks # == sugar activities == sugar-browse # Because they need this to install activities. sugar-log # Because they need this for debugging. sugar-physics # Because this is a great demo example (quick demo). sugar-terminal # Because this makes debugging easier. sugar-turtleart # Because this is a great demo example (extended demo). sugar-xoirc # Because this helps us help them. The initial proposal I like; makes a lot of sense and raises the bar. IT basically increases the chances of a satisfactory first use. Six activities not so much -- you need many steps + internet to add activities... and it'll be random activity from ASLO, may well be unstable or useless. It significantly _reduces_ chances of satisfaction. All IMHO... +1, six does seem rather slim, more of a technical taster for a developer audience (not necessarily a bad thing in the right context). Walter mentioned perhaps making this a Fedora spin, rather than an official SoaS release aimed at our real target users (teachers/children)? Regards, --Gary P.S. I am worried about reports of several previously well working activities that seem to be currently broken in recent SoaS builds (Write and IRC), unfortunately I don't have time to often test under SoaS (other than the official Blueberry) as well as my regular day to day sugar-jhbuild set-up (F10). ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 24, Issue 39
Hi James, On 20 Mar 2010, at 17:59, James Simmons wrote: If I could suggest adding either (but not both) of Get Internet Archive Books or Get Books. GIAB is pretty robust, has just been given a new-style toolbar, and no longer leaves behind a useless Journal entry after it runs. This (or Get Books) would enable new SoaS users to get a bunch of books to read with Read (from a collection of over a million). +1, but you'll notice Read is not in the 6 proposed base activities included... It is listed in the kickstart file, commented out, under a section titled These are Activities that aren't quite there, but are important, so we're going to encourage people to test them. I've not seen any track tickets yet for why Read is not up to par. http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/soas/repos/mainline/blobs/master/fedora-livecd-soas.ks I wish I had more time to help out, but what time I can spare goes to Sugar/Activities upstream, not distro platform and packaging issues. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Anki - open source memorization tool.
On 11 Mar 2010, at 02:38, Caroline Meeks wrote: An open source memorization tool. Looks simple and cool and already runs on Linux, might be a good addition to Sugar. http://ichi2.net/anki/index.html Interesting, but looks way too complicated for kids (just my opinion)... it has more features than our Sugarised version of abiwrite! We already have Assimilate, a flash card activity written natively for sugar from Urko Fernandez Roman, but it had little support/encouragement from the community at the time of writing and has probably bit rotted and in need of some final polish. If any one has free time and is looking for an activity to pick up and move over to Sugar labs infrastructure, the original repository is here: http://dev.laptop.org/git/activities/assimilate/ Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] More new and revised chapters of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! ready for review, feedback
Hi James, On 24 Feb 2010, at 17:48, Gary C Martin wrote: Hi James, On 24 Feb 2010, at 16:52, James Simmons wrote: Gary, It's kind of interesting but I see a lot of words in there like should, good, putting etc. Well it is based on your word usage ;-b Actually, perhaps 600 terms was a little too deep for this size of text. Just looked at the frequency filter output and it indicates every term on the map was only used 4 or more times in your text (ignoring kill-lists for prepositions, determiners conjunctions, pronouns etc). I usually have that at a much a higher frequency threshold – I guess the give away here is all that blue ocean (low frequency, weakly associated terms). I regenerated the map only placing the top 300 terms, does it look any better to your eye? http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Activities_guide_sugar_som_23rd_feb.jpg Regards, --Gary Plus the complete text includes a lot of code samples, so that's going to make an SOM less meaningful too. I do strip out source code, it's highly repetitive nature would swamp your text narrative with self being the dominant term. It's hard for me to get much of an idea of what the book is about from the diagram. OK, thanks for the feedback! The most interesting thing like this that I've seen is the tag cloud for the Children's Library at the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/browse.php?field=/metadata/subjectcollection=iaclview=cloud Yea, though I'd personally much rather they went the extra mile and placed related subject terms spatially near each other rather than just an alphabetical list, that way you could find subjects and associated/related subjects at a glance and work your way over a topic area of interest (I'd need some local access to their archive to generate that map, though it could be generated from a subset I guess). Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] JTLA Special Edition: Educational Outcomes and Research from 1:1 Computing Setting
Hi Christoph, On 19 Feb 2010, at 10:27, Christoph Derndorfer wrote: Hi all, thanks to an article on eschoolnews.com (http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/02/16/11-programs-only-as-good-as-their-teachers/) I stumbled across a special edition of the Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment (JTLA) which focuses on Educational Outcomes and Research from 1:1 Computing Settings. The six articles are all available as free downloads and while I haven't had time to do more than quickly browse through them they are promising to be interesting (weekend) reads: http://escholarship.bc.edu/jtla/ I've wikified the links, abstracts, and a uploaded a SOM image for each of the six papers: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic_papers#Papers Regards, --Gary Cheers, Christoph -- Christoph Derndorfer co-editor, olpcnews url: www.olpcnews.com e-mail: christ...@olpcnews.com ___ support-gang mailing list support-g...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] kickstarter: funding for activity development?
Hi Tomeu, On 19 Dec 2009, at 12:33, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Hi, just came across http://www.kickstarter.com/ and wonder if a team of activity developers could fund a project that way? Interesting site, thanks for the link. US only at the moment, though I guess SL could be the entity? Regards, --Gary Regards, Tomeu -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Future of Zero Sugar
On 15 Dec 2009, at 13:36, Aleksey Lim wrote: On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:52:56AM -0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 04:07, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:16:02AM +0545, Bryan Berry wrote: I strongly agree w/ tomeu on this. Making Sugar easier to contribute to isn't anywhere near the top of the list of requested features by our kids and teachers in Nepal. The far and away most requested feature by teachers in Nepal is a mechanism for kids to turn in homework. I am not talking about invasive testing here. The typical Nepali teacher just wants to know which students out of 50-70 kids are failing to understand basic concepts. I absolutely agree with such points, but: * as a 3rd party developer, I don't see such teachers requests listed somewhere on wiki, that let me see what can I do and peek most interesting/suitable-for-my-skils/etc task I'm painfully aware of this situation and have been spending my energies on this problem for already a good while. Our colleagues at Uruguay and Paraguay are already working on upstreaming their developments, but are also going to work with us in identifying the most pressing needs in deployments. Have already some ideas about what to work on, how do you think we should track them? Since we have nothing for now, any movements are welcome. In my mind having wiki page(one page with links to subpages, or category) is enough, the major things I'd look for is is having priority(deployment schedules etc), summary/description and contacts (having irc contact would big plus). * I'm feeling huge discomfort as a developer when I need to package binary blobs to my .xo, w/o instrument which let me unify installing/upgrading process of such non-SP/specific-to-my-activity dependencies I agree this is a problem, but also think that many activities shipping binaries don't actually need them. Bindings for libraries can be written in ctypes, without need to use a .so. * I'm feeling less(but still big) discomfort as a developer when I don't have standard method to share my core related changes, for-testing-purposes/to-show-what-I-have-in-mind, well please, attach my cloned repos, install them still works but not so attractive for users What about generating a SoaS (or Trisquel, etc) image with such changes? This is something that can be done today without so much trouble. * implementing Zero Sugar initiative, in my mind, is providing fishing-rod for developers/doers instead of feeding users thus has prime priority I don't see things so black and white. I have been working on this same problem for a while now (view source key, extensions, etc) and our users are taking advantage of at least the extensions facility. We are going to see patches very soon for keybindings, device icons and control panel sections. And that code can be already deployed without waiting for upstreaming because of the extensions mechanism. So _today_ we have empowered users that are deploying shell extensions without disrupting the rest of the shell, and simultaneously are working with the community and sharing the fruit of their work. The technical part has been in place since a year ago, but the trigger for this to happen has been actually social interaction. There's no point in making our platform super-hackable if we don't work as well in the non-technical part of the problem. Just to be clear, the technical part of Zero Sugar is http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Services its not something huge, just a set of declared rules how to work with external(to activity or SP) dependencies. Code is ready for first release usage and I'm going to spend this week(and looks like next) to prepare proper docs/tutorials/infrastructure and remove blobs from all ASLO activities. Woooaaahhh... Removing binary blobs from all ASLO activities!? Now I'm no fan of having to include a binary blob (I avoid it if I have any choice), but Sugar is not targeted at an environment of always on internet cloud computing. An activity must be a self contained, sharable bundle for 99% of our users, needing no downloads of eternal resources at first run/install. I'm most happy to see some smooth fallback mechanism for the 1% running some hokey-pokey hardware/software platform, but resources (binary or otherwise) for our majority use cases should live inside activity bundles. Regards, --Gary That's my strong intension and not only as a developer but also as a ASLO editor - I think we should stop posting bundled binaries to ASLO as soon as possible. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] sounds in Speak
On 14 Dec 2009, at 15:30, Aleksey Lim wrote: On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 05:48:39PM -0700, Sameer Verma wrote: Hello everybody, This afternoon, I had an interesting conversation with a Montessori teacher, about Speak. She asked me why Speak says a when a is pressed and not the *sound* of the letter a. Montessori teachers teach the shape and sound of letters first, and then the name of the alphabet. I did not have an answer for her, but I wondered if it would be possible to have an option in Speak to do so. not sure it could be done in existed Speak(it just passes string to speak engine). But it could separate activity or mode in Speak which teaches alphabet. FWIW: I had a go at this quite a while back. At the time, on an XO-1, I found the latency was much to high for even quite slow typing. The sound was delayed arriving, often stuttered, and typing became quite difficult due to the poor responsiveness. Not sure anything has really changed since I last tried. Regards, --Gary I'd imagine that the sound of the letter would vary depending on language, right? cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Aleksey ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Wanted: List of Sugar activities for the XO-1.5
Hi Mike, On 5 Dec 2009, at 20:43, Mike Dawson wrote: Hi All, The GCompris stuff is very very nice indeed and I would highly recommend having some of them. Even just because it has such great demo power and then further activities can be installed from the school server. My concern with GCompris ports is they do not follow even the most basic of Sugar UI standards, many don't even support keeping a Journal resume state. There's are some nice applications, but highly concerned they dilute understanding of basic Sugar behaviours and UI expectations if installed as default demos of what is good. Regards, --Gary I would recommend against including finance by default. As laptops are given out by government agencies in countries where people are often suspicious of the government and it's often the time that they are trying to increase tax revenue this might well lead to suspicions. We otherwise would have loved to include it. Regards, -Mike (in Afghanistan) 2009/12/6 Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com: Here's a list of activities that I think would be great, both worth starring and worth having unstarred (it's a large enough list now that it's confusing to have them all on the home screen by default, but there are lots of great activities that people who know about them will want even when they're offline with no way to get new activities). There may be another 5-10 of these that are worth unstarring for a clean, useful firstboot home screen... I'm testing these over the weekend. OLPCorps classes had lovely stories about using both Micropolis and Moon with parents and students becoming interested because of those activities (Moon for religious reasons). Words still accumulates bad characters at the start of its input field if you keep using it and encounter words with accents, but it's also been very useful. Read Etexts is a bit redundant with Get Books, but it is lovely in its own focused way, and small. OOo4kids and Gcompris (a suitable subset) would be excellent additions... both have sizeable development communities compared to most of the activities here SJ TO TEST: == Browse Calculate Chat Distance Etoys Implode Infoslicer IRC Labyrinth Maze Measure Memorize Physics Pippy Read Record Scratch Speak TamTam * Terminal Turtle Art Typing Turtle Words Write [ADD] Get Books Help Wikibrowse (en, es) .. Falabracman FoodForce2 Micropolis (Corps support!) OOo4Kids (link to Gnome) GCompris TuxPaint .. Finance Geogebra SocialCalc [UNSTAR] Analyze Jukebox Log Moon (Corps story!) Paint [ADD UNSTAR] VNC Launcher Read Etexts? -- Forwarded message -- From: Chris Ball c...@laptop.org Date: Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 3:54 PM Subject: Re: Devel Digest, Vol 45, Issue 53 To: Reuben K. Caron reu...@laptop.org Cc: OLPC Development de...@lists.laptop.org, Eric Bachard er...@openoffice.org Hi, [Added ericb to CC; Eric, we're talking about which applications to include by default on our OLPC XO-1.5 software release.] How about suggestions for programs on the Gnome side? That's a good idea, thanks. I haven't decided what to do about OpenOffice yet -- at the moment we don't ship it, but do ship abiword and gnumeric. The options for it look something like: * just add the openoffice.org Fedora packages for GNOME. (How much disk space would that use?) * just add the Ooo4Kids activity for Sugar. * just add the Ooo4Kids activity for Sugar, *and* find a way to make the same activity launchable inside GNOME. This would need Ooo4Kids to be useful for older kids as well, since they're the target audience for using GNOME instead of Sugar. The OOo4Kids activity is here: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4241 (100MB) Perhaps someone could try out OOo4Kids, see how it compares to standard OpenOffice, and see how much disk space adding the full OpenOffice packages would require? Thanks! - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Help Activity on XO-1.5 [was: List of Sugar activities for the XO-1.5]
Hi Adam, On 29 Nov 2009, at 22:36, Holt wrote: Brian/Seth Sandy raised a critical issue on our Support call today-- how much work would it be to upgrade your great Help Activity from Sugar 0.82.1 to Sugar 0.84.x for the XO-1.5? And how can experienced Support people help Help (and learn learning ;) here? http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Help_(activity) http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Help Or would you dare ship the Help Activity as is? I may have missed some recent activity, but the last help activity I saw failed in 0.84 and up due to hulahop changes needed for underlying mozila changes. A version was patched (by Sayamindu I think) for olpc France to ship for a Madagascar (I think?) deployment: http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/helpfr I'm guessing you could pick up from here and add new 0.84 content via some documentation sprint effort. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] AP: Schools shun Kindle, saying blind can't use it
On 11 Nov 2009, at 18:44, Luke Faraone wrote: On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 13:35, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: So, no text-to-speech on Kindle? Very silly. The blind will have to wait for the mp3 versions of books, then. The Kindle has text to speech, but they allow it to be disabled on a book-by-book basis by the publisher. Most publishers opt for this, in the hope of boosting audiobook / playaway sales. Fascinating, even ignoring all the horrific Kindle DRM issues (when you die, all your books die with you), this seem quite some breach of fair use especially for folks with visual disabilities, I hope some group take the offending publishers to court. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] (Please read) Re: Proposed Trac - Launchpad migration
On 1 Nov 2009, at 22:06, Chris Ball wrote: Dear Sugar folks, This mail didn't get any replies, but it's important to know whether people agree with it before going ahead. So, please understand that: * bugs.sugarlabs.org is moving from Trac to Launchpad. Ouch, oh my that's a bolt from the blue, thanks for emailing! I had no idea this was really on the cards, just assumed it was some background noise/chatter from a few folks who never liked using trac. Personally I've ignored Launchpad as I don't have time to burn on yet another 'lets try some other misc thingamajig' cycle. FWIW, will likely ignore Launchpad for a number of months more even if we migrated yesterday. * Existing bug data will be imported, but the bug numbers won't be the same. So the git commit messages referencing trac bug tickets will be future information garbage, oh joy. * It will be hosted by Canonical externally, rather than by SL as Trac currently is. If any of these are not to your liking, the time to speak up is now, before it all happens. :) Not to my liking, but if some really smart/committed folks are willing to do the work, have it well tested, say this is really worth the pain, and don't mind some folks ignoring the move for a few months... Though, I would first really love to see a clear explanation of why this is a good idea, and how the move benefits us. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)
Hi Rubén, Feedback after testing trisquel-sugar_3.0RC_i686 on a recent MacBook Pro: 1). Live CD boots and runs fine on a MacBook Pro (though has no wireless network, or camera support, and screen redraw was a little slow in some activities so I guess no or little use of gfx hardware acceleration). 2). Using the Live CD to install trisquel-sugar to a USB stick (my main test goal). WARNING DATA LOSS: Targeting a USB stick for the install process worked smoothly, but right at the very end I spotted it saying installing grub to hd0. This renders the primary internal hard disk on a Mac un-bootable. After much experimentation***, the only safe solution was a fresh re-patrition of the drive, and to perform a full restore from a back-up (thank goodness for Apple's Time Machine). *** PRAM resets, Disk Utility volume recovery, re-setting start-up disk, blessing from command line, re-install of OS, couple of other 3rd party recovery tools. If someone is unfortunate enough not to have a recent back-up, I think the disk data may be still recoverable as I did eventually manage to access the original data. If I had more time to faff, I think I could have experimented using the diskutil command line tool. The default install of an Intel Mac HD is a GUID partition scheme, with a small EFI partition, and then the rest of the disk as a bootable HFS+ partition (this looked fine but I didn't want to risk using the data there). FWIW, the visible symptom upon reboot was a grey screen for perhaps 30 sec, eventually a blinking grey folder icon with a question mark – the Mac basically can't find a bootable HD (but will happily boot off other media, say your original OS install DVD). 3). The resulting USB Stick failed to boot on a MacBook (but might work on other hardware, need to test). Regards, --Gary On 1 Oct 2009, at 21:47, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote: I have no illusions about the difficulty of jumpstarting an ecosystem, but since that is necessary to the success of Sugar, we need to make it happen. I have ideas for plans for that too [...other ideas for plans] That's all great but it boils down to what I said: we can't do it now, where we is Sugar Labs and it is: create better distro than Fedora-ish and service that distro with distro-vendor-quality support and infrastructure. So I propose we come up with some way to do it (ibid.) to propose to SLOB or we get real should say we're not going to do it (for now). Either is better than the status quo of not doing it and pretend that we are I'm still a newbie here, but let me propose an idea. Feel free to discard it if it's inappropriate. In the project Trisquel we've just made our own -still unnamed as a project- version of a distro for Sugar, and it has all the features you were talking about in the last days, including a disk installer, live cd with persistence, live usb with persistence, live usb graphical creator, Sugar style artwork, LTSP support, unattended installation... Coming soon we will have unattended distributed installation using pxe. We are going to maintain this project no matter if it is used by SL or not. And as an important feature, Trisquel is fully libre and endorsed by the FSF. We are open -and looking forward- to collaboration with SL. We don't want to compete with other projects like SoaS -we will not use that name either-, in fact I'd like to thank the SoaS authors, as I'm sure their work made it easier for us to make our version. My only intention with this message is for you to know our alternative. We are distro hackers -I don't like the vendors moniker-, so we have the skills and resources required, allowing you to focus on the Sugar development. Now that the initial tasks of our project are done, the maintenance will be easy. In fact, we will start publishing nightly builds with the latest Trisquel updates and the latest version of the Sugar components. We hope it will be a tool for developers and testers. You can find more info here: http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar Rubén ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] GPA Report - Feedback on using the Journal
Hi Caroline, On 9 Oct 2009, at 02:42, Caroline Meeks wrote: Today we worked with two groups on multiplication. They made squares with each side being a different multiplication problem that had the same answer. http://screencast.com/t/sUbiof2H We also had them reflect in their Journals about what they did. All of this went well. What was horrible was trying to get the right point in the project saved to the Journal and then navigating to the correct place to write. Sorry if this sounds a little terse, but it seems you decided to completely avoid using the Stop button at the end of each of your tasks: 1) Start a new Activity 2) Do stuff 3) Stop Activity 4) Name it 5) Goto 1 The Keep button, as currently implemented, will come back to haunt you when you return to work on those activities later (I've tried to explain this in all its gory detail in previous emails). None of the issues you mention above have yet hit the gory Keep versioning issues, so you'll have that joy to come when kids want to resume a couple of old kept activities for reference when working on a new one. I'll be happy the day that the Keep button is removed, it's clearly causing you and others horrible confusion. I smiled the day I realised the new toolbar designs at least demoted that darn button to a second class UI component (i.e hidden in a secondary toolbar) :-) It would be better if it just died even if we have no better replacement. For the engineers reading, the Keep function actively prevents users from 'manual merging' of their work, so as an intended method for exposing a versioning system, it is actually having the reverse effect. The solution I suggest is when you click the Keep button (Journal Icon) from an activity that the Journal reflection dialog box appears. Here are the problems we had. • Hard to get to the Journal, no easy F# short cut. There's been lot's of discussion (feature proposals, email threads, trac ticket comments) trying to find a free F# key that is not gong to conflict. F5 seemed a good candidate but is a poor choice for XO hardware. Likely we need a control panel that allows distros/ deployments to make their own choice and for the user then to have the ability to change if needed (perhaps the current frame CP module would be a place for changing Sugar shortcuts). • Hard to find the little arrow that gets you to where you can write. Especially since if the Frame is active, which it has to be to get to the Journal, the little bitty arrow you need to click is covered. There's a recent deployment (Mexico I think) ticket reporting this, I'm sure a design solution can be found. Note that you could direct kids to use the palette menu on the icon and select View Details as an alternative. • When students did their assigned task they were eager to go back to exploring with Sugar and wrote over their work without it being saved, or using the same name as the assigned activity. This was probably the worst outcome because then it was like they hadn't done the assignment, they had nothing to show for their work and we'll want to use it later for a portfolio. Get them to Stop when complete, and then Start new. • clicking the Activity Tab to write down the name is a PITA (this one is fixed in .88 I think). The 0.86 new toolbar design still requires you to click the Activity toolbar icon to show the title input box, but at least you're not then lost at that point (i.e. primary toolbar still visible and usable). • After they reflected they wanted to immediately go back to exploring in TA and we had to stop them, make them change the name again. They were very perplexed by this because they didn't know what to name their new file because they hadn't done anything yet. Get them to Stop when complete, and then Start new... • The word Description is not very friendly. I like What did you do? Walter wants to expand it even further, I'm not sure about that, its pretty challenging for the students to type so I'm not sure we want more boxes. No comment, I don't like this whole dialogue to be honest (it breaks my working flow and distracts me from whatever I'm trying to achieve), but I'm not a pedagogic type so don't feel I have a say in this design. I get the impression most (adults and kids) will just skip past this dialogue anyway give half a chance. There's been some noises to remove this dialogue completely, or at least let folks easily disable it from within Sugar. • Confusion between the Keep button and the samples and the snapshot icons. This is pretty much a TA design issue (and also that everyone still seems to be completely confused as what the Keep button actually does). • No feedback when you click Keep so there is a tendency to click it repeatedly. Yea, that's always bad. I usually try to stick
Re: [IAEP] SOAS Write problem
Hi Gerald, On 27 Sep 2009, at 01:35, Gerald Ardito wrote: Walter, Thanks for the suggestion. When I examine the log file, here's what I see: /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/sugar/util.py:25: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead import sha Traceback (most recent call last): File /usr/bin/sugar-activity, line 21, in module main.main() File /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/sugar/activity/main.py, line 105, in main module = __import__(module_name) File /usr/share/sugar/activities/Write.activity/ AbiWordActivity.py, line 35, in module from sugar.graphics.toolbarbox import ToolbarButton, ToolbarBox ImportError: No module named toolbarbox The new version of Write is only compatible with 0.86 (or 0.85.x development versions with the new toolbar code). Can you tell me where you downloaded Write from? The activities.sugarlabs.org site should not have let you download this version if you are running an old (0.84.x or earlier) version of Sugar. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SOAS Write problem
Hi Gerald, Many thanks for the feedback. On 27 Sep 2009, at 02:52, Gerald Ardito wrote: Gary, This image came from Caroline Meeks at Solution Grove. It came as part of a version of SOAS that she put together for me. Gerald OK, looks like a SoaS build mistake. Caroline, just a quick ping. Checking activities.sugarlabs.org, it tells me Write-63 was the last version compatible with Sugar 0.84.x. I believe Aleksey started working on the new 0.85.x toolbar code as of version 64, breaking compatibility with earlier versions of Sugar: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addons/versions/4201 Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Which Language?
Hi Caryl, On 26 Sep 2009, at 05:00, Caryl Bigenho wrote: On Thursday, Ben wrote in the IAEP list: My feeling is that the most important thing we can do in this area is to make it easy to write Activities that are intrinsically cross- platform. To borrow a phrase, one way to do this is to choose languages, and interpreters, that are incapable of expressing platform dependencies. So I have a question for you folks. I am in discussion with a college CS prof who would like to teach beginning programming with XOs. He is interested in trying several different languages, but I am interested in pointing him toward the one that would result in the most universally usable Activities with the idea that his students would be able to write Activities as class projects that could then be widely distributed. It would be great if they would be, as Ben suggests, cross-platform. By that, I mean usable on the XO-1, XO-1.5, SoaS, live CD, etc. for PCs and Intel Macs. Of course my dream ideal is that they would also be able to be run on the old PowerPC Macs that are still widely used in the public schools, but that is probably too much too hope for. So...the question is, what should I tell him? Python. Regards, --Gary P.S. I can provide more ifs and buts, if you really want, but given the lengths and distractions of some recent threads, I thought I'd just give you the answer, straight up ;-) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar
Hi Bernie, On 23 Sep 2009, at 17:19, Bernie Innocenti wrote: El Tue, 22-09-2009 a las 16:51 +0100, Gary C Martin escribió: This is not a what if it works right now and since 0.84. Any .xo bundle in your Journal can be 'sent to' over the either to any friend, where by Journal will automatically install it for them. I have sent the Physics.xo bundle to a number of remote folks via this method (followed by sending example physics simulations). If you take into account sneaker net, you've always been able to pop a .xo on a USB stick and hand it to someone else. This is a reason I'd be happy to see all .xo bundles appear in the Journal (so they can be shared, or hacked on by our users). Lets not loose one of the major open source benefits of Sugar, that the commercial competition really can't provide. Sure. You make it sound like I said let's drop the activity sharing feature, when in fact I was talking about esoteric scenarios, such as a user of i386-fedora10-sugar0.84 who wants to share a *binary* activity bundle with another user running armel-squeeze-sugar0.86. Would that not potentially be covered if ActivityTeam agree a set of supported platforms (and agree a 'fat' bundle)? We can _never_ test and QA every platform in existence, so we have to at least agree on a core N amount of 'stuff we will actually test', and modify N as those core user platform needs change over time? New platforms will need to use new Sugar releases. The use cases that work now would continue to work with any package format. Those that do not work now, would at least fail gracefully. In a distant future, we could even come up with good fallbacks for these what if scenarios. But I wouldn't recommend complicating the design *for* them. I say again :-( This is not a distant future, I see this as a core benefit of current Sugar to educators and learners since Sugar was released – though you can argue not many have (visibly) leveraged this fantastic software feature – but that's just an education issue ;-) I would dearly love to see only core Sugar components falling in the 'needs distro packaging' camp. And then all additional Activities as non binary including source scripts. The process would then be about agreeing the binary dependancies for sucrose at each major Sugar release, and then requiring the minimum sucrose release needed when trying to install a new .xo bundle. Regards, --Gary P.S. these threads really depress me, why am I not working on Labyrinth, Moon, Physics, et al, testing and QA'ing Sugar builds, instead of trying to read this thread and argue (no offence intended to Bernie, he's a great guy we would horribly, horribly struggle to get along without). I can see me picking up N Sugar activities for maintenance and then just releasing them in a way I think would be best for our users (rather than professional developers or distro maintainers). P.P.S as a mac head I have no idea what to do with random distro packages, but am quite happy renaming .xo as .zip and then picking through the content on my platform of choice for review/reuse (quite a frequent process for me at least). All of my dev/visual work is done on a mac, I just make sure I test it all on an XO sugar install and/or a Fedora Sugar vm before release so I'm not pushing garbage. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] A Virtual Box solution that works with Sticks
Hi Caroline, On 23 Sep 2009, at 20:10, Caroline Meeks wrote: The current status of the GPA is: The 4th grade classroom has a bank of 6 machines that can boot Sugar on a Stick. The 4th grade specialist has one used laptop that can boot Sugar on a Stick. Access to the PCs in the computer lab is problematic and likely not to happen very much. There are two laptop carts of 25 bought last year Macbooks but booting Sugar on a Stick is problematic. See https://answers.launchpad.net/soas/+question/81566 for gory details. The teachers are enthusiastic! The goal is to be able to use the classroom bank of computers for Center Work that is time in the day when students break into groups and work on different things in different parts of the room. Sugar would become one center. We also want to be able to do whole class instruction by signing out a laptop cart of Macbooks. We have sufficient privileges to install Virtual Box on the laptop cart Macbooks. Can anyone think of way to use Virtual Box that would allow students to use the info on their sticks so they can at another point in time use a classroom computer and not always need to use the same MacBook? Sure, you could just link the ~/default/datastore directory on the VM to the matching location on the stick. I'm not sure how the pretty way to do this would be (likely at this moment in time would be just tweaking the VMs to assume the stick was there). Pop stick in, then run the VM would be the workflow once set-up. From a future stand point, you'd likely want to push upstream for a feature where Sugar checked for valid (and correct version) data-stores on start-up (perhaps with a UI if more than one valid data-store was found), so any external media device, or perhaps even mounted network volume could become the default data-store for that session. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar
On 23 Sep 2009, at 20:22, Bernie Innocenti wrote: El Wed, 23-09-2009 a las 14:33 -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz escribió: Or, we bless a small number of completely self-contained virtual machines (e.g. etoys squeak, mozilla javascript, Sun Java, perhaps a restricted python), and then run them on any hardware. I think that would create a much better environment for end-user application developers, and would solve many (but not all) of the compatibility issues. It's still too restrictive for external developers who would like to do more ambitious things, like Karma and Physics. Those would have to come and beg us to approve their dependencies. +1 That is just what should happen if they are deemed valuable by educators/learners. I would be very happy if the bulk of 'activities' were content/material created in such meta activity environments. Currently, they can just go on and package up all they need independently. That is also what is and should happen ;-) Regards, -Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] A Virtual Box solution that works with Sticks
Hi Bill, On 24 Sep 2009, at 00:17, Bill Bogstad wrote: On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Sure, you could just link the ~/default/datastore directory on the VM to the matching location on the stick. I'm not sure how the pretty way to do this would be (likely at this moment in time would be just tweaking the VMs to assume the stick was there). Pop stick in, then run the VM would be the workflow once set-up. From a future stand point, you'd likely want to push upstream for a feature where Sugar checked for valid (and correct version) data-stores on start-up (perhaps with a UI if more than one valid data-store was found), so any external media device, or perhaps even mounted network volume could become the default data-store for that session. Could you clarify what you are suggesting? Most VMs (including VirtualBox) typically use large files within the host environment to provide the contents of virtual disks to the OS running under virtualization. By default VirtualBox uses a format that dynamically allocates in the real filesystem as the guest OS actually writes to the virtual disk. I don't think this file is going to be directly compatible with any file (or filesystem image) that SoaS is storing on a USB stick. If you were thinking of something else, please let me know. Yes, I routinely use the Shared Folders feature for VirtualBox on the Mac :-) Every thing Sugar flavour I work on resides there for easy access between different VMs. VirtualBox treats this as a device (after installing guest additions) so after a reboot I run: sudo mount -o uid=500 -t vboxsf name_you_give_share name_of_intended_mount_point ...which should should do the trick. Also be aware that you need to tell VirtualBox it's allowed to use USB, I think it defaults to allow, but you can also filter for named devices if that makes more sense in a deployment. I would also want to sanity check the shut down process to make sure we didn't bork users sticks at the end of a session. Ping if you'd like to work this through, should be easy enough for me to set up a test cycle here if you think this is valuable. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] A Virtual Box solution that works with Sticks
Hi Dave, On 24 Sep 2009, at 01:55, Dave Bauer wrote: Last I checked virtualbox could not boot from USB on a Mac. This may have changed in a more recent version. Yep correct, that is still the case**. But, we were not talking about booting USB. Just mounting it and using the data-store from there, tweaking a VM for deployment 'should' be small change. This of course runs into all the 'what version of Sugar is installed in the VM' vs. 'what version of data-store is installed on the stick' but for a small deployment with control over both, and with specific HW needs, I don't see this as an issue. Additionally, if some data-store validation checks could be put in place I could even see this being a very positive feature for Soas and/ or upstream Sugar; an ideal little solvable issue for the two to resolve in a way that would benefit any deployments with old or not currently compatible hardware (where either the OS or a VM has to be run from the physical machine). ** unless you put the whole damn vdi on the stick and forgo the idea of booting the stick independently as a normal OS, though there could be room to investigate booting of a small partition with a reliable host OS that did nothing but dive right into the VM for those cases. Seems doable, but scary. Would much rather spend effort in finding a way to boot a USB directly – likely requires providing a Mac only image, though they can quite happily boot from USB, they just require correct boot formats (EFI for Intel Macs) but current Linux's seems well behind that curve. Most other HW manufacturers are still on old BIOS set-ups, Macs can support this for booting, Boot Camp does just this, but not for booting from USB devices unfortunately. Regards, --Gary Dave On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Bill, On 24 Sep 2009, at 00:17, Bill Bogstad wrote: On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Sure, you could just link the ~/default/datastore directory on the VM to the matching location on the stick. I'm not sure how the pretty way to do this would be (likely at this moment in time would be just tweaking the VMs to assume the stick was there). Pop stick in, then run the VM would be the workflow once set-up. From a future stand point, you'd likely want to push upstream for a feature where Sugar checked for valid (and correct version) data-stores on start-up (perhaps with a UI if more than one valid data-store was found), so any external media device, or perhaps even mounted network volume could become the default data-store for that session. Could you clarify what you are suggesting? Most VMs (including VirtualBox) typically use large files within the host environment to provide the contents of virtual disks to the OS running under virtualization. By default VirtualBox uses a format that dynamically allocates in the real filesystem as the guest OS actually writes to the virtual disk. I don't think this file is going to be directly compatible with any file (or filesystem image) that SoaS is storing on a USB stick. If you were thinking of something else, please let me know. Yes, I routinely use the Shared Folders feature for VirtualBox on the Mac :-) Every thing Sugar flavour I work on resides there for easy access between different VMs. VirtualBox treats this as a device (after installing guest additions) so after a reboot I run: sudo mount -o uid=500 -t vboxsf name_you_give_share name_of_intended_mount_point ...which should should do the trick. Also be aware that you need to tell VirtualBox it's allowed to use USB, I think it defaults to allow, but you can also filter for named devices if that makes more sense in a deployment. I would also want to sanity check the shut down process to make sure we didn't bork users sticks at the end of a session. Ping if you'd like to work this through, should be easy enough for me to set up a test cycle here if you think this is valuable. Regards, --Gary ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- Dave Bauer d...@solutiongrove.com http://www.solutiongrove.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Bug reporting
Hi Dennis, On 16 Sep 2009, at 04:40, Dennis Daniels wrote: Greetings, I have roughly diagrammed the bug reporting process for Sugar here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Reporting_a_bug.png -- snip -- The tool I'm using for the diagrams is Umbrello. I'd be happy to post the XMI to these diagrams if someone is interested. What, so you didn't stick with the Labyrinth Activity? ;-) I'm working on v8 at the moment, mostly likely just a revision bump for supporting the new 0.86 toolbars, MIME support, and a few minor bug fixes. Remember, right click to drag :-b Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] What Activity Is This?
Hi Caryl, On 14 Sep 2009, at 18:07, Caryl Bigenho wrote: Hi Folks, I'm just checking over the things left on the journals on the XO M- stock machines I lent to the Bozeman and Billings (MT) LUGS. Someone in Billings left this. What is it? The journal says it is Audio by Cracker (the name of the computer is Cracker because it has a small crack in the screen). What Activity is this? I haven't seen this screen before. The icon for the Activity does not appear in either the list or favorites view. I will attach it also. I tried a small audio recording in Record to see if this would come up. It did not. It's the default icon for a sound object, likely was something like a .ogg file downloaded via Browse. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming
On 12 Sep 2009, at 21:40, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: Martin Dengler wrote: On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 05:30:30PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote: re marketing course: in fact I have accepted Mel's invitation to do a classroom for Fedora. Congratulations. re logos: Strawberry=6, Blueberry=4, and 5 we'll use some other time Very clear - thanks. [Have we agreed on Blueberry as the Name of Record?] Sebastien? So it will be! :) The next release of SoaS will be named Blueberry. Gary, Sean, could any of you give creating a new boot screen with an updated logo for plymouth a try? Sure no problem, have all the artwork already, just need to swap the colours. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] turtle art: 2 instances, no?
Hi Bill, On 7 Sep 2009, at 12:09, Bill Kerr wrote: I can't see any way to load 2 instances on the SoaS version If I have a project loaded, saved and named Then go into the journal and try to load an older saved version then it doesn't load but puts me back to the current open version I have to first close the current version and then open the older version to get it This is not a bug with TurtleArt. It's (in my view) the major design backfire that is the Keep button... Keep is not like a copy, duplicate or 'save as' file operation in other OS environments. Sugars Keep is actually a (bad) attempt at Keep version snap shot, unfortunately no where in the Journal UI is this visually indicated/ referenced. Think of Keep a little like non-linear undo states stored to Journal. The problem with all this is that Sugar currently treats all versions you Keep from an activity as the same activity. You can only have one of the versions active at once, this is what you're seeing when you try to resume (what you think is another old activity is actually a version) and Sugar switches to the current version of it you already have open. To create fresh new activities, you need to: 1) start new activity 2) create masterpiece 3) stop activity 4) goto step 1 If you ever find yourself clicking Keep give your self a small jab in the hand with a sharp protractor ;-) In every release of Sugar to date, Keep == horrible design failure, even for the upcoming 0.86. The problem is the real deal (true versioning) is always just over the horizon, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and the blasted button some how makes it through (and causes way more grief then it ever solves as the common use case is I want a duplicate copy of this). Regards, --Gary Also if I am working on a project and remember an idea from a sample project then I can't just load the sample view the idea and then quickly return to my current project to implement there I have to close current project, then open sample and view idea, then close sample, then reopen current project, etc. Please correct if I am wrong about this ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] turtle art: 2 instances, no?
On 7 Sep 2009, at 15:03, Bill Kerr wrote: On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Bill, On 7 Sep 2009, at 12:09, Bill Kerr wrote: I can't see any way to load 2 instances on the SoaS version If I have a project loaded, saved and named Then go into the journal and try to load an older saved version then it doesn't load but puts me back to the current open version I have to first close the current version and then open the older version to get it This is not a bug with TurtleArt. It's (in my view) the major design backfire that is the Keep button... Keep is not like a copy, duplicate or 'save as' file operation in other OS environments. Sugars Keep is actually a (bad) attempt at Keep version snap shot, unfortunately no where in the Journal UI is this visually indicated/referenced. Think of Keep a little like non-linear undo states stored to Journal. The problem with all this is that Sugar currently treats all versions you Keep from an activity as the same activity. You can only have one of the versions active at once, this is what you're seeing when you try to resume (what you think is another old activity is actually a version) and Sugar switches to the current version of it you already have open. To create fresh new activities, you need to: 1) start new activity 2) create masterpiece 3) stop activity 4) goto step 1 If you ever find yourself clicking Keep give your self a small jab in the hand with a sharp protractor ;-) hi gary, I'm doing some of the barry newell 40 shapes challenge I posted on another thread Some of the shapes are related to other shapes eg. after I do shape 6 then I want to Keep that as BN6 then use it again to make BN7, etc So I change the name in the box from BN6 to BN7 and click Keep It does work similar to Save As ... If I go to the Journal and click the arrow on the right the image represents the different versions But the confusion arises when I try to open an old version and just get back to the currently open version So I can achieve something like Save As ... but can't achieve opening two versions at once, as you say I did just the same thing last year with a set of shapes from a Logo work sheet from one of the deployments, use keep to modify a previously similar TA setup. I got to about 30 before Keep got me into a total mess. In the end I had to take screen shots of each of the TA project tile sets, and manually recreate each so I could have several examples open at the same time. Using Keep will get you into even more hot water if you intend to share such examples via collaboration... As shared versions will be seen as the same activity, a remote user will likely just get whatever they version they first joined, then each time then join (what you may think is) a different shared activity example, they will just resume/switch to the previous one. The Keep button is quite the Sugar usability land-mine :-( I think Walter has added a new Save snapshot button to a recent version of TurtleArt to avoid just this very issue. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Remove the naming alert in 0.86
Hi Simon, On 2 Sep 2009, at 16:35, Simon Schampijer wrote: On 09/02/2009 01:32 PM, Christoph Derndorfer wrote: On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 3:36 AM, Simon Schampijersi...@schampijer.dewrote: Hi, some of you may know, I am doing a Sugar Pilot here in Germany. I try to keep my blog (listed on the sugarlabs planet as well) about my findings up to date [1]. For technical findings (how to setup nfs, ldap on Fedora for example) the plan is to use the wiki. 'Debatable things' I will try to bring up on the mailing list as well. Regards, Simon [1] http://erikos.sweettimez.de/ --- Categories: Sugar, Deployment and Teaching [2] http://planet.sugarlabs.org/ +1 on removing the “naming alert”, this has been bugging me since the day it's been introduced. Adding “rewards” to the Journal is something that David Van Assche and Gary C Martin discussed quite a bit Paris. Unfortunately nobody had the time to really follow up on these discussions with some actual code... :-/ Looking forward to the next blog posts about your experiences in the school! Christoph Let me post here from my blog post why I think it is important: As much as I am a friend of highlighting the naming, tagging and description purposes, I don’t think the alert is a good way to ‘enforce’ this. I think those actions are not first class ones. I am happy when the kids understood the concept of the Journal a bit, but they will not start to make better descriptions in the first Sugar days or weeks, with or without the alert. For now, it is just a confusing dialog that pops up when you close an activity. And later, once the kids would know about the importance they would be better served with other tools. For example an option in the activity toolbar (like we have for the title already). From my experience I highly recommend to remove the alert, +1 when for 0.86 already. Personally I'm not keen on it either. I pretty well always skip past it myself and have learnt to click Stop and tap return. But, being neither qualified on the pedagogical needs, nor having seen actual learners of out target age, I didn't want to rush forward and +1 Simon's proposal. The main goal as I remember was to try and combat the slew of un-named Journal entries, but a good chunk of this was likely due to the Home favourite view always starting new activity instances. Now that it resumes by default, the Journal 'spam' has been cut down quite significantly (for me). Perhaps we drop this dialogue and then seriously take another look at improving the names automatically generated for new activity entries? Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] deployment team meeting?
On 30 Aug 2009, at 17:32, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: would like to propose a meeting to talk about how deployments can provide better feedback and how we can process it so developers and the rest of Sugar Labs can prioritize their work accordingly. How does it sound? +1! Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] svg animations, no?
On 29 Aug 2009, at 10:07, Lucian Branescu wrote: Your best bet is using a browser runtime, like hulahop. Gecko has good support for SVG, but without SMIL. You'll have to use JavaScript for animations. Right now, the only runtime I know of that can run SMIL is Opera, and that one is useless (because it's closed source). You could use Fakesmile (http://leunen.d.free.fr/fakesmile/) for other browsers, but it's rather slow. FWIW, Webkit (testing with Safari in Mac OS X) is showing all animated SVGs rather well (thanks for the link Bill), Hilbert curves were my favourite :-) Hmmm, there was some interest at one point in making Browse's back end (Gecko) interchangeable with Webkit. Also seem to remember Sayamindu mentioning he was using Webkit inside the latest Read so he could support a new ebook format (and do some other interesting interactive book stuff). Regards, --Gary 2009/8/29 Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com: thanks for information, tony What I stress to my students initially is the strong underlying rationale for knowing more about SVGs. Some of the points I go over with them more than once are: animations are fairly easy to achieve (SMIL or Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language is part of SVG) it offers a path into some core web techniques and standards: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and SVG It's mathematical - both simple co-ordinate systems and more complex maths such as bezier curves. I like the fact that art can be done with maths good free open source software is available, eg. inkscape the small size (low bandwidth) and scalability of SVG graphics means they have a big future, eg. in the mobile phone industry images are scalable There are some very interesting essays and SVG examples at this dev.opera page (view these pages using Opera browser) ie. I see a strong educational rationale for teaching more about SVGs (this first occurred to me when reading Tim Berners Lee's book Weaving the Web), but confess to my lack of success in persuading anyone else at all about this :-( btw my year 10 students are enjoying the challenge to make their own icons to replace the XO icon - I'll be posting some of their icons soon On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 1:57 PM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: Sugar uses librsvg to render all SVGs, I'm not sure which are the capabilities of this library regarding animations. http://osdir.com/ml/gnome.lib.librsvg.devel/2008-07/msg3.html Animation is going to be a lot of work, and I'm not sure that I'd want it in librsvg. It's a very good, fast static SVG rendering library, and I'd like it to stay that way. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Release Physics-3
Hi Bill, On 29 Aug 2009, at 14:44, Bill Kerr wrote: the default single click shape does not work for the box but does work for circle and triangle Just to confirm, this is tested and working. But, I think what happened here is that you may have dragged a very small (too small) box first, and then subsequent single clicks were then trying to clone that non drawable shape. I thought I'd avoided that case by not remembering parameters for shapes too small to draw, will fix this in the next release – so thanks for reporting it! :-) I think there needs to be clear install instructions for those doing this for the first time. I wasn't sure what to do. Option A: (all releases of Sugar) Installing new or upgrading an individual activity should be as simple as: 1) visit http://activities.sugarlabs.org 2) find something you want to install (or upgrade if you already have an old version) 3) click download Option B: (all releases of Sugar) If there is no internet connectivity, the teacher can: 1) download the .xo file (using Sugar or any other system) 2) put the .xo bundle onto a USB stick 3) Provide the USB stick to the class Option C: (Sugar 0.84 and up) Or again for no internet connectivity, the teacher can: 1) download the .xo file to their Sugar 2) use the Journal send to - friend to send the .xo bundle to each member of the class Option D: (Sugar 0.82 and older uses OLPC infrastructure hosting old activity releases, Sugar 0.84 needs to be manually configured and likely only works with old OLPC infrastructure, Sugar 0.86 and newer will use latest release from activities.sugarlabs.org by default) Automatically upgrade all installed activities to the latest versions available should be as simple as: 1) open the my settings control panel 2) click on Software update icon There have been some bumps in the upgrade system (which if encountered should be reported as BUGS, needing to manually erase before an install would be a BUG). Upgrading is a particular problem for distros that package and install Sugar activities in their own distro specific way – which basically makes every user for that distro need root privileges and know how to yum, or apt install/upgrade and breaks all of the above Sugar GUI install methods :-( To end on a brighter note, the last release or so of Sugar on a Stick has been installing activities using the Sugar conventional .xo bundle process into ~/Activities, so excluding any bugs, options A to C should be working fine. Hope that was more help than muddying the water! Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [math4] Git tutorial
Hi David, On 29 Aug 2009, at 18:47, David Farning wrote: Currently, there are tidbits of information on git spread around the wiki. One of the hurdle for new contributors (of code) is figuring out how to create an ssh key, set up an account on git.sl.o, and use git. I would like to propose going through the wiki and moving the git related information to a collection of three pages Activity_Team/Git, Activity_Team/Git_FAQ, and, Activity_Team/Git_tutorial. There are excellent resources out there all ready, and all ready linked to from our wiki. Lets not make even more work for ourselves by writing lessor, and duplicate documentation. But by all means have a wiki clean up, and make sure we're pointing folks to useful maintained content. The trick with the wiki is keeping a minimal but needed set of information, so people actually have the energy to find it, read it, and we can keep it maintained and accurate! Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Release Physics-3
Hi Bill, On 30 Aug 2009, at 01:30, Bill Kerr wrote: On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 1:35 AM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Bill, On 29 Aug 2009, at 14:44, Bill Kerr wrote: the default single click shape does not work for the box but does work for circle and triangle Just to confirm, this is tested and working. But, I think what happened here is that you may have dragged a very small (too small) box first, and then subsequent single clicks were then trying to clone that non drawable shape. I thought I'd avoided that case by not remembering parameters for shapes too small to draw, will fix this in the next release – so thanks for reporting it! :-) the square block does work if you click on it first but try clicking on the circle, the triangle and the square in that order - the square does not create a shape by default (the others do) then exit physics and go back in click on the square, the triangle and circle in order - the circle does not create a shape by default (the others do) and variations of the above - sometimes the default (click shape, click screen, shape standard size shape created) works sometimes it doesn't eg. it might always work for the square but not at all for the triangle or circle depending on the clicking order in some cases it leaves just an arrow on the screen and the program crashes all of the above without me trying to create any smaller shapes Hmmm, that's really interesting. I can't reproduce any of these cases here :-( Is anyone else able to reproduce these cases? I've tested on an XO-1 running 0.82, XO-1 running 0.84, and a Mac running F11 and sugar-jhbuild 0.85.x Just to help my sanity, when you next reproduce this... With the tool that you find fails, can you click and drag to create a size of your own choosing, and then afterwards single click to create a clone? Just to be sure that your not managing to create a 'micro' shape as the default by accident (yes I need to fix that case). Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Release Physics-3
Just thought I'd forward this over to IAEP. (If you are running an older build of SoaS, you'll need to erase the existing Physics Activity before trying to upgrade. The older SoaS shipped with Activities installed in a non-standard place, with administrator permissions, preventing the normal Sugar activity upgrade process. You'll likely need to drop into Terminal, find and remove the Physics.activity directory from there. Current SoaS builds have this issue resolved). Regards, --Gary Begin forwarded message: From: Sugar Labs Activities activit...@sugarlabs.org Date: 27 August 2009 18:41:21 BST To: sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: [Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Release Physics-3 Reply-To: sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org Activity Homepage: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4193 Sugar Platform: from 0.82 to 0.86 Download Now: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/version/29221 Release notes: * Journal state saving now supported! * MIME type support added so Physics Journal entries can be sent to others (application/x-physics-activity) * Fixed Activity title text input so you can name your work correctly (olpcgames glitch) * New Grab toolbar icon (hand) * New Polygon toolbar icon (irregular polygon shape) * Cleaned up toolbar order * Single click behaviour so that Circle, Triangle, and Box tool add default sized shapes * Single click behaviour for all tools, so that a subsequent single click creates a clone of the last shape made with that tool. * Erase tool now erases (one by one) pins/joints/motors from a shape, before finally removing the shape itself. * Using +key for all keyboard shortcuts (was causing PyGame input focus issues when typing a title) * Using the Sugar standard arrow cursor for the PyGame canvas (well, a fake one) * Cleaned up the Activity icon * Upgraded to new version of Elements 0.13 * Upgraded to new version of Box2D * Picked up Pootle (July 3rd) translations Many thanks to Asaf Paris Mandoki, and Brian Jordan for all their hard work! Reviewer comments: Trusted activity Sugar Labs Activities http://activities.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.
On 25 Aug 2009, at 16:49, Gary C Martin wrote: On 25 Aug 2009, at 16:03, Michael Stone wrote: El Mon, 24-08-2009 a las 20:58 +0200, Martin Langhoff escribi=F3: And also... and completely from the outside... I'll apologise in advance for saying something I know might be controversial. I worry that SL seems to have -- for a external party like me -- more bureaucracy than it has people doing. IMHExperience, the projects I enjoy working on, and that I see being productive have a much lower procedure/label/committe : contributor ratio. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but just 2 days ago I was offered an advice on the other side of the spectrum by Michael: he notes that a lot of important things are falling through the cracks because nobody organizes the available resources. His suggestion is to introduce real project management into the game, which is basically what David's Projects idea seems to bring. For the record, I consider my puny efforts to offer more support for Martin's and Greg's remarks than for David's. (The analysis is simply that our current situation is unsurprising given the facts that, first, SL seems to consist more of leaders than of followers and second, that there seems to be a real dearth of people who care more about getting other people unstuck than about making progress on their own pet projects.) (Though, obviously, I'm more guilty than most here.) A meta-comment on your post: you don't need to apologize and be shy for offering your criticism, no matter how many people will disagree with you. Actually, he does need to apologize and to be shy because doing so makes it easier for folks to hear what he's trying to say. (In our current environment, it works rather similarly to good-cop/ bad-cop.) I recently got useful criticism from Bemasc, Christoph and Daniel on #sugar regarding our relationship with Deployments. Their feeling is that we didn't do enough to get them involved, mine is that our efforts to reach out have been largely unsuccessful for reasons I do not fully understand. Here's another reason for you to consider: I have come to believe that many people involved in deployments have *learned* that they're not going to get anything useful out of interacting with SL because: 1. SL has largely ignored the feedback supplied by these deployments in 2007-2008 and exhaustively documented by Greg Smith and S Page at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Roadmap Wow, blast from the past :-) Actually I'd strongly disagree here. Having re-read through most of what is listed here, much progress has been made on a large number (dare I say majority) of these items! OK, I took up my own challenge here... So, please do treat comments below as from the peanut-gallery, and not as authoritative responses to these ~82 feature requests – many of them significant compound feature sets in of themselves. I'd say close to 50% have been resolved, 10% are specifically XO hardware related, 10% XS server, 15% I don't know enough to confirm or deny, 5-10% are duplicates: FWIW: There's a cold beer waiting at the end of this email. -- Feature roadmap/Spell checker in Write: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Spell_checker_in_Write English checking is back in and working, though unsure about other languages, likely just down to availability of a dictionary file for a given language. -- Feature roadmap/Sugarized color picker: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Sugarized_color_picker Done and in working for Write, Paint Activity (and others that use colour) haven’t picked this up yet, just a matter of free time (I almost did Paint but keep getting distracted). -- Feature roadmap/Easy Sugarization: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Easy_%22Sugarization%22 How long is this piece of wet string ;-) But there has been lot’s of effort here. Off the top of my head I’d point to the switch to Metacity in 0.86, Tomeu’s GTK+ widget for making Gnash content into full Activities, Tomeu’s hellow-world PyQt based Activity example. Benjamin’s GSOC Groupthink workhttp://bemasc.net/~bens/groupthink/groupthink-module.html for solving collaboration simply (for the author) in many classes of Activity type. Lucian’s GSOC Webified work http://honeyweb.wordpress.com/ for creating custom site specific browser Activities. Universal bundle work from Aleksey came close but pused to 0.88 for time/ stability reasons. -- Feature roadmap/Activity updater improvements: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Activity_updater_improvements This was part of OLPC distro onlu for a long time, but is now recently over as a part of Sugar. Majority of work I’m aware of is to get it working smoothly with the activities.sugarlabs.org mozilla addons based site (a big improvement from all the manual wiki hacking). -- Feature roadmap/Concept maps: http://wiki.laptop.org/go
Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?
Hi Bill, On 22 Aug 2009, at 22:44, Bill Kerr wrote: hi alan, still thinking about the broader issue you raise about the importance of real science and its connection to computer based work and how to attempt to implement this in school settings (complex issue) however, I do notice that many of the standard etoy simulations are simulations of real world scientific type events, and not just maths related - salmon sniff - fish and plankton - particles dye in water - particles gas model I just checked the etoys gallery. It even says in the gallery, Frame-based animation can be used for physics analysis Here's another quick idea that could be part of a lesson plan: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Physics_transverse_waves.png Regards, --Gary P.S. Physics-3 is real close now, honest! :-) I diverted some time this week instead to Sugar design issues as we are just shuddering into the feature freeze for this release. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?
On 18 Aug 2009, at 17:49, Caroline Meeks wrote: How do we help people find this sort of idea and the video I made? I think we need to link them from the activities.sugarlabs.org page somehow. Is there already a solution for this? Currently we're building up: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Physics There's a couple of youtube videos linked there already (but would be nice to get .ogv links if this content starts to grow). Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?
Hi Bill, Not sure if you wanted answers :-) On 15 Aug 2009, at 02:51, Bill Kerr wrote: I might try these next week and see how they go: does altering the size of an object affect its drop time? No does joining objects together (large and small) affect drop time? No Remember, you can run all cases at once! Just pause the simulation. Add a box right across the horizontal middle of screen. Pin it at left and right edge so it's fixed. Then across top half of screen add a large sphere, a small sphere, a couple of linked objects. Play the simulation so all shapes land on the horizontal pinned box. Pause simulation again, and delete the horizontal pinned box. Now you're all set up, shapes all aligned up for their race to the ground :-) Play! does altering the length of a pendulum affect its swing time? Yes. For more advanced, you might like to try a 'split pendulum', and get to see a slow and fast swing in one cycle (some thing like the attached image works fine). inline: Physics_split_pendulum.png before doing the above say what you think will happen after doing the above say whether you think the physics program reflects real world behaviour (possibility of follow up real world experiments here) possibility of follow up real world experiments here nice :-) +1 FWIW: Newton's cradle type set-ups don't work quite as expected (you end up with an oscillation of half the balls each time), I think this might be down to the default material properties we are currently using for all shapes. We have a future Physics feature to expose the material properties, likely a simple list of material pre-sets (something like helium wood, rubber, steel, lead). design a catapult system to accurately hit (a) stationary distant target (b) moving target (c) close target build a complex or elegant building that doesn't fall down A nice one here for a challenge is to restrict the design to only use circles with links. Try for an Eiffel Tower like shape. It is World of Goo all over again ;-) http://2dboy.com/games.php other ideas along these lines? General miscellaneous tips: - Pretty fundamental is the need to pause the simulation when constructing more complicated structures (unless you make that the challenge, build an X without pausing the simulation). - While paused, use shapes to help as 'construction templates' to help place new things accurately (they can overlap), then delete the template shape before resuming the simulation. extra features I would like to see in physics: copy shapes Not on our feature list, will have a think how practical this would be to actually implement. move them while in setup mode Been requested before already. Might be hard to implement. Don't think we have control over this in Physics, likely something down stream in either Elements, or Box2D (or all 3!). a timer My call on this is related to another possible future feature. Object trails would be very useful (daub a blob of paint on a shape and watch it leave a trail on screen). This 'paint daub' could be set to pulse to a timer, then you could just count the trail marks. Sound would also be great, set a specific shape to make a custom sound on any collision, set a shape to play a sound based on it's velocity (or rotation). I'd likely suggest we avoid sound until Sugar (well the various distros) have reliable stable sound (right now it seems a real mess). icons: I think it would be better if the polygon icon looked like an irregular shape rather than a regular hexagon Have this feature request already, you should get it in the next release :-) btw if there was a regular hexagon then you could use it to do some work with tessellations in setup mode using the triangle, square, hexagon - if you had the move feature in setup mode eg. make a tessellation in setup mode and then support it so it doesn't fall apart under gravity Not planning on this, but will keep it on a possible feature list. Thanks for all the great feedback so far!! Regards, --Gary___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Physics - Lesson plans ideas?
On 15 Aug 2009, at 20:58, Asaf Paris Mandoki wrote: build a complex or elegant building that doesn't fall down This can be done on top of an earthquake simulator (see attached image). The earthquake simulator can be modified to produce longitudinal and transverse waves. Now that is a really great/valuable idea, thanks for sharing! Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS with Rosie's Girls
On 12 Aug 2009, at 08:59, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 04:25, Caroline Meekssolutiongr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: This is turning out to be a very important concept to explain to people. Does anyone know of any educational material that can help people understand this distinction and how to set up a network correctly. We should put this information here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Collaboration How does Apple explain that a printer is seen only if in the same network segment? (or iChat or any other of their services that use mDNS). Good question :-) They don't, well not much, here's a support doc regarding iChat and Bonjour: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iChat/4.0/en/9717.html Here's the cherry pickings: You can use Bonjour to chat with other iChat users on your local network without using an instant message account or server. Each computer communicates directly with its neighbors. Other iChat users who are on the same network segment (”subnet”) as you appear in the window. If you connect to the Internet using PPP (or PPPoE), you won’t see other Bonjour users. If you connect via a shared network segment, which is common with cable modems, you may see other iChat users. If your computer is protected by a firewall, you might be unable to receive messages from other Bonjour users. To use Bonjour, you need to change your firewall settings to allow activity on port 5298. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Any way to hide google translation stuff in the printable version of wiki pages?
On 6 Aug 2009, at 21:07, Kevin Cole wrote: On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 14:57, Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com wrote: I've set up Google Translations in the wiki sidebar for a community evaluation, http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Welcome_to_the_Sugar_Labs_wiki . In addition to making all pages longer, the 'Using the Wiki' section of the sidebar is pushed further down. ...Bernie might be able to move that, if the community prefers. Hmmm, wow folks actually still print? :-) I had a colleague who would incessantly print out every email she received and file it away by date, that was quite fun to watch ;-) On a community wiki, material is going to be out of date _really_ fast if you're referring to a print- out. One benefit now is that all pages have translation links. True, though I'm still not keen on all the vertical scrolling into empty space. -.8 if it comes to a vote :-) Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Any way to hide google translation stuff in the printable version of wiki pages?
Hi Kevin,
On 6 Aug 2009, at 23:32, Kevin Cole wrote:
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 17:52, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com
wrote:
Hmmm, wow folks actually still print? :-) I had a colleague who would
incessantly print out every email she received and file it away by
date,
that was quite fun to watch ;-) On a community wiki, material is
going to be
out of date _really_ fast if you're referring to a print-out.
I frequently find myself in situations where I have but one
computer, and
browsing the documentation while trying to do something else on the
same
computer (particularly the XO), is a RPITA.
One benefit now is that all pages have translation links.
True, though I'm still not keen on all the vertical scrolling into
empty
space.
My original thought (which Dave Bauer filled in what I left unsaid)
was
using either a class or id attribute on the div and/or table
within it,
and then setting that class/id to display:none for @media print.
This would
avoid the empty space you're referring to: Pages would show up as
most do
now, but when printed, all the translation magic would disappear
from the
printout.
That would be cool, it's some css magic I wasn't aware of.
Barring that solution, would you be okay with something that
rearranged the
order of the sidebar to minimize scrolling? (Of course, different
people
are going to want different stuff at the top...)
-.8 if it comes to a vote :-)
Tell us how you REALLY feel. ;-)
Well a re-arrange would help a little, still, mark me down as a -.75
for the side bar (it was already too big to be honest) ;-)
Just did some testing – I've modified the Activity Team page with the
below snippet:
noincludediv class=noprint{{GoogleTrans-en}}{{TeamHeader|
Activity Team}}/div/noinclude
...and all the google translate is removed when printing:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team
Can you give it a quick test and confirm?
Regards,
--Gary
___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS in the classroom feedback
On 29 Jul 2009, at 18:25, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 4:55 AM, Bill Kerrbillk...@gmail.com wrote: 1) once I have created a stick can I upgrade just one program, such as the version of Physics which saves (if so how?), or do I have to wait until that version is officially released and then reformat all the sticks - I suppose both are time consuming since I have about 20 sticks to do - but the latter involves waiting for the official release Installing from packages and from .xos are incompatible. To upgrade Physics, 1 Delete or rename ~/Activities/Physics.activity. Physics is not part of Fructose, so its inclusion in the Strawberry release should be as a regular .xo (in ~/Activities with normal permissions) that you can upgrade from using Browse (or sugar-install- bundle if you prefer the command line). Regards, -Gary P.S Very glad to hear that all Activities are going to be installed as .xo bundles in future SoaS releases :-) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] An Opportunity to bring vital content tothe Sugar/XO world - Needs technical help.
On 27 Jul 2009, at 18:13, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 16:08, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: On 22 Jul 2009, at 10:59, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 14:46, Costello, Rob Rcostello.ro...@edumail.vic.gov.au wrote: if you need some one to look at a fla or decompile a swf and have a look at what the actionscript is doing i can probably help don't know anything much about gnash but have done lots of flash coding Would be really great if you could run the .swf in soas and debug the .fla in order to know why it isn't advancing to the next level. Once you get an explanation from the Flash side of things of why this happen, I think the Gnash developers will be able to find a fix in Gnash. Tomeu, for what it's worth I don't think this is anything todo with Flash/Gnash incompatibility. The current eatboom SWF (and FLA source) is simply not quite working (likely related to the quick change they made for it to run outside of the rest of their system). I've tried with a number of Adobe Flash player versions and plugins, including your current gnash rpms, and they all fail to progress in the same way. After bin hexing the binary files to work out what version they were created with, you will need to have the Adobe Flash 9 IDE to debug this code – my last $$$ upgrade was for 7, so I can't help debug the current FLA from the git rep. John can provide us with a Flash CS3 or Flash 8 version, would that help in any way? Sorry not for me. FWIW: If this is a blocker. I could install the Flash 30 day trial and attempt a one off eatboom fix for now, but it's not much of a FOSS solution going forwards... Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] An Opportunity to bring vital content tothe Sugar/XO world - Needs technical help.
On 27 Jul 2009, at 23:23, Costello, Rob R wrote: i've got flash CS4 and the latest ASV decompiler ...might have missed an email but i asked offlist if the swf had been moved...can debug on windows (if that word survives the technical or ideological filters!) if needed http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/eatboom/repos/mainline/trees/master --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS feedback
On 28 Jul 2009, at 01:18, Bill Kerr wrote: My second semester year 10 control tech class is trialling SoaS. My blog is http://xo-whs2009.blogspot.com/ describes some of the lesson plans and issues arising. Student blogs (first impressions) are linked on the sidebar One big issue at this stage is that a Physics screen does not appear to save, this will severely limit what we can do with it. Physics is by far the most popular activity in free exploration provided for the first few lessons Give us a chance, it's coming (thanks to Asaf)... :-) Regards, --Gary P.S. Actually Physics state saving has been working for a couple of weeks or so now in git, but has not been release as we need to have confidence the format will not break in future releases of Box2D (I'd hate to have all your lovely Physics Journal entries stop working in 6 months because of a change upstream we had no control of). ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS feedback
Hi Edward, On 28 Jul 2009, at 02:02, Edward Cherlin wrote: It saves on mine, in Strawberry. Which version of SoaS are you using? Just to confirm: Physics-2 has no save support, v2 is the currently released/distributed version. We have been working on the next Physics release cycle in its git repository. State saving has been working there for a couple of weeks now. The saved states that the development version currently generates are a temporary format that are in the process of being replaced so we have some control over the storage format for future proofing against Box2D changes. Are you using a development version of Physics from git? An official Physics-3 will likely be released (within a few weeks I hope) including this new work. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS feedback
Hi Edward, On 28 Jul 2009, at 02:52, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Edward, On 28 Jul 2009, at 02:02, Edward Cherlin wrote: It saves on mine, in Strawberry. Which version of SoaS are you using? Just to confirm: Physics-2 has no save support, v2 is the currently released/distributed version. I'm running v2, and I'm looking at a saved session in Journal. Screen shots attached. Have you tried resuming one? If you're using the current release they will be the usual blank Journal entries with no world state (I did specifically note that in the activities.sl.org release notes). Asaf, Brian, and myself made the call to dig in, rescue, debug, and fix-up the old semi-released Physics from bit-rotting over at wiki.lt.org. Physics-2 was our first cycle on that effort (may thanks to both of them for taking this task on). For more information please see: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Physics ... and a recent Activity IRC meeting we had a couple of weeks back will give you a good idea of where we're going with future Physics releases: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Activities/Physics Regards, --Gary We have been working on the next Physics release cycle in its git repository. State saving has been working there for a couple of weeks now. The saved states that the development version currently generates are a temporary format that are in the process of being replaced so we have some control over the storage format for future proofing against Box2D changes. Are you using a development version of Physics from git? An official Physics-3 will likely be released (within a few weeks I hope) including this new work. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS feedback
On 28 Jul 2009, at 03:18, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Edward, On 28 Jul 2009, at 02:52, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Edward, On 28 Jul 2009, at 02:02, Edward Cherlin wrote: It saves on mine, in Strawberry. Which version of SoaS are you using? Just to confirm: Physics-2 has no save support, v2 is the currently released/distributed version. I'm running v2, and I'm looking at a saved session in Journal. Screen shots attached. Have you tried resuming one? Yes. Several times. Well apologies, but please expect any existing Physics Journal entries you've created to stop working when we release the official version Physics-3. You've managed to get a work in progress development version installed sometime over the last few of weeks. Sincerely, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] An Opportunity to bring vital content tothe Sugar/XO world - Needs technical help.
On 22 Jul 2009, at 10:59, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 14:46, Costello, Rob Rcostello.ro...@edumail.vic.gov.au wrote: if you need some one to look at a fla or decompile a swf and have a look at what the actionscript is doing i can probably help don't know anything much about gnash but have done lots of flash coding Would be really great if you could run the .swf in soas and debug the .fla in order to know why it isn't advancing to the next level. Once you get an explanation from the Flash side of things of why this happen, I think the Gnash developers will be able to find a fix in Gnash. Tomeu, for what it's worth I don't think this is anything todo with Flash/Gnash incompatibility. The current eatboom SWF (and FLA source) is simply not quite working (likely related to the quick change they made for it to run outside of the rest of their system). I've tried with a number of Adobe Flash player versions and plugins, including your current gnash rpms, and they all fail to progress in the same way. After bin hexing the binary files to work out what version they were created with, you will need to have the Adobe Flash 9 IDE to debug this code – my last $$$ upgrade was for 7, so I can't help debug the current FLA from the git rep. Regards, --Gary P.S. Sorry if I'm repeating myself, there have been some off list emails and I'm loosing track of what I've reported to whom. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] An Opportunity to bring vital content tothe Sugar/XO world - Needs technical help.
On 22 Jul 2009, at 15:15, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 16:08, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: On 22 Jul 2009, at 10:59, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 14:46, Costello, Rob Rcostello.ro...@edumail.vic.gov.au wrote: if you need some one to look at a fla or decompile a swf and have a look at what the actionscript is doing i can probably help don't know anything much about gnash but have done lots of flash coding Would be really great if you could run the .swf in soas and debug the .fla in order to know why it isn't advancing to the next level. Once you get an explanation from the Flash side of things of why this happen, I think the Gnash developers will be able to find a fix in Gnash. Tomeu, for what it's worth I don't think this is anything todo with Flash/Gnash incompatibility. The current eatboom SWF (and FLA source) is simply not quite working (likely related to the quick change they made for it to run outside of the rest of their system). I've tried with a number of Adobe Flash player versions and plugins, including your current gnash rpms, and they all fail to progress in the same way. But it's working here on Flash 10.0 r22 :/ Any idea about what can be going on? Oh joy... FWIW: It fails to progress with Flash 10.0 r22 here with OS X Leopard on my Mac. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] An Opportunity to bring vital content tothe Sugar/XO world - Needs technical help.
On 22 Jul 2009, at 15:41, Gary C Martin wrote: On 22 Jul 2009, at 15:15, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 16:08, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: On 22 Jul 2009, at 10:59, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 14:46, Costello, Rob Rcostello.ro...@edumail.vic.gov.au wrote: if you need some one to look at a fla or decompile a swf and have a look at what the actionscript is doing i can probably help don't know anything much about gnash but have done lots of flash coding Would be really great if you could run the .swf in soas and debug the .fla in order to know why it isn't advancing to the next level. Once you get an explanation from the Flash side of things of why this happen, I think the Gnash developers will be able to find a fix in Gnash. Tomeu, for what it's worth I don't think this is anything todo with Flash/Gnash incompatibility. The current eatboom SWF (and FLA source) is simply not quite working (likely related to the quick change they made for it to run outside of the rest of their system). I've tried with a number of Adobe Flash player versions and plugins, including your current gnash rpms, and they all fail to progress in the same way. But it's working here on Flash 10.0 r22 :/ Any idea about what can be going on? Oh joy... FWIW: It fails to progress with Flash 10.0 r22 here with OS X Leopard on my Mac. Agh! :-) I take it back!! It turns out the game has an extra key you have to guess for. You do not just use the cursor keys to walk about and collect the correct correct answers, once you pick it up an answer you have to press return/enter to accept it! Arrrggh!!! OK so now I'm progressing levels with Flash 10.0 r22, and failing to progress on Gnash. Many apologies for muddying the water (but this game needs to clearly indicate you have to press return to eat). FWIW: This swf currently holds a bunch of audio/mpeg mp3 files that are all erroring out in GNASH due to it being non-free codec that would need separate install. For anyone with a current Flash IDE this should be a 30sec fix to change the audio publish format to something supported. I doubt the audio issue is preventing the levels from progressing, but there is a big fanfare at the end of each level as you exit the door. Apologies again, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adding a word-count to write
Thanks Martin, On 19 Jul 2009, at 10:30, Martin Sevior wrote: Nice screen shot! The toolbars look very easy to understand and easy use to me. Unfortunately I can't really give much of a critique because it's hard for me to think like a primary-school child now :-) A fair and most valid answer :-) I hope to make a working version of the TurtleArt Activity using the same design style, as Walter and Caroline are currently using TA to teach in a school pilot over the summer. They can likely get some first hand impressions from our real audience. Now I'd rather have had more feedback before I commit my time to the work, but no one has screamed blue murder about the proposed change yet so perhaps it's time... Plus I've seen some kids absolutely fly through learning how to use a computer so even AbiWord's full on gui is accessible rather quickly anyway. :-) Just to let you know, one new feature in AbiWord-2.8 we really should expose to Write are annotations. These will be very useful for teachers to comment and correct submitted work from children. Giving full control over annotations within the context of Write's simplified toolbar will be a challenge and it would be great to get feedback on exactly which parts of an an annotation feature should be provided. I managed to find: http://www.abisource.com/wiki/Annotations ...but no screen-shots or mock-ups of the feature set. Do you know if there are any available yet? Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] sugerencia para actividad clock
Hi Tomeu, On 18 Jul 2009, at 10:56, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Paola asks in olpc-sur about adding to the Clock activity the capability of changing the time. Don't know who is the maintainer of the Clock activity, thus sending this email to IAEP. It's another Sugar Labs adoptee Activity I'm maintaining now. At the moment it is designed to display and/or speak out the current real time in a number of different formats. By changing the time does Paola intend this like a system control module type thing, changing the physical laptop time? Or is it for the child to move the hands about and print/speak the different times? Kind of, Teacher says make it 11:30, everyone sets the hands of the clock face and then shows the teacher. Regards, --Gary P.S. There is also a GCompris ClockGame on activities.SL.org, but I've not tried it myself yet. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4112 ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] clock activity
On 14 Jul 2009, at 23:54, Caroline Meeks wrote: Can the clock activity be used to teach telling time? It seems to only show the current time with no way to change it. The second graders just did a unit on telling time and it might be cool to do something with time on Sugar. Clock Activity is focused around the current real-time, but it does have some nice features (if sound is working) for speaking the time, and showing it in various different formats for comparison. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] New version of Read Etexts available, now supports annotations and multiple bookmarks
Hi James, On 13 Jul 2009, at 15:46, Jim Simmons wrote: Tomeu, Read Etexts is in pootle right now. Unfortunately, since I tend to develop my project incrementally there are probably strings in my Activity that never made it into pootle. If there is anything anyone needs from me to get this properly translated let me know. I've been leaving the business of translation to others so far so I don't fully understand the process, but ask and it shall be given. The po/activity.pot file is the one you need to make sure stays in sync with your string changes. You can automatically generate this with ./setup genpot, but (out of habit) I usually just do that at the beginning and manually edit the .pot file after that – as penance for messing the translation team about :-) (also some of the projects I've worked on have lots of strings we do not need translated and so the .pot needs cleaning up). I try get my strings right as early as possible, before going in to Pootle, and then make as few changes as possible (and if so try make them all at once). The translation system will pick up the new .pot changes, but does trigger some manual steps for Sayamindu (and then obviously more work for the actual translators). Regards, --Gary James Simmons I'm adding Tabitha and Martin to CC because they are conducting testing sessions and may be interested in trying your activity and giving feedback. Perhaps the next step would be translating to Spanish and offering to olpc-sur for testing? Regards, Tomeu James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] GPA Notes from visit on Wed July 8
Hi Greg, First, thanks for the great write up! On 8 Jul 2009, at 20:40, Greg Smith wrote: Seemed like a lot to me but most kids did it with a little help at some steps. The other hard work flow was creating two images, one right after the other. Here are the steps for that: - Open paint - Create painting - Change name - Click keep button (there's no feedback that it was saved, definitely need something there) - Change the name again - Click Edit tab and erase the whole picture - Paint new picture - Save new picture These steps show a very common mistake/misunderstanding based around a central design idea in Sugar – and likely show that idea to be a dangerous and/or poorly implemented one. It ties into the whole idea behind Journal, Activities, Keep, and Stop. Activities do not save, in the traditional sense, when you hit that keep button. The object you generate with 'keep' is of the the same 'Activity' but with a different state. You end up with a trial of what looks like saved objects in your Journal with different states (sounds fine so far...). But try resuming any 2 of them at once... The first resume will work as expected, the 2nd will just switch you to the already opened Activity instance... Sugar believes them to be the same Activity, just different revisions, like a hidden chain of versions. I'd certainly suggest you not try collaborating with objects created like this, especially Write. You WILL be in a world of pain and WILL very likely lose work. But in the above case, the importing of such objects into Memorise luckily avoided the 'same activity id' problem. The correct procedure with current (and past) Sugar is: - Open new Paint Activity - Create painting - Change name - Click stop - Repeat This way each Journal entry is a new, separate Activity – no hidden barbed-wire code hooking it to other seemingly separate entries. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Reading (was Re: changes in outlook with Sugar
Hi Jim, On 4 Jul 2009, at 17:09, Jim Simmons wrote: Edward, I think you have an interesting idea here. It reminded me of the scene in _2001 A Space Odyssey_ where Hal 9000 is having the higher functions of his brain disconnected and he tries to sing Daisy while he still has enough connected to do it. From my experience working with espeak I'd say that getting a computer to sing, even badly, may be beyond what we can reasonably do today. Espeak can speak at different pitches and rates, but I don't think you can change pitch and rate while speech is going on and if you could that's still a long way off from actual singing. Not convinced it would make a viable solution for Sugar but... There's a speech synth called Festival (actually developed by Edinburgh University, my old Uni). It does support a singing mode, but others have extended it more completely. Here's some MIDI generated samples from flinger (festival singer): http://speech.bme.ogi.edu/cgi-bin/flinger/show_jukebox.pl?all A few yeas back a colleague of mine was involved in a gallery art installation that used (I think) 4 Mac minis mounted on a wall, and a small back room server to parse incoming junk mail. The Mac minis then sang out some of that text content realtime :-) Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] segregated activities from the sugar platform
On 2 Jul 2009, at 10:44, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: I explained that with the move to metacity this would be a possibility in the not too distant future (I hope I did not speak out of tone.) Well, with the metacity move, activities that behave badly in terms of window sizing will be exposed and we'll be able to fix them. But I don't think that's one of the biggest issues when running Sugar activities out of Sugar. I'd hoped I'd been of some help on this one re: http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/602 But more reports most welcome! :-) Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Physics
On 30 Jun 2009, at 17:21, Caryl Bigenho wrote: Hi All, I sent this yesterday, but it got filtered out by some machine since I didn't send it as a reply. So I am sending it again today. This is the old science teacher in me talking...I think the Physics Activity has great potential for getting students interested in Physics and in thinking like scientists. I watched a 13-year-old girl play with it at the Bozeman LUG meeting last week. She loved experimenting with the shapes to see what they would do. How do scientists think and work? They observe, take notes, make predictions (hypotheses) test them, and repeat. This program is perfect for that! We need someone to design some simple experiments tied to curriculum goals that will help students of various levels enjoy playing scientist with the Physics Activity as they learn a tiny bit about physics and a lot about thinking like a scientist. Many thanks for the feedback! :-) I haven't played enough to know what all is included in the Activity. Does it have, for example, the option of changing the material an object is made of? In the latest release (Physics-2), no, there is no user-interface for trying different materials, though this is on my list of things to explore. Keep in mind that (I think) Physics should have as simple a user interface as possible, so young kids just play. But, I'll likely try a few mock-ups where the current set of buttons have hover palettes for additional (advanced) options – like Paint does (just click a brush and start painting, hover over the brush button and you get some more settings for size and shape). Currently all objects have the same material settings: density=1.0 restitution=0.16 friction=0.5 So we have these variables to potentially expose in the UI, or perhaps wrap them up into some pre-set materials (rock, rubber, wood, iron, type thing)? Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar on Wireless
Hi Caroline, On 27 Jun 2009, at 16:07, Caroline Meeks wrote: I'm back home now and checking in. When I was at FOSSED it looked like Macs running under virtual box could not use local collaboration because it doesn't directly see the APs. Is this confirmed? Are there other ideas for getting MacBooks using VirutalBox to collaborate without an XS? I've not done extensive collaboration tests with the SoaS Strawberry image, but cursory Salut tests with Chat (between a MacBook Pro running the Strawberry VM, and 2 other XO-1s running 0.82.1 connected to my local AP) seems to be working just fine. Each machine sees the other 2 in the Neighbourhood, each can share or join Chat Activities created by the others. Were the VirtualBox VM networks set up correctly? I think NAT is the default setting for VirtualBox, and I'm pretty sure that will fail for Salut. Think of that NAT behaving like new virtual local network, as if your VM was running behind another separate AP. Regards, --Gary Thanks, Caroline On 6/26/09, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Laura, On 26 Jun 2009, at 14:13, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: Laura Johns wrote: Hmm... I have Sugar on three Macbooks. I removed the sugar labs server address from all three and verified that I could get on the internet. I could not see the other Mac books. That is a problem. How were you running Sugar? In Virtualbox? If so, one of our Virtualbox experts will have to work with you on network topology issues. (The problem could be that Virtualbox is running the virtual machine behind a firewall, rather than giving it direct access to the local network.) FWIW, I use these network settings. There are a number of different ways to get a working network, but this one seemed closest equivalent to being 'just another laptop on the network'. One thing to note, is that VirtualBox does not represent wireless interfaces specially as wireless interfaces. It just treats them like a wired ethernet connection. No big downsides to this, but you will see the Sugar frame showing a Wired Network icon, and you will not see any wireless access points showing up in the Neighbourhood view – you need to be correctly connect to your network access point over in OS X. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 15, Issue 114
Hi Jim, On 27 Jun 2009, at 03:02, Jim Simmons wrote: The problem with books on a shelf is that Aleksey is already using that image for his Library Activity and I think it is more fitting for that because he is creating a sort of electronic bookshelf, whereas I'm creating a card catalog. The 3 key items in your Activity description for seem to be: 1) Internet access required 2) Search for books 3) Download to Journal Don't think I can cover all that in an icon easily :-) but how about: A). a single 2d book with a (smallish) Browse icon on it, and a magnifying glass over it. B). a single 2d book with a (smallish) Browse icon on it , and a 'book worm' character emerging (might be more kid friendly). Regards, --Gary P.S. Happy to take a shot if you like either of the above and want to focus on coding. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] picked up by CrunchGear, with YouTube video
On 24 Jun 2009, at 17:09, Sean DALY wrote: http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/24/sugar-on-a-stick-turns-your-old-computer-into-an-olpc/ Cool, great little youtube video as well – it's nice to see a video of someone's (admittedly an adult techy) first hands on encounter with the Sugar UI. Some useful HCI feedback in there for us... Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Mac Woes
On 25 Jun 2009, at 00:36, Caryl Bigenho wrote: Hi... OK, here's the dumb question for today. I am sitting here in the wilds of MT with only a Mac and would like to create the latest Strawberry Soas for my Mac. Hi. I haven't had a chance to try booting the Strawberry SoaS on my MacBook Pro yet, (us Mac users hate and rarely need to reboot and loose application state), but Strawberry works well for me under VirtualBox if that's a reasonable, quick, compromise solution. Regards, --Gary P.S. happy to describe my basic VirtualBox steps in more detail, but it is close to download .iso; run in VB; tell it to boot from a 'CD', and point to the downloaded ISO file. Good for demo's and fast testing only, as this quickie gives your no state between boots, though that does mean you can mess around trying stuff with impunity. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] ActivityTeam meeting on Friday June 26th - 17:00 UTC
Hi All, David Farning has suggested agenda items for the ActivityTeam to cover; I'm not sure we can realistically solve many, but it would at least be good to see what page each of us is on, where we might be able to pull in the same direction, and bounce about some ideas in realtime :-) What: ActivityTeam meeting When: Friday June 26th 2009 - 17:00 UTC Where: IRC on channel #sugar-meeting Agenda: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Meetings Agenda - How to move forward with updating Activities via ASLO. Should at least be on roadmap to synchronise work and expectations. - Reduce redundant information on w.sl.o, w.lt.o and ASLO. Factors to consider: -- Expectations of existing user base. -- Update mechanism at existing deployments. -- Reduce overall confusion. -- Reduce workload on Activity developers. -- Scalability of solution. Please feel free to edit or add to the agenda. See you there! --Gary (ActivityTeam co-co-ordinator) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] ASLO Suggestion
On 11 Jun 2009, at 08:37, Aleksey Lim wrote: Hi all, Let me finalize this What tags we should use for GCompris/Fructose/ etc discussion :) New AMO version and incoming ASLO v3 version have collections feature https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections I think we can move tags GCompris and Fructose(Core, etc) to collections moreover every user/deployer/editor could create theirs own collections. Is it the way to go? Yes this seems to be a solution. Allows the tags (categories) to be simple and learner friendly, while collections can be used for for the rest (collections are a secondary site UI, so don't clutter up the main site unless you visit their page). Regards, --Gary On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 09:50:31AM -0500, James Simmons wrote: The new style sheet for ASLO reminds me that something has bugged me about the design of the site from the beginning. The site does not do a good job of showing just how much is available. When you click on a category you see entries for three or four Activities, seemingly picked at random, and no indication that these Activities are not the only ones available in the category. Yes, there is a link to show everything in the category. It's not that you can't find anything if you really want to. It's that the site doesn't do a good job of selling what it has. What I would suggest is to put totals for each category in a prominent place on the page. When you first come into the site and no category is selected you should see something like 500 Great Activities Available! Choose a category like Documents and the line would read 10 Activities In This Category. The other thing that has bugged me is the Recommended Activities. We need to put more thought into what gets recommended. Currently one of the Activities that is recommended is Read. Now an XO owner or SoaS user already has Read, so why recommend it? Is there some reason I should remove the Read I already have and install this one? Recommended Activities should promote Sugar. They should meet the following criteria: 1). Fairly robust. 2). Not included by default with anything. 3). Should do something interesting. Think of the iPhone commercials that show all the apps that are available. Why not recommend something like Food Force or Story Builder? I also question the category GCompris. I understand these Activities are related to each other, but the relationship would not be meaningful to a teacher or a student. A little salesmanship could go a long way in making this site better. James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Aleksey ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] soas install to hard disk
On 11 Jun 2009, at 10:08, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Hi, I'm forwarding this to some people who I heard yesterday in IRC discussing this issue. Yea, FWIW I had a quick go as a test case trying to see if it was possible to install Soas booted from a USB stick onto the XO nand. I was doubtful it was going to work (due to the XO custom hardware), but I didn't get too far anyway as the current Soas does not have anaconda; and trying a yum install it got close to complete before the XO went OOM and locked up. I may try again in Virtual Box. --Gary If anyone has had success installing SoaS to disk and could share their experiences, would be great. Thanks, Tomeu On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 11:28, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 09:21, Ashar Iqbals.ashar.iq...@gmail.com wrote: I have soas2 beta dated 14 April burned to a cd and booting/working fine on a PC. I now want to install the software onto the hard disk - cd is slow and temporary. hd would be faster and more permanent. I could run soas off a USB, but since the PC will be dedicated to running soas it makes more sense to use the hd. Hi Ashar, may be easier/better to download an official Fedora 11 image and install it to your hard drive? Then you can install Sugar and use that instead of GNOME. But it may be possible to install a Soas2 image to the hard disk with the command 'anaconda', though I haven't tried it myself. Regards, Tomeu Ashar ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion
Hi James, On 11 Jun 2009, at 15:34, James Simmons wrote: Gary, Replace Communication and Literacy with Writing and Reading and you'd have a list I'd vote for. Remember that Activities can go into up to three Categories, so Categories don't have to be so broad that every Activity has only one. Thanks for the feedback. FWIW, Literacy was meant to be for Writing and Reading (we started with the two as separate tags but Activities seems to overlap so much Literacy would cover both). And Communication was to try and cover Activities like Chat, Video Chat, IRC, and any other email/messaging/comms type Activities. Without Communication, these would likely end up at Utilities. Regards, --Gary If you look at Firefox Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ The latest version of the software supports Collections which is a perfect place to put stuff like Sucrose, Fructose, and the like. It also shows numbers like I wanted, both by Category and at the top they have 1,455,889,902 add-ons downloaded, 162,086,241 add- ons in use. Our numbers will be less impressive, of course. James Simmons Gary C Martin wrote: Not too much input from existing teachers unfortunately back then, but the list I was keeping track of ended up at something like the below: Art Communication Games Geography Literacy Maths Music Programming Science Utilities How does this seem to folks, anything missing or could be better named? Was trying to keep the list reasonably short and non- technical. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Booth Banner page on wiki!
On 10 Jun 2009, at 17:22, Sean DALY wrote: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/BoothBanners I have managed to create a Booth Banner page on the wiki. Still have to add the links to the source PDF files though (they are uploaded but I need to write the markup for the links). I've added links on the wiki page to the PDF vector artwork files. Regards, --Gary I have updated the Marketing Team/resources page as well and will update it further. Both of these are in production as steel-stand rollups and will be ready for LinuxTag. My supplier didn't mind at all doing the 2 different color versions. Kudos to Gary C Martin for his work on this. The plan is for one to live in Germany and the other in France, taken to events, conferences, SugarCamps as necessary. Note to Mike Lee, Seth: if you wish, you can find a local supplier and have one made from the source files, I can help you identify a decent supplier :-) thanks Sean ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion
Hi James, On 10 Jun 2009, at 17:48, James Simmons wrote: Martin, First and foremost ASLO has to make sense to grade school kids and their teachers. That's why I didn't care for GCompris as a category. Now since we can give an Activity up to three Categories it might make sense to have one for the stuff that comes pre- installed. Other than that, does any kid or teacher care who maintains an Activity? As I said once before, I'm really not a fan of ontologies, it's all shades of grey for me, but I guess we should try and get agreement on some set. Can't be much worse than we have already! :-) Here's the thread from back in March when we last tried to move on this: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-March/004715.html For ASLO we might want teachers to suggest categories based on subjects taught. For instance, instead of Documents we might have Reading and Writing or Reading and Writing. Instead of Media Creation and Media Playing we could have Art and Music. Not too much input from existing teachers unfortunately back then, but the list I was keeping track of ended up at something like the below: Art Communication Games Geography Literacy Maths Music Programming Science Utilities How does this seem to folks, anything missing or could be better named? Was trying to keep the list reasonably short and non-technical. Regards, --Gary Among ourselves we can make any taxonomy we like, but for the public face of Sugar Activities we have to remember the target audience. Any discussion of taxonomy reminds me of grocery shopping on Sundays. Whoever does the taxonomies for Jewel and Dominick's seems to have no purpose in mind other than keeping me in the damned store as long as possible. On the other hand Costco arranges stuff in reasonable categories. James Simmons Martin Dengler wrote: On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 05:34:29PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote: I think that's a great idea - will be very helpful in identifying the classics. It'd be great if the classifications found happened to, or could be easily made to, be sensibly related to the classifications used for quite some time now: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Taxonomy Somthing like: SL-maintained / classics / core -- Fructose community-maintained / others -- Honey pre-installed [on SoaS] -- Starch/Cellulose I'm not saying the existing Taxonomy is the sexiest or most-comprehensible-to-the-outsider, but it's well-aligned with the development/deployment processes and if we promote a completely orthogonal categorization it may cause a troublesome impedence mismatch. thanks Sean Martin ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen
Hi Sebastian, On 7 Jun 2009, at 14:37, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: Hi all, looking at the wiki page, I'm really impressed - great work! :) I also really like the idea of switching the logo color for each release - this shouldn't be hard and is an interesting approach. Has there already been some kind of agreement on which version we're going to use for the LinuxTag release? Yes I was wondering this also, given the weekend was the deadline :-) Is the one with the progress bar something everyone could agree with? FWIW, my two current favourites are the grey progress bar, or the grey circle of dots: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:XO-sugar-boot-with-progress-bar.gif http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:Refined-XO-sugar-boot-with-overlap.gif And could I possibly get the .png files, so that I can compose a new snapshot with a preview of the new boot screen (we can still change it afterwards, but I'd like to have some snapshot to test it)? I don't want to short circuit a decision making process, but let me kick out their PNGs and email to you (will do that now). That way you at least have a couple of the possible candidates to experiment/test with now. Regards, --Gary Walter: Have you heard anything regarding the use of the XO in our boot screen? Is this okay with OLPC? --Sebastian Sean DALY wrote: Actually the logo color linked to a version idea was in my long mail the other day about communicating the version :-) I too think 2 changes a year will give us time to cycle through the twelve variants. To make that work, the actual place where the version number is communicated (Control Panel / About my computer) would need to have the matching color Sugar Labs (not just Sugar) logo. I like this progress bar boot screen because: * ultrasimple, unobtrusive, fits perfectly with Sugar HIG * bar is universally easy to understand, no possibility of confusion with graphic elements. * keeping logo around that long=strong branding, which is vital for Sugar to be recognized by name rather than just the system running on XOs, netbooks, etc. I miss the iconic ring treatment though. And, no matter how clean we would like it to be, we still need to address the questions of school/sponsor co-branding (if they have a logo, they won't feel like jst putting their name in grey) and distro co-branding. Perhaps we could solve those problems by putting them in the About my computer page as well? Awful as far as co-branding goes (partners would not be happy), but will keep boot minimalist and functional. For a shining example of how more-is-less packaging is ruinous, may I direct your attention to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k Sean On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:44 PM, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: On 4 Jun 2009, at 16:35, Gary C Martin wrote: On 4 Jun 2009, at 15:45, Sean DALY wrote: Yes that would be very helpful I think I was just going to start tinkering again, I'll make an animated version of Eben's XO and progress-bar for evaluation. Just uploaded an animated version showing Eben's boot with progress bar treatment: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:XO-sugar-boot-with-progress-bar.gif FWIW: +1 on Eben's suggestion for changing the colour of the Sugar logo for each major new Sugar release. It nicely avoids what looks like jumping through lot's of technical burning hoops of fire, trying to set up a boot anim that dynamically changes to match the owners own colours (nice idea but I think a big ask at this point in time). FWIW2: Just incase any one was wondering, the colour dot versions were based on the 1-12 official Sugar Logo treatment colour pairs, i.e definitely not not random :-) Regards, --Gary If we can reach consensus by tomorrow and finish the actual PNG frames over the weekend we will meet the deadline but, we need a volunteer to do the frames (unless Gary what you have is nearly ready; my stuff is cut/pasted mockup no color control etc) Sure, getting a series of PNGs from any of my mock-ups is just a save for web away. Regards, --Gary thanks Sean On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Christian Marc Schmidt christianm...@gmail.com wrote: I agree with Eben's points below... Maybe it would help if one of us mocked up the alternative he is describing? Christian On Jun 4, 2009, at 10:35 AM, Eben Eliasoneben.elia...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Eben Eliasoneben.elia...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 7:24 AM, Sean DALYsdaly...@gmail.com wrote: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Boot_Logo Christian - I myself prefer the rays to dots which I feel too closely resemble networks in the Neighborhood view, confusion is possible (networks being connected to at startup?) Fred - I'm willing to try that sunrise metaphor, tonight if I can (travelling today) Re splash page
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] collaboration testing session
On 5 Jun 2009, at 09:24, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 06:09, David Van Asschedvanass...@gmail.com wrote: Hi folks, We are having a collaborative sugar testing session next week Wednesday 10th June at 20:00 UTC (That is 4 pm EDT, 3pm EST, 2 pm CST, 1 pm MST, and 12 pm PST, most of Europe that will be 9 pm, 8 pm for the UK) So far we have 5 people signed up, but more are welcome as we really want to see how collaboration works on many activities where it isn't quite obvious. We will be taking notes and storing log files of the sessions, and will suggest ways in which the activity in question might be more collaborative, or may need less of it (who knows :-) We will be testing the activities that come preinstalled on the openSUSE sugar images, but we'd like to test various distribution methods (virtual appliance, cd, usb, hd) and various distros (at least Fedora SoaS, openSUSE sugar, Mandriva or Caixa Magica) I dont believe 0.82 images are compatible with 0.84 for collaboration, so am afraid this is for 0.84 only... What do you mean by compatible for collaboration and why do you think it won't work between 0.82 and 0.84? Just wanted to chime in here, and great idea by the way! FWIW, I don't remember any Activity releases announcing they had broken collaboration with previous releases, so issues should be down to general collaboration bugs within an Activity, Sugar collaboration code, the server/network infrastructure, or possibly the dirsto/ platform (e.g a few months back Fedoras default firewall setting was blocking local collaboration). It's very much worth keeping track of Sugar version, activity version, distro as you test, that way you can re-test a bug with different combinations to help isolate where the fault is (also testing later in a local salute environment can isolate issues caused by Jabber server use). You will bump into faults... if you want to make a real difference, finding clearly repeatable cases is the absolute gold standard in getting fixes (random fail reports are interesting but rarely actionable). Wednesday 10th June (I'll be there) will be a fair shake of the tree. Later, in more controlled version/release/network/distro environments each issue can be re-tested, confirmed-reproducible, isolated as far as possible and trac reported. Regards, --Gary Regards, Tomeu Please post your willingness to participate so we have an idea on who/how many will be collaborating. We also need a volunteer to take notes, and a volunteer to store logs files. There will of course be a transcript of the irc session too (we will meet at #sugar-collaboration) We forsee this taking between 1 and 2 hours... Here is the list of activities we will be testing, so make sure you have them installed if you plan to take part (not all have collaborative abilities, and for those that don't it can be a brainstorming session on whether/how we can make them collaborative: sugar-finance sugar-flipsticks-activity sugar-freecell sugar-imageviewer sugar-implode sugar-infoslicer sugar-jigsaw-puzzle-activity sugar-joke-machine-activity sugar-jukebox sugar-labyrinth sugar-maze sugar-memorize sugar-moon sugar-paint-activity sugar-pippy sugar-playgo sugar-read sugar-readetexts-activity sugar-record sugar-slider-puzzle-activity sugar-speak sugar-storybuilder sugar-tamtam-common sugar-tamtam-edit sugar-tamtam-jam sugar-tamtam-mini sugar-tamtam-synthlab sugar-analyze sugar-turtleart sugar-typing-turtle sugar-viewslides sugar-write sugar-browse sugar-irc sugar-calculate sugar-xomail (sugar-sweetmail) sugar-cartoonbuilder sugar-clock sugar-colors sugar-connect sugar-drgeo-activity xoEditor sugar-evince sugar-fiftytwo sugar-chat sugar-terminal sugar-journal sugar-physics sugar-library sugar-poll sugar-tuxpaint kind Regards, David (nubae) Van Assche www.nubae.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen
On 4 Jun 2009, at 12:24, Sean DALY wrote: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Boot_Logo Christian - I myself prefer the rays to dots which I feel too closely resemble networks in the Neighborhood view, confusion is possible (networks being connected to at startup?) Coloured dots resembling access-point icons, hadn't twigged with, me but I do see your point now you've mentioned it. I'm still playing safe with a simple all grey vote at the moment ;-) http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:Refined-XO-sugar-boot.gif Fred - I'm willing to try that sunrise metaphor, tonight if I can (travelling today) Re splash page with logo: in my next mockup I'll leave off the example school logo.and move that frame to the end. It might be better to reserve a frame for customizable logo or message, before or after the Sugar spash page Hmmm, think this will destroy the whole idea of making the boot process animation a transition into a working user interface. If it's just going to show some random branding at the end, there's little benefit in trying to initially transition gracefully (might as well make the whole sequence some branding message). Version info: In fact I feel strongly about showing version information... or its corollary, making it easy to find. Teachers, parents, admins, G1G1 donors unfamiliar with Sugar will not have the foggiest idea how to hunt down version information (Learners might not have trouble finding it - they will explore their machines ad infinitum - but they can't be expected to know about versioning). We are about to embark on hundreds of thousands of XO-1.5s running v0..84 which will coexist with a huge installed base of v0.82 (and many earlier); SoaS with its simplified numbering scheme will (we hope) sow the seeds for preinstalled Sugar in distributions for education projects. We may be deploying v0.86 at the end of the year... aside from how we manage the Activity compatibility matrix, we need to make such info *extremely* easy to track down for someone interested in checking if Sugar + Activities are up-to-date. Our strategy for teacher buy-in is star marketing on Activities (see press releases); making Activity installation/upgrade simple this summer is part of what we need to do to make SoaS possible in the classroom. Helping users understand what version they have (of Sugar, of each Activity) is a key aspect of that. I agree that it's unpleasant to see numbers at boot time (especially a datestamped snapshot number). Why don't we borrow an idea from Apple? They have a tiny apple icon in the upper-left corner of the screen; clicking on it opens a window with the processor, RAM and OSX version number. In addition to the About my computer section in the Control Panel, perhaps we could show the version in the Frame? The bottom bar has room I think. -1, to misc numbers in the frame. When we start to get consolidated feedback, we will know if difficult-to-find version info is a problem for Sugar / Activity updaters or not. We really need to solve this technically (as best we can), not make folks need hunt through compatibility lists to see if their Sugar version number allows them to install and run some Activity. Regards, --Gary I feel sure it is and showing the version in the Frame (the one-glance status communicator) seems to me a good approach which would let us skip info in the splash screen. Nota: my idea would be for each version to change the Sugar logo color too... potentially allowing troubleshooters to ask what color is the Sugar logo? and match that to the version number. thanks Sean On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 5:00 AM, Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com wrote: Please indulge me to make another pitch for the 'sunrise' metaphor for the growing ring. Using the same color locations, the ring would build from sunrise orange to midday yellow to afternoon greens and blues to dusky red-violets (perhaps the darker one last). These are just common earth metaphors that might come to mind as children worldwide--who may have never seen a analog or digital clock--anticipate what may be waiting for them in their day ahead of them. The ring would also build from one foot, and end symmetrically on the other--a growth surrounding the nascent learner like a cover--a home--a safe shelter for learning or a shower of celestial opportunities. Will I grow too like the graphic is suggesting? OK, these are just potential metaphors... On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 10:17 PM, Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com wrote: I like that a lot. I'm with others on leaving the version number as well to the 'About my Computer' panel. (It can be referenced and then read as needed after booting, whereas the vanishing boot image just makes me nervous about writing down or memorizing a long number.) The Green Hornet, would of course only appear on a 'Graphic guidelines' page for
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen
On 4 Jun 2009, at 15:45, Sean DALY wrote: Yes that would be very helpful I think I was just going to start tinkering again, I'll make an animated version of Eben's XO and progress-bar for evaluation. If we can reach consensus by tomorrow and finish the actual PNG frames over the weekend we will meet the deadline but, we need a volunteer to do the frames (unless Gary what you have is nearly ready; my stuff is cut/pasted mockup no color control etc) Sure, getting a series of PNGs from any of my mock-ups is just a save for web away. Regards, --Gary thanks Sean On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Christian Marc Schmidt christianm...@gmail.com wrote: I agree with Eben's points below... Maybe it would help if one of us mocked up the alternative he is describing? Christian On Jun 4, 2009, at 10:35 AM, Eben Eliason eben.elia...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Eben Eliason eben.elia...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 7:24 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Boot_Logo Christian - I myself prefer the rays to dots which I feel too closely resemble networks in the Neighborhood view, confusion is possible (networks being connected to at startup?) Fred - I'm willing to try that sunrise metaphor, tonight if I can (travelling today) Re splash page with logo: in my next mockup I'll leave off the example school logo.and move that frame to the end. It might be better to reserve a frame for customizable logo or message, before or after the Sugar spash page Yes, in that mockup the first screen is kind of overwhelming with several logos and a few pieces of textual information. At the same time, we tried very hard to eliminate the slideshow effect that feels (well, is) like a bunch of marketing material that detracts from the UI. I think the Sugar logo should stand alone, so it reads powerfully, and then be replaced in short order by the XO. Perhaps we could entertain a text only solution to identifying the school, in gray beneath the sugar logo. Thoughts? Version info: In fact I feel strongly about showing version information... or its corollary, making it easy to find. Teachers, I think it's more important that we make it easy to find in the UI. Kids won't reboot that often, and it would be silly to reboot just to find that info. parents, admins, G1G1 donors unfamiliar with Sugar will not have the foggiest idea how to hunt down version information (Learners might not have trouble finding it - they will explore their machines ad infinitum - but they can't be expected to know about versioning). We are about to embark on hundreds of thousands of XO-1.5s running v0..84 which will coexist with a huge installed base of v0.82 (and many earlier); SoaS with its simplified numbering scheme will (we hope) sow the seeds for preinstalled Sugar in distributions for education projects. We may be deploying v0.86 at the end of the year... aside from how we manage the Activity compatibility matrix, we need to make such info *extremely* easy to track down for someone interested in checking if Sugar + Activities are up-to-date. Our strategy for teacher buy-in is star marketing on Activities (see press releases); making Activity installation/upgrade simple this summer is part of what we need to do to make SoaS possible in the classroom. Helping users understand what version they have (of Sugar, of each Activity) is a key aspect of that. I agree that it's unpleasant to see numbers at boot time (especially a datestamped snapshot number). Why don't we borrow an idea from Apple? We basically have this already. We ust happen to have an XO in the center of the screen, instead of an apple icon in the upper left. The info is actually in the About my XO section of the settings, which might be one step too far. We could go back to an earlier design for the XO menu and have a direct About my XO menu item which jumps directly to the correct settings panel. We could also separate the About my XO panel from settings, removing it from the settings panel completely and showing it as it's own modal dialog accessible via an About my XO menu item. I would be fine with either approach. They have a tiny apple icon in the upper-left corner of the screen; clicking on it opens a window with the processor, RAM and OSX version number. In addition to the About my computer section in the Control Panel, perhaps we could show the version in the Frame? The bottom bar has room I think. There's no need to expose this information directly. It will only be needed on occasion, and the Frame is designed for the information you want to carry with you all the time. When we start to get consolidated feedback, we will know if difficult-to-find version info is a problem for Sugar / Activity updaters or not. I
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen
On 4 Jun 2009, at 16:35, Gary C Martin wrote: On 4 Jun 2009, at 15:45, Sean DALY wrote: Yes that would be very helpful I think I was just going to start tinkering again, I'll make an animated version of Eben's XO and progress-bar for evaluation. Just uploaded an animated version showing Eben's boot with progress bar treatment: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:XO-sugar-boot-with-progress-bar.gif FWIW: +1 on Eben's suggestion for changing the colour of the Sugar logo for each major new Sugar release. It nicely avoids what looks like jumping through lot's of technical burning hoops of fire, trying to set up a boot anim that dynamically changes to match the owners own colours (nice idea but I think a big ask at this point in time). FWIW2: Just incase any one was wondering, the colour dot versions were based on the 1-12 official Sugar Logo treatment colour pairs, i.e definitely not not random :-) Regards, --Gary If we can reach consensus by tomorrow and finish the actual PNG frames over the weekend we will meet the deadline but, we need a volunteer to do the frames (unless Gary what you have is nearly ready; my stuff is cut/pasted mockup no color control etc) Sure, getting a series of PNGs from any of my mock-ups is just a save for web away. Regards, --Gary thanks Sean On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Christian Marc Schmidt christianm...@gmail.com wrote: I agree with Eben's points below... Maybe it would help if one of us mocked up the alternative he is describing? Christian On Jun 4, 2009, at 10:35 AM, Eben Eliason eben.elia...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Eben Eliason eben.elia...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 7:24 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Boot_Logo Christian - I myself prefer the rays to dots which I feel too closely resemble networks in the Neighborhood view, confusion is possible (networks being connected to at startup?) Fred - I'm willing to try that sunrise metaphor, tonight if I can (travelling today) Re splash page with logo: in my next mockup I'll leave off the example school logo.and move that frame to the end. It might be better to reserve a frame for customizable logo or message, before or after the Sugar spash page Yes, in that mockup the first screen is kind of overwhelming with several logos and a few pieces of textual information. At the same time, we tried very hard to eliminate the slideshow effect that feels (well, is) like a bunch of marketing material that detracts from the UI. I think the Sugar logo should stand alone, so it reads powerfully, and then be replaced in short order by the XO. Perhaps we could entertain a text only solution to identifying the school, in gray beneath the sugar logo. Thoughts? Version info: In fact I feel strongly about showing version information... or its corollary, making it easy to find. Teachers, I think it's more important that we make it easy to find in the UI. Kids won't reboot that often, and it would be silly to reboot just to find that info. parents, admins, G1G1 donors unfamiliar with Sugar will not have the foggiest idea how to hunt down version information (Learners might not have trouble finding it - they will explore their machines ad infinitum - but they can't be expected to know about versioning). We are about to embark on hundreds of thousands of XO-1.5s running v0..84 which will coexist with a huge installed base of v0.82 (and many earlier); SoaS with its simplified numbering scheme will (we hope) sow the seeds for preinstalled Sugar in distributions for education projects. We may be deploying v0.86 at the end of the year... aside from how we manage the Activity compatibility matrix, we need to make such info *extremely* easy to track down for someone interested in checking if Sugar + Activities are up-to-date. Our strategy for teacher buy-in is star marketing on Activities (see press releases); making Activity installation/upgrade simple this summer is part of what we need to do to make SoaS possible in the classroom. Helping users understand what version they have (of Sugar, of each Activity) is a key aspect of that. I agree that it's unpleasant to see numbers at boot time (especially a datestamped snapshot number). Why don't we borrow an idea from Apple? We basically have this already. We ust happen to have an XO in the center of the screen, instead of an apple icon in the upper left. The info is actually in the About my XO section of the settings, which might be one step too far. We could go back to an earlier design for the XO menu and have a direct About my XO menu item which jumps directly to the correct settings panel. We could also separate the About my XO panel from settings, removing it from the settings panel completely and showing it as it's own modal dialog
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-06-01
On 2 Jun 2009, at 09:05, Martin Dengler wrote: On Mon, Jun 01, 2009 at 07:36:46PM +0100, Gary C Martin wrote: [delete that page you talked about, create a page with just orphaned activities] Help welcome! You're being too polite :). Me? Polite? How very dare you ;-) I can't tell if you're politely asking me to do that stuff or waiting for feedback on a course of action. I'm happy to do something along the lines of what I understood you to be asking... Very happy for you to do stuff (if you have the time) and will join in with what I have here off-line once I see where you're going. If we wait much longer for feedback, you'll be hearing from my droid butler. Regards, --Gary Regards, --Gary Martin ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] My first experience with eTexts
On 1 Jun 2009, at 15:44, James Simmons wrote: Caroline, The books can be downloaded as a Zip file. In the Zip file is a small website for offline reading. I'm copying your question to the IAEP list because there has been some discussion about making the Browse Activity able to work with offline websites stored in Zip files. +1 Yep, this is on the roadmap for 0.86. It would open up using a whole new set of content directly through a well tagged Journal (no need at all for the old .xol format and it's non-standard use of browse to access the information through a custom scripted home page). --Gary This is actually a more popular format than you might think. For instance, Project Gutenberg has a bunch of illustrated books in that format, for instance _The Innocents Abroad_ by Mark Twain is one. It is reasonable to assume that some future version of Browse will be able to work with Zip files like this one. James Simmons Caroline Meeks wrote: Hi James, Here is another interesting source of books. How hard to make a reader for these? Or would we do something completely different? http://bookbuilder.cast.org/library.php ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] My first experience with eTexts
On 1 Jun 2009, at 20:44, Caroline Meeks wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: On 1 Jun 2009, at 15:44, James Simmons wrote: Caroline, The books can be downloaded as a Zip file. In the Zip file is a small website for offline reading. I'm copying your question to the IAEP list because there has been some discussion about making the Browse Activity able to work with offline websites stored in Zip files. +1 Yep, this is on the roadmap for 0.86. It would open up using a whole new set of content directly through a well tagged Journal (no need at all for the old .xol format and it's non-standard use of browse to access the information through a custom scripted home page). Great, so no need for us to put in any tickets or anything? Is there somewhere I can make a note of where these specific books are, they would make a great test case. Well, slightly off topic – but also on – I'd point you to ticket: http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/840 Goal is, I think, to come-up with some agreed on set of items for an otherwise fresh Journal and add them in a well tagged, titled, described, meta-data way to kick-start folks going to the ways of the Journal (with actually useful content), eg. go to Journal type Berlin in search and see a couple of entries that are world maps showing Berlin somewhere (I have this now easy), perhaps one is an actual FLOSS street map of Berlin, Germany; and a couple of ebooks written by authors in or about Berlin. And then, more on topic, I'd go for: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Release/Roadmap/0.86#Browse Regards, --Gary --Gary This is actually a more popular format than you might think. For instance, Project Gutenberg has a bunch of illustrated books in that format, for instance _The Innocents Abroad_ by Mark Twain is one. It is reasonable to assume that some future version of Browse will be able to work with Zip files like this one. James Simmons Caroline Meeks wrote: Hi James, Here is another interesting source of books. How hard to make a reader for these? Or would we do something completely different? http://bookbuilder.cast.org/library.php ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen
Hi Christian, On 30 May 2009, at 10:17, Christian Marc Schmidt wrote: Hi Gary, this looks good, though I wonder about the loss of the XO in the center. The boot sequence was intended to establish the UI, and in many ways the XO does signify the Sugar brand as much (more?) as the logo. Suggestion: Could we not simply show the logo for a few seconds, before transitioning into the current boot sequence? I'd hate to lose the current sequence, I think it works very well, and Eben will attest that much time was spent arriving at where we are today... Yes, agreed, the original boot up is very hard to beat (showing a child as central). Just bouncing ideas about here. My only criticisms of the original would be: 1) not liking the kid icon breaking into a rotating arrow treatment (seems too forced/smart, the whole XO icon is a stronger identity, appearing dots show progress just fine) 2) seemed odd for the dots to appear from 6 o'clock to 6 o'clock (12 to 12 feels more natural to me) 3) lack of any colour (though this is tough to avoid breaking HIG iconography on colour use) Regards, --Gary Christian On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 10:59 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Folks, Just to get a basic, safe, default starting point in there, I've uploaded one simple treatment to: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Boot_Logo#Sugar_Boot_Logo_Animations Will try to upload a couple more tomorrow. Night, --Gary P.S. Should pull this back on list, your call Sean, but probably worth getting a couple more ideas up so that folks can input to some alternative treatments. On 30 May 2009, at 00:58, Sean DALY wrote: Christian, Eben I'm not sure if you are on sugar-devel but this is I think an outstanding opportunity for Sugar branding, celebrating Sugar interface.iconography and greeting children. I know nothing about the plymouth boot animator, but i deduce that consecutively named files will do the trick I'm willing to attack this but before I try scraping screenshots, do you guys have any interface assets i could grab? Input greatly appreciated thanks Sean On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 12:32 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe we could work on it together? here's my idea like my booth rollup banner mockup which Christian 7 Eben both liked, I want to stay as much as possible within the Sugar HIG and iconography. boot should start with our logo ... smaller than in the previous SoaS ... (not sure yet if should be with or without labs) The ring is iconic ... I want to keep a ring at boot... but instead of dots, I want XO avatars - kids! In the middle... each succeeding image with a colored Activity icon... matched to the corresponding XO avatar appearing in the ring. So kids understand that Activities are for them. And ending with... kids around the Journal! Alternate idea: cycling through the 12 logo color combos? Not mutually exclusive... logo could be on the bottom of ring What do you think? thanks Sean P.S. I've actually done something similar with a titling sequence for a short film. I started with the final image and wiped elements, backing down to the first image I use imagemagick a lot no problem to create a script which could inject arbitrary text into a ppm file On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Sean, FYI, this came in off list. Regards, --G Begin forwarded message: From: James Zaki james.z...@gmail.com Date: 29 May 2009 22:24:06 BST To: Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen I'm in touch with a design company who owes me a favour or two. I could get them to whip up some concept designs for inspiration? James 2009/5/29 Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com On 29 May 2009, at 21:37, Sean DALY wrote: Sebastian, Gary I'd like to take a stab at it, I've actually had an idea brewing for awhile Cool, shout if you need extra hands/review. --G What's the deadline please? thanks Sean On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: On 29 May 2009, at 18:41, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: Hi folks, sorry for the short notice, but this is rather urgent. I've been spending yesterday afternoon to update the packages in our SoaS Yum repo to reflect the changes for Fedora 11. As it turned out, the plymouth package has been partly rewritten, and I was wondering (also with regard to #709), how we wanted to deal with a new boot screen. For now, I've just implemented the old Sugar logo again, but we might also want to have something more shiny (probably with a progress bar). Some form of progress indicator would be a useful addition. I'm not really that good at art and the Sugar logo thing there was at first nothing more than a quick hack, so it'd would
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen
On 30 May 2009, at 16:36, Christian Marc Schmidt wrote: I agree with your points--comments below: On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Christian, On 30 May 2009, at 10:17, Christian Marc Schmidt wrote: Hi Gary, this looks good, though I wonder about the loss of the XO in the center. The boot sequence was intended to establish the UI, and in many ways the XO does signify the Sugar brand as much (more?) as the logo. Suggestion: Could we not simply show the logo for a few seconds, before transitioning into the current boot sequence? I'd hate to lose the current sequence, I think it works very well, and Eben will attest that much time was spent arriving at where we are today... Yes, agreed, the original boot up is very hard to beat (showing a child as central). Just bouncing ideas about here. My only criticisms of the original would be: 1) not liking the kid icon breaking into a rotating arrow treatment (seems too forced/smart, the whole XO icon is a stronger identity, appearing dots show progress just fine) Yes, I fully agree! A stationary XO icon would be simpler, less forced. 2) seemed odd for the dots to appear from 6 o'clock to 6 o'clock (12 to 12 feels more natural to me) Agree with that, too. Cool. There's a sample animation of the 2 above uploaded. 3) lack of any colour (though this is tough to avoid breaking HIG iconography on colour use) Here, I think it would be best if the XO would have the colors set in the UI... Sebastian is truly, madly, deeply going to hate you for this suggestion ;-) I do like that use of greys to signify that 'things are not ready yet' so I'm on the fence here. I did try another animation with the dots appearing in the 12 logo fill/outline colours. I did wonder about showing them all as grey from the start, and then lighting up with colour. Regards, --Gary Regards, --Gary Christian On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 10:59 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Folks, Just to get a basic, safe, default starting point in there, I've uploaded one simple treatment to: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Boot_Logo#Sugar_Boot_Logo_Animations Will try to upload a couple more tomorrow. Night, --Gary P.S. Should pull this back on list, your call Sean, but probably worth getting a couple more ideas up so that folks can input to some alternative treatments. On 30 May 2009, at 00:58, Sean DALY wrote: Christian, Eben I'm not sure if you are on sugar-devel but this is I think an outstanding opportunity for Sugar branding, celebrating Sugar interface.iconography and greeting children. I know nothing about the plymouth boot animator, but i deduce that consecutively named files will do the trick I'm willing to attack this but before I try scraping screenshots, do you guys have any interface assets i could grab? Input greatly appreciated thanks Sean On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 12:32 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe we could work on it together? here's my idea like my booth rollup banner mockup which Christian 7 Eben both liked, I want to stay as much as possible within the Sugar HIG and iconography. boot should start with our logo ... smaller than in the previous SoaS ... (not sure yet if should be with or without labs) The ring is iconic ... I want to keep a ring at boot... but instead of dots, I want XO avatars - kids! In the middle... each succeeding image with a colored Activity icon... matched to the corresponding XO avatar appearing in the ring. So kids understand that Activities are for them. And ending with... kids around the Journal! Alternate idea: cycling through the 12 logo color combos? Not mutually exclusive... logo could be on the bottom of ring What do you think? thanks Sean P.S. I've actually done something similar with a titling sequence for a short film. I started with the final image and wiped elements, backing down to the first image I use imagemagick a lot no problem to create a script which could inject arbitrary text into a ppm file On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Sean, FYI, this came in off list. Regards, --G Begin forwarded message: From: James Zaki james.z...@gmail.com Date: 29 May 2009 22:24:06 BST To: Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen I'm in touch with a design company who owes me a favour or two. I could get them to whip up some concept designs for inspiration? James 2009/5/29 Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com On 29 May 2009, at 21:37, Sean DALY wrote: Sebastian, Gary I'd like to take a stab at it, I've actually had an idea brewing for awhile Cool, shout if you need extra hands/review. --G What's the deadline please? thanks
Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58
On 28 May 2009, at 18:04, James Simmons wrote: David, I thought I had answered that one with a previous email. First, you can see the latest git changes at this link: http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/readetexts/repos/mainline/trees/master I don't know why the main page doesn't show that. It never has; it's something I've just lived with. Second, the activity is 100% python, so if you have the .xo file you have all the source there is. Yes, my feelings exactly... I understand there is an option in python setup.py that lets you create a source package but I've never used it. If I created such a package where would I post it? Unfortunately what David is referring to (and I don't mean to pick on David) is the desire of packagers to have everything provided as .bz2 for individual bundling. Now I don't understand the desire, or need for this, and have yet to see a good argument for it, but it does seem (for now at least) that if an Activity author wants to make life easier for a packager to distribute their Activity, they should: 1) Use ./setup.py dist_source (this generates a .tar.bz2 file in ./dist) 2) Scp the .bz2 file to shell.sugarlabs.org/upload/sugar/sources/honey/ activity-name/... This makes it appear at http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/honey/ but you will need to request shell access first by creating a trac ticket at dev.sugarlabs.org (I'm happy to upload the .bz2 bundle for you if you email it to me, as it may take a while to get an account, and making every Activity author use a shell account on sunjammer is not very scalable). 3) Edit the Honey table at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Source_Code and make sure it lists and points to the latest .bz2 4) Edit another wiki table at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap if you want to get Read Etext onto the SoaS distro. 5) Write a Subject: [RELEASE] activity-name-version email and send it to sugar-devel providing a link to the .xo bundle, a link to the .bz2, and some release notes about what's new, so that distro maintainers and packagers know it available for packaging. Quite a few additional hoops there for authors to jump through, sorry, and you'll need to repeat this for each subsequent release. Suggestions for improving this workflow anyone? And I'd love to understand what is so good about .bz2 and/or if they really are needed why a packager can't generate them with ./setup.py dist_source. Regards, --Gary James Simmons David Van Assche wrote: Please could you also give us the link to the source for the readetexts activity. We have it packaged in openSUSE, and I'd like to be able to offer the latest version... kind Regards, David Van Assche P.S. The last git commit I see for read e texts was in March... On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 5:26 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.com wrote: Tomeu, This link is not to the main Gutenberg site, but to a Czech Republic site. The books seem to be all in Czech. Project Gutenberg does not list this site as an affiliate. I don't know what's going on here. James Simmons Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Hmm, actually I looked for this book and couldn't find it from inside ETexts: http://www.gutenberg.cz/kniha.php?etext_nr=357 Any idea why? Thanks, Tomeu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Did anyone get a photo of the getting involved Funnel we did in Paris?
Hi Caroline, On 28 May 2009, at 14:00, Caroline Meeks wrote: Here is the Participation Funnel we drew in Paris. I'm working on writing up notes on the things we hope to do to improve each stage. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Volunteer_Funnel Please feel free to help me with the page whether or not you were in Paris. Is there anyone who get get the photo onto that page? Including Images does not appear in the help for the wiki as far as I can see. Cleaned up a photo and uploaded. Regards, --Gary Is there a deep reason we don't use a WYSIWYG editor for the wiki? Caroline On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 9:21 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Looks like my friend Diana took one. Thanks On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 6:11 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi, Here's the monster res version... Regards, --Gary On 25 May 2009, at 21:38, Caroline Meeks wrote: Hi, Can anyone point me to a picture of the funnel my group did in the Paris camp. I want to do a write up on it. Thanks! Caroline -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax funnel.png___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] adding or updating an Activity: two typical teacher scenarios, let's lower barrier to installation
On 27 May 2009, at 15:35, Sean DALY wrote: Scenario 1: Let's say I'm a teacher reading about Sugar in a magazine. I consider myself comfortable with computers, visit the web every day, but have never used the command line. I've succeeded in downloading SoaS, loading it onto a stick with the Fedora LiveUSB Creator and booting my PC with it. I've tried a few Activities and am wondering what other Activities are available. Later, back in Windows, I've visited www.sugarlabs.org and found the Activities section. Browsing by section, I find a couple of Activities that seem interesting. I've clicked the pancake buttons and downloaded two .xo files and put them on my hard disk where I usually store the attachments friends and colleagues send me. Scenario 2: A colleague has mentioned Sugar to me, talking about the OLPC project. I have a Mac for ease of use and I never see a text screen. I visit www.sugarlabs.org and after reading the teachers section with interest, I return to the homepage and click on Try Sugar with a child today, arriving on the page that advises how to install for each system; I click on the Apple icon. The boot helper instructions seem complicated, but I find the VirtualBox OSX installation instructions and get Sugar running. I'm intrigued by the Activities and want to know if there are more, so I switch to my browser in the other window, return to the Sugar Labs site and find a very interesting-looking Activity in the website's Activities section. I click the pancake button and download the .xo file to the Mac's desktop. ** Questions: 1) what are the teachers' next step? Would the procedures be different for these two scenarii? * No instructions I could locate on activities.sugarlabs.org :-( * In the wiki section, I eventually located Activity Library and found a page called End Users, but two of the three pages are blank and the other one talks about a sandbox... * The search engine doesn't help either, there are lots of documents found but none give advice about how to add an Activity or update to a more recent one. 2) I think we are assuming Activity installation from within Browse under Sugar, but that method may be too much to assume for a newbie or for someone with no net connectivity with Sugar... automatic if connected though I don't remember if a new Activity arrives in the list view or is a favorite... we need to communicate what to expect in that case Currently, installation of new Activities (via a GUI) is only via Browse on the system in question. 3) Someone told me how to add an Activity by placing the .xo bundle in a directory... but I can't find the mail :-( and CLI manipulations daunting for many ordinary users If you are at the Sugar Terminal and have a .xo bundle accessible some place (perhaps you used the Terminal to scp/curl/wget/ftp the file from somewhere, or you are running Sugar in a Virtual Machine and are sharing some disk space with the host operating system where you've already downloaded an .xo bundle), the command you are after is: sugar-install-bundle the_activity.xo This will install and place the Activity icon in the home favourite view (though unlike downloading via Browse, there will be no record of this new bundle in your Journal). 4) If I remember correctly, a collaborative Activity set to public sharing is pushed out over the network to other Sugar machines. Are those machines permanently updated with more recent versions, or installed if new versions, or merely borrowed during the session? No unfortunately not. I had high hopes of this when I first read of the idea in the early Sugar days, a great way to virally spread/ distribute an Activity organically via peer to peer collaboration. But the feature has never been implemented (only sane to do in a world with Rainbow or some similar security blanket). It's worth noting that currently you only see shared Activities in the neighbourhood for Activities you already have installed. 5) if there is a problem, is it possible to roll back to the previous version of an Activity? If you have the previous Activity version as a bundle in your Journal still, I think so... (but will need to retest as it's been a while since I last tried this and things may have changed). Regards, --Gary ** any info appreciated. The Marketing Team can help write installation tips copy if necessary. thanks Sean ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Help to Find the PO file of Some Activities to able me to Translate Them
On 25 May 2009, at 12:33, David Van Assche wrote: Super... that methodology should be written up some place as its a great guide to follow... I'd much rather try and find some agreement to cut un-necessary steps, rather than to wikify/formalise it and push every unfortunate Activity author through the same sausage factory! :-) /me puts on tinfoil hat and asbestos socks I've still not heard a good argument for why Activity authors currently need to create two bundles with identical source content (one .xo zip and one .bz2), upload them to two different locations, and document them in several different places. It's really easy to get out of sync. I'm also still not convinced about the sanity of distros needing to package up each individual Activity (other than perhaps sucrose as one collection). If, for a moment, you think of Sugar as a Firefox, and Activities as Addons, does each distro really consider packaging up every Addon kicking about for Firefox? Once a Sugar release and its platform dependancies are yum, aptitude, or whatever installed; the Sugar UI should then be the one to add/update additional Activities (via Browse as currently, or via a future update control panel checking with activity.sugarlabs.org). Regards, --Gary David On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi David, On 24 May 2009, at 11:47, David Van Assche wrote: Overall it would be nice if we had an activitiy matrix that showed the stages of projects. The Activity Team have been making contact with past authors, slowly, slowly we're moving along even if it means adopting extra activities ourselves: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Activity_Status The best thing folks can do If they have a favourite activity that is not yet migrated to Sugar Labs infrastructure is make some noise about it. Email the IAEP and/or sugar-devel and advocate or ask about it, email the author/s, see if they are still working on it or have future plans. Many activity developers seem to think no one is interested/using their work and often seem pleasantly surprised when they get an email about their past efforts. This would be helpful to show what people could work on to. Something like, name of activity on one side, and on the other stage (planning, pre-source, alpha, beta, rc, release, packaged, xo bundled, translated) Something along those lines, but I'm sure someone can come up with a better matrix. If this was up at some place, we could know pretty quickly what people could be working on. It could even be split by distro too... The idea came to me because there are a ton of git projects with no code in them. If there are git projects with no code in them, what makes you think the developer will edit another page somewhere else with project status information! ;-b With my activity developer hat on, I do find it a pain how many seemingly random places there are to work on when releasing a new version, even more for a new project, or migrated one. My check-list/ todo-list is something like: If it's a new project: - Create a Gitorious project repository for it http://git.sugarlabs.org/ and start hacking on your code - Request a trac component for you activity at http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ - Open a trac ticket to request addition to Pootle (if your strings/ release is reasonably mature/ready) - Create a page at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/actvity- name If it's a new release: - Update your activities wiki page at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/ actvity-name - Upload the .xo bundle, screenshots, notes to http://activities.sugarlabs.org/ - Upload .bz2 source to shell.sugarlabs.org /upload/sugar/sources/ honey - Edit wiki table http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Source_Code and make sure it's pointing to your latest .bz2 - Edit wiki table http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap to get it on Soas - Write a [RELEASE] activity-name-version email and send it to sugar-devel If the project is migrating from olpc infrastructure: - Migrate git repository from http://dev.laptop.org/ - Migrate open trac tickets from http://dev.laptop.org/ - Track down relevant wiki.laptop.org pages and indicate the migration - For deployed activities make sure relevant http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities page version templates point to the correct/latest working bundles. I'm sure I missed a step or two, but I think you get the picture! On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hi Mohammad, On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 06:36, Mohammad Hamed m.ha...@paiwastoon.com.af wrote: Dear Software Translators, Could you please tell me how can I translate some Activities like: Physics, X2O, WFP, Implode, Conozco Uruguay to my language? FWIW: Having spoken with Alex
Re: [IAEP] Did anyone get a photo of the getting involved Funnel we did in Paris?
Hi Caroline, On 25 May 2009, at 21:38, Caroline Meeks wrote: Hi, Can anyone point me to a picture of the funnel my group did in the Paris camp. I want to do a write up on it. It's here, but it's too low resolution (non-pro Flickr I'm afraid), will email you the high resolution image off list: http://www.flickr.com/photos/50394...@n00/3539794155/in/set-72157618264065620/ Regards, --Gary Thanks! Caroline -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Help to Find the PO file of Some Activities to able me to Translate Them
Hi David, On 24 May 2009, at 11:47, David Van Assche wrote: Overall it would be nice if we had an activitiy matrix that showed the stages of projects. The Activity Team have been making contact with past authors, slowly, slowly we're moving along even if it means adopting extra activities ourselves: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Activity_Status The best thing folks can do If they have a favourite activity that is not yet migrated to Sugar Labs infrastructure is make some noise about it. Email the IAEP and/or sugar-devel and advocate or ask about it, email the author/s, see if they are still working on it or have future plans. Many activity developers seem to think no one is interested/ using their work and often seem pleasantly surprised when they get an email about their past efforts. This would be helpful to show what people could work on to. Something like, name of activity on one side, and on the other stage (planning, pre-source, alpha, beta, rc, release, packaged, xo bundled, translated) Something along those lines, but I'm sure someone can come up with a better matrix. If this was up at some place, we could know pretty quickly what people could be working on. It could even be split by distro too... The idea came to me because there are a ton of git projects with no code in them. If there are git projects with no code in them, what makes you think the developer will edit another page somewhere else with project status information! ;-b With my activity developer hat on, I do find it a pain how many seemingly random places there are to work on when releasing a new version, even more for a new project, or migrated one. My check-list/ todo-list is something like: If it's a new project: - Create a Gitorious project repository for it http:// git.sugarlabs.org/ and start hacking on your code - Request a trac component for you activity at http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ - Open a trac ticket to request addition to Pootle (if your strings/ release is reasonably mature/ready) - Create a page at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/actvity- name If it's a new release: - Update your activities wiki page at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/ actvity-name - Upload the .xo bundle, screenshots, notes to http://activities.sugarlabs.org/ - Upload .bz2 source to shell.sugarlabs.org /upload/sugar/sources/honey - Edit wiki table http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Source_Code and make sure it's pointing to your latest .bz2 - Edit wiki table http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/ Roadmap to get it on Soas - Write a [RELEASE] activity-name-version email and send it to sugar- devel If the project is migrating from olpc infrastructure: - Migrate git repository from http://dev.laptop.org/ - Migrate open trac tickets from http://dev.laptop.org/ - Track down relevant wiki.laptop.org pages and indicate the migration - For deployed activities make sure relevant http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities page version templates point to the correct/latest working bundles. I'm sure I missed a step or two, but I think you get the picture! On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hi Mohammad, On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 06:36, Mohammad Hamed m.ha...@paiwastoon.com.af wrote: Dear Software Translators, Could you please tell me how can I translate some Activities like: Physics, X2O, WFP, Implode, Conozco Uruguay to my language? FWIW: Having spoken with Alex Levenson yesterday, I've started to migrate Physics over to Suage Labs infrastructure (X2o is next on my list). It runs fine on sugar-jhbuild, but does need some UI work and clean-up before I request addition to pootle for translation, or upload a bundle to activities.sugarlabs.org. I also mailed Jo Lee (Implode) about his availability, will migrate that over as well if he doesn't have the time at the moment. Regards, --Gary If you could tell me that how can I find the PO file of the activities it would be easier for me to translate them. Looks like these activities are not in pootle yet. What I think we should do is to contact the maintainers and work with them so their activities are translatable in pootle. If the activities have no active maintainers, then perhaps the Activity Team could adopt them? Regards, Tomeu Sincerely, Mohammad Hamed User Service Officer One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project PAIWASTOON Networking Services Ltd. Email: m.ha...@paiwastoon.com.af Mobile: 0093 786 876546 Phone: 0093 794 195494 PAIWASTOON Networking Services Ltd. 1st street Kart-e-Se, Darul Aman Road Kabul, Afghanistan www.paiwastoon.com.af www.olpc.af ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The eBook ah ha moment for Sugar on a Stick
On 12 May 2009, at 19:42, Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: This issue was discussed at length about a week ago, and James Simmons and Alexei (I think) were discussing the provision of a library activity. Until that happens, I think James' reader activity and Sayamendu's fbreader activity should be packaged for SOAS to allow epub, comic format and text formats to be read conveniently in SOAS. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/search?q=newberycat=all is a package on aslo of all the free Newbery honor books by women authors as a .xol package. The texts themselves are epub format. I wish someone would reinstate the ability to access .xol files in SOAS. I still see little reason why .xol files are a benefit, seemed like a novel but largely irreverent and high maintenance idea considering almost all the old .xol content ended up being pdf, html, image, or audio content, and can simply be downloaded and accessed directly from the Journal (it used to cause a fair amount of UI friction with folks having to switch between browse - journal_detail_view - some_activity - and_often_back_again; often ending up with multiple duplicate copies junking up the journal, and causing low memory situations on XO-1s). Just opened a related Soas ticket, with the suggestion that we initially cherry pick some of the useful .xol items and pre-populate a few good examples so that Soas has some initial journal entries to get folks rolling in the right direction. Other old .xol content, if folks still find them useful and are keen, can just be un-bundled and placed on a web page, Moodle lesson, for normal download: http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/840 Regards, --Gary On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: Add the Bible and Qur'an reader programs? Those should at least be on the activity portal. Can you see if you can get in touch with the maintainers? Thanks, Caroline On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: For the next SoaS Beta I'd like to help users trying out Sugar, especially educators, have an ah ha moment about how Sugar on a Stick can open a huge world of books for their students. The US elementary schools I visit have a computer lab and they have books. But they certainly don't have the budget to get as many copies of as many different books as they would like. Maybe our new users will know that there are free books on the internet. Good chance they have never actually tried it themselves. Plus, having a book on the internet doesn't help their students if they get one hour of computer time in the lab. But having a book on your Sugar Stick and being able to read it in multiple locations is actually very useful! This is one of the many things I want educators to discover as they play with their Sugar Sticks. I know we have wonderful library apps coming down the pike. What I'm interested in right now is what is the art of the possible for the next Beta in June? Suggestions so far: - Include the FLOSS Sugar manual in the SoaS Image - Add a link to one or more free book sites in the startup page on Browse - Include a kids book in the SoaS Image. Other ideas? Thanks, Caroline -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/ دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The eBook ah ha moment for Sugar on a Stick
On 12 May 2009, at 18:37, Caroline Meeks wrote: For the next SoaS Beta I'd like to help users trying out Sugar, especially educators, have an ah ha moment about how Sugar on a Stick can open a huge world of books for their students. The US elementary schools I visit have a computer lab and they have books. But they certainly don't have the budget to get as many copies of as many different books as they would like. Maybe our new users will know that there are free books on the internet. Good chance they have never actually tried it themselves. Plus, having a book on the internet doesn't help their students if they get one hour of computer time in the lab. But having a book on your Sugar Stick and being able to read it in multiple locations is actually very useful! This is one of the many things I want educators to discover as they play with their Sugar Sticks. I know we have wonderful library apps coming down the pike. What I'm interested in right now is what is the art of the possible for the next Beta in June? Suggestions so far: - Include the FLOSS Sugar manual in the SoaS Image - Add a link to one or more free book sites in the startup page on Browse Whatever happened the 'great and glorious' Moodle? Lot's of noises were made about how well suted ti education it is, and much effort was made setting up servers and accounts, but where is the simple basic literature lesson plan that links to 5 or 6 decent pdf ebooks as reading material so folks can download and get going?? I was hoping http://schools.sugarlabs.org/ was going to be a growing resource of such top level educational example content, but it seems to be a barren wasteland – and that's one of the reasons I was OK with the default home page going to a local school server (at Martins request) rather that to schools.sugarlabs.org. Would be happy to rework the default home page with a javascript trick so that the school link tries for a local school server first, and then falls back to schools.sugarlabs.org if no local server is found – just didn't have time to do thins in the last cycle. Perhaps Moodle was a poor choice of content management system? Perhaps teachers are unwilling, unable, or unconvinced enough about Sugar to help provide lesson plans? - Include a kids book in the SoaS Image. Other ideas? Is it possible to provide a handful of example pdf books into the Journal? Would be great if they could also be well named, with useful metadata (description/tags/preview), and starred for easy sorting/ finding. I've always thought the Journal could do with a few 'hello world' example entries to get people into the concept. --Gary Thanks, Caroline -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] How Can We Showcase Turtle Art Portfolio
On 12 May 2009, at 23:23, John Tierney wrote: Hello All, Would like commentary from the community on how we can try and showcase the abilities of Turtle art Portfolio along with the things each of us are working on. The email below came from my inability(due to my confusing question) to start the thread in our IRC marketing meeting today. I hope those of you going to Paris get a chance to spend some time on this subject. This is an important piece of our Educational Outreach and a capability that all community members can showcase. Therefore, I have cross-posted to IAEP, Developer, and Marketing-please pass along to others who can be of help to the conversation. My main question would be; can we easily upload activity states from the journal to the web/wiki or some other location (perhaps Moodle)? I keep meaning to go through some of the activities and upload their state to make sure they can be re-downloaded again to the Journal in a useful manor. If that virtuous circle is complete it allows much easier content creation and asynchronous sharing direct from Sugar. I'm guessing there are mime hurdles for some activities, i.e. I know Labyrinth (I look after this one) is not yet specifying a custom mime type for the Journal content it creates, and I'm not 100% sure how best to proceed. Taking Labyrinth as an example I could easily see a range of sample mind-maps over various subjects being useful references (i.e with my geek hat on, I use some mind-maps for reminding me of obscure vi keyboard shortcuts, git commands, etc). From a more lesson plan direction, creating template mind-maps, or mind-maps with unanswered questions at the leaf nodes, could make a good educational process. Students could then provide final pdf's** of their edited work to the teacher for feedback***. ** I have pdf working from Labyrinth now, just some glitches if raster image thoughts are in the mix – still working on it... *** some simple pdf annotation features in Read would rock. Regards, --Gary Thanks, John Tierney Hi Walter,Sorry I wasn't so clear in my question was just trying to start thread about importance of Showcasing TA Portfolio-The Journal and TA Portfolio combination for Teachers ability to see child's work and progression is one of the themes we should push. The idea that every activity integrates with the Portfolio is great selling point for teachers. When developers and activity designers discuss and describe their work mentioning it integrates with TA portfolio reinforces key concepts of reflection and critique and allows for children to showcase their creativity for Parents, Teachers, Peers and Community. From the non-technical/developer world I am not sure if it works with all activities. Showcasing and featuring the TA Portfolio as an additional assessment source which allows children to let their creativity shine is an important thing to get across. Allowing all community members to market this ability(Helps or Works with TA Portfolio) will help bring many more Teachers and others into the fold. Having a little session with the members at Sugar Camp Paris and with OLPC France about TA Portfolio and its ability to help Teachers and Students and the Programs ability would be very beneficial, even more so if it was recorded. Much like Evangeline's and your presentation at Sugar Camp it was one of the most instructive pieces on how this ability can make a true difference in the classroom. Now that the TA Portfolio activity has been realized, putting forth it's usability seems advantageous.Just an idea-Spot on. The reason why I give all my talks using Turtle Art is exactly to make this point of closing the loop. -walter___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: [Sur] Labyrinth 6
On 8 May 2009, at 10:22, Simon Schampijer wrote: Gary C Martin wrote: On 17 Apr 2009, at 08:15, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Congratulations to Gary and Aleksey. Paola is a teacher from .uy and has already tried the new version of Labyrinth and written a small tutorial about how to create mind maps with it, see link in the forwarded email below. Thanks Tomeu, very open to feedback (have a long list myself also), so please do feel free bounce any feedback you see my way. Regards, -Gary Hi Gary, awesome work - of course a big thank to Aleksey as well. Had fun creating a map with Labyrinth today - some thoughts: - zooming shortcuts: In Browse we use (ctrl++ and ctrl+-) for zoom in and zoom out. Write does the same. Not sure what Read does - at least ctrl++ does not work. Would be cool to settle on some short cuts. (Btw: the wheel on a mouse does work as well for zooming) Agreed, I tried to use ctrl+- and ctrl-= originally but they failed to work (api didn't like the symbols) so went with ctrl+1 and crtl+2 for the release. After asking Tomeu, he kindly managed to dig into the source (X I think it was in the end), to find that symbols are described by name (ctrl-minus, ctrl-equal, and now documented in the sugar almanac). Planning to change them in the next release. - zoom: is there a way that when I zoomed in, that I move to another area of the canvas? (hope it is clear what I mean here) Yes, you want to pan. Hold the 'hand' key (on Mac the key equivalent are the cmd/Apple keys) and drag with the mouse. I'd like to improve this in the future and not need the mouse button down (eg, just 'hand' key and mouse movement), there's also the option to extend the right button so that when you right drag on an empty area of canvas it pans (right drag is currently just used for repositioning thoughts). - scaling of images: when an image is scaled moving it does take very very long - I guess it is re-rendered Will take a look, but yea large images do slow things down. - translations: is labyrinth up in pootle? Yep, Sayamindu kindly added it in about a week ago as part of the pootle push to move it to the Sugar Labs infrastructure (though I seem to have lost my translation password and there is no password reset, oops). Thanks, Simon Thanks for the feedback! Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: [Sur] Labyrinth 6
On 8 May 2009, at 10:44, Simon Schampijer wrote: Simon Schampijer wrote: Gary C Martin wrote: On 17 Apr 2009, at 08:15, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Congratulations to Gary and Aleksey. Paola is a teacher from .uy and has already tried the new version of Labyrinth and written a small tutorial about how to create mind maps with it, see link in the forwarded email below. Thanks Tomeu, very open to feedback (have a long list myself also), so please do feel free bounce any feedback you see my way. Regards, -Gary Hi Gary, awesome work - of course a big thank to Aleksey as well. Had fun creating a map with Labyrinth today - some thoughts: - zooming shortcuts: In Browse we use (ctrl++ and ctrl+-) for zoom in and zoom out. Write does the same. Not sure what Read does - at least ctrl++ does not work. Would be cool to settle on some short cuts. (Btw: the wheel on a mouse does work as well for zooming) - zoom: is there a way that when I zoomed in, that I move to another area of the canvas? (hope it is clear what I mean here) - scaling of images: when an image is scaled moving it does take very very long - I guess it is re-rendered - translations: is labyrinth up in pootle? Just seen that this is already the case - and that we have the German translations even done already. Yes, thanks to user 'fab' (sorry don't know your name) for creating a ticket with the German pot file before Labyrinth had made it into pootle! Maybe we can do a release with the translations? Is the translation team aware that Labyrinth is ready to be translated? No spanish translation yet - as of today. I guess the teacher from Uruguay who has been doing the tutorial will have it done in 5 minutes ;) Absolutely, would love to at least get Spanish in there, I have time to make another release and some fixes over the next few days. --Gary Cheers, Simon ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] versus, not
Hi Kathy, On 8 May 2009, at 23:28, Kathy Pusztavari wrote: David, Do you have any good links for those of us just starting? Links that would answer how to install python, how to interface with sugar from a different platform (XP, Mac), sugar specific issues in developing activities in python? The Activity Team resources page is a good place to have a browse: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Resources If you're working on a Mac, Python will already be there to start experimenting with (open up a terminal window and type python, this will give you an interactive python shell you can tinker about and test the language out in). To get deeper, if you have an Intel Mac (i.e not PPC), then you can install Suns VirtualBox and run a fully emulated Sugar environment for easy hacking (this should also be an option if you want to use your XP box). I seem to remember... http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Activity_Tutorial ...as being a useful hello_world starter for me, I note that it is a little out of date now (a bunch of unnecessary steps) but should still work fine (worth a quick skim at least). For me the best place to learn is to go and pick you way through an existing activities code, you don't have to understand it all but you'll see the rough template most folks are building to. I think my Moon activity code is reasonably simple (i.e not much really going on) if you want to give it a look: http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/moon/repos/mainline/trees/master Do others think the hello_world template is worth migrating and updating as a 'first blood' resource for the activity team pages? I'm willing to move and tidy it up. Regards, --Gary -Kathy -Original Message- From: iaep-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:iaep-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of David Farning Sent: Friday, May 08, 2009 12:22 PM To: Kathy Pusztavari Cc: iaep Subject: Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] versus, not On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Kathy Pusztavari ka...@kathyandcalvin.com wrote: I'll have to admit I don't have much right to request, complain, or even discuss. If I don't get off my butt and program something myself then I'm part of the problem. But I'll tell you, it is difficult to start in this programming environment where the learning curve is extremely steep (coming from Oracle and PL/SQL stored procedures). I'm still trying to figure out WHERE to start playing with Python let alone how. Kathy, Developer documentation is currently a huge hole for Sugar Labs. So, if you are interested in contributing that would be a great place to start. david -Kathy -Original Message- From: iaep-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:iaep-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Walter Bender Sent: Friday, May 08, 2009 6:26 AM To: Bill Kerr Cc: iaep; Sugar-dev Devel Subject: Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] versus, not One of the real pleasures of this adventure we are on is that there has been thoughtful criticism of ideas. I cannot get away with vague or sloppy thinking. On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 4:37 AM, Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure what is meant by a big tent Why do some people want a big tent for learning theory but not a big tent which accepts both FOSS and proprietary software? Phrasing it that way is intended to encourage people to think about what sort of thing is learning and hopefully will not be interpreted as just being provocative for its own sake. FOSS is a theory of learning. We don't need to reach consensus about either learning theory or FOSS, but to be members of this community, we must agree that we can progress from critique to making positive changes. you can have a big tent where people don't discuss learning theory because it's too hard to reach agreement you can have a big tent where people passionately argue about learning theory but actually listen to what each is saying and argue rationally when I look at minsky's theory of mind I see that he supports multiple models of thinking but also argues against models of thinking that he thinks are incorrect or which emphasise only one way of doing things, eg. although he helped create connectionism he now thinks it has too much influence As Martin points out, Sugar Labs is building tools. But we are not agnostic about how they are used. We are deliberately building affordances into our tools to encourage and promote learning activities that are C in their nature, because we believe that that is the principle means by which learners will reach a level of fluency as described by Alan. But the tools can be used in support of other learning theories and, to rephrase Minsky, if you don't learn something more than one way, you don't learn it. that suggests another version of a big tent which I favour - cherry picking the best parts out of different learning theories /
[IAEP] Logic simulator
Noticed this Flash based logic simulator: http://joshblog.net/projects/logic-gate-simulator/Logicly.html Would be quite a simple sandbox activity to make (python, gtk+, ciaro); but before I burn time (well add to my future todos list), do teachers on this list think it is more than just a geeky play-thing, or does it have educational merit? FWIW: it could do with a few more input/output and processing devices (sensors, buzzers, coloured leds, motors, counters). And, hey if time is no obstacle, perhaps make it a split screen view, holding a physics sandbox with the logic driving/animating simple little motorised constructions. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Some ars technica soas coverage
Just noticed this in my feeds so thought I would pass on: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/sugar-labs-releases-beta-of-live-usb-learning-environment.ars --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 13, Issue 73
On 24 Apr 2009, at 18:44, Caryl Bigenho wrote: Hi Caroline, Bert, and everyone else, About 5 minutes ago I got SoaS to run on my MacBook. : ) I followed Bert's fine instructions again, adding one tiny detail (if Virtual Manager doesn't open, click on the little yellow folder at the right of the pull down bar...if it doesn't open, double click again). All I tried was Speak. It worked fine with English and Spanish. It seems like the mouth doesn't open as wide and it talks a little faster, but maybe that is my imagination. I have to refinish a 9 drawer dresser now, so I will have to wait until evening to play more with SoaS on the MacBook. BTW...how do I add activities? (Greedy I guess). Using Browse, the default page has a link to the Activities web site, though only a portion of activities have been migrated there so far. Old, likely unsupported and untested activities, can also be downloaded from the wiki.laptop.org site as before. It's worth noting that the current Soas distributions come pre- installed in such a way that you can not update some of the activities from within Sugar... Though, if you know your way around terminal it is easily fixed. I think this currently covers all Fructose core activities. One way to tell is to hover your cursor over the activity icons in Home view, you'll notice some have Erase greyed out, these are the locked ones. Regards, --Gary I will take my MacBook, 5 XOs, and the nice SoaS stick Walter sent, to the InfoTech event tomorrow. Someone there will probably have a PC we can use the stick on. I have been following the discussion about the length of time schools would continue to use PowerPC Macs. In my experience schools keep machines until lots of their keys fall off or they totally die. Then if they are thrown out, some enterprising teacher will go dumpster diving and rescue them to set up a computer lab in their classroom. I know of at least one instance of this actually happening! So, yes, IMHO it is worth it to spend the time to get to run on the PowerPC. Caryl P.S. In Latin America they call USB sticks pens. That means SoaS there would be SoaP! ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Advanced search on ASLO
On 25 Apr 2009, at 03:46, Josh Williams wrote: Hey everyone, I've finally started a style sheet for ASLO. You can see what I have so far at http://activities-devel.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/ . It's not much, but I'm moving forward. Fab :-) Just wondering if there was a consensus to ditch the advanced search options? I think it might be a good idea for the sake of simplicity and ease of use for kids. However, I don't know if it's something some users actually need. I think at the very least within categories should be removed even if we do keep the advanced options. Any thoughts? I'd never even noticed the advanced search feature until you just mentioned it! FWIW, I'd be happy with just the plain search input box over on the top right (no 'advanced', no 'within'). The simpler the better, given our target audience. Every UI feature you can get away with removing... is one less item of distraction/confusion/ maintenance :-) Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: SoaS on a MacBook?
On 21 Apr 2009, at 21:38, Caroline Meeks wrote: I'm pretty sure you will definitely need the CD Helper. But I was able to boot my iBook with one so I'm very much looking forward to your results! Just a quick report on trying to boot Soas2-200904161412.iso on a MacBookPro without luck. I'm pretty sure the soas-boot.iso boot CD was working well, but after the Fedora boot loader and some hopeful looking USB key flickering, it just sits there with a black screen, and eventually I had to just hard power off. USB (2Gb) key was built in Fedora-10 following instructions as per: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Linux The one item I did notice is that the USB key's I have available both ship as FAT32 format (I'm reluctant to reformat). Does the soas- boot.iso boot a FAT32 stick for anybody else? Regards, --Gary P.S. The Soas2-200904161412.iso boots fine in VirtualBox, though I know of no way of making VirtualBox boot from USB to test the stick image directly (just CD/HD/network/iso). Thanks, Caroline On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Dave Bauer dave.ba...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi... I've been trying to get the SugarLabs usb stick, Walter so kindly sent, to boot on my MacBook. I can get it to recognize the stick but when I try to boot from it, following the instructions from Apple Tech Support, it goes instead into OSX. The stick shows as a third drive on my desktop and I can open it and see that the files are there. The read me file comes up blank. I think someone mentioned having to use something they may have called a virtual box to get it to boot on the Mac. I hope someone can fill me in on how to do this. I want to be able to show it at the LAUSD InfoTech event at the LA Convention Center this Saturday. So, I do still have some time to work out the kinks. The Mac I am using is an Intel based MacBook so this should work. I just need to have the instructions! Hi, You might be able to boot using the boot helper CD. http://people.sugarlabs.org/sdz/soas-boot.iso Hold down 'c' when booting to boot off the CD and it should recognize the USB stick and continue booting from there. If that doesn't work you can try the VirtualBox instructions here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/VirtualBox Good Luck. Dave Thanks! Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Dave Bauer d...@solutiongrove.com http://www.solutiongrove.com -- Dave Bauer d...@solutiongrove.com http://www.solutiongrove.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: [Sur] Labyrinth 6
On 17 Apr 2009, at 08:15, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Congratulations to Gary and Aleksey. Paola is a teacher from .uy and has already tried the new version of Labyrinth and written a small tutorial about how to create mind maps with it, see link in the forwarded email below. Thanks Tomeu, very open to feedback (have a long list myself also), so please do feel free bounce any feedback you see my way. Regards, -Gary Regards, Tomeu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Unified Objects (was Unified bundles)
On 8 Apr 2009, at 20:17, Wade Brainerd wrote: The idea that activities actually exist in the Journal (and only in the Journal) is really exciting to me. Yes, it's a right old lucky dip mess for what you find in Journal for Activity bundles just now. Old bundle versions that you're not sure if you erase if it will also de-install the newer version of it (I've had this happen a few time but haven't tested behaviour lately); and many bundles missing altogether from Journal as an activity arrived via some other non-journal route to you system (pre-installed, software- update, manual sugar-install-bundle). To fully realize this, we should unpack their .xo bundles *into their Journal entry directory*, not /home/user/Activities. I like it, that would resolve the distros from what seems like using arbitrary directories the user has no control over. Also, the default Activities should be present in the Journal, which means the Journal would not be empty at install time. And finally, the Home view should actually be a special view of the Journal, showing all Journal entries that are activities. As Aleksey says, this would open up all kinds of possibilities for alternate Home views which are different views of the Journal. Yep. The current home list view could die, no need for it, and the default ring view content would show an icon for each unique Activity bundle from the Journal providing the same view we see now. We could use the Journal favourite star for the same purpose as currently in the home list view, so any Activity bundle with a Journal favourite star would appear in the home ring. Home view is then just a view type of the Journal, actually you could finally drop the 'Journal as a separate activity object' and just have a home with a favourite view and (at least one but could be list and grid) journal view. Is this the direction we should be moving in? I do like that it seems to simplify the UI and reduce code needing to be maintained. Regards, --Gary -Wade ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Call for Testers (New Snapshot!)
On 4 Apr 2009, at 04:26, Caroline Meeks wrote: Results Boots up fine. Love the sugar branding! There are a lot fewer activities in the ring then SoaS1 Memorize, Speak, Moon, Turtle, Jigsaw puzzel, joke book, typing turtle, cartoon builder, Finance, Freecell - Work great. Sound works too Browse - School gives me an error. I see why a school would want this link on their system but it doesn't make sense to me to put out a page with a broken link. Yes, I wasn't too happy with a broken link for some users either, but there was a reasonable sugar-devel thread which seemed to settle (vaguely) on keeping it based on Martin Langhoff's (owner of the XS school server project) original request for it's inclusion on the static page (as it always was with the OLPC default web page). The question boils down to how many will use the new Sugar in the presence of a schoolserver, and how many won't. Nobody could give me a straight answer*** either way :-) *** and really anyone deploying more than ~25-50 in one location (my guess) should really be considering a server to help smooth collaboration and provide other services like journal backup, moodle. Three solutions: 1) Edit your master stick image /etc/hosts file and resolve to the server you want. For example the below one line addition will direct folks over to the schools.sugarlabs.org moodle server: 206.192.23.203 schoolserver 2) Edit your master stick image on line 55 of .../Browse.activity/data/ index.html and change http://schoolserver/ to point to the server you want; down side of this is if they upgrade Browse, your change goes away: http://schools.sugarlabs.org/ 3) Wait for me to try and implement some some magic javascript trick that tries to load a potential local schoolserver first, but if it then fails, tries to load schools.sugarlabs.org. I think I've seen one similar example kicking around but, I don't have time to play at least over the next few days (I'm trying to focus free time on Labyrinth now). Regards, --Gary - The arrow flashes annoyingly when web pages are loading on my X40 eToys - The screen flashes black a few times while it is loading its a bit disconcerting Maze - The icon seems a bit bit in the circle Calculator - The font size and the curser seem a bit weird together. I took a picture. Pippy -The Run, Stop and Clear buttons are a bit cut off. I took a picture Read - Why have the read activity with nothing to read? Story Builder, I haven't seen it before. Very cool! The characters seem a bit pixilated, are they supposed to look like that? flipsticks Either I am using it wrong or saving a firgure by clicking the bottom circle does not work. Bounce, Colors did not start IRC, Seemed to connect, and I got a message that my laptop SoaS2 had entered the room but I couldn't actually see what people said in the room or see what my laptop said while I was in the room. Yay! This is good! Its good enough for FOSSVT except for not having a working collaboration server, but that's a different thread :) Here is my wish list. Add to favorites Ring: Slider Puzzle, Jigsaw Puzzle, Story Builder, Typing Turtle, Cartoon Builder, Take out of the favorites Ring Log, Terminal. Read Add a book or two for Read then add Read back to the favorites ring Add Scratch and let me test it. It doesn't seem to be on the Activities Portal yet. Fix: Colors, Flipsticks and IRC and add the to the favorites Ring I'm open to dissenting opinions here, this is just my current impressions of what would make a good demo stick. On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.com wrote: Hi folks, the SoaS team has another snapshot ready for testing - it's absolutely important that it get's tested as much as possible for our release! You can grab it from here: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas2-200904031934.iso If you're going to put it on a USB key or a SD card under Linux, please make sure to use exactly this version of livecd-iso-to-disk, as you might encounter issues with other versions, which are around: http://shell.sugarlabs.org/sdz/livecd-iso-to-disk.sh There's also a new appliance snapshot available, but testing should really focus on the .iso file for now: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/appliances/soas2-20090403.tar.gz What has changed? * We're now supporting locales! You can change it in the control panel. * You'll notice our funky boot screen - no hotdog anymore... ;) * Browse has been updated - including skin and default page changes! Again, please give it a try. And if you think that we should include this or that specific activity, make sure to come up with it! So long, thanks and happy testing, --Your SoaS Team -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 -
