Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS] [SLOB] yet another motion regarding Samson's travel

[Martin Dengler]

How many votes would it take to change the tagline of IAEP to “It’s An 
Education Project (not a travel agency!)”?

Martin

(Not directed at Caryl personally - this whole thread comes off as pretty far 
from SL’s mission to this observer. It should be internal IMHO.)

> On 24 Sep 2017, at 23:39, Caryl Bigenho  wrote:
> 
> Ed and I would love to host Samson in LA for a couple of days between Google 
> and Boston. Kayak is showing the one way ticket at $111 at the time he can 
> fly (evening). We will get that ticket for him if the rest of his trip is 
> approved.
> Caryl
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On Sep 24, 2017, at 8:15 PM, Adam Holt  wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 4:33 PM, Lionel Laské  wrote:
>>> 
>>> -1 for this motion.
>>> 
>>> Participation to the GSoC Summit is already a privilege. It's fair that 
>>> Samson as a mentor could have opportunity to attend to it.
>>> I don't see any advantage for SugarLabs on the Samson side trip, so there 
>>> is no reason for SugarLabs to pay for it.
>> 
>> Lionel,
>> 
>> While I strongly sympathize (I work with Haitian teachers who don't find it 
>> funny that Samson appears willing to let substantially more than $500 
>> disappear, far more than a year's salary for my educator colleagues in 
>> Haiti...)
>> 
>> Still let me still ask: what would you think if Samson approached this with 
>> a spirit of compromise, spending $1277.68+190 instead of the earlier desired 
>> 1920.82 (1730.82+190) or 2110.22 (1920.22+190) ?  In this fashion his 2 side 
>> trips would not cost Sugar Labs much at all:
>> 
>> $1,277.68 @ Emirates.com for https://goo.gl/flights/5WpL Lagos - San 
>> Francisco Oct 12/13; Boston - Lagos Oct 21/22
>> $190 Los Angeles - Boston Oct 15/16
>> 
>> Nobody appreciates a "planned emergency" like this, when Samson's side trips 
>> could easily have been mentioned in public earlier this summer, instead of 
>> forcing everyone to the brink like this with de facto high-pressure sales 
>> tactics.
>> 
>> But let's try to make the best of this obvious disaster and put that behind 
>> us.
>> 
>> If you agree, Samson might be wise to jump on this opportunity immediately 
>> instead of arguing for days over a trip that could Very Easily Go Down The 
>> Drain (as prices are now rising quickly, with Oct 12 only days away now).
>> 
>> In Context: the companies I've worked for across my career would * never * 
>> allow the purchase of intercontinental flights only ~16 days prior to travel 
>> like this, even if Samson's side trips had been mentioned forthrightly a 
>> priori (instead of forcing Sugar Labs to the brink, and costing us money 
>> with ever-rising flight costs...)
>> 
>> ___
>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
> ___
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] [SLOB] Motion regarding xo-computer icon

[Martin Dengler]

> On 15 Sep 2017, at 14:13, Lionel Laské  wrote:
> 
> 
> +1 for the motion.
> 
> @Martin, thanks to wait for all votes or at least the end of voting delay.

Sure Lionel - what is the voting delay? I actually was waiting but the wiki had 
been updated already (not by me) so I figured as the wiki had been updated and 
the outcome was not in doubt it was ok to summarize it in an email. I agree the 
delay should govern in the future.

>   Lionel.

Martin
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Re: [IAEP] [SLOB] Motion regarding xo-computer icon

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 10:12:28AM -0400, Walter Bender wrote:

Motion: To answer the questions posed by the SFC regarding the xo-computer
icon as follows:
(Q1) Why is the XO logo included in the sugar-artwork repo now -- and does
the SLOBs want to keep it there?
(A1) The xo-computer icon has been part of Sugar since we first designed
and built Sugar (beginning in 2006) and we would like to keep it there
until such time as the design team decides there is a reason to change it.
(Q2) Assuming the SLOBs want to keep the XO logo in sugar-artwork: what
outcome would the SLOBs *prefer* to see happen?  E.g.,
- Does Sugar want downstream users to be able to redistribute and modify
Sugar's codebase with or without the XO trademark file included in the
program?
- Does the SLOBs want downstream users to be able to modify and
redistribute the XO trademark image itself, or is that less important to
Sugar?
(A2) Sugar Artwork, including the xo-computer icon, is currently licensed
under the GPL and we would like our downstream users to be able to use all
of our artwork under the terms of that license. As far as the use of any
trademark image outside of the context of Sugar, we have no opinion.

[...]

regards.

-walter


I believe the motion has passed.  
https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Decisions#2017-09-15

Martin


Motion 2017-09-15 "Motion regarding xo-computer icon"
=

URL: https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Decisions#2017-09-15
Motion: 
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2017-September/054648.html
Second: 
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2017-September/054710.html

Votes and SLOB members (in order listed on
https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board )

+1 Walter Bender [1]
+1 Lionel Laské  [2]
+1 Sameer Verma  [3]
  Adam Holt [4]
+1 Samson Goddy  [5]
+1 Ignacio Rodríguez [6]
-1 Laura Vargas  [7]
== =
+4 Total to-date
+3 Minimum
+5 Maximum

1. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2017-September/054648.html
2. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2017-September/054667.html
3. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2017-September/054713.html
4. Nothing found as of 2017-09-15 19:11 GMT on 
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2017-September/thread.html
5. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2017-September/054710.html
6. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2017-September/054716.html
7. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2017-September/054711.html


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Re: [IAEP] Save as

[Martin Dengler]

Tony,

> On 10 Jul 2016, at 16:34, Tony Anderson  wrote:
> 
> It is hard to describe 'Untitled' as an innovation since it is used by major 
> applications everywhere. 

There are many things that Sugar does differently than major applications 
everywhere. It was painful to re-think assumptions based on "major 
applications", but usually worthwhile.

> Tony

Martin
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Re: [IAEP] SOAS Page?

[Martin Dengler]

Dave,

> On 10 Jul 2016, at 18:43, Dave Crossland  wrote:
> Who is responsible for the text and illustrations on 
> https://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/ ? :) 

I don't know, but there is a link at the bottom of the page:

Please send any comments or corrections to the websites team.


> -- 
> Cheers
> Dave

Martin

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Re: [IAEP] Wiki Gardening Weekend (May 14-15, Boston, USA)

[Martin Dengler]

> On 12 Apr 2016, at 14:45, Dave Crossland <d...@lab6.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 12 April 2016 at 15:38, Martin Dengler <mar...@martindengler.com> wrote:
>> The point is that because it's a waste of work and nobody wants to do it,
> 
> Give me the keys and I'll do it. 

You don't need keys. You need a wiki replacement. You need to do the work to 
create a replacement for wiki.sl.o. Then the DNS can be changed.  It's 
super-easy to say "let's do it" and super-hard to actually do it. Put your wiki 
where your mouth is :).

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Re: [IAEP] Wiki Gardening Weekend (May 14-15, Boston, USA)

[Martin Dengler]

> On 12 Apr 2016, at 11:36, Dave Crossland  wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
>> On 12 April 2016 at 09:17, Sebastian Silva  wrote:
>> One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that, although we could do
>> better, the wiki and the mailing list are among the *things that work*.
> 
> Right, that's why I am focusing on reforming them :) 

Replacing is hardly reforming.

> Kindly, the wiki [is] stale.

Changing a wiki with "click to edit" to a different system with a "click to 
edit" function will not make it less stale.

>> Frederick Grose has been on top of the Mediawiki from the web-admin
>> point of view and is quite knowledgeable of it.
>> I'm afraid a longer different-to-wikipedia process might be a chore to
>> set up with little return of investment.
>  I'm advocating for [changing from mediawiki to something else].

You don't seem to have anyone to actually do the work to even set up a credible 
alternative yet. Why don't you do that first and migrate part of the content, 
then advocate for switching?

>> El 12/04/16 a las 07:58, Dave Crossland escribió:
>> >
>> > +1
>> >
>> > Who will set this up on the SL servers, and when? :)
>> 
>> As with all volunteer projects, those who do the work decide how (and
>> when) it's done. I don't think this is low hanging, or even fruit.
> 
> If no one wants to do it, I think Github Pages + Jeykll wins, because the 
> only systems administration effort is required is setting the DNS records. 

If noone wants to change things, we should change things?

The point is that because it's a waste of work and nobody wants to do it, it's 
not going to get done. Not dealing with that is just wasting emails.


> -- 
> Cheers
> Dave

Martin

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Re: [IAEP] More Sugar Numbers.

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 09:28:51AM +0300, Dan Tenason wrote:
  Some more interesting Sugar and XO numbers.
 
 At the site  https://www.one-education.org/   OLPC Australia is reporting
 that 2,370 out of 42,329 phoned home.

I can't find those numbers on that website.  Do you have a link?

 At  http://allafrica.com/stories/201503190336.html  they are reporting that
 the OLPC program is getting worse results than expected. They will be
 dropping XOs for another device.

From that article it isn't clear to me that that is due to Sugar or the XO.

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] Sugar future

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 03:48:00PM -0700, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
 [...] the individual activities are *not* what makes Sugar such a
 compelling proposition. Sure, having some of them as apps on other
 platforms would be nice. But isn't collaborating and sharing at the
 heart of Sugar? The Journal as central UI? The effortless discovery
 of your peers in the neighborhood view? Etc? *That* experience would
 have to be ported to another platform first, and then the activities
 can follow. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of random apps, of which
 there are plenty already in the various app stores.

This.  Bert has nailed the fact that Sugar is more than the sum of its
parts, because the parts are coherent.

We can still port individual activities.  But having the sugar shell
running on android is a major step up in what a collection of
coherently-designed activities provide.  Noone's doing that work,
AFAIK.  I bet someone (cscott?) has already investigated its
feasibility, though...

 - Bert -

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar future

[Martin Dengler]

On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 11:25:46AM +0800, Martin Dengler wrote:
 I bet someone (cscott?) has already investigated [porting Sugar to
 Android]

Answering myself: 
http://www.google-melange.com/gci/work/download/google/gci2012/7972209?id=17001

 Martin

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] users doing python in XOs

[Martin Dengler]

On Sat, Dec 01, 2012 at 10:08:07PM -0600, Yama Ploskonka wrote:
 If it is defunct, can we use binaries finally to optimize and speed
 up operation

Using binaries is not what needs to be done.  Rewriting each
activity (that you want to speed up) is what you're saying needs to
be done.  That's a lot more work than just finding the bottlenecks in
existing python applications and reducing them.

 instead of an interpreted language, notoriously less
 efficient of the very limited resources?

Interpreted languages are more efficient at using porting resources
when the binary formats change, and more efficient in how they use
developer resources.  Python is at the top of the list of
languages/platforms that meet the Educational and Technical goals on
http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=pagepage=contributors .
It's one of the best languages for the low floor, high ceiling goal.
And in many areas it's becoming more and more common in the
workplace[1], so it's hardly a niche language any more.

If you want to rewrite the applications in C or Lua or something, I
don't think anybody's going to stop you.

Martin

1. 
http://news.efinancialcareers.com/15728/if-youre-a-technologist-with-python-or-scala-skills-consider-yourself-in-demand/


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Re: [IAEP] Sugarized binaries? was Re: users doing python in XOs

[Martin Dengler]

On Sun, Dec 02, 2012 at 10:57:39AM -0600, Yama Ploskonka wrote:
 On 12/02/2012 08:13 AM, Martin Dengler wrote:
 On Sat, Dec 01, 2012 at 10:08:07PM -0600, Yama Ploskonka wrote:
 If it is defunct, can we use binaries finally to optimize and speed
 up operation
 Using binaries is not what needs to be done.  Rewriting each
 activity (that you want to speed up) is what you're saying needs to
 be done.  That's a lot more work than just finding the bottlenecks in
 existing python applications and reducing them.

 [no response]

shrug

 with lesser importance, my authorities were that C and variants are
 far ahead [...] of anything else [...], as the language for the
 real world right now [...] I'm surprised to hear otherwise

Of course C is the most popular (by lines written, and usefulness as a
desert island language), and nobody say anything but.

 [...] but then there are specialized applications, I agree, and
 opinions :-)

Specialized applications like a constuctivist learning platform,
perhaps?

 I quote the Python link: “It’s still a relatively niche skill-set
 and demand isn’t astronomical [...]

Your tiobe.com reference categorizes python as a mainstream
language.  If you're asking about re-writing major/all Sugar
activities, we'd better have more to argue about than that.

Martin


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[IAEP] Teaching kids to program - how to train your robot

[Martin Dengler]

Nice hack for holding kids' attention while teaching them
programming: use the parents as the computer.

http://drtechniko.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/how-to-train-your-robot/

I wonder if there is any direct tie-in to Sugar activities?

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Gmail other Google TOS

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 11:56:03PM -0400, Chris Leonard wrote:
 On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 11:54 PM, Chris Leonard
 cjlhomeaddr...@gmail.com wrote:
  On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 11:46 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com 
  wrote:
  Is there a link to the TOS argeement you mention? Maybe worth
  discussing with them.
 
  http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS  ???
 
  cjl
 
 
 Most likely this section on Accepting the terms.
 
 2.3 You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a)
 you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google,

It may be a COPPA[1,2] issue. The issue perhaps comes from
http://www.sunpig.com/martin/archives/2011/07/05/alex-and-google-follow-up.html

 cjl

Martin

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act
2. http://www.ftc.gov/ogc/coppa1.htm


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Article on Why files need to die

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 11:54:40AM +0200, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
 Please also see this article (
 http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2011/06/08/new-pony/) which Tomeu Vizoso (one
 of the early Sugar developers) just shared on Google+, well worth a
 read!

The article offers no solution that avoids the problem of naming and
organising documents[1].  It ends with other people are setting up
clouds, where's ours?, which doesn't seem very relevant to
educational software in an intermittently connected world[2] like the one
I think we're targeting.

The words privacy, security, or control do not appear in the article.

The article is good insofar as it lays out one avenue of improvement:
we need to take advantage of new connectivity options and improve the
user interfaces for the information which is often or hard to manage
right now.

But would our computers be useful for learning, writing, reading, or
playing if the only user interface was like Facebook or iTunes?

 Christoph

Martin

PS:

We (this audience, and others like GNOME) are in danger of being
distracted by the current limitations of moving audio-visual data
around into thinking that our conversations, thoughts, and stories
don't deserve designers' time, or can be managed in the same simple
ways.  At their essence this information is neither audio nor visual;
it is textual (for practical, useful definitions of essence).  And
their labels (meta-data) are the same.

Sure, these things can be compressed or expressed in different forms.
But they cannot be easily used, or separated easily from context (what
the original article's author found so terrible), without the control
that the cloud takes away or the simplicity of the written word.

We are at risk of sacrificing clarity and simplicity of expression so
that Facebook or Apple or Google can sell us ads for the Kabbalah,
mormonism, or DVDs.  That is, if what what google.com and bing.com
suggest when I search for 'the meaning of life' is any indication.
Speaking of which, I'll finish this postscript after I watch the
Meaning of Life... 


1. Even after the author has narrowed the scope of the file problem
three times to Document, then to MS-Office-type document, then to
document one never needs to move outside of the cloud, he still
doesn't say anything about how this fixes file management (which I
infer he thinks of as naming, organising, and sharing.

2. One of the commenters basically said the author and other are
getting distracted into re-creating appliances rather than designing
for general purpose computers; rather than helping people manage the
information they generate or manage mostly unconsciously now, it seems
a big inferiority complex is being fed, since Facebook is so good and
iCloud will make sure your documents (whose naming is never discussed)
can appear on all your devices.  Which is almost never useful unless
you a) have always-on, low latency connections; and b) have a large
amount of bandwidth; and c) never need to do anything with the
information except look at it onscreen or what the cloud provider lets
you do with it.


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Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS]: Request for certifications of developing an activity

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 06:11:31PM -0400, Chris Ball wrote:
 Hi,
 
 On Tue, Jul 12 2011, Walter Bender wrote:
  Can we discuss this? I think it would be good to have a certificate
  program of some sort. I image that if we get sign-off by 2+
  experienced developers, we should be willing to award some sort of
  certificate (perhaps we can get the design team to work something up.)
 
 Perhaps we could tie the certificate-awarding to posting an activity on
 ASLO and getting a review from someone on the Activity Team or
 something?

Perhaps even prominent reviewers on ASLO (are there any?).  Either way
it's more sustainable and honest than herding developers to sign off
on certificates.

 Thanks,
 
 - Chris.

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS]: Request for certifications of developing an activity

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 04:07:49PM +0200, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
 With education students I feel it's hard to get them involved because
 they're simply not used to tools such as mailing-lists, wikis, and
 IRC

How do you think we could reach education students?  Is it worth
doing?

 Last but not least we have to realize that many student projects operate
 on a term-by-term basis.

Probably not, I guess...?

 Cheers,
 Christoph

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS] Sugar Labs 2010 Goals Review

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 01:17:12PM -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
 On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Sascha Silbe
 sascha-ml-ui-sugar-de...@silbe.org wrote:
   Are developers using Sugar as their day-to-day development
   environment yet?
  I do while I'm using my XO-1.5. I even integrated my MUA with the Journal
  using datastore-fuse. [1]
 
 That sounds very cool!  Can we package your hacks?  I bet there are
 some other people who might want to try this (or run with it, to
 develop a 'real' Mail activity).

I would want to try it.

  --scott

Martin

PS - this is more devel@ conversation, I think.


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Re: [IAEP] [Design] Multiple instances of same activity (Was: First steps with Sugar)

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:15:10AM -0500, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:
 
  Has anyone seen good real world cases where allowing multiple
  instances of the same activity to be run was useful or a vaguely
  common practice?
 
 
 
 browser is a good example of what does /not/ work well in this sense

That's hardly a real-world example.  

Back on topic, how about:

- Multiple instances of Write to read another student's essay and
  write one's own commentary on it
- Multiple instances of Read to read two similar works side-by-side
- Multiple instances of Image Viewer to, err, need I go on?

  Regards,
  --Gary

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] [SoaS] [Sugar-devel] Heads-up: POSSE folks hacking in Fedora/Sugar thisweek and next

[Martin Dengler]

[In light of sense and recent conversations, please can we not
cross-post to five mailing lists in the future unless there is clear
information that all lists can benefit from]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2010 at 03:37:19PM -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
 On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote:
  On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Art Hunkins abhun...@uncg.edu wrote:
  I've noticed that neither the SoaS CD Boot Helper nor the SoaS Floppy Disk
  Boot Helper manage to boot SoaS Mirabelle (Fedora 13).
 
  [Please tell me specific devices that don't boot using boot helper CD]
 
 
 [Helper CD is fine, think Windows 2000-era PCs as most benefited]

This conversation is about as useful as emailing a car designer's
mailing list and saying I bought some diesel but I can't get to the
supermarket.

We need:

1) Specific machines (BIOS + motherboard model #s) that don't work
2) Precise symptoms - doesn't work, doesn't boot,
crashes, hangs, are all useless and frustrating for everyone.

Otherwise please don't waste anyone's time.

  Art Hunkins
 
  Peter
 
 -walter

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Devel Team vacancies

[Martin Dengler]

On Sun, Jun 06, 2010 at 10:30:45PM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
 [sugar 0.90 release manage{er,ment} discussion]

Could you or someone of similar standing merge this thread with
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-June/024425.html ?
They seem to be on almost the same subject.

 Regards,
 
 Tomeu

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Books and educational achievement

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 05:26:37PM -0400, Chris Leonard wrote:
 This study seems to make a powerful argument in favor of ramping up the
 quantity of e-book content on school servers.
 
 Books in the home as important as parents’ education level
 http://www.unr.edu/nevadanews/templates/details.aspx?articleid=5450zoneid=8

The article itself:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B82Y4-4YC2XKM-1/2/7c2bbf36de3f004c7cd8606ee7d851cc

Anyone have a link to the paper itself or a draft thereof?  I love
reading a 2007 paper for $31.50 as much as the next person, but...

 cjl



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Re: [IAEP] (fwd) Open Source Schools Think Tank [March, in the UK]

[Martin Dengler]

olpc-uk list: anybody already going to this event?  I'm in London so
could go if anyone thought it'd be useful.

Martin

On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 12:17:06PM +0100, Sascha Silbe wrote:
 Hi!
 
 There are a lot of projects listed we cooperate with (GCompris,
 Scratch, Ooo4Kids, ...), but I can't see Sugar mentioned anywhere on
 their page. Maybe someone should tell them about us?
 
 CU Sascha

 Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 13:19:38 -0800
 From: Bill Kendrick n...@sonic.net
 To: Tux Paint tuxpaint-de...@lists.sourceforge.net,
   Schoolforge Discuss schoolforge-disc...@schoolforge.net,
   Tux Math tuxmath-de...@lists.sourceforge.net
 Cc: mi...@opensourceschools.org.uk
 Subject: [Tuxpaint-devel] Fwd: Open Source Schools Think Tank [March,
   in the UK]
 
 
 Caroline Ford of Tux Paint received this, and I suggested passing
 it along to the T4K lists to see if anyone in the neighborhood
 would be interested in attending.  (Also including Schoolforge).
 
 Miles -- I hope that's ok!  Thanks for contacting us  good luck!
 
 -bill!
 (in California)
 
 - Forwarded message from Caroline Ford -
 From: Miles Berry mi...@opensourceschools.org.uk
 Date: 28 February 2010 16:33:30 GMT
 To: caroline.ford.w...@googlemail.com
 Subject: Open Source Schools Think Tank
 
   Dear Caroline,
   The Open Source Schools team would be delighted if you could join us
   for a cross-sector 'think tank' event on open source in schools on
   Friday 26th March. We would like to bring together a few of the key
   members
   of our own community, including both teachers, technical staff and
   those with more strategic roles together with representatives of the
   wider open source world to explore a few common concerns from a range
   of perspectives, and would be very pleased if you were able to
   participate in this meeting.
   We'd like your input on what could and should be done now to support
   and extend the use of open source applications in education, at a
   range of scales from handheld devices and open source on Windows, to
   region wide web-based services. We'd also appreciate some input on the
   future direction of the Open Source Schools community, in particular
   addressing why you chose to become involved and what could be done to
   increase participation amongst those in a similar role to yourselves.
   Our intention is that the day will result in a set of practical
   recommendations to Becta for how to strengthen the position of open
   source in the schools technology ecosystem, together with some idea of
   the role that the Open Source Schools community might play in this.
   The 'think tank' will meet at the British Academy, Carlton House
   Terrace, in their Council Room. We're confident that venue will be
   conducive to convivial conversations. We have in mind running the
   meeting
   from 10 am to 4:30 pm.
   I do hope you'll be able to attend.
   Best wishes,
   Miles.
   PS - we've been using TuxPaint with our undergraduate and PGCE teacher
   training students at Roehampton - it's been universally popular, and I
   suspect more than a few will be taking it into school with them. Many
   thanks!
   --
   Miles Berry
   Senior Lecturer, ICT | Roehampton University | roehampton.ac.uk | 0208 392 
  3241
   Community Manager | Open Source Schools | opensourceschools.org.uk | 07779 
  628656
   Blogger | milesberry.net
   Twit | twitter.com/mberrys,
   Miles.
 
 - End forwarded message -




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Re: [IAEP] Confusing Musings re: versions, updating downloading. Please Advise!

[Martin Dengler]

Hi Caryl,

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 02:59:06PM -0700, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
 * Another really big question: Is SoaS ready for big time?

What do you mean?  I'd recommend it but I don't know enough about what
you want.

 Thanks Folks! Caryl

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 07:22:46PM +, Sebastian Silva wrote:
 Yes actually, sorry for the lack of detail, was doing it  from memory.
 I'll transcribe my result:
 
 Boot device: /sd/disk:\boot\olpc.fth Arguments:
 Boot device: /sd/disk:\boot\vmlinuz Arguments: ro boot=casper rootdelay=1
 fbcon=font:SUN12x22
 Loading ramdisk image from sd:\boot\initrd.img ...
 
 (and that's all folks...)

Perhaps it's similar to http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/9100 ?  The
serial console (after making the appropriate changes to the kernel
args) would be interesting to muck around with.

 Cheers

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Calculate and SocialCalc Lesson ideas?

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 09:11:35PM -0400, Gerald Ardito wrote:
 I can recommend [an example lesson plan's] flow:
[...]
 Hope this helps.

Thanks - I added your suggestions to the template:

 
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Lesson_plan_template/Wiki_Version#Instructional_Procedures

 Gerald

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 08:06:29PM -0500, Sebastian Silva wrote:
 I'm trying to boot into TOAST from an SD card.
 I created it using usb-creator included in Trisquel GNU.
 As per instructions from Ruben I created a /boot/olpc.fth and
 copied respective files into initrd.img and vmlinuz.
 
 The contents of my olpc.fth file are:
 
 \ Boot script for SD Boot
 \ created from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Custom_bootloader
  ro boot=casper rootdelay=1 splash console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0
 fbcon=font:SUN12x22 to boot-file
  sd:\boot\vmlinuz to boot-device
  sd:\boot\initrd.img to ramdisk
 unfreeze

Right after the unfreeze line, can you try adding these lines:

setup-smbios
dcon-unfreeze
visible

...?

 boot

 Nevertheless, can't boot.

 It freezes.

Can you expand on freezes, please?

 Regards from Lima
 
 Icarito

Martin


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[IAEP] Lesson Plans for Sugar (was: Re: [support-gang] The last XO)

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 02:41:10PM +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:
 On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 05:56:16PM +1300, Tabitha Roder wrote:
  Teachers would find it helpful if volunteers would write lessons
  plans that show the links between the curriculum and the
  activities on the XO has anyone done any of that type of work?

 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_UK/Pilots/Resources#Lesson_Plan_integration_ideas
 has some ideas.

I've just received some UK lesson plans that I would like to write up.

Does a taxonomy of lesson plans exist on Curriki or elsewhere?

  Tabitha
 
 Martin

Martin

PS - One barrier I see to getting more lesson plans is that a)
teachers often don't have time to write up lesson plans particular to
Sugar; and b) I (and perhaps other OLPC/Sugar contributers) don't
think I know what teachers mean by Lesson Plan.  I presume Lesson
Plan is more than just list of things I'm going to have the class
_do_, but a) if it's not, let's say that; and b) anyway, let's build
a corpus of lesson plan templates so that interested people can
write a lesson plan for teachers [in their target deployment/region's
template format], rather than forcing the teacher to do it.

For example, a developer who wants their activity to be
used/downloaded could write some lesson plans and use it to drum up
interest.

Perhaps even having lesson plans could become a requirement for
Fructose applications (or a distro's favorited-by-default
applications).



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Re: [IAEP] [activit...@sugarlabs.org: Sugar Labs Activities: Doom-1 Nomination]

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 05:56:34PM +, Aleksey Lim wrote:
 Hi all,
 
 Got the followed notification from ASLO, so the question I have in
 mind - should ASLO editor be guided only technical questions during
 pushing activities to the public(in all previous cases it was so).

Non-technical editorial power, once exercised, will set expectations /
precedence / obligations (in some jurisdictions) that I only
understand to the extent that I hope I never have to pay a lawyer to
understand.

I don't think we're going to want to make these decisions.  Are we
going to say no to a Bible-reading activity?  Wikinomicon slice?  A
wikipedia slice with pictures of Mohammed?  One containing articles
critical of governments?  Etc.

If a response in the form of a proposal is useful:

Leave it open technically so someone can make
kidsactivities.theirdomain.biz and similar, but otherwise exercise no
non-technical editorial control.  And never raise the question again.

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Sugar .84 on the XO

[Martin Dengler]

Hi Gerald,

On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 08:59:20AM -0400, Gerald Ardito wrote:
 I could use some help.
 I am trying to install Sugar 84 on my XOs, and have followed the copy-nand
 instructions on the olpc wiki.
 But then, when I reboot the machine, I get an error message saying the
 machine will power off in 30 seconds.


You've probably installed an unsigned image on a XO that still has
security enabled.  The anti-theft protections have been triggered,
unfortunately.

Do you still have your developer key (without which you couldn't have
used copy-nand)?  If so, follow these instructions:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_developer_keys#If_you_wipe_out_your_developer_key

...then you should disable the anti-theft protections
permanently.

 Thanks.
 Gerald

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 12:50:31AM +0200, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote:
 El jue, 01-10-2009 a las 22:04 +0100, Martin Dengler escribió:
  On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 10:47:57PM +0200, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote:
   You can find more info here: http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar
  
  Thanks for the info.
  
  Two questions:
  
  1) May I ask why you are creating a Sugar spin?
 
 Trisquel was born as a university project, and it has a strong focus in
 education. We think schools are the main battlefront for free software.
 This is why we made the Trisquel Edu edition, including several sets of
 educational software running on GNOME, and tools for class management
 like iTALC or LTSP. Sugar is a wonderful addition to our educational
 suite, and it can make use of the tools we already have in the system.

Thanks for the background.

  2) How can we send patches?  IIUC the latest Trisquel Sugar .ISO won't
  boot on an OFW machine like the XO-1 due to the lack of an olpc.fth.
 
 We didn't try it on a XO yet

I did :).

  One like SoaS uses[1] might be good to include, but - I'm sorry for
  the lack of searching skills - I couldn't find a place to submit a
  patch that includes a suitable olpc.fth.
 
 We use the issue tracker for that:
 http://trisquel.info/en/project/issues

Thanks - I'll file a request to have XO-1 boot Trisquel.

 I've just added the Sugar component to it. We need to come up with a
 cool project name.

 What do you think about TOAST, for Trisquel On A
 Sugar Toast? :D

Heh, good recursive retronym.  Trisquel's On a STick might be another
one you could use.

Where is the code you use to
  generate the ISOs (I assume it's a lot more complex than the SoaS
  code[2] because I did manage to find the How Trisquel is made[3]
  page)?
 
 You can find it here:
 http://devel.trisquel.info/isobuilder/makedistro

Thanks - that's interesting (I guess it has a bootstap issue - one
needs a Trisquel master CD to make a new CD, but that's only a
theoretical curiosity for me) and good to know about.

 It is in fact a very simple script, most of the job is done in the
 Trisquel packages and metapackages. We are now rewriting the script
 using the live-helper tool from Debian, which should allow us to reduce
 it to a dozen lines or so.

Cool.  I didn't see anything about persistent overlays in the
makedistro script (as it's just for the .ISO, makes sense) nor in the
http://devel.trisquel.info/live-usb*.sh scripts.  I don't want to
waste your time walking me through this stuff, but I guess I was
expecting to be able to find most of the code in a source code repo.
I pointed you to our repo in case you want to look around.

There's also the OLPC Fedora-11-on-XO code at
http://dev.laptop.org/git/projects/fedora-xo/ .

 The How Trisquel is made describes how the distro was created, but now
 that it is done, it is a lot easier to maintain than how it looks. If
 you want a new, let's say, amd64 version of the Sugar iso, you just need
 to run makedistro all amd64 trisquel-sugar and wait for five
 minutes.

...and have downloaded the Trisquel CD and have access to all the
Trisquel team's work on the trisquel servers, but yeah :).

 We did almost no changes to our build scripts for this project, it works
 just with the tiny trisquel-sugar metapackage, some artwork, and the
 impressive repository Aleksey built for us.

I am impressed by the amount of infrastructure you guys have.  Thanks
for getting involved with Sugar.

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 09:36:20AM +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:
 On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 12:50:31AM +0200, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote:
  El jue, 01-10-2009 a las 22:04 +0100, Martin Dengler escribió:
   One like SoaS uses[1] might be good to include, but - I'm sorry for
   the lack of searching skills - I couldn't find a place to submit a
   patch that includes a suitable olpc.fth.
  
  We use the issue tracker for that:
  http://trisquel.info/en/project/issues
 
 Thanks - I'll file a request to have XO-1 boot Trisquel.

I filed a request at
http://trisquel.info/en/issues/please-include-bootolpcfth-ext2-bootable-parition
with an example patch at
http://www.martindengler.com/~martin/tmp/makedistro.patch - but I
don't know the environment so it might be totally the wrong place for
inclusion of olpc.fth.

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 10:47:57PM +0200, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote:
 You can find more info here: http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar

Thanks for the info.

Two questions:

1) May I ask why you are creating a Sugar spin?

2) How can we send patches?  IIUC the latest Trisquel Sugar .ISO won't
boot on an OFW machine like the XO-1 due to the lack of an olpc.fth.
One like SoaS uses[1] might be good to include, but - I'm sorry for
the lack of searching skills - I couldn't find a place to submit a
patch that includes a suitable olpc.fth.  Where is the code you use to
generate the ISOs (I assume it's a lot more complex than the SoaS
code[2] because I did manage to find the How Trisquel is made[3]
page)?

 Rubén

Martin

1. http://cgit.sugarlabs.org/soas/mainline/tree/soas-base.ks#n137
2. http://cgit.sugarlabs.org/soas/mainline/tree
3. http://trisquel.info/en/wiki/how-trisquel-is-made

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Re: [IAEP] SOAS[DP] Educator's Opinion

[Martin Dengler]

Are you guys talking about Sugar or SoaS?

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Which Language?

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 11:08:56AM -0400, gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada 
(705) 250-0112) wrote:
 Jim Simmons, in part:
  The original question was about developing Activities for a classroom 
 assignment,
   with the idea that these Activities could be widely distributed.
 
 If (big IF) J will run on XO, labs is a built in feature of J.

Since you don't know if J can run on the XO, J is not a good thing to
recommend for developing activities on the XO, right?

 Gerry

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Which Language?

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 11:36:03AM -0400, gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada 
(705) 250-0112) wrote:
 Martin Dengler:
 
 Since you don't know if J can run on the XO, J is not a good thing to
  recommend for developing activities on the XO, right? 
 
 Wrong.  J is worth investigating.

The question was what language can be used now.  You're answering a
different question.

 Gerry

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] decision panel: waste of time

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 12:05:36AM +0545, Daniel Drake wrote:
 I've looked at some initial discussion on the decision panel (I
 don't even have time to read all of it) and I think it's time to go
 back to the start.

Why are you prolonging this even more?  SLOBs decided that a Decision
Panel was worth it.  Clearly they are not interested in wasting their
time and (y)ours.

 [other questions]

We can debate them on the SoaS list, to at least avoid wasting IAEP's
time.

 Daniel

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] SOas waste of time

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 01:38:09PM -0500, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:
 [an opinion]
 +1

Please in the name of all that furthers education, stop voting on
things that don't require voting :).

http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/125203.html

If you're just saying me too, I thought that died out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_too

Martin

PS - yes, I have lost by replying to this email. I'm ok with that.



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Re: [IAEP] Which Language?

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 02:57:48PM -0400, gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada 
(705) 250-0112) wrote:
 Martin wrote:
 
   The question was what language can be used now.
   You're answering a different question.
 
 Possibly.   Depends on whether J can be used now (or soon).

Only if possibly means yes.  You're answering a different question
to what language can be [usefully] used now.  There are no J
bindings for dbus.  I can't find any J FFIs.  One can't use J to write
Sugar activities.

J seems interesting enough, but not for a teacher now who wants to
teach people now to write Sugar activites now on an XO.

 Gerry

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] SoaS: Searching for Decision Panel volunteers.

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 10:33:45AM -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
 4.  We will entrust the marketing team with labeling products in a way
 that is amenable to all parties, including the users and creators of
 Sugar-based systems.  The Marketing team is, and has been, responsible for
 ensuring that we choose names that do not harm the mission by creating
 confusion.

I've missed your point, because I think you're saying SL would be (via
the marketing team) 1) labeling non-SL products (e.g., a
hypothetical NNSOAS product); and 2) ensuring non-SL products don't
have names that confuse our audience.  Neither of which seems
sensible, to say nothing of enforceable.

Martin




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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 08:06:43AM -0500, David Farning wrote:
 This sets several important [precedents]:
 Delegate authority - In this case the soas project can define its
 own future.  And the marketing team can define its own marketing
 strategy.

This is not the precedent.  Authority has not been delegated.  SLOBs
is still making the decision:

'The Oversight Board will review and ratify Decision Panel [report]'
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-September/019544.html

The decision panel is going to be told what the question(s) it has to
report on is...so let's not pat ourselves on the back on being
decisive here.

 Sugar Labs does not declare an official soas.  Instead, the marketing
 team can pick the best soas on which to base its strategy.

Is this your personal opinion or SLOB's?  It seems broadly phrased if
the former, contradictory if the latter.

 [T]he meta [lessons] from this experience:)

 1.  [Trademark guidelines are overdue]

 2.  [project policy is overdue]

 3.  [soas and marketing teams can work together]

All I see is a lot of unproductive reinforcement of 4. let's talk a
lot about tangential stuff to the detriment of letting SLOBs get on
with answering the original question[1,2].

Like I said: It's not hard to say 'no', but it takes a  150 post
mailing list thread and a committee to really avoid saying it for so
long and with such obfuscation.

 david

Martin

1. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008373.html
2. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008473.html
3. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008469.html


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:07:05PM -0400, metamel wrote:
  All I see is a lot of unproductive reinforcement of 4. let's talk a
  lot about tangential stuff to the detriment of letting SLOBs get on
  with answering the original question[1,2].
 
 Patches welcome.

You're replying to one.  It seems to have failed to apply to your
repo.  I'm submitting to mainline, though, and perhaps you can explain
how your repo differs to mainline, or mine?  Or you'd like me to
understand this and submit a patch to your repo as well?

Does this terminology help this conversation?

 [What are you doing about what you're complaining about? - was Patches 
 welcome]

If you mean what's your contribution?, it's a) some soas commits,
and b) the question that Sebastien asked, which hasn't been answered.

By repeatedly asking a pertinent question of the body with standing, I
hope to get an answer.  But you seem to take my reply out of context:
I'm replying to David, where he tried to summarise the progress from
the question by pointing out lots of things - things that were not
part of answering the question.  I pointed this out.  What's the
problem?

 Process and product are both important; the former builds our capacity
 to get on with making the latter. Think of those sections of this
 thread as a review request for a decisionmaking protocol. Rather than
 generalizing I don't need this to nobody needs this, step back and
 think about why *somebody* (in this case, multiple somebodies) thought
 we needed something like it. What are they trying to accomplish?
 
 I highly doubt anyone here has the goal of talking a lot about
 tangential stuff

No, but perhaps until it's pointed out that the conversation has
degenerated into a tanget people will at least be motivated to change
the subject at message #100-ish, so that those interested in the
original question don't have to read tangents that can't be bothered
to put a relevant subject.  Or, if people _think_ they're still on
topic, but the topic starters don't, then I think it's useful to point
out this disconnect.

 transparency and consensus are things we want to have; the price for
 it is occasionally hitting frustrating overhead. It is a tradeoff.

Fair enough.  You may consider my reply as trying to improve the
process next time by pointing out when the process - getting an answer
and enjoying the journey to the answer - is no longer being served.

 Over and out,
 
 --Mel

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 01:03:37AM -0400, Mel Chua wrote:
 Ok - then the situation is this, then:
 http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/index.php?title=Talk%3ASugar_on_a_Stickdiff=37874oldid=37820
 
 It looks like the SoaS team is unblocked

I don't see how the SoaS team was ever blocked on the things that
are now unblocked (mailing list, start team/SL project).  Sebastien
was just going to do them[1].

Sebastien's original question[2] is unanswered perhaps because it's
been deemed maybe-already-answered[3] or peripheral (your page)
despite being important[4,5,6] and the fact that the thread is now
over a hundred messages long.

It's a week and a bit after the original mail already.  This is a
convincing demonstration of the utter failure in decision-making.

I'm going to fall back on Daniel's advice[7] about letting the code do
the talking, but I hope that the people that don't have this option
get a better deal next time they need something clarified by SL.

It's not hard to say no, but it takes a mailing list and a committee
to really avoid saying it for so long and with such obfuscation, it
seems.

 --Mel

Martin

1. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008322.html

2. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008373.html

3. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008387.html

4. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008374.html

5. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008386.html

6. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008405.html

7. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008404.html

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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 07:35:25AM +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:
 This is a convincing demonstration of the utter failure in
 decision-making.

This is overly harsh, sorry.

 Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Walter's essay up on Groklaw yesterday, our press release carried by LWN + Register article

[Martin Dengler]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 10:59:13PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090918110925298
 
 http://lwn.net/Articles/353419/
 
 http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/09/18/windows_seven_sins_ngos/
 
 Also note that from yesterday morning on, the top Google News result
 for Software Freedom Day has been Reuters' reprint of our press
 release (which, oddly, was not aggregated with news articles on the
 subject).

Nice work.

 Sean

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] XO Special interest group at Sugar Labs

[Martin Dengler]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 02:49:41PM -0500, David Farning wrote:
 In some of the other threads we have been seeing an interest in the
 Sugar Labs Community improving the Sugar experience on the XO.  As
 such, I would like to create a XO SIG within Sugar Labs.  I have filed
 an initial draft application with the OLPC Contributors program for 5
 loaner machines for developers.
 
 My idea is to start by getting a working version of the current
 versions of Sugar and Fedora running on an XO.

Seems completely redundant with F11-on-XO and SoaS-on-XO (not to
mention debxo and probably others).  I don't see how this is going to
do anything but cause fragmentation and confusion.

 david

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 10:37:52PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
 Hi,
 
     If it were on me, I'd just ditch the XO bundle format and use
     native packages for each distro.  Some are already being
     packaged, and the Python distutils are capable of producing rpms
     and debs with the same ease of our current setup.py scripts.
 
  But then every child in Uruguay (plus other deployments that withhold
  root from their users) would hate you 'cause they wouldn't be able to
  install activities anymore.  A solution that results in a significant
  percentage of Sugar's users not being able to download activities
  anymore is not a solution.
 
  If we could switch to .rpm *and* find a good way to install .rpms
  without being root, though, that would be pretty compelling.
 
 Its called PackageKit :-) See discussions from previously...

Which discussion pointed out how PackageKit could install different
rpms for different users?

 Peter

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 05:15:31PM -0500, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:
 Chris Ball wrote:
  Hi,
 
  TBH I'm not 100% sure on that as I'm not a PackageKit developer
  but I believe that is addressed by ConsoleKit and as its in use
  on Fedora and I'm pretty sure Ubuntu and others (and I'm pretty
  sure its an external dependency of gnome too) I'm sure that issue
  has been addressed.
 
  My understanding is that the developers consider it addressed by
  %post runs as root, and if you don't like it then don't install RPMs
  [from untrusted sources].  So, we need to find out what's up there.
 
  - Chris.

 Very good point you make.  It gets complicated as the users - kids - 
 have not been shown they get it regarding giving their full name, age 
 and address and some even phone number, so it is unlikely they will deal 
 safely with the nuances of untrusted sources.
 It would be sort of a shame that the first massive attack of malware on 
 Linux platforms happened under our watch...

The whole point of Rainbow is that what I think you're talking about
isn't an issue, and it's encouraged that kids share Activities.
Eliminating this sharing ability is one of the problems with the
current rpm / PackageKit proposals AIUI.

 Yama

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 11:02:55PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
  Hi,
 
      If it were on me, I'd just ditch the XO bundle format and use
      native packages for each distro.  Some are already being
      packaged, and the Python distutils are capable of producing rpms
      and debs with the same ease of our current setup.py scripts.
  
   But then every child in Uruguay (plus other deployments that withhold
   root from their users) would hate you 'cause they wouldn't be able to
   install activities anymore.  A solution that results in a significant
   percentage of Sugar's users not being able to download activities
   anymore is not a solution.
  
   If we could switch to .rpm *and* find a good way to install .rpms
   without being root, though, that would be pretty compelling.
 
  Its called PackageKit :-) See discussions from previously...
 
  Which discussion pointed out how PackageKit could install different
  rpms for different users?
 
 Do you mean different versions of Write for different users? Or one
 person on a machine have access to Write and another person not to
 have access to it?

Well I meant precisely what I said (sorry to be pedantic). If one
replaces rpms with XO bundles, it's what we have now, and what I
think's being proposed to be replaced with rpm/PackageKit.  Different
versions of Write for different users seems to be an example, yeah.

 Peter

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 11:54:09PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
 On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Martin Dengler
 mar...@martindengler.com wrote:
  On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 05:15:31PM -0500, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:
  Chris Ball wrote:
   Hi,
  
       TBH I'm not 100% sure on that as I'm not a PackageKit developer
       but I believe that is addressed by ConsoleKit and as its in use
       on Fedora and I'm pretty sure Ubuntu and others (and I'm pretty
       sure its an external dependency of gnome too) I'm sure that issue
       has been addressed.
  
   My understanding is that the developers consider it addressed by
   %post runs as root, and if you don't like it then don't install RPMs
   [from untrusted sources].  So, we need to find out what's up there.
  
   - Chris.
 
  Very good point you make.  It gets complicated as the users - kids -
  have not been shown they get it regarding giving their full name, age
  and address and some even phone number, so it is unlikely they will deal
  safely with the nuances of untrusted sources.
  It would be sort of a shame that the first massive attack of malware on
  Linux platforms happened under our watch...
 
  The whole point of Rainbow is that what I think you're talking about
  isn't an issue, and it's encouraged that kids share Activities.
  Eliminating this sharing ability is one of the problems with the
  current rpm / PackageKit proposals AIUI.
 
 How is the sharing implemented currently?  [...]  except for the
 hack to the mime type in the browse activity.

Sorry, I wasn't explaining very well.  I meant both running
lightly-trusted Activities is much safer / encouraged due to Rainbow's
protections and because [of that], it's feasible to ask kids to
share Activities [that are not rpm packages].

I'm not saying we couldn't move from here (xo bundles,
Rainbow-as-currently-implemented) to there (rpm, PackageKit), but that
it seems like a step backwards and nobody seems to be doing the work
(whereas Rainbow gets worked on from time to time).

 Peter

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 07:01:13PM -0400, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
 El Mon, 21-09-2009 a las 23:47 +0100, Martin Dengler escribió:
  The whole point of Rainbow is that what I think you're talking about
  isn't an issue, and it's encouraged that kids share Activities.
  Eliminating this sharing ability is one of the problems with the
  current rpm / PackageKit proposals AIUI.
 
 Currently, Rainbow is a much weaker protection than, say, the Javascript
 sandbox of a browser.  And, realistically, it will never get close to be
 that good.

Well I'll leave that to the real experts.

 Besides, the way you *install* a program does not affect the way you
 *run* it.

 I could install the same malicious program by unpacking a zip file
 or an rpm (which is a cpio archive with a header).


I believe the statement I was replying to can be summarised by let's
think about the usage of rpm so as not to open ourselves up to
malware, and so Rainbow is in scope.  Admittedly, I was reading into
that vague statment. If you are just concerned with the message to
which the message I replied to was replying, which was about %post
scripts, sure.

 What could be achieved with the .xo bundles that couldn't be achieved
 with an rpm?

Given both involve Turing-complete languages, nothing.  Given that one
works now and one involves lots of work, everything.  Rhetorically,
point taken.  Practically, nothing's changed.

Actually, I take that back. You're now talking about tieing Sugar
activities to rpm, which is a whole set of code / practices, instead
of the current XO format, right?  So what was a downstream choice (how
to package activities) now becomes fixed?  Or are you proposing
Fructose is distributed in a distro-specific way, and just
non-Fructose Activities as rpms?

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 07:06:44PM -0400, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
 El Mon, 21-09-2009 a las 23:53 +0100, Martin Dengler escribió:
  Well I meant precisely what I said (sorry to be pedantic). If one
  replaces rpms with XO bundles, it's what we have now, and what I
  think's being proposed to be replaced with rpm/PackageKit.  Different
  versions of Write for different users seems to be an example, yeah.
 
 Why would we care to have concurrent versions of the same activity for
 different user accounts?

Because to do otherwise is to unnecessarily limit what we can achieve
and unnecessarily regress from what we have now.  I thought that'd be
a pretty huge step backward for, well, as I've pointed out elsewhere,
less functionality and more work.

  Our computing model is inherently single-user.

Eh?  I didn't realised Sugar prescribed that much about the OS it ran
upon.  In fact, I suspect LTSP people are going to surface in droves
and beat you to a pulp in parallel :).  Or at least point out that
it'd be really nice if Sugar didn't require a whole different OS for a
different user's Sugar desktop environment.

 Besides, once you achieve local installation of rpms in ~/Activities,
 you'd get this feature too.

Indeed - I guess that'd be fine.  Your suggestions were interesting.

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 10:21:34AM -0400, Art Hunkins wrote:
 From: Mel Chua m...@melchua.com
  [make SoaS friendly/consistent/sustainable]

 This is exactly the kind of feedback SoaS and deployment teams
 need. Kudos!

I'm not sure why you see it as relevant.  You're only right insofar as
SoaS aims to make an un-friendly, inconsistent, unsustainable
GNU/Linux distribution.

In any case, that's hardly the topic at hand. Otherwise it certainly
doesn't mean the original question should not be discussed.

 Art Hunkins

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] SLOBs Position on SoaS

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:39:08PM -0400, Bill Bogstad wrote:
 This note is only tangentially a response to Peter Robinson's...
 
 Here's my thought process...

[meta: it's hard to know to what email are you replying or to what
topic you're speaking]

 I ... don't think we can leave Sugar LiveUSB to any distribution.

What is Sugar LiveUSB?  Is it SoaS?

 Bill Bogstad

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] SoaS: Searching for Decision Panel volunteers.

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 04:27:03PM -0400, Chris Ball wrote:
 This mail is to ask for volunteers for the Decision Panel.
 [...]
 Please volunteer by replying to this mail if you're interested

I volunteer.

 Thanks!
 
 - Chris.

Martin


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[IAEP] What is Sugar LiveUSB (was: Re: [Sugar-devel] SLOBs Position on SoaS)

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 02:54:30PM -0400, Bill Bogstad wrote:
 There seems to be a lack of consensus of what SoaS actually is or
 what it's goals (use cases) should be.

I'd like to say I see your point, but across the internet that's a
dangerous thing to say in the face of the somewhat amusing ambiguigty
of trying to talk about that thing whose identity we can't agree
upon.

When I say SoaS I mean the direct result of the build process using
a version of the code contained in
http://cgit.sugarlabs.org/soas/mainline , which I believe a) is what
Sebastian Dziallas means by SoaS, and b) what Chris Ball means by
SoaS-Fedora.  So let there be no ambiguity about that.

SoaS in this sense is something worked on by a few people but
clearly led by Sebastien and supported by a host of SL and non-SL
people.

If you wish to point out that consensus of what SoaS is is lacking
amongst many people that haven't helped with SoaS (not Sugar) except
by perhaps proferring opinions about how it should be
built/used/marketed/designed, well, I can't think of much
constructive to say.  There's a place for that consensus-building, but
it's not this thread.

If you wish to change the subject, let's change the subject line as is
customary.

  I ... don't think we can leave Sugar LiveUSB to any distribution.
 
  What is Sugar LiveUSB?  Is it SoaS?
 
 That's my question.

Ok, so the autistic answer is: Sugar LiveUSB does exist - or rather,
at least two things calling themselves that do.  Look at the second
and third google hit for 'sugar live usb' (no quotes). A
sugar-live-image-built-on-opensuse (I don't know the name) exists.  I
am certain there are other
sugar-live-image-built-from-some-big-linux-distros but also don't know
their names.  A quick google search shows a number of promising
results.

What is SoaS? is either tautological or confusing.  I appreciate
that some of the implications I think you want to raise are issues
that can be usefully discussed but I think if we attempt to fork off a
broad discusion from a specific and big discussion and cover wide
stretches of unfamiliar ground no constructive progress is going to be
made.  So let's discuss precise questions in the appropriate forums.

 So far Strawberry (and it's variants, successors) is the only
 LiveUSB environment that I know of that makes Sugar the default UI

I mention some others above.

 If someone takes any of a number of other LiveUSB environments and
 makes Sugar the default, will that be SoaS (but not Strawberry)[?]

Not at present as far as I'm concerned.  I'm not anybody with much of
a claim to that name, but I suspect even those that do would answer
the same.

 Maybe Sugoppix? :-)

Heh.

 I hope that I have clarified somewhat.

Thanks.  Likewise.

 Bill Bogstad

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 05:32:55PM +0200, Sebastian Dziallas wrote:
 == What is SoaS? ==

 [...] SoaS aims to make it easy for local deployers to provide each
 student with a thumbdrive (stick) [...]

Notably, this does not say SoaS is Sugar Labs' way of providing
[anyone] with a [image to put on a] thumbdrive.

Should we understand SoaS goal as a source-only distribution-making
kit?  If SoaS is to be Sugar Labs' way of distributing Sugar, we
should clearly say so.  If not, then we should clearly say so as well.

 Thanks,
 Sebastian Dziallas

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 11:17:42AM -0400, Bill Bogstad wrote:
 [non-release-naming issue]

Please take this to the mailing list to which it belongs:
sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org.

 Bill Bogstad

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 05:12:46PM -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
 Sebastian Dziallas wrote:
  So my vision is that this SoaS is actually *the* way of
  distributing Sugar, as a SL product. If Sugar Labs doesn't think
  so, I'd have preferred to be informed much earlier.

 I don't think you're likely to find much support for that vision as
 phrased.

De jure (or de populum), perhaps, but not de facto.  Witness the
marketing effort around SoaS (thanks Sean et. al.).  Witness the
non-wiki sugarlabs.org saying that to try sugar use our ... Sugar
on a Stick.

David and the vision page on the wiki say:

The mission of Sugar Labs® is to produce, _distribute_ [emphasis
mine], and support the use of the Sugar learning platform

...which while distribute may of course mean Sucrose/Fructose rather
than Starch, SLOBs has left this intentionally ambiguous on this and
has put much effort into marketing SoaS.

In Walter's 2009-03-17 email, he mentioned this under the heading of
What are our short- and long-term (measurable) goals?

Sugar on a Stick v1.0, will be launched in 2009 as well.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/Archive/2009-03-17

Hopefully this email thread can settle these questions officially,
once and for all:

1) Is SugarLabs going to _itself_ distribute a Linux distribution?

2) If so, is it to be based on Sebastien's Sugar-on-a-Stick work at
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/soas/repos/mainline ?

If these questions are not finally answered, SL is doing Sebastien a
disservice, in my mind.  They're simple questions and have simple
answers (though far-reaching consequences), so only the will is
lacking, it seems.

 SoaS is a great way to distribute Sugar, but it will certainly never be
 *the* way, as long as all these other people are around, working hard on
 other distribution mechanisms.

I interpreted Sebastien's statement as something like:

[My vision is that] Sugar-on-a-Stick is the the way that SugarLabs
distributes Sugar directly to Learners.  Many other ways exist using
the big Linux distributions and the extraordinary efforts of many
people.  But SoaS is how SugarLabs does it directly.

I don't speak for him, though, or pretend to know his thinking on this
subject.

Martin





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Re: [IAEP] The Future of Sugar on a Stick

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 11:05:08PM +0200, Sebastian Dziallas wrote:
 So my vision is that this SoaS is actually *the* way of distributing  
 Sugar, as a SL product. If Sugar Labs doesn't think so, I'd have  
 preferred to be informed much earlier. But wait, who's SL here?

 Is it me? Is it SLOBs? Who's going to provide certainty here?

SL is SLOBs, from my non-SLOB POV.  Otherwise there's going to be
continual back-and-forth on this list amongst the interested parties;
witness http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-June/006509.html
.

 --Sebastian

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 11:18:55PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 Bill - I completely agree our numbering systems are byzantine and
 difficult to grasp... there is the Sugar version number, the Fedora
 version number, the OLPC-OS version number and the XO build number.

The numbering is for developers...why are we having this discussion at
a marketing level?  Developers can appreciate the difference between
each of those numbers, and each of them is precise*.

The SoaS strawberry ISO is called soas-strawberry.iso:

http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/

No byzantine numbers in sight.

 thanks
 
 Sean

Martin

* Two of the four aren't even relevant to SoaS.  I fail to see why
throwing unrelated numbers around helps this discussion or contributes
to a Byzantine SoaS numbering scheme.


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 08:20:43PM -0400, Bill Bogstad wrote:
 I've been watching this thread since it began and understand that from
 a marketing perspective numbers are 'ugly'.

Numbers are for the developers, ice cream flavours are for the press /
GUI users, as I understand it.

 On the other hand, everyone seems to acknowledge that numbers make
 it easier to track things from a development and deployment support
 perspective.  Obviously, that works best if the numbers are
 consistent.

  Unfortunately the number usage has NOT been consistent.

Every numerical series has been monotonically increasing.  They're
completely consistent; you just seem to find them surprising.  To wit:

 Martin's original web page with proposed logos seems to indicate that
 the SoaS Strawberrry release was release 1.   SoaS 1 is also what
 shows up on the the 'ugly?' text oriented plymouth start up screen for
 Strawberry as well.

Consistent.  Yes, the text screen is ugly.  I wish it weren't, but oh
well.

 On the other hand, the CD labels as well as the ISO filenames for
 Strawberry and its test releases all referred to themselves as
 SoaS2.

CD labels, yes.  ISO filenames, no:

http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-strawberry.iso

For the CD labels, boot screens, etc., that mention SoaS2: this is
not the same as the marketing release number that is what's on the
page discussing the marketing naming (Martin's original web page).

I agree this is surprising and not optimal.  But it's consisent, as
SoaS2 is not the marking release number.

 The current Blueberry? beta ISO calls itself SoaS3 internally in
 the same places that Strawberry calls itself SoaS2.

...consistent...

  From a deployment support perspective, this is not a good thing.

Apart from being shown on the boot screen and /etc/issue, which the
people you're worried about should never see, where is this an issue?

 Unfortunately, I can't think of anyway to sink the numbers up again
 that won't result in additional possibilities for confusion.

How about just calling the Blueberry release SoaS2 everywhere?  Or
just marketing the next release as v3?

  Are we stuck documenting the fact that the official release number
 and plymouth displayed versions are always one less then the CD
 label and ISO filename?

ibid.  The ISO filename does not include a release number.  The ISO
filename is soas-strawberry.iso.

 Bill Bogstad

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

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?

 thanks
 
 Sean

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 09:41:31AM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 I'm sorry Martin, I thought I was answering

You were but there's a lot of extra information that's sometimes hard
to parse - ultimately someone needs to put an image file in a
directory...so I was hoping that you would just say yes or no - use
[this one] when I asked you:

  Ah - so perhaps this:
 
  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Logo_white_05.png
 
  ...is the logo you want, not the one I mentioned in my email:
 
  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Logo_white_04.png

[Hoped for:]
 YES - use #5
[or]
 NO - use #4

But the reason I'm dragging this out even further is I got:

 About the logo, it's the blueberriest one we will want, variant 4

Aha so it's 4...but no, wait:

 the one we used in the marketing materials prepared for the Strawberry
 launch, variant 6:
 http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/BoothBanners

...so it's...6?!

So do you want 4 (like you said first above) or 6 (like you said
second above) or 5 (like you said earlier since you want it to be one
of the ones from the beauty shot that clearly doesn't have 4 or 6)?


 No, there wasn't marketing decided, it was Tomeu who thought of
 flavors, myself who thought of ice cream flavors (preferably fruit
 since natural wholesome sugars, a fun treat for kids), and
 sdziallas who agreed to the idea at the marketing meeting.

Tomeu suggested exactly what he suggested, which was clearly NOT
flavours: Cherry-Oak is not a flavour.  You and Eben were talking
about colours explicitly and nobody said _anything_ about flavours:

 [SeanDaly]
 [Eben]
 [Tomeu]
 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.

 I actually think changing the colors with each release is a pretty
 awesome idea.

 So awesome that it may solve the controversial issue of naming
 releases: Banana-Chocolate Sugar, Cherry-Oak Sugar, etc

When I say marketing decided ice cream, I mean:

1) marketing came up with the idea:

[11:16:41] SeanDaly So, why not name SoaS versions as flavors, based
on the boot logo color?
[...]
[11:18:38] SeanDaly caroline: I think the ice cream metaphor can
really serve us

2) marketing championed it

[12:30:02] SeanDaly sdziallas: OK for SoaS v1 with a flavor name?
[...]
[12:30:44] SeanDaly I rather like strawberry as a first one, but i
don't think we have a logo that color

3) marketing called the vote:

[12:34:07] SeanDaly Can we go with logo 06 Strawberry for this
  release?
[12:34:26] SeanDaly we can disagree all summer over the next one
  (joke)
[...]
[12:35:54] mtd strawberry +1
[...]
[12:36:24] caroline strawberry +1
[...]
[12:36:49] sdziallas strawberry +1 from me, too ;)

4) and marketing corrected me about the etymology :)

It's certainly not worth the ink I've made you spill on it but it is
nice to be able to say where the buck stopped with a given decision.
If you don't want it pinned on you, ok :).


 The key takeaway is that marketing is not something that is tacked
 on at the end when something is ready for release, it's part of the
 development process.

Sure, that's why we're having this discussion, right?

 But, again, there's no advantage to choosing the flavor/color beyond
 the next one. We should together pick the v3 flavor in a few months,
 not as a function of the 12 logos we have, but rather the catchiest
 and most fun one.

Ok, I'm convinced.


 [marketing tips]
 Is this clear I hope?

That marketing lesson was very clear and interesting - you should
teach a course!

 thanks
 
 Sean

Martin



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[IAEP] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

Hi,

This is to solicit feedback on the naming and colouring of the Sugar
on a Stick v2 release scheduled for 2009-11-24[1]:

1) Release name: Blueberry

2) Release logo colours: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Logo_white_04.png

Please reply all with any feedback.

If you want to get involved with SoaS, please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Getting_Involved .

Martin

PS: The full release naming and colouring schedule is here:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:MartinDengler/Commentaries:SoaSReleaseNaming

PPS: apologies for the cross-posting - better solutions welcome.

1. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap


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Re: [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 10:10:40PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 Hi Martin
 
 The idea is ice cream flavors

Ok.  I hadn't picked up on this, despite being in the meeting when it
was mentioned[1].  I suspect others may not have, either.

 and Blueberry works since I had rollup banners and posters made in
 both the Strawberry and Blueberry colors, keeping them current for
 at least a couple of years (considering their cost).

Excellent.

 However, as stated previously it hasn't been our plan to name SoaS
 releases in advance

Where is this policy?  Does it state how far in advance is in
advance?

 thanks
 
 Sean

Martin

1. http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting.log.20090609_1104.html


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Re: [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 04:04:33PM -0400, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:

 Thank you, I love this naming concept with fruit names.

I guess Sean's corrected you and I that it's ice-cream flavours :).

 yet a couple snags I see, No blueberries (arandanos) I ever saw in
 South/Cental America...  (very delicious in Virginia, though!)

 Shouldn't we try to aim for something easy to localize and feel
 ownership of?
 Strawberry was good, orange, grape...

Not sure how far to go with this, since I don't know how we could come
up with something that's localisable enough.  Perhaps you can expand
on the ownership point?

 Also, blueberry-grape followed by grape-blueberry might be a tad
 confusing..

I changed around the proposed order to try to compensate.

 Yama

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 04:42:07PM -0400, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:

 I guess Sean's corrected you and I that it's ice-cream flavours :).
 If it's ice cream flavors, Vanilla and Chocolate are universal...

I guess I was assuming that there needs to be a tie-in between the
colour of the flavour and the colour of the logo.  I got the possible
choices of logos from http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Logo
, and I've updated my page[1] to clarify that flavour-colour -
logo-colour link.

Martin

1. 
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:MartinDengler/Commentaries:SoaSReleaseNaming 



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Re: [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 10:57:00PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 In fact Martin if I remember correctly we had already discussed this
 on-list... I will try to find the thread.

Please let me know.  I did google for 'sugar ice cream soas' before
I said I couldn't find anything besides the IRC meeting I mentioned.

 The idea is to maximize launch impact by keeping the element of
 surprise on our side.

Ok...who are we surprising, though?  The journalists?  Won't they be
surprised anyway, not being subscribed to our lists?  As recent list
posts have demonstrated[1,2,3], even people subscribed to our lists are
surprised by content as recent as a few months ago.

 This is also why the ice-cream shop doesn't announce their summer
 specials in advance

The analogy is not apt for software _development_, though it may be
apt to _marketing_.  Given Fedora and Ubuntu do announce their
codenames well in advance of the release, they must be missing out on
the marketing surprise in preference for the developer sanity (not
having to remember not to say the code name publicly, or not even know
what the logo will be until late in the game).

Perhaps Fedora's each code name is related to the last in an
insider-known way that it's fun to guess might be a way to speak to
both needs?

Or developers can just settle for talking about things in terms of
integers, which isn't so bad.

 Another idea with the flavor name roughly matching the logo color is
 for nongeeks to easily identify a SoaS version by mentioning the color
 of the Sugar logo at boot time. This helps us avoid horrid text and
 version numbers during the graphic boot sequence.

I think this point is for Yama, right?  You and I both assumed this
point was self-evident, but I guess it's not.

 You may remember Gary said (after his great green recoloring job on
 the beauty shot) that he was putting in a vote for Gooseberry
 (http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting.log.20090609_1104.html)...

Yup, and you mentioned Apple before him.  Are you suggesting either
in place of Lime?

 Sean

Martin

1. Let's log IRC channels in
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008186.html

2. Can we add a new [!!!] [SoaS] naming scheme [using numbers]? in
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-September/019000.html

3. The irony of me saying oh, did I miss a list post immediately
before this is not lost on me.


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Re: [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 11:56:25PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 11:13 PM, Martin Denglermar...@martindengler.com 
 wrote:
  On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 10:57:00PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
  In fact Martin if I remember correctly we had already discussed this
  on-list... I will try to find the thread.
 
  Please let me know.  I did google for 'sugar ice cream soas' before
  I said I couldn't find anything besides the IRC meeting I mentioned.

 http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-June/001546.html

But that's just me asking again where the flavours policy came from
:), and you saying it came from the meeting I mentioned, and me saying
I didn't catch it then, and...is it still Groundhog day?

Well, Marketing decided Ice Cream flavours shall be the names of
releases.  Done.

  The beauty shot of the branded USB sticks for example was designed
 to have the colors of the first four versions of SoaS, and hence be
 reusable... since we won't have a pro photographer willing to help
 us out every time.

Ah - so perhaps this:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Logo_white_05.png

...is the logo you want, not the one I mentioned in my email:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Logo_white_04.png

...?  C'mon, it took a while to get the ice cream flavour choice sunk
in, please don't leave us hanging on the logo choice...what do you
want it to be?

 Other FOSS projects, distros likely have excellent software
 development methods... I can't comment intelligently on that. However,
 without naming names, I can say that most of them have sorry marketing
 indeed.

Yes, and that's why _I_ asked _you_ questions, which you...didn't
answer.  You did quite politely say [geeks are bad at marketing][1].
I don't want to waste your time: you don't have to convince me of
that, and I doubt anyone else is going to ask you to prove it either.

So:

  The idea is to maximize launch impact by keeping the element of
  surprise on our side.
 
  Ok...who are we surprising, though?  The journalists?

...and:

  [option a] Perhaps Fedora's each code name is related to the last
  in an insider-known way that it's fun to guess might be a way to
  speak to both needs?
 
  Or [ option b ] developers can just settle for talking about
  [releases] in terms of integers, which isn't so bad.
 

Which is it to be - a) or b)?  I'll listen, now, really.

 Sean.

Martin

1.
 This is not a reflection on the projects; geeks understand
 that they need to do marketing and PR (and of course community
 relations and recruitment, which are interrelated), they just don't
 have the experience. Although marketing/PR looks ridiculously easy to
 do from the outside, the reality is that if it were that easy,
 projects wouldn't have so much trouble getting known. The phenomenon
 of GNU/Linux desktops failing to gain marketshare on the desktop over
 the past decade has everything to do with poor marketing (as well as
 stiff - and not always fair - competition).
 
 So rather than seek inspiration from other FOSS projects, I'd much
 sooner seek inspiration from organizations/companies/projects which
 broke out and grew quickly in recognition. Inspiration, but not
 copying: the Spread Firefox campaign for example was very effective
 indeed in 2004, but the methods used were specific to the browser
 market and the context of the time. We have the fabulous opportunity
 to break new ground, and innovate marketing on a shoestring which
 spreads the word better than capitalized companies... all we have to
 do is be smart, consistent if we can (damage control wastes precious
 resources), and create initiatives instead of waiting for the phone to
 ring.


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Re: [IAEP] logging of #sugar channel

[Martin Dengler]

On Sat, Sep 05, 2009 at 03:05:58PM -0700, Dennis Daniels wrote:
 I'd like to bring up the discussion of logging the Sugar IRC
 channel.

-1 from me, as before.

A Google search for #sugar irc logs would turn up a long discussion
of this issue.  If a google-able discussion of an exact issue doesn't
help communication, I'm not sure why you think public IRC logs will.

 Dennis

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 11:18:13AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
 Tomeu  Do you have any actionable ideas about how to work better for our 
 users?
 
 I perceive a double bind: I have lots of ideas, but ideas are cheap and seem
 most unwelcome here -- they're just talk instead of do, aren't
 they?

I think you should share them.  Talk isn't bad unless it distracts
or detracts from do.

 Michael

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:42:57AM -0500, David Farning wrote:
  [Michael and Tomeu talk]

 An effective way to become a respected member of on open source
 community is to start with small ideas and implement them.  If the
 deliverable works, is useful, and meets coding standards it will be
 accepted. A couple of iterations through this:
 a: Produce improvements to the product.
 b. Help the contributor earn the respect of the current community so
 they will be encourage to participate  and take on larger projects.
 
 That tends to open doors.
 
 Drive by ventings tend to shut them.

These points are valid but not apt.  I don't think Michael's doing
anything drive-by.  His (and Tomeu's of course) ventings are quite
well-informed.

Constructive disagreement is valuable.

 david

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.

[Martin Dengler]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 01:50:25PM -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
 Fedora aims for a lightweight [compromise to foster intiatives]:

 * Special Interest Group
   + Can be created by anyone
   + One leader (i.e. the person who requests the mailing list)
   + No governance expected or required
   + No accountability in particular
   + Can apply for Project status as it grows

 * Project
   + Usually starts as a SIG and is, at some point, blessed by the Board
   + Full governance
   + Weekly meetings and minutes mandated
   + Expected outcomes
   + Accountability to the Board


Those seem like what Fedora gets out of SIGs / Projects.  What does
the group get out of being a SIG / Project?  The next question will
be: what does SugarLabs want to get and give from its Projects.

 --g

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] SOAS and Terminal

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 01:51:23AM -0400, Kim Toufectis wrote:
 Terminal told me it did not recognize wget so I'm stuck.
 Any advice?

Try sudo yum -y install wget without the quotes.

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] SoaS with SD cards irregularities

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 09:11:31PM +0930, Bill Kerr wrote:
 The sticks I have with SD cards have started to fail on the older computers
 at school (after working ok for 2 weeks of lessons). But they still work
 fine on my newer Dell mini inspiron. This is a very consistent pattern. I
 have 8 sticks with SD cards and 6 have failed on older computers but all of
 those 6 still work on the Dell mini inspiron.
 
 They start to boot, the xo icon appears and dots but not icons appear in the
 circle. This screen hangs for a while and then exits to a black screen with
 this message:
 
 Warning: cannot find root file system
 
 Create symlink /dev/root and then exit this shell to continue the boot
 sequence
 
 bash: no job control in this shell
 bash - 4.0#
[...]
 Let me know if you want more detail such as answers to all of the above
 questions.

It'd be interesting to see if turning off pretty-boot in one of the
stick's /boot/olpc.fth allowed you to see any other interesting
messages.

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] USB Sticks - Was: Re: Presenting Sugar to Rosie's Girls Camp, recommendations for cheap, fast flash drives

[Martin Dengler]

Hi Caroline,

On Sun, Aug 02, 2009 at 11:36:38AM -0400, Caroline Meeks wrote:
 Nicco's example has a good example use case from the field that relate to
 our work on trying to create a more robust Sugar on a Stick.

I think a session on how to not remove the USB stick unless Sugar is
shut down, plus a way to wipe the read-write overlay part, would be
the best bang for our engineering buck.

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] community influence on development

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 04:17:56PM -0300, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
 
 On 28.07.2009, at 07:22, Martin Dengler wrote:
 
  On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 03:24:13PM +0545, Daniel Drake wrote:
 
  However, I feel like it could be better if the community (who I
  might even stretch to call customers) could have more influence.
  [...]  What are the options for the community having more of an
  influence here?
 
  Influence on whom?  Developers?  There are no SugarLabs employed
  developers.
 
 
 But if we get feedback from the front line, from teachers actually  
 using our software in the field, the volunteer developers I know  
 struggle to find a way to make it easier for them. Nothing beats  
 direct contact with children of course, but even meeting teachers from  
 the deployments and hearing first-hand accounts of the problems (and  
 successes!) is rather motivating. Reading these reports on a mailing  
 list is less emotionally moving but still a great hint at how to  
 prioritize one's spare time.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I'm struggling to see how
it's relevant to the OP or my reply.  Perhaps by the volunteer
developers I know struggle to find a way to make it easier for them
you're implying that we need to make it easier for volunteer
developers to contribute?

 The problem is we get way too few feedback.

Indeed.

 - Bert -

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] Still Problems Saving in Scratch. Who Can Solve This Mystery?

[Martin Dengler]

On Sat, Jul 04, 2009 at 10:55:39PM -0700, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
 
 OK, I tried the code in the Terminal Activity again a few times,
 being sure I was typing it in correctly and now I get this result:
[...]
 Then it returns a prompt.  All very colorful, but I haven't a clue
 what it all means.

You're not typing what they asked you to (since it's gibberish to you
that's understandable).  You typed

ls ld ~olpc/Activities/Scratch.activity

...but you want to type:

ls -ld ~olpc/Activities/Scratch.activity

(note the minus sign, and where the spaces are)

 See my initial message at the bottom to see what the problem is
 saving a Scratch project on XOs running build 802.

I think Bryan's answered your original question: one has to change the
folder in which one saves from the default that's offered.

 I do notice that the code on the prompt varies with the machine:
 o...@xo-27-90-c8 ~]$
 o...@xo-0d-5c-68 ~]$
 o...@xo-27-8a-0f ~]$
 I assume these are just individual codes for each machine.  

Your assumption is correct.

 Have others experienced this problem saving in Scratch?  Is it new
 to 802?  Is there an easy fix? I will be happy to grannie-fy it
 into the wiki and or FLOSS manual if you tell me what it is!

The fix is what Bryan said:

  You can save projects in scratch by putting them in a certain folder.

  (1) Click save

  (2) When the save dialog comes up, click the Desktop button on the
  left.

  (3) Type the name of your project, and click OK


  The Desktop shortcut goes to
  /home/olpc/isolation/1/uid_to_home_dir/1/data, which I guess you
  can save to from within Scratch.

  Screenshot of dialog after clicking Desktop (and revealing the path):
  http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~bjordan/Picture%2038.png


 Thanks,Caryl

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and Mastering Educational SW

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 11:08:18AM -0500, David Farning wrote:
 [thread about how to get kids interested in science]

 While this is an interesting topic.  It is getting pretty far from the
 goals of Sugar Labs, to create and promote a learning platform.

I think it speaks to the components such a platform could contain
and/or encourage.  I didn't find it off-topic.

 thanks
 david

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] Reflections on giving a Sugar Demo

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 08:19:11PM -0400, Caroline Meeks wrote:
 First off it went well. The teacher's loved Sugar, saw a lot of
 possibilities and are motivated to help us go forward. People talked with me
 about it the entire conference.
 
 That said, I learned a lot of lessons and there are things I would do
 differently.

Thanks for the summary.  I put it up here:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/How_to_present_sugar

...along with the links to the presentation and the video of the
presentation.

Martin

(and of course I added it to
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_UK/Pilots/London2009/OLPC_UK/Pilots/Resources
)


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Re: [IAEP] HUMOR: SoasS-strawberry torrent

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 03:31:37PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 At the launch this month of the Archos Digital Satchel in Paris
 (Archos plans to be a Europewide partner for the Intel Classmate), the
 head of the proprietary learning software package bundled with the
 Archos chose sugar as an example of what kids like but is bad for
 them, then called video games digital junk food.

I wish Intel luck with their Castor Oil learning platform.

 Sean.

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] picked up by Gizmodo off of TechRadar: Sugar On a Stick Turns Any Netbook Into Your Very Own OLPC

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 11:36:02AM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 Hi Sascha, in fact I have no idea where that one came from.

Before I read this sub thread I commented that he should use something
like http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=gallerypage=media_04
, but in fact that wasn't terribly easy for me to find.  I looked
through

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Logo
http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=pressarticle=20090624language=english#20090624
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Welcome_to_the_Sugar_Labs_wiki
http://www.sugarlabs.org/
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Getting_Involved
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team

...before I somehow came across it.

 thanks
 
 Sean

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] the SoaS term (was: Press release flurry planning...)

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:28:09PM +0200, David Van Assche wrote:
 [Sugar on a Stick] should [...] describe the medium by which sugar
 is delivered (a usb stick) Nowhere is there any mention of something
 distro specific, nor should there be.

I'm amused that a few meme-weeks ago we had a discussion which implied
the other side: Sugar on a Stick meant a solution including not only
a specific distro's livecd .iso filesystem, but also a set of best
practices for running a Sugar-based curriculum, Sugar documentation
manuals, Sugar teacher training guidelines, XS-based (or -like) backup
solution, wireless network topology guidelines, and educational theory
suggestions.  Quite the other side of a spectrum from some source
code from git.sugarlabs.org put on a USB stick with no partition
table, which I think you're saying is perfectly reasonable :).

 I am actually quite surprised that this discussion is coming up on a
 mailing list that is very open source based.  Taking ownership of a
 very generic term goes against the philosophy/politics of open
 source in general.

This has nothing to do with open source as defined by its creators:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd .  I think you're saying
appropriating a general term to disenfranchise a constituency is
unfair and inconsistent with everyone's peer-imposed duty to take a
constructive, supportive, and inclusion-sensitive role in the
community.

We need inclusion but not at all cost.

 Regards,
 David Van Assche

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Fwd: [Marketing] Press release flurry planning (LinuxTag - FOSSED - NECC - GUADEC)

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 01:50:00AM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 Martin - we worked out Flavors at the marketing meetings

Ok.  It'd be nice if there was a mail sometime stating that.  I guess
your one a few minutes ago was that mail.

 Sean

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Fwd: [Marketing] Press release flurry planning (LinuxTag - FOSSED - NECC - GUADEC)

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 02:17:09AM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 I'm having difficulty with this launch (which was originally planned
 for three months from now :-)
 
 We're making it, but it's a pressure situation...

It'd be nice was meant without its usual sarcastic implication,
sorry.  I did mean I look forward to all the clarity we can get
(reasonably, considering volunteers are doing it) around the critical
subject of marketing direction / branding so the rest of us can move
forward with and worry about coding rather than higher-level debates.
In retrospect I should've tried to unpack that a bit from It'd be
nice.

BTW, it'd be nice[1] to have a clarification of a) SL's relationship
to SoaS[2]; and b) SoaS[3] sometime :).

Martin

1. ibid.
2. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick#Project_Goals
3. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick#Introduction


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 10:40:31AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
 
 On 17.06.2009, at 10:28, S Page wrote:
  Nooo, I want to keep my working 8.2.1 in NAND.  Can I simply boot my
  XO from the USB or SD card?
 
 No, these images are meant for NAND install. For USB/SD we'd need yet  
 another image, OLPC used to provide ext3 ones.
[...]
 Actually, Sebastian, there should be a big WARNING in your  
 announcements about this ...

Maybe we should only email sugar-devel. If we have to explain every
time that copy-nand will overwrite your nand it's going to slow things
down a lot.

 - Bert -

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:24:51PM +0200, Martin Langhoff wrote:
 On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Martin
 Denglermar...@martindengler.com wrote:
  It seems build engineers go to a a lot of effort to create multiple
  ginormous downloads in .img/.usb/.iso/.bootable.gz formats when
  they're 99% the same files laid out in different file system(s) with
  appropriate boot, config, and partition info.  Could some day a tool
  like LiveUSB Creator download only updated files from the net
 ...
  It's because those engineers have been whined at about because many
 
 Actually, a tool that's most of this smartly, it's called jigdo, and
 _nobody uses it_. Even projects that do all the setup work and
 document how end users can use it see little or no usage.

Reading the docs, I think that jidgo will allow the user to download
(say) a .iso and a .img (NAND) file by downloading the files that are
contained in them and then re-assembling the .iso and .img files?  In
this case it's something we/anyone can implement, though I'm not sure
it's going to serve a large portion of the target audience (I imagine
they'll want only one of the options).

 m


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:41:05PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
 What if we developers only announce in developer-oriented forums and 
 someone else (marketing team?) takes the task of communicating it to 
 end users?
[...]
 I suggest transforming it into this instead:
 
 Beware of the target audience of the list you post to.  If you are
 unsure if your message could be misinterpreted (e.g. if you are a
 geek with a message to end users) then consider passing it through
 someone more devoted to communicating (e.g. the marketing team).

Good point, but I think the audience involved has self-selecting down
to developer - tester.

I don't think we need to be worried about anyone else.  Do we need to
worry about a person, who a) doesn't understand copy-nand but b) is
subscribed to IAEP, suddenly deciding that they'll run mysterious
commands on huge downloaded files and end up with something they
didn't expect?  I don't think that more than a handful of people will
do that, if that.

 Kind regards,
 
   - Jonas

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 01:38:32PM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
 
 On 17.06.2009, at 12:56, Martin Dengler wrote:
 
  On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:41:05PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
  What if we developers only announce in developer-oriented forums and
  someone else (marketing team?) takes the task of communicating it to
  end users?
  [...]
  I suggest transforming it into this instead:
 
  Beware of the target audience of the list you post to.  If you are
  unsure if your message could be misinterpreted (e.g. if you are a
  geek with a message to end users) then consider passing it through
  someone more devoted to communicating (e.g. the marketing team).
 
  Good point, but I think the audience involved has self-selecting down
  to developer - tester.
 
  I don't think we need to be worried about anyone else.  Do we need to
  worry about a person, who a) doesn't understand copy-nand but b) is
  subscribed to IAEP, suddenly deciding that they'll run mysterious
  commands on huge downloaded files and end up with something they
  didn't expect?  I don't think that more than a handful of people will
  do that, if that.

 Many developers can't imagine with how little understanding actual
 end users approach tasks like this. Even slapping on a big WARNING
 sign does not really prevent them from severely damaging their
 system.

I appreciate the scope of the problem that we're telling lots of
people about things that they don't understand...:

  Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:12:10 +0100
  From: Martin Dengler mar...@martindengler.com
  Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1
  To: S Page skierp...@gmail.com

  Spend a few seconds contemplating how easy those steps can be.  Now
  contemplate how many ways people might screw up each step (mis-type
  the removable device letter? assume that dd just adds some stuff to
  their USB stick and get upset when it overwrites their thesis?).

...but I don't think that's the problem:

 For you it seems obvious nobody should undertake this unless they know  
 exactly what they're doing. Which is precisely the problem.

No, that's not the problem.  It's people that don't know that they
don't know what they're doing.  My point is that I think we're
worrying about people that a) want to be testers; and b) are so keen
that they go copy-nanding (after getting a devkey, etc.) without
understanding what they're doing.  As I'm saying I don't think there
are enough people like that on IAEP/sugar-devel to worry about, and
you're saying there are (IIUC).  Well, I'm happy to leave it at that.

 Saying that developers should not talk to users is only half a
 joke. It's often frustrating for both sides. You need someone who
 can think on both levels to mediate.

I agree, but I think most developers [on this project] *can* but just
lack the time.  And given the additional time it'd take, I think (as I
said directly to S Page and as others have said) that someone else
should do it if it's a problem.  But I'm glad sdz sent his mail.

 - Bert -

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] The Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 06:34:02AM -0700, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
 Tell Grannie about it too!  I will muddle my way through it this
 week and write a short Grannie's Guide To Running SoaS on your XO.
 I guess I will have to include a guide to getting a developer key
 for your XO.

I (and it sounds like others) would love to help.  Let us know when
you get around to it.

 Caryl (aka Grannie among other things,  former AlgebraS
 teacher...the S stands for Slow... not the teacher!) 

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 09:51:24AM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 ultimately, the question is: are there (or not) Activities common to
 every, or nearly every instance of Sugar?

This is Fructose:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Taxonomy#Fructose:_The_set_of_demonstration_activities

If you keep asking what to call them we'll keep telling you what
they're called.

Feel free to suggest alternates, but it's hard to effectively do so
without an understanding of the status quo.  Please point out what's
confusing as I'm sure plenty of people would like to make things as
comprehensible as possible.  I recognise that the fact people keep
asking could certainly be because it's not being well-explained.

Please consider this diagram as well:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Taxonomy#The_SUGAR_stack:_block_diagram_view

 Sean

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] LWN article

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 09:17:36AM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
  [Re: ttp://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/336910/3878a88c0c27f977/ ]
 [...]
 A very key point to me is the essential critical thinking issue. In
 ten years or so there will be thousands of young adults who started
 out with Sugar who will be speaking their minds about what we do.
 There may be praise, or we may even be disappointed by what they tell
 us. It's possible that general computing will move to a more intuitive
 paradigm and make today's Sugar seem quaint. But those judgments by
 our Learners, the critical thinkers of the next generation to come,
 are something to motivate us.

Excellent point.

 Sean

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 10:55:51AM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 I guess I'm confused because for me, a set of demo Activities is not
 at all the same thing as baseline Activities included in every Sugar
 deployment.

I agree they're not exactly the same, but I think that's probably
because baseline Activities included in every Sugar deployment
really is the wrong set to seek to define: why might we think every
deployment ever will need a given activity?  I can't see many
deployments going out without the ones you listed (Browse, Read, etc.)
but they certainly *could* (imagine a small deployment that doesn't
want / have internet / web browsing).

It's not only theoretically hard to define, but:

 I can't find a list of packs actually used in deployments, do we have
 one somewhere?

...it's practically impossible to observe this list, as you've begun
to encounter.

Perhaps the discussion might be what should we call Fructose instead
of 'demo' activities?  I agree demo feels like it misses the point
somehow.  But core seems to beg the question (core activities
are...those that are core??) and pre-installed deployed everywhere
seems to presume too much.

Maybe core / base or soemthing is as good as we're going to get,
though.

 Activity Packs (Sets? Groups? Bundles? Hives?) seem to me a key part
 of deployments, but I'm not sure where they fit in the diagram :-(

Activities are manifest in activity bundles (.xo).  Or are you talking
about content bundles (which are going to go away as a separate
concept, IIRC)?

 thanks
 
 Sean

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 02:47:45PM +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:
 On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 03:10:49PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
  I actually don't think it's that hard to set a list[...]
 
 27 messages in this thread: 
 http://n2.nabble.com/G1G1v2-Activities-td1096680.html

20 comments on this ticket: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6598

Martin



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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion

[Martin Dengler]

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


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 11:48:43AM -0500, James Simmons wrote:
 Martin,

 First and foremost ASLO has to make sense to grade school kids and their  
 teachers.

Sure - I'm agreeing

  That's why I didn't care for GCompris as a category.

I didn't see that as an issue.

 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.

Sure - I'm agreeing

 Other than that, does any kid or teacher care who maintains an
 Activity?

Clearly you view the answer as no (I think in general, the right
answer is not unless they can get something out of that person,
which is a distinct possibility in FOSS-land, so actually I think the
answer should be they should because it can help them).  I don't
know what point you're making, expect possibly we needn't care about
aslo's coherency for anyone other than 'learners'.

 Among ourselves we can make any taxonomy we like, but for the public
 face of Sugar Activities we have to remember the target audience.

Did you think I was saying the opposite?

 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:

I hardly read that as the classifications must be only what we
already have.

 Any discussion of taxonomy reminds me of grocery shopping on
 Sundays.

Well, I didn't start it :).

 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.

Are you saying that we should design our taxonomy to get people off
ASLO as soon as possible?  If not, what?

 James Simmons

Martin


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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 04:47:07PM +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:
 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.

This came out wrong: a *completely orthogonal categorization / tag
set can be very sensible and could be great for the target audience.
A not-so-completely orthogonal one could cause confusion.  More
tersely: s/completely/incompletely/.  Sorry for any conflagrations.

I think it'd be great if there were categorizations that were
super-useful to Learners / etc. regarless of their utility to
developers.

  thanks
  
  Sean
 
 Martin




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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion

[Martin Dengler]

I think we're in violent agreement: different taxonomies are great in
that they can serve different needs [and we don't want to confuse
anyone if we can help it].


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Re: [IAEP] Please help us choose a Sugar on a Stick boot animation sequence by tomorrow

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 07:07:17PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
 Ring of Dots
 http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Boot_Logo#XO_Sugar_Boot_With_Overlap

+1


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