Re: [IAEP] BERNIE
On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 7:37 PM, Tony Anderson tony_ander...@usa.netwrote: Please let me know if there are any problems with the site. It's missing a logo. Maybe this image can be stylized and repurposed... http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8207/8198080349_a40d2f849c_o.jpg m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugarized binaries? was Re: users doing python in XOs
Hi Yama, what you outline in #1 is generally doable. Just a bit of elbow grease to put the files in the Sugarized activity and have a wrapper to set the appropriate *PATH variables. #2 is generally not doable. As you say, there may be a way to do without superuser privs... You just have to find someone both motivated and skilled to get you through with #1 and investigate #2. Both are very specific to the program at hand, so can't give you precise advise. cheers, m On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Yama Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: You are right, Bert, sorry, got carried away. The main point was not compiled vs. interpreted, that was just a point of theology. The main point for me :-) is 1) stuff that currently lives as RPMs be usable by Uruguayan XO users, who are no allowed /sudo/ I hoped some kind of Sugarization or wrapper or something could do it msp430-libc and dependencies, and mspdebug 2) one of those binaries, mspdebug, also currently needs to be run as sudo again, maybe there was a way to do it without. I really don't have the skills or knowledge. Also, due to Uruguay going to Classmates for Middle School onwards, this sort of becomes a moot point. On 12/03/2012 11:23 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote: On 2012-12-03, at 18:08, Yama Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: The main point The main point is that you can write Sugar activities in any language that suits you, as long as it can connect to D-Bus and provide an X11 interface. Sugarizing means implementing the interfaces Sugar expects - adding some window properties so Sugar can find your window, loading state from / saving to the Journal, sharing on the network. It's not that much, really, and it is described here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Low-level_Activity_API In Python, there are already libraries that help you with these tasks (called the Sugar toolkit). When using another language, you have to do that on your own, and the best way to do it of course depends on your application. But it's entirely feasible, as the fact demonstrates that there are non-Python activities shipping on XOs. - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Renaming the Telescope activity to Scope
On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:58 PM, Chris Leonard cjlhomeaddr...@gmail.com wrote: As I recall, this activity was already renamed once from xoscope after it became clear it was colliding in name space with an oscilloscpe activity. Renames are a pain in infrastructure, and in upgrade handling for users. I would say prefer to retain the current name until there's an overwhelming case for change. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Names for new XO-3
Hi Caryl, just to clarify -- the unit is XO-4. Two variants will be available -- XO-4 Laptop and XO-4 Touch (a laptop with multitouch screen). The XO-4 Laptop is in general terms externally similar to XO-1.75, but gruntier guts. XO-4 Touch adds multitouch, so the frame changes a bit. cheers, martin On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: OK... crazy idea time... since the new XO-3 will actually be a hybrid of laptop and tablet, maybe it should have a new device name to distinguish it from others that are merely one or the other. Here are a couple of ideas for device names that hit me this morning: LapLet TabTop Anyone else have an idea to share? Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] [SLOBS] New Co / Nueva Empresa
On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 1:07 AM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: It has been 7 months since the Bumblebee brainstorming group had its discussion in San Francisco. I'm not sure what we thought would work for us, My recommendation is to let each group do their own thing. It's their name, their reputation on the line. If the original SF Bumblebees run a successful deployment in X, an unrelated group in New Zealand has no business using the Bumblebee name (potentially asking for money or goods). They should use their own name -- build their own reputation. There are some specific cases where the _services_ of a non-profic org are extremely useful. Software for the Public Interest (SPI) comes to mind -- it helps administer money from various conferences and events related to FOSS projects. You'll note that Debian conference organizers (debconf) make use of SPI's services, and that saves them a ton of time. Each year debconf happens in a different country, and is managed by a different group. Setting up a non-profit in a different country every year is madness. SPI's help is used every year by a different group. But SPI is not an umbrella of any kind, and nobody operates in their name (except the few people actually part of SPI). In a case I am familiar with, the Debconf Helsinki team used SPI's bank accounts and legal entity to handle receipt of donations, payment of bills, importation of gear into Europe, sponsorship of visa applications... These service non-profits are very useful (they require a lot of work too!). OTOH, I am extremely wary of any umbrella name or umbrella organization, and I believe you should be too. I've sat through plenty of talks and presentations where people were asking for material help (money, equipment, services) based on the good work of someone else entirely. Makes my blood boil and, besides my personal ethics, it does not lead to good outcomes. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] New Co / Nueva Empresa
On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 8:07 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: concluded [3] that the Local Lab construct, which entails activities above and beyond writing, improving and documenting FLOSS, fell outside of the scope of our parent organization, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) [4]. Why would they be limited in what they do? If there are strange rules that make being a Local Lab so limiting, the members can be a LL only parttime ;-) or declare their organization to be just a Friend of SugarLabs.org or something like it. At the end of the day, it's just a logo or a name people like to have. The _top priority_ should be to get stuff done with your own means. There are many real life barriers to overcome in the get stuff done with your own means track... is anyone that is busy getting their hands dirty getting stuff done worried about this logo stuff? (The your own means is important here. Lobbying for using someone else's good name to request help or money from a third party isn't in my good books. The good name of SL is a precious asset based on work from a global effort; if anyone wants to be a LL because it makes it easier to get grants... I'd run in the opposite direction. Applying for a grant is fair game, just do it in your own name, build your own reputation. ) cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] RFC:Simple Help widget for activities
2012/3/8 Manuel Quiñones ma...@laptop.org: Here is a mockup I did for the same activity with this ideas: http://dev.laptop.org/~manuq/simple_help_mock.png I really like this work track. Manuel and Gonzalo's proposed examples are, IMO, good to be options for activities. The central goal is _a starting place for users to explore the UI_. The users that need it the most are 6 to 8 year olds, and _teachers_. The first group won't do very well with text, so text-based help is only appropriate for activities where text is central. Our UI has moved in the right direction (for the younger users) when we moved to icon-based toolbars. This simplifies understanding the UI for younger users, and enormously simplifies localization. Now we need to break the ice when a user opens a new activity. What do I do first? is the question we have to provide hooks for. So I believe we should define some possible getting started help options for activities, provide (simple) API support, and (great) example implementations in the core activities. So the options, IMO, should be along the lines of: - Where possible and relevant, avoid the empty canvas, show some pre-selected content. Example: GetBooks, Browse, Wikipedia. - Images showing initial actions (as per Manuel's screenshot). Yes, this seems more work up-front, but it is a ton less work in localization, and is approachable for younger users. Of course, not appropriate to all activities. - A brief animation (example: Implode). - A text help when appropriate. For example, it may be appropriate in Pippy. It is important that we prioritize what is good for our users. We spend a ton of effort in things that are invisible to our users (hi commit msg and variable name nitpickers :-) ), we have to spend similar effort in things our users see if we want happy users. cheers, -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Uruguay first to get XO 1.75
On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 16.03.2012, at 19:45, Alan Jhonn Aguiar Schwyn wrote: Developers: begin to compile for ARM... Actually, developers have been doing this for many months already. As Bert says, we are shipping as a _result_ of the gigantic effort from developers who have been compiling for ARM for many months, and debugging things with us. Thanks to Bert, activity maintainers, Fedora ARM porters, general Linux ARM porters, everyone. So thanks for the encouragement, but it were a bit late if we only started now. Even more interestingly, we'd have reverse causation :-) m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Edujam 2012 sera mejor que Edujam 2011
On Feb 9, 2012 8:40 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: As to your various questions regarding programming, the answer is, it depends. Creo que Walter aqui esta reaccionando a intentos excesivos de definir programar y escribir codigo. Visto de afuera, esto de programar es misterioso. Es como la disciplina de escribir. Para quien no puede leer y escribir facilmente, es dificil de imaginar que escribir no es un comportamiento unificado. Pero escribimos. Este email, la lista de compras para el super o de tareas para hacer en la proxima hora; una nota de agradecimiento, una carta de amor, una novela, un tratado sobre semiotica. Garabateamos aburridos en clase, firmamos documentos, tallamos nuestro nombre en un arbol, lo pintamos en un puente, hacemos dibujos y esquemas (en el pizarron, en un papel) para explicar a otros y para _explorar ideas, aun cuando estamos solos_. Una vez que el musculo mental sabe escribir, _escribe_, para resolver problemas cotidianos, para entretenerse y para _pensar_. Lo mismo pasa con la programacion; es una destreza mental que una vez incorporada, nos ayuda a resolver problemas de todos los dias, entretenernos, y pensar ciertos tipos de problemas. Algunos escriben profesionalmente (escritores, periodistas) -- muchisima gente escriben. Algunos programan profesionalmente, y hay un camino por recorrer para que muchisima gente programe... un abrazo, m ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar UI font
On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 8:20 AM, Sridhar Dhanapalan srid...@laptop.org.au wrote: Just a thought - how feasible would it be to take an existing open-licensed font (there are lots of good ones) and substitute in an a and 9 that are more consistent with Australian classroom That is your best shot IMHO. Just make sure you have it done professionally, so that you get the vector modified elegantly... but also the hinting. Good hinting will make it render to clear/legible glyphs on screen. Hinting is gonna be hard possibly costly. It is the price you pay for having a font that handles print and screen correctly. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Raspberry Pi - $25 computer coming soon....
The thing is -- you gotta put a computer around it to make it useful. Add a screen, a keyboard, touchpad, speakers, microphone, camera, storage... Once you do all that, if you want a rugged form factor, it looks a lot like a green-and-white unit we know. If you don't, then some of the lowest-cost netbooks around give you guidance. m On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Valerie Taylor vtay...@gmail.com wrote: Raspberry Pi - $25 computer coming soon http://www.raspberrypi.org/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=2 - specs Sounds like they are working on having a Fedora distribution for the November launch. They are actively inviting anyone with large educational programs to get in touch with them now. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] copy files to/from server
On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: Not sure the exact details but sharepoint does support sharing as webdav. I'm not sure how it works on the server side but at work it works with Fedora 14 and webdav on the client side. AFAIK, if all you want is WebDAV, stock standard IIS and Apache can share folders via WebDAV. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] copy files to/from server
On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:12 AM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: why not use Moodle or Sharepoint or Blackboard? Yeah - there's an easy-installation Moodle package. That's what I'd go with. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] copy files to/from server
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Martin Abente martin.abente.lah...@gmail.com wrote: I still didn't make up my mind about which technical approach should I take in order to get this working, but I guess people already started sharing some ideas. And I would appreciate more ideas and discussion before I get to that point. ok - some notes from me on this topic For file management, I very strongly recommend using WebDAV. It is a bit less efficient than real network file system protocols, but the benefits are many: - more flexibilty - closer to you and me in the stack - you can easily find WebDAV toolkits in HLLs that allow you to expose your data as files and directories over WebDAV, as well as client implementations - it deals reasonably gracefully with intermittent connectivity (SMB/CIFS, NFS, etc get you nasty system freezes if the server disappears) - wide range of (fairly well behaved) client and server implementations - a good test suite for the server side - On the XS side... Moodle has a WebDAV implementation and Apache has one too. From the department of optimizations to keep in mind early (but implement late...) -- if ds-backup is working correctly, you'll have most of the content already on the XS. Might be a nice optimisation to skip transferring it -- if you have a msg exchange *before* the WebDAV (or other) file transfer. The very basic requirement is: each children must have its private cloud volume, where they can drop their files in the same way they interact with physical external storage devices. Why would I drop the file there? In my understanding, what you want to do with it is *publish* it. On top of that we can do a lot of things that might be very useful for teachers daily in the classrooms. Yeah - *publish it to my classroom group* -- via Moodle. I've worked for ~10 years with teachers and that's what they want to do 99.9% of the time -- publish it to the group. If we do that nicely, we're golden. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] XO power management hindering collaboration
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 3:14 AM, Sridhar Dhanapalan srid...@laptop.org.au wrote: This is with OLPC OS 10.1.3 (XO-AU 10.1.3-au2 - we haven't made any changes that would affect reliability of collaboration). The XOs were registered and using an XS. I've reported this at http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/10878 thanks for filing this! You'll see questions and discussion, because we are trying to understand what exactly it is you are seeing. The initial problem description you give us is something we strongly believe we fixed between 10.1.2 and 10.1.3 -- and we tested 10.1.3 a lot to confirm it was working. So we think that there's something else at play -- and we'll be needing for info (and needling you for it :) ). cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] copy files to/from server
Hi Sridhar, I don't fully understand your scenario. You say an XS is not an option... but I thought you were using XS, with Jerry's help? If you are using XS, you can use Moodle. If there is no XS, then any webbased tool that offers a file upload form to post a file to share will work. You can install Moodle (even on Windows servers ;-) ), or Mahara, or WordPad or anything you like. In a pure-MS world, it will probably work with Sharepoint if it has a usable web frontend. Unfortuntely, there's no easy way to do it with CIFS or NFS -- it would be an interesting addition to Sugar (possibly to the Journal) but it's a big project. hth, m On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 3:42 AM, Sridhar Dhanapalan srid...@laptop.org.au wrote: How can XOs copy files to/from their Journal with a server? We want the ability for teachers to easily make files available for children, and for children to upload to the server. It's not practical to install another server (so an XS is not an option). Most schools have a Windows-based server, so they could use CIFS files shares. Accessing this is doable through GNOME, but not in Sugar with the Journal. Sridhar Dhanapalan Technical Manager One Laptop per Child Australia M: +61 425 239 701 E: srid...@laptop.org.au A: G.P.O. Box 731 Sydney, NSW 2001 W: www.laptop.org.au ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+
On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 10:09 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: To me, one of the more compelling arguments for considering GPLv3 is When the Rules Are Broken: A Smooth Path to Compliance. Interesting! I hadn't thought it'd be so awkward, but if one is to be 100% formal, you need to do something like that. Good news is -- if SL likes that, GPLv2 doesn't encode a mechanism for a path to restoration; so nothing blocks a project from stating its practices for restoration. As a promise from the copyright holder, it effectively extends the license. You can't extend GPL adding restrictions, but you can sure add promises :-) (The project would need agreement from copyright holders - just once.) m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] GPL non compliance? was Re: GPL non-compliance, was Re: GPLv3
On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 8:10 AM, Gabriel Eirea gei...@gmail.com wrote: Fact 1: in Plan Ceibal the XO 1.0 and XO 1.5-HS don't provide access to root. Yes, but as Walter indicates, I understand it is allowed in newer OSs. In any case I am aware of efforts to make it available. This means that Sugar can't be modified by children. Well, that is not correct. You *can* modify Sugar and run your modified version without root. Fun things like changing the home view layout or changing the XO icon, among many other things, are impossible Possible. Not as trivial as yum install foo but a script can be written to automate it. useless because children can install absolutely no additional software packages (they can't do yum install). Um - again you _can_ install sw in your homedir. Not as practical but possible. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+
Hi Bernie, thanks for the thoughtful response. The use by employees area is something I need to study further, as I suspect is more complex than what you're describing. On the tivoization part... On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 2:50 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Sat, 2011-04-23 at 03:38 -0400, Martin Langhoff wrote: What is done with said code was never the business of GPLv2. GPLv3 starts getting its nose into the how it is used side. Wait a moment: neither the GPLv2 nor the GPLv3 has ever put any limitation on the way you can *use* the software. One could use GPLv3 software to murder people or to implement DRM. Except that antitivoization clauses provide for unlocking the DRM so you actually can't. That is squarely the intention of v3. So then you write It's not happening right now, but one day someone could get the idea to take the wicked business model of ebook readers into the world of education. By going with the GPLv3, we'll prevent this sort of things from ever happening in the future. Hey! You can't have it both ways. Either you are dictating how it is used, or you are not. Someone could have the wicked idea of using Sugar to teach a whole lot of things that could go very much against what OLPC is all about. Should we start revising GPLv3 to restrict a whole lot of things that are contrary to OLPC and SugarLabs' goals? Racism, sexism, hate, xenophobia, partisan rewriting of history... the list is long and sadly colourful. Mind if I say that DRM is very *very* far down that particular list? :-) Or should we stay clear of that mess, and keep the license apolitical and focused on sharing the source? It is clear that FSF does not like DRM, and I respect that position. However, it is a topic of *how* the software is used, and that is an essentially political topic. I'll comment below on a few side-topics -- ... There's no explicit prohibition to use GPLv3 software on a locked-down platform, as long as users are given the ability to install modified versions the GPLv3 code (and not the entire OS). Of course, if the GPLv3 software happened to be the kernel itself, jail-breaking would become trivial. Agreed, and this is very relevant to Sugar. In what *planet* do you live? Honestly, GPLv3 is controversial amongst anyone whose work is possibly tivoized. It was so all through the drafting process. Ok, that's true, but it shouldn't be controversial among *us*. I am surprised you are surprised. Not everyone thinks like the FSF, even if we have good friends there :-) GPLv2 has been _such a successful license_ in its share-and-share-alike side that people use it not because they squarely believe in FSF's goals, but because they believe in much humbler goals, like keep the source open by sharing it. There are lots of uses of software that aren't aligned to our dreams and goals. But the license is very much the wrong place to try to advance them. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] GPL non compliance? was Re: GPL non-compliance, was Re: GPLv3
On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 8:34 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: Likewise, Sugar Labs has an obligation to act on all GPL violations reported on Sugar Labs copyrighted code. But we cannot act on our own if we do not hold copyright. Minor technical note here -- SL has a right, but (surprisingly) no obligation to act. With trademarks, for example, you have an obligation; if you don't act, infringers can say you've relinquished your right to the trademark, and you may lose it. (Acting doesn't need to be in condemnation; a friend of SL may be found using SL's trademark without prior authorization, be asked in friendly to formally request authorization, and then have it granted. Sounds like a silly dance, but so are trademark laws.) Copyright, OTOH, is a right that is not lost via inaction. Not that you'd want to avoid action, but are definitely not rushed into action. That's in part why those enforcing GPL compliance can take time in negotiations and discussions -- and usually do. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+
On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 6:14 PM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@sugarlabs.org wrote: I sure wish that GPLv3 was limited to those bugfixes, and the anti-tivo wording was segregatd to a new license; a bit like some clauses were split off to the Affero-GPL. The GPL always has been about protecting the famous Four Freedoms. Back when the GPLv2 was created, nobody had yet figured out that tivoization could be used to game the license and effectively deny users the freedom to modify the software. That is the position of the FSF. However, a very wide community of practice has adopted the GPL for its share and share alike mechanics. In that sense, I stand squarely on the same position as Linus and other kernel hackers. I have always used and liked the GPLv2 because it ensures the sharing of the code. What is done with said code was never the business of GPLv2. GPLv3 starts getting its nose into the how it is used side. There's even explicit wording allowing employers to have workers or contractors use GPL'd software without automatically transferring them any rights: Can you point me to the relevant section on this? Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you. Is that the wording? So for this to stick employees using a locked-down machine can't copy binaries to a removable disk? A few years ago, a large American publisher of schoolbooks asked us to implement features for copyright control, so they could sell their books to students ensure they couldn't exchange copies. In Paraguay, a local publisher came up with another scheme involving Adobe Flash to limit what users could do or not do with books. With the GPLv2 alone, any deployment or hardware vendor could make a deal with a publisher and turn Sugar into a Kindle full of DRM. Well, I don't much like the above, and wouldn't personally do it. However, GPL never gave me any rights upon how users use of my software, or in which direction developers may develop it. Get the hang of this: licensing software GPL, any version, I am allowing many dictators to use it to do, coordinate, automate and organize the most horrid actions you can think of. Torture? Check. Murder? You bet! And this isn't hard to get over. (And I don't say this lightly, having grown up in a country blighted by a nasty civil war, with family members on both sides.) GPLv2 is a humble instrument. Licensee, do whatever you want, but share the source when you distribute. - At what point do we say hey, this has scant upside, and negative controversy around it, let's spend our time in productive things instead? Which negative controversy, the one you're personally fueling? This is kind of a circular argument :-) In what *planet* do you live? Honestly, GPLv3 is controversial amongst anyone whose work is possibly tivoized. It was so all through the drafting process. You've expressed some valid concerns and I believe I've responded satisfactorily to all of them. If not, I'm glad to hear a counter-argument from you. No -- there is no upside I can see. Sugar's license hasn't been in the business of restricting usage, and it should not get there. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+
On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: Murder? You bet! And this isn't hard to get over. Easy. Oops. Not easy to get over. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] GPL non-compliance, was Re: [SLOBS] GPLv3
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 7:05 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 11:15 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: Walter, I am too dumb to know the full ins and outs of this. I also have been advised that I should not mess with this because (as I understood it) Yama, please inform yourself _above_ gossip. You say you don't know enough and then make outrageous accusations. The two things don't go together. Sugar is GPLv2, I explained yesterday why GPLv2, even v3, is not a problem, even for Bitfrost-style locked-down machines, as long as you can install Sugar Sugar Toolkit in your home directory. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] GPL non-compliance, was Re: [SLOBS] GPLv3
Folks -- one thing we need to be in good intellectual shape to handle loaded questions. Everyone here probably knows them well, but I just re-read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question and it was rather refreshing and useful. In general, if you don't know much about a topic, it is a good idea to *avoid* making inflammatory statements and accusations. You can ask, but please don't mix the valid questions with accusations or loaded questions. It doesn't help anyone. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@sugarlabs.org wrote: The oversight board is considering a motion to upgrade the license of Sugar from GPLv2 or later to GPLv3 or later. Before proceeding to a vote, we'd like to request feedback from the community. Interesting. (Bad timing though -- we have a productive pace, can't we go back to fixing bugs?) From the PoV of OLPC-A, this is a mixed bag. The patent wording in v3 is a positive, though nothing ever protects you from a broken patent system. The anti-tivoization clause OTOH is worrying and not desirable. In any case, v3 is acceptable but not desirable, staying with v2 is strongly preferred. Here, I speak with my OLPC-A hat, and from having formally studied GPLv2 and v3 in two courses in software licensing, masters level, at Victoria Uni of New Zealand; and reviewed the same licenses with several lawyers (some specialized in copyright). As anyone, I may still be misunderstanding some parts; in that case, it'd be a well-studied mistake. From a personal PoV -- those who write/own the code get to say what happens with it -- and I haven't written more than a dozen lines of mergeable Sugar code. You won't ever hear me pontificate on other people's choice of license or sexual orientation./personal One point to note: there isn't copyright assignment to SL so SL does not own the copyright. So SL can, on its own, relicense as anyone else could. It may not please some of the authors :-) Q: What about sugar-toolkit, which is LGPLv2+? A: Following the path of least resistance, every LGPLv2+ module will be upgraded to the LGPLv3+. Worried here about the least resistance. If SL is going to do this, I strongly recommend a review of LGPLv3. FSF licenses aren't all good. I can point to one really good license with broad appeal -- GPLv2. Other licenses are controversial (GPLv3), good but confusing (LGPLv2) or downright so-bad-it-should-die (GFDL). You cannot trust FSF to have crafted a good license. If you are going to be lazy, be truly lazy and *don't change license*. Q: How will the GPLv3+ affect anti-theft systems? A: As long as end-users can request and receive developer keys, the Bitfrost anti-theft system is compatible with the anti-tivoization clause of the GPLv3. This is... unfortunately not so easy. My analysis, and I believe it is well reasoned, says that a Sugar install is not affected by bitfrost in the least. What GPLv3 actually demands is that the user can modify the source and install (to run) the modified code -- it only asks for special signing keys or unlocking keys *if* they are needed for installation of the sw. On a bitfrost-locked machine, without root access, I can install sugar and sugar-toolkit in my homedir, and run it from there. Nothing speaks about replacing the pre-installed binaries. (Look for references to installation information in the text of GPLv3.) However, I believe that there is disagreement on the above topic. Unfortunately, there are strong believers in GPLv3 with a different view. Q: How will the GPLv3+ affect OLPC deployments? A: Sugar will simply add a few more GPLv3 packages to the ones already present in Fedora, so there is no real difference here -- The deployments are *already* using GPLv3 software today. I wish it was *that* simple. From the deployments' PoV, Sugar moving to GPLv3: - It adds a weak patent protection. - It opens them to GPLv3 challenges, both warranted, and unwarranted. Now here's my question -- what the *is* the upside for SugarLabs? There is a nice group of people being productive at this very moment, I say let's focus on good code, and feature work... let's not risk a big fscking flamewar for a change that has no apparent upside. If anyone is bored of hacking, let's argue about enforcing a mandatory text editor. I say nano. :-) m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Authors can express their intentions through a license. If you didn't want your code to be redistributed under a later versions of the GPL, then why didn't you distribute as GPLv2-only? On a personal note here... programmers that liked GPLv2 due to its share-and-share-alike quid-pro-quo (like me, perhaps Scott too) trusted FSF for have future versions be bugfix versions. So I've also published GPLv2 bits and now I wish I hadn't. Some things in v3 are bugfixes -- the license compatibility, the patent wording (though it could scare some corporations that do hold patents). But the anti-tivoization clause changes the social contract significantly -- it moves towards a new territory that is problematic. I sure wish that GPLv3 was limited to those bugfixes, and the anti-tivo wording was segregatd to a new license; a bit like some clauses were split off to the Affero-GPL. To me, this seems like the GPv3 has a long list of *practical* advantages over the GPLv2: None of those seem interesting to Sugar. A clearer patent license, no ambiguities for distributors Nice, but GPLv2 is well understood by now. better compatibility with other licenses, A high-profile, well-liked project like Sugar never has problem to get a dual-license grant from any incompat license. I've requested -- and obtained -- such dual-licenses from many (PHP-licensed) projects that we wanted to include in Moodle (GPLv2, and not as high profile as Sugar). anti-tivoization This is rather problematic. While it doesn't affect OLPC/bitfrost, it can affect situations where I'd like to see Sugar in use. For example a well-setup thin-client / terminal server (like SkoleLinux/DebianEdu) may lockdown X so that .xsession is ignored. protection from the DMCA Not relevant. Sugar ain't mplayer. easier path to return into compliance for accidental violations... Nice but... was that ever a problem? There's ample best practice around accidental violations. It doesn't change anything. So my questions are - What's the upside? - At what point do we say hey, this has scant upside, and negative controversy around it, let's spend our time in productive things instead? cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+
On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 12:54 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote: Yes, you seem to be confused Bernie. You can redistribute under a license however you like, usually without explicitly stating it. But if you alter the source files or replace COPYING, you are *changing the license*. That is a different act. You are right but in practice in this case there isn't much difference. Anybody, following GPLv2, can just redistribute it under GPLv3, and you *could* track each file as to GPLv2, v3, or mixed. But that would be a lot of bureaucracy that wouldn't help anyone -- anybody interested in GPLv2 sources should just go to the last commit or release under v2. A more passive-aggressive means to your end might be to announce that SugarLabs will only accept new contributions which are licensed GPLv3+. That will effect the redistribution change you want, while still (a) pissing off parts of the community, and (b) not illegally altering the license on code you do not own. Honestly, option b is rather annoying if relevant authors/owners of the copyright aren't in agreement. But it has notthing illegal. The copyright lines are advisory only, and nonbinding. Of course, courts look unfavourably upon knowing infringers that remove (as upon anyone found hiding evidence) them but they aren't sacred in the normal course of things. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Exploring Sugar-on-Tablets
On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 4:43 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: PCs and Linux machines yes. But... there still lots of issues with Macs and so far it does not work with the older G4 Power PC Macs (EToys to go does!). Does Android run on your G4 PPC Mac?? Or is this all random talk? m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Any olpc/Sugar/ICT4E people in Spain?
On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 5:56 AM, Christoph Derndorfer e0425...@student.tuwien.ac.at wrote: olpc/Sugar/ICT4E who are based here in Madrid or elsewhere in Spain? In Spain the Moodle community is very strong -- peaks around Catalunya. Vasque country is strong on alternative linux distros for education (non-Sugar afaik). Again, Madrid is a bit weaker on this track. Maybe post in moodle.org's Spanish forum? m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: This seems to me to be a red herring. What does connectivity have to do with your choice of OS? While technically possible to write all sort of sw yourself, you choose an OS based on the affordances it offers. The OSs being discussed (Android, ChromeOS) have very strong assumptions about ubiquitous connectivity to the internet and the role of the device (network client, not peer, not server). With enough work and time you may be able to provide all the missing bits and fix the broken libraries and APIs. You might even rewrite the apps in the app store to work without connectivity. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
Hi folks. I wish to make a radical proposal: Sugar is starting to move forward again. We could focus or we could Get Distracted! :-) [ Yes, there are some interesting hints on the Android side. And on the cloud. And Tablets! And ChromeOS! And Win7-on-Nokia! Don't forget Kinect. Rebase and reimplement on every latest fun-thing-du-jour. CADT wins - http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html ] cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 7:31 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: Stepping back for a moment, the key question is: how can we get Sugar out of the window manager and network manager and activity update and UI toolkit business, where it's just not keeping up (and wasting our efforts), and concentrate on the stuff we're all really here for: enabling kids to learn and explore and share? How much can we strip away and still have Sugar? If you want to abstract away, get far away from the computer and the OS and target HTML5. You'll have some significant limitations, but that's the tradeoff. The thing is... if you want to be closer to the metal, you're gonna grind against it; and IMHO the best path looks a lot like what we have in Fedora+Sugar. We pay a big price for it, but it takes us to the highlands in Peru and many deep deep jungles, without and XS and without internet. Forget about kids in those places (they'll get broadband-quality internet... eventually) and yeah, we can do it all with JS and your favourite language on the server side. I look back at when OLPC started, and some things have changed in the world _we_ live in. But the kids we want to help with... their world hasn't changed much. They still haven't got internet for starters. Some things might be a tad closer -- lower costs per laptop, tablets are possible -- but connectivity isn't any easier or any cheaper. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] !! in 10.1.3, setting languages property clears all activities
On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Yamandu Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: thus having an image available might actually save bandwidth - AFAIK Sugar is about half the size of a Fedora download Yes it is smaller, but if Tim in Haiti is very bw-limited, even the smaller thing is too large. Daniel -- looking forward a bit... would it be practical to build an img with a longer list of locales (all the ones we have reasonable support for), and then extract the relevant files in a tarball or similar so that they can be installed (with a script)? Are locales cleanly separated into files / dirs or is there any file that needs to be recompiled? If it's doable, there is a definite use case for auto-installing signed-tarball-with-locale from USB. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] llamado internacional a capacitadores Moodle
2011/1/19 Yamandu Ploskonka yamap...@bolinux.org: Ceibal ha publicado este llamado para capacitadores Moodle http://tinyurl.com/4rnkl2v Es trabajo a distancia, 1.000 USD por mes, requisito es ser residente de un pais del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo Excelente! Si alguien está en una lista Moodle (yo me borré hace un año), por favor copiar, y ¡gracias a anacim! Yo voy a pasar el mensaje. Y si Ceibal ha publicado esto en listas Moodle, les debo una disculpa y una pierna de cordero bien asada la próxima vez que pase por el paisito. En vez de ofender sin ninguna buena razón a gente que está trabajando en serio, y por las dudas pedir disculpas... qué tal evitar ofensas sin razón? un saludo, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Child in charge of FOSS or Sugar
On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 9:21 AM, Teemu Leinonen teemu.leino...@aalto.fi wrote: The issue is even more important when the project is claiming to promote FLOSS culture, like in the case of Sugar. In my definition of That is _not_ the primary goal of Sugar. Sugar aims for lots of goals, first and foremost, is about children as users, and their learning. One of the key aspects of the FOSS culture that is very visible in Sugar is that it is something explorable, learnable, hackable (as opposed to a black-box). Other aspects of FOSS are less applicable to primary-school age children and their learning, so... cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Child in charge of FOSS or Sugar
On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 9:27 AM, Søren Hougesen soren.houge...@gmail.com wrote: For about a month ago, I asked as a curious outsider, if kids were actually hacking sugar. Two factors are important here: - We all have very high and complex expectations for Sugar, so Sugar itself is internally complex; and that trend is increasing. So to actually hack in the core of Sugar you have to make a long trip of discovery and learning. (Activities are a lot easier to hack.) - Sugar (and XOs) have not been in use for long enough! Sugar users have only started their journey. Will they travel all the way to hacking Sugar? Hard to know! If they are working on TurtleArt / TurtleBlocks, EToys, Scratch or Pippy, they are on the right track. hth, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Mesh Dreams = OLSR
On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 11:13 AM, Reuben K. Caron reu...@laptop.org wrote: Where Mesh != 802.11s but rather an adhoc, self healing, self organizing routable network. Cerebro gave a great working demo of what you describe. Don't know how they compare. I think it is perfectly feasible to achieve what you want... - to do it seamlessly and with polish will take a ton of work - very few users will actually benefit because the under a tree scenario covers IMHO most of our interesting use cases. People do talk about having a mesh that covers their whole town, and it's great dream but not achievable with our current constraints - town-wide meshes are made of stationary nodes - the mesh approaches we're discussing burn CPU / battery... - perennially power-starved users will focus on use, not on maintaining the communal mesh up Imagine a world where Sugar on a Stick machines can communicate on the same network as an XO laptop We have that now with ad-hoc and infra. Limited but we have it. A world where mesh capabilities are hardware agnostic allowing anyone to bring up a mesh network by booting a live cd. Mesh is pixie dust for most people. Your 'imagine' lines will make the imagine things that cannot be made to work _in the way people imagine_. Some meshy things can be made to work in a lab. Others just involve tradeoffs no sane user would take on... We've had bazillion threads about this, because mesh stokes passion. Problem is... even if you had the magical code right now working seamlessly... the cost/benefit ratio isn't good. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS] Sugar Labs 2010 Goals Review
On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 3:04 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: I think an honest assessment would indicate that OLPC has done some initial work on supporting touchscreen devices, but that SugarLabs has not (so far). (...) SugarLabs is where many developers get together. Similar to 'linux dev community' vs 'RH linux kernel developers'. So if OLPC developers that hack on Sugar do that work, the SL dev community is doing it. WRT dogfooding, I think we have to do it to a reasonable extent. It's getting better, and much closer to happening for me -- specially with the HS machines. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Who determines what version of Sugar is used in the field?
On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 7:02 AM, Mel Chua m...@melchua.com wrote: Mel's response: To me, this is very clear - SL decides what version(s) of Sugar it will support, and deployments will decide what version(s) of Sugar they will use. Exactly. That's a huge part of the Free in FOSS. We can all stand on top of a mountain and declare that people should run X, Y or Z software. But deployments take their own decisions. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS] [SLOBs] F11+0.88+XO1.* as a SL project
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 5:29 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: So that could be what defines a project, but which are the consequences of becoming an official project? Yeah - what does it mean? I'd say just highlight, endorse, promote, congratulate and celebrate projects :-) Truth is, of the people who drive it drop it... well... that's it. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Notes from OLPC/Waveplace Health Discussion
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 6:27 PM, Beth Santos b...@waveplace.org wrote: See notes below about our Public Health meeting from Tuesday, June 22nd at 4pm EST. Given the interest in health -- do you know about... - USAID's health materials at http://www.globalhealthlearning.org/ - WHO Pacific's openly available health materials at POLHN - login as guest to get into the courses at http://courses.polhncourses.org/course/category.php?id=9 . Main website at http://polhn.org/ , brief outline of what they do at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=66852 cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Proposal release management
On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Michael Stone mich...@laptop.org wrote: Perhaps we should instead be talking about whatever role describes the people who /do/ care about the code that goes in? Programmer. Implementor. Product manager. :-) I think the view is that features have their own drivers (motivated programmers making sure it gets done) the RM keeps things orderly as they get merged or landed into the master branch. The above is just my limited understanding -- proper SLers probably know much better. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] OLPC rules out Windows for XO-3
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 6:56 PM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: Do you think that the solution is to create a new and more narrow list No more lists please ;-) ! Move thread to d...@lists.laptop.org where it belongs ;-) Mostly the same crowd, but not quite. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Supporting Sugar .88 on the XO1
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 7:48 PM, David Farning dfarn...@gmail.com wrote: As Bernie announced, we working on supporting Sugar .88 on the XO-1. Excellent. No need for soul searching. Get it done for your users, get the patches out :-) Give not a second of thought to blame and failure. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 1:43 PM, David Farning dfarn...@gmail.com wrote: Over the past couple of months I have been exploring business opportunities to promote the adoption and development of Sugar. One of these opportunities is a service and support business for deployments. As such, we are building network of developers to work on deployment specific issues. Excellent news. All successful software -- regardless of license, platform and other factors -- thrives on a network of highly skilled professionals around it. IME, an important challenge going forward for all involved is to maintain a high level of professionalism in the good and in the bad times. There are lots of little things -- for example managing expectations and knowing when you are speaking for yourself / your company, when for SL, when for OLPC. Some people have @laptop and @sugarlabs addresses -- making sure that it is clear who you are, and what hat are you wearing at a particular time is not trivial. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:04 PM, Christoph Derndorfer e0425...@student.tuwien.ac.at wrote: Done critically, creatively, and transparently, voluntary free software projects There is a bit of misdirection in there. Projects are rarely defined as a voluntary free software project. IMHE successful long term projects have diverse group of developers with diverse driving forces. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Jonas Smedegaard d...@jones.dk wrote: Making deals with commercial partners have a tendency to spawn discrete communication and work shared openly but as a result, not a peer process (a famous example is that of Google Android release process of linux kernel patches). Actually, most of the kernel development these days is funded. The planning, design, development, review and rework are done openly. All teh technical work is open and transparent, that's all. Android, of a thousand of funded projects, has been mismanaged from the PoV of the kernel upstream. Sure. But the correlation you are trying to make is not there. The evidence is overwhelmingly on the other side. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] How to save Journal entries from multiple students to a single computer?
David, Sugaristas, maybe there's a way to disable the auto-login-as-liveuser and create a different account (and homedir!) for each user. I don't know how SoaS does the auto-login-as-liveuser -- my recipe would be - find out how, and disable the trick - create accounts for each user - have them login as you would in a shared terminal m On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 12:59 PM, David Han ds...@bu.edu wrote: I'm David Han. I'm a student at Boston University. Anurag Goel, Francis Thalakotur and I (all BU students) will be deploying Sugar on a Stick to three classrooms in Delhi, India this summer. We're researching the affect Sugar has on student learning. A major part of our research design is analyzing student work on digital portfolios. On Sugar, the Journal is the closest fit to a portfolio. How can we take the data from the students' Journals and save it on a single computer? Thanks! David Han -- David ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] How to save Journal entries from multiple students to a single computer?
2010/5/14 Raul Gutierrez Segales r...@rieder.net.py: Based on the backup function, I wrote a script that calculates the total number of Journal entries (among all users) for each activity. My idea was to infer the favorite activities.. but I need some heuristics because counting created entries alone is kind of misleading. How about getting this reimplemented in PHP, and exposed in Moodle so it integrates with the teacher's view of the course? cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Peru, OLPC and Wikipedia
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:49 PM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: the interviewed social Darwinist is Robert Wright, the author of Nonzero http://www.nonzero.org/ The filmmaker is Righteous Pictures http://righteouspictures.com/ Wright seems to believe that there is a higher purpose to biological and social evolution, that in some way, we will be fulfilling our destiny if we become one globalised culture. When I watched the videos, I did get a similar feeling of concern. And Robert Wright's answers can be read as neo-social-darwinist. But note the can be read... I am not sure if he is actually darwinist; reading his book right after reading Guns, Germs and Steel may lead to a completely different perspective. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Long-term development strategy (Was: New XO-1.5 10.2.0 build 119)
On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 4:45 AM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: And there is a perfect reason for a stable distro such as RHEL or CentOS :-) :-) Two quick things I want to inject into this conversation. - Timing affects this decision. We're not in the abstract -- this is _now_. If RHEL6/CentOS6 is reasonably close to shipping on the target release date, I'd pick RHEL6 instead of F13/F14. Maybe a year or two later the base OS is F16. This is entirely pragmatic. - In my (fairly long) experience customising upstreams for deployment, once your upstream has the basics you need, it's _a lot_ less work to backport specific things you need than to re-base, re-test, re-stabilise all your work on top of a new release often. Specially when your test surface is large. And ours is _huge_. Yes, backporting things is a pain, but it's visible and localised. And you know when you are done. Re-testing is a huge workload, and we're just not seeing it because very little of it is getting done. The test teams we have are good -- we'd just need 10x of them! So many bugs that come from library changes (churn) are not being found, reported or fixed; and this has very low visibility, and hard to measure completion. Earlier (F7, F9), stable-ish upstreams didn't have what we needed, so Fedora's bleeding edge approach was crucial. When RHEL6/CentOS comes out, that game changes profoundly. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] ANNOUNCE: New F11 XO-1build 115 Paraguay
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: Our short-term goal is to meet a release criteria of no regressions against build 801. Once this is done, we'll re-sync with the latest improvements from our upstreams, F11-XO1.5 and F11-XO1. Bravo. To Stephen, to all the ParaguayEduca folks pushing for this. To you. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Argentina List
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 8:42 PM, Gonzalo Odiard godi...@gmail.com wrote: The Decalogue is a proposal about how a project 1 to 1 should be, to provide to the ministry of education of the city of Buenos Aires. Its interesting remark that we and 12 associations are developing and signing the decalogue. This is good progress -- and I am frankly impressed with the govt there. One of the main challenges for SL OLPC is to educate governments about what's important to consider when planning 1:1 projects -- and avoid it all coming down to what's the shiniest laptop we can get for the lowest price. Which still happens, lots. The hard part is moving from shiniest to best fit for the challenges; and from laptop to the whole package view, including the laptop's technical suitability to kids' environments as well as important intangibles like community, educational orientation philosophy and openness... If you think from the perspective of the children and schools involved, those things make or break a project... but it is hard to know you need to evaluate them (specially for people in a conventional govt IT environment). And the evaluation is not easy. But if we were into easy, we wouldn't be here. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists
On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: So what do you see that we are missing to be able to do that? I'll assume you're referring to burning the usb disk. I agree with you -- it's hard to point at any single thing that would make it significantly easier (no silver bullet), and the easiest is to ship USB disks with SoaS on them (and a few people seem to be doing that). In any case, I'm not a user of the GUI iso-to-bootable-usb tools... someone closer to that user profile can probably help with hints as to pitfalls and gaps... cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: the real intention is this is where you start But... what's the target user for a this is where you start? Someone who can make their own spin... there's only very few of those target users, and they can help themselves (IOWs if there isn't a SoaS, they'll yum install sugar-*, set gdm to autologin and they'll be ok). Not many of those users are close to a school. Teachers who want to use SoaS in a classroom... there are lots of them... and they don't want to learn how to make spins. It's usually hard enough to burn the USB sticks so that they boot already. And they need many activities to be included, so they can give it to 6 or 7 year olds... Yes, there are some teachers who have a geek sidekick with linux/fedora know-how, but that's a vanishingly small number... cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists
On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: the real intention is this is where you start But... what's the target user for a this is where you start? Someone who can make their own spin... there's only very few of those target users, and they can help themselves (IOWs if there isn't a SoaS, they'll yum install sugar-*, set gdm to autologin and they'll be ok). Not many of those users are close to a school. Sebastian, SoaS'ers, I am aware that here everyone-but-the-ones-that-build-it are talking about SoaS. Personally, I am thankful for the work you do... I have also been using SoaS recently as a starting point for a SoaS matching OLPC builds and that was tremendously useful. Thanks! I'd reword what I wrote earlier to say: there is a huge need for something like SoaS that focusses mainly on being in the hands of teachers (and may be useful for testers and developers like me). From the outside, it seems there's nobody in better position to do it than you. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Mel Chua m...@melchua.com wrote: The short version is that instead of include all Activites by default, we're thinking of shipping very few (6) Activities by default - the ones that help users get further Activities and help I read Sebastian's post... and is less drastic than that. He seems to say: include only the well tested, known to work, actively maintained activities, with an eye towards activitries that serve as a good intro to the platform and that demo well. But you say only 6... Which one is it? The initial proposal I like; makes a lot of sense and raises the bar. IT basically increases the chances of a satisfactory first use. Six activities not so much -- you need many steps + internet to add activities... and it'll be random activity from ASLO, may well be unstable or useless. It significantly _reduces_ chances of satisfaction. All IMHO... m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists
On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 10:26 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: The problem with this approach is that it renders SoaS ineffective for new tryers of Sugar (i.e. the overwhelming majority of teachers and parents we are trying to reach). I don't think it will be any less ineffective than having 20 activities of which half have issues, crash or just don't run. Are people saying _only 6 activities work reliably?_ My question of which is it? was assuming there are more than 6 that run well, demo well, maintained, etc. So it meant which plan is it, 6 activities that allow downloading and installing of more, or the good ones? If there are only 6 good ones... would focus on making that list longer. Did APIs break with Sugar churn, Fedora churn? Developers upload without testing? (Rethorical! Flamefest warning! Those questions are bound to be a flamefest blaming people who don't deserve to be blamed... :-( ) cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS] non-free activities on ASLO
On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Yes. We ratified at a SLOBS meeting that non-free activities (or content) should *not* be hosted on ASLO, and attempted to specify what we mean by non-free: I personally think it is very good that free are clearly separated from non-free, and I think it's good strategically for all involved. There is one aspect that will be tricky on the content side -- it is very easy to create / release content that is in itself free, but dependent on non-free software. Picture the well-meaning content creator that releases a Flash interactive under a CC license (and it uses fancy Flash10 things that are not in Gnash). Educational content creators aren't as educated as FOSS programmers in the vagaries and politics of patents, software licensing and all (they are educated in other legalities, usually). We can't flame them for being dumb, they are smart about a different set of things. Much of their work will be what Debian would call contrib -- Free in itself but depending on non-free bits. While 'contrib' in Debian is usually not very big, if Sugar succeeds attracting content creators, it might be a big category... at least until the free tools mature, and the authors learn why it matters, switch tools, etc. It is a social process that will take a while -- I am sure there'll be 'contrib' stuff for quite a while, maybe forever. /rambling background So... what about contrib? m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praises OLPC in South America
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima yosh...@vpri.org wrote: And if she gave an impression to think that giving laptops to children in the disaster-hit country will solve their problems, it would be a political suicide. Do read Hillary's speech. It is actually pretty good, and the mention of OLPC is well framed amongst projects that can get LatAm countries into thriving societies (and economies). None of these projects will on its own turn around a region, but a smart combination of them, and serious work will. And this is visibly at work in many LatAm countries today. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 08:33 -0500, Gerald Ardito wrote: By the way, how do you upgrade the XOs (we have XO-1s) to .84? This is a very big deal for us. We use a local variant of the F11-XO1 images by Stephen Parrish, signed with the deployment keys. How well is that build working, from a let's use it in the field PoV? cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: If you ask me: our recent F11-XO1 builds have reached equal or better quality than build 801, provided you disable automatic power management. Are all activities working, including collaboration? In Gnome, can you actually use FF? Camera? Hopefully, they will complain a little less on the next upgrade to 0.86 and 0.88... Until they finally get used to the idea that software tends to improve over time rather than getting worse. Or we slow down to a rhythm that they can cope with ;-)! m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Video Chat, Video Editing and VOIP activities for Sugar
On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 3:33 AM, satyaakam goswami satyaa...@gmail.com wrote: Old one http://cinelerra.org/about.php still , also can look at the distros like ubuntu studio . Cinelerra is a quirky beast, designed for high end hw, with lots of UI complexity, abundant unexplained segfaults and but it works for me developers. May be it can be turned into the opposite of what it's been for the last few years. But it does seem like you have better candidates these days... m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] dealing with mailing lists
On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Luke Faraone l...@faraone.cc wrote: Your mail client doesn't collate mails with similiar content and identical Message-IDs? Maybe Gmail has me spoiled, but I'm sure there are ways in other clients... Same here on the gmail spoilage. But naturally not everyone likes it. Modern procmail has a 'catch duplicates' feature. It's not perfect -- just like gmail's, it leaks a dup every once in a while, specially if the mailing list sw messes with the message a lot -- but in practical terms it works just fine. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Mockup for collab.sugarlabs.org
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Collab_mockup I see that you are pointing to Ubuntu's brainstorm, which has a huge overlap with the wiki-ish blueprints and tasks/bugs as tracked in launchpad/malone. Comparing Ubuntu's brainstorm with their own use of blueprints+bugtracker, the blueprints+bugtracker win big time. Brainstorm takes a lot of page / screen real state for very few tasks, and the quality of discussion/interaction isn't very high. Maybe a better path for users to get into the wikipages that Walter mentioned (Feature Request, etc) would work? cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Need Live CD to take to Argentina
On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: You got some good replies already, but you may want to consider contacting Gustavo Ibarra or Gonzalo Odiard (cc'ed) who are pushing Sugar in Argentina. My thoughts exactly. Also -- if you're going to be in Buenos Aires, it is worthwhile to cross over to Uruguay. Colonia del Sacramento is a gorgeous city, there is a direct ferry from Buenos Aires harbour, and is of course Ceibal territory. I grew up in BA, and spent a lot of time in Colonia and its surroundings. Thoroughly recommended. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] hearing impaired education and Sugar
Hi David, I think the Ceibal / LATU team has also been looking at various accesibility tools for Sugar. I've been talking with them recently about a 'Zoom' tool for kids with limited vision (hoping to post about this soonish) , and I think they've done some work with a screen reader. CC'ing Guadalupe Artigas and Emiliano, as I suspect they may have been involved. cheers, m On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 5:47 AM, David Han ds...@bu.edu wrote: Hi all, I'm David Han, a Boston University student. I'm working with Caroline and Anurag in Boston. There is a prominent school for the hearing impaired in Allston, MA (Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing). This is very close to BU. I'm hoping to organize Sugar on a Stick workshops for the local community at the Honan-Allston Branch of the library. I would like to approach this school to participate in our workshops. Are there activities on Sugar that support the hearing impaired? -David Han ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sharing work between XOs/SOAS devices
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.com wrote: As our 5th graders are doing more and more work with their XOs, their being able to turn in and share their work products (as opposed to collaborating with others) is becoming more and more important. This is very high priority for me. At the moment I'm on leave, so please forgive brevity... deployments using XS/Moodle are in minority also so... - On 0.84/0.86 sharing Journal Entries via usb sticks just _does not work at all_. I have a patch for that on dev.l.o, posted recently here asking for review... (and then RL hit and I went on leave... but nobody's reviewed it :-/ ) - 0.84/0.82 cannot read Journal Entries saved on a USB stick by 0.82. This is serious as there is no sane upgrade path for the passionate committed teachers that have been putting work on their materials (upgrades in large deploymetns are done via reflash of the NAND, as olpc-update doesn't scale network-wise). I have an almost working patch for 0.84 to read JEs from 0.82, will try finish/post it soon. And I'll be begging for review on sugar-devel... - Now, re the workflow you describe when you have an XS, it is horrid. What I want to do ot make it simpler is... 1 - Teach the XS/Moodle about shared status of JEs or implement in Moodle a share this option; in both cases, it's for the files already saved automagically by the backup system. 2 - Make the backup UI more prominent, and also a UI of shared documents of my classmates 3 - Add in the Journal some option to force-a-backup-sync-now, or a very smart heuristic to do it in the background. Does the above help? m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sharing EToys projects
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 12:31 AM, Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.com wrote: I am working with 140 5th grade students who are using XOs (mostly) and netbooks with SOAS. About 50 of them are using Etoys to create projects. I am trying to find a way to share them with their teachers and each other. When I try to upload them to a Moodle course and them download them, the downloaded files can't be read by EToys. If you are using the Moodle included in XS 0.5.2 or 0.6, I added the etoys mimetypes so this would work: http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/martin/moodle.git/commit/?h=mdl19-xsid=c4a2a76328b5ff0ee8d4289445f41b42ffd46e6d m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Yama Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: Elonex One clones are available right now for about $75 USD in quantities over 100. They were released original well after the XO 1, and have about similar hardware. Originally they sold for about $300. Again, probably unsold stock. The XO seems to be about the only one defying Moore's :-) No, we are in good company. I am seeing some companies doing misleading PR over *incomplete* laptops that allegedly cost USD100. Except that if you add ram, storage and some kind of battery, they cost 200. And Wifi is still not included. Forget about it being designed for kids, rugged, long life batteries that don't explode, high quality screens or anything. We opened this market, so it's good to see it evolve. It'd be nice to see people build something actually comparable, at a comparable price. Nobody does right now. Do they muddy the waters? Heck yeah! Dodgy PR is way cheaper than engineering. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 4:57 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: ROFL!!! żte tragaste un payasito? This is not a forum for trolling. And do take note that this work... is serious work for a lot of us. Not for you clearly. I don't think you know much about the strange dynamics of manufacturing electronics. If you did, you'd be looking for more information about what these people are doing. It is incredibly hard to get good pricing, unless you cheat somehow. And there are many ways of cheating. If you are curious, maybe you should contact those suppliers and ask them if they have a limited stock or whether they can build them at that price, and on what conditions -- cash up-front? how long before delivery? Is the price FOB, and at which port? A usual trick in many markets where stock is expensive (and short lived as 'hot electronics' are) is to get a good profit on the early sales (when the product is hot), and then dump the remaining stock (sometimes below cost) at the end of the sales cycle. I don't know how the technique is called, but I've seen it in action since I was around 14 years old, and bought my computer parts at the tail end of it :-) I think the battery we ship is for anyone to buy from the suppliers -- but they'll have to bring the whole machine down in consumption radically for our battery is very low power. And that takes real engineering. Screen -- it's not ours I suspect (but I don't know for a fact). m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/04/playpower-80s-computing-21st-century Interesting. Though the challenge they have -- localising closed src binaries... to non ASCII-using locales -- is rather hard. Hard not to note the very misinformed description of OLPC in Uruguay: Recently, the project made a group to provide computers for every student in Uruguay, but after years of deal-making and political machinations, it is still only making relatively slow progress. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 11:48 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr je...@merlintec.com wrote: The non ASCII is a complication, but changing binaries was very popular in Brazil in the 1980s (the copyright law here was only extended to software in 1987). I am argentine, and grew up patching binaries on the C=64. It's been downhill from there ;-) Anyway, the point is: within ascii, you can binary-patch to localise (with some imagination and elbow grease). But non-latin scripts are... very hard. Even for th open source projects mentioned -- anything like utf8 text handling on 8bit cpus is just going to be pain. They're more likely to use cranky codepages. Ugh. I sure don't want to return to *that* world. The main factor for the low costs is Moore's law: you can either get twice the transistors for the same price in 18 months or the same transistors for about half the cost. I don't think it's quite like that. Making chips is only cheap if you have huge volume. Basic QA of chips and boards is costly. Assembly (it has countless parts) is costly too. Financing a production run requires a lot of money, and stocking all of that costs... lots. It's very likely the they are just selling very old stock -- that's the only thing that'd explain the price. As soon as it runs out, any crazy entrepreneur that wants to make more will find out the real costs. Anyway, it's a great project, if limited. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Some Questions About Setting Up A School Server
On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Jim needs help setting up a school server. For starters, I referred him to: He has the following questions. what's missing at least in part is network topology and possibilities, especially on the LAN side of the xs. There are some graphs that illustrate the network topology - see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Installing_Software for example, assuming eth0 for WAN (internet access) and eth1 for LAN (xo) access, can we connect eth1 to a switch and connect an access point to the switch (this lets us connect xo boxes either by wifi or by wire). Yes yes yes. Do read the links above :-) as a different example, how to configure one of those cheap little home routers so we can connect eth1 to the router and then connect xo boxes either to the built-in switch on the router or the built-in access point on the router to allow the xs dhcp server to respond to xo requests for ip addresses (i.e. inhibit the router's dhcp server)? I have seen instructions for at least one model of AP in our 'XS Techniques' page. But as you know, there are gazillion APs out there. Cheap, expensive, simple, complex... some even work. You might have to do some research on the model you have, and read the documentation that comes with it -- or that the vendor posts on the big wide internet. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Montessori madness...
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: I've been reading Montessori Madness for a few hours now, and I find Another good one is Montessori Today http://www.amazon.com/Montessori-Today-Comprehensive-Education-Adulthood/dp/080521061X The funny thing is that since I've been exposed to Bryan Berry's poignant theory of education, I can't help looking at Montessori and thinking that it is excellent, but not because Montessori's approach and materials are inherently better. It is excellent because - Montessori teachers are teachers who are clearly smart and passionate about education, and the school environment (principals, etc) share the smarts and the passion. - Parents sending kids to a Montessori school are smart and passionate about education. - The group of kids is small and manageable, so the smart and passionate teachers can work their magic. And that wins. They could teach with computers, or abacuses or post it notes or books written in Esperanto. It's all a catalyst that brings the 3 (purely human!) elements above together. Indirection. A social mind trick. Of course, I like most of Montessori's approach. But remove the human elements and... poof! it's effects will be gone. Montessori strategies in a crowded group with an unenthusiastic teacher have very slim chances. Bryan, you need to postulate your theory more formally :-) cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Montessori madness...
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Dave Bauer dave.ba...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Martin, can you point to Bryan's theory or give me a hint on search terms to find it? I googled for it too, don't think he's posted anything google-readable. He mentioned it in a couple of presentations at OLPC. Boils down to the fact that most of the early trials / pilots of technology or technique in education, including things like the Paper/Negroponte adventure many years ago, Montessori's own work with kids, etc succeed because they are done with small groups of children and passionate talented educators. So IIRC Bryan shows one of the pictures of Papert back in the 70s working with kids and computers in Dakar, and points out that you have Papert and 12 kids. The computers are redundant. You could do the same with a picture of Montessori herself, with kids and her specially designed learning tools. It is a controversial take on things of course :-) -- but helps me keep focused on making simple tools that just work (see my sig!) for teachers and kids in crowded schools. There is no silver bullet the foundational book on programming said. It may as well have been about teaching, or any complex human endeavour. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Montessori madness...
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Yama Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: Let me go a step further than Martin. Anything, including the bestest and newest computer thingie, will fail when the expected enabler is an unenthusiastic teacher. Sometimes. And sometimes it will make an unenthusiastic teacher interested (maybe permanently, maybe for a while). Sometimes it will open a window for curious kids (that is: all of them) to explore a bit on their own. I don't agree on the purely negative reading of WBs theory. And actually nobody here does, otherwise we'd use our time in something more productive. But it is a very good kick in the gut to make us realize that we aren't the star in the movie. The protagonists are the children and teachers. We're just... an accessory. Sometimes useful, sometimes getting in the way. And I am here to maximize the useful, and minimize the getting in the way. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] XO Special interest group at Sugar Labs
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Martin Dengler mar...@martindengler.com wrote: 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. Maybe it is just a new name to recognise the efforts currently underway? It doesn't sound like David is going to start a new project on this. Maybe applying a label is a way to give it more visibility? m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] XO Special interest group at Sugar Labs
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 4:06 PM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: The goal is to provide a place where the various people working But there _are_ people working on this already, and they probably have plans, priorities, etc. Why don't we just let them do their thing? Are they asking for external planning? m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] SLOBs Position on SoaS
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org wrote: Personally i would just get on with it and let the code do the talking... Produce the best distribution that you can and people will use, respect and protect it. +1. Sebastian -- you have unending respect from both developers and (most importantly) the users. Even if the nitty-gritty of the SoaS/SL/Sugar/OLPC interaction is not always ideal, you are building something very concrete for the users. In practical terms, of course it is important that things are handled fairly, but in terms of worth (as in is this worth it), I'd suggest taking stock of the amazing impact of SoaS. Most OLPC fans I know are running SoaS, just yesterday I met a guy who saw me with the XO and mentioned he was been playing with SoaS, in a completel unrelated gathering. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] The Future of Sugar on a Stick
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: We already have de...@lists.laptop.org for OLPC, fedora-olpc-l...@redhat.com and others for Fedora, debian-olpc-de...@lists.alioth.debian.org for Debian, ubuntu-sugart...@lists.ubuntu.com for Ubuntu. Why SoaS would be different and share the mailing list with the upstream developers? And I think it is wrong and counterproductive to have so many mailing lists. - All have very modest subscription numbers, and very low traffic. - Anyone has to follow a lot of them to keep track of things! - But most importantly: *where the hell am I supposed to post anything*? We'll have even more cross-posting in lists where you have 90% overlap, and to make matters worse, some of the lists involved here have broken Reply-to settings that _break_ cross-list discussions. So replies to a crosspost that involves fedora-olpc for example _break_ the discussion. Human brains s are _excellent_ at filtering, and we are a small group. Yes, all of these are sub-projects of a grander Sugar (and Fedora, and Debian, and Ubuntu, and OLPC) vision. These subprojects deserve a separate identity -- but a separate identiy does not equal a separate forum of discussion. We all talk in one shared space, but retain our name and affiliation. We need to hear all the voices and we naturally filter the messages that are relevant. -- a separate identiy does not equal a separate forum of discussion -- cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Where should we put Lesson Plans? Currwiki?
Some notes I think may be interesting. On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.comwrote: For the Moodle advocates. I am a big Moodle fan. But I don't think its our right now solution for the work we are talking about doing. 1. Our target, elementary school teachers are not currently using either Moodle or Sugar, adding both at once makes the learning curve even harder. Adding a 3rd system... easier? 1. We are focusing on lesson plans in the 1 hour and even 20-minute groupwork time frames. Moodle is more focused on longer time frames. I am about to include José Cedeno's new 'timeline' courseformat which should make classroom usage a bit better :-) 1. We are focusing on what the teacher will do and what the class will do both online and offline during the lesson as well as learning goals, standards, help for the teacher in differentiating the lesson etc. Think the teachers guide for the text book. Moodle is more focused on what the student is doing online. Its not a very natural fit. That sounds a lot like the paper-based materials Peru is putting together. A booklet for the teacher that guides a (probably multi-day) lesson called XO-Reporter that covers lots of things, from choosing a topic to report on, asking good questions, writing in news style with inverted pyramid -- some parts involve using the XO. http://www.perueduca.edu.pe/olpc/archivos/Fasc_PERIODISTA.pdf More like that (though of varied depth) http://www.perueduca.edu.pe/olpc/OLPC_fichasfasc.html For new teachers, and in agreement that we are snowing them with a ton of new things, these docs seem to be most useful _on paper_. I cry a bit for the lost trees, but we do need these stepping stones. And heck, I like my key guides / books / references to be on paper. If things to aid support computer use want to use the same screen I am trying to use for something else, it's a losing proposition. 1. Moodle has tremendous promise in terms of reducing teacher workload. Here is an example of what I hope that in the future Moodle will be able to: 1. Provide a link that students click and they open a Write document that is a template/scaffolding for a specific assignment, say writing a scientific argument. I have _just_ published a Moodle update on Friday that should do this. If a teacher creates a template and uploads it as part of Moodle topic 1. When the document is saved it is automatically turned in as Homework in Moodle allowing the teacher to review and comment on the document from anywhere, even on days when the class does not see the science teacher. That's a bit harder :-) but doable. However, I still see Moodle as just one format teachers will use. Of course :) m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Where should we put Lesson Plans? Currwiki?
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Thank Martin! Your email really helped me. No prob. I generally agree w your notes, except that reuse is heavily crossed by - languages and dialects - local culture, mores and MoE study programme not sure what Curriki's approach is. Is there room for various Spanish variants? British English even? m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] The Future of Sugar on a Stick
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.com wrote: Short Term Action Items: * We create a SoaS mailing list. * We establish the SoaS development team. if you split off sugar-dev, to reach the involved people you either have to crosspost all the time, or get everyone sub'd to both. And from the tasks/issues... very few of our issues are so narrowly defined to be only SoaS or only Sugar or only Fedora, specially when we start exploring the area. Splitting up the infra forces your hand -- before stating you have a task, a problem, a project, you have to choose in what part of the stack you want to address it. And that's not something you can usually do, and even if you can, it is usually not a good idea to. So again, you have to CC all the lists. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Where should we put Lesson Plans? Currwiki?
What David is saying is true. Current situation - For ease of integration - use Moodle itself, and linux-for-education.org is a good place to do it. There is no other curriki-like moodle instance that I know of. Moodle.org is building an index of such resources though. - IME Curriki is mainly an index of resources -- only some of its content uses curriki's wiki AFAICS. And is focused on content that is online. There is no packaging of content for offline use -- in Moodle or in Sugar. Probably because the content is not hosted at curriki itself. On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Luke Faraone l...@faraone.cc wrote: Hm, that doesn't sound right: wouldn't Curriki benefit by making their content easily convertible to a variety of formats? We'd all win, but that is a ton of hard work. And you actually have to host the content. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] student guidelines _very_ rough draft
FWIW, Helen Foster @ Moodle handles that -- according to Google's SoC ppl -- is one of the best-run GSoCs. What I hear from students is that the explicit 'expectations' document is very good guidance. All the docs are -- I think -- interesting: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Category:GSOC as a mentor, Helen is always there, and sends me brief kind emails in advance of deadlines, calls on meta-mentors to help when I am bogged down and not answering to my mentees in timely fashion, etc. Her approach is really outstanding. As a mentor for 3 runs now, I have so say that the best indicators of success have been... - The time I spend on it -- not just direct irc time -- quality code review takes a lot of time! - How hard the students work, and how skilled they are, *before* the project starts. A student that can't get a checkout and a build going and patch a bug or two without help is of no interest to me (in the context of GSoC). Pretty damn high bar, but there are a lot of people applying for GSoC -- get the best ones :-) -- and it will be valuable dev time diverted from other work. hth, m On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 12:45 AM, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: This summer, Sugar Labs had 12 students working under various gsoc, intern, workstudy, and co-op programs. Overall, the results have been promising. There are a few things which we can do to improve the experience for everyone. Based on conversations with other opensource project the three keys to success for working with students are: 1. Clearly defined expectations for student, sponsor, and project. 2. Clearly project plan with implementation strategy. 3. Experienced mentor. Below is a very rough draft of a student guidelines document. I would appreciate suggestions. david Thank you for your interest in working, and learning, with Sugar Labs. Sugar Labs has a large number of smart and passionate student participants. These student often go on to become Sugar Lab's most important contributors and project leaders. One of the advantage of being a student is that you can combine your learning experience at Sugar Labs with your official school activites through intern-ships, co-ops, work study programs, and privately sponsored contracts. The following guidelines are intended to insure that your Sugar Lab's experience is beneficial for you, your school, and Sugar Labs. Working with Sugar Lab's as an intern, co-op, or work study student means that there is a contractual obligation between you, your school, and Sugar Lab's. This document represents the thoughts and deliberations which have gone into making your experience at Sugar Labs beneficial for you, your school, and Sugar Labs.[REPEATED TEXT] == project description== Experience has shown than the most important factor in having a successful experience at Sugar Labs is your project plan. The plan represents the vision of what you want to accomplish and provides roadmap for how to make that vision a reality. Exploration, collaboration, and reflection. Plan provides boundaries so you can freely explore. First big project for many students. Done before starting program good plan implies investment by student-investment by student results in good mentor. Fail to plan - Plan to fail. The plan should include: [CHECK LIST] *deliverable *learning objective ==mentor== The second most important piece to success is your mentor. link to community master - apprentice ==General information== Below is general information for filling out your school's forms. ===Overview=== Sugar Labs is organized as a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy[1]. The SFC is an umbrella organization which handles the accounting work, financial management, and makes sure the activities of Sugar Labs fit within the scope of the non-profit status. ===Mission statement=== The mission of Sugar Labs® is to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, and teach with the Sugar learning platform. ===Funding=== Sugar Labs is funded through donations from its contributing members. ===Agency Name=== Sugar Labs (A member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy) ===Agency Contact=== Bradley M. Kuhn ===Postal Address=== Software Freedom Conservancy 1995 Broadway FL 17 New York, NY 10023-5882 ===Telephone=== +1-212-461-3245 tel +1-212-580-0898 fax ===Email=== conserva...@softwarefreedom.org ===Addition information=== For additional information or forms please contact dfarn...@sugarlabs.org. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] DB module for moodle in XS server serously coool and needed addittion
On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 2:56 AM, David Van Asschedvanass...@gmail.com wrote: To create a easy reference for linux commands, the best way was to use the Moodle database module. You can create quite elaborate databases which are then easily edited and added to by users. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=132152 :-) m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] FSF attitude to xo and sugar
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Sean DALYsdaly...@gmail.com wrote: I have interviewed Mr. Stallman several times in the past and will brief him on the current situation. I don't know if he wrote the actual copy in question. It may be more effective to talk with Mako Hill. He is well known by Sugaristas/OLPC'istas past and present; he is very well informed that XOs are not shipping with Windows (with very specific exceptions of XOs _bought by MS_ long ago) and is part of the board @ FSF. AIUI, Bernie should have Mako at hand at this time. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Bernie Innocentiber...@codewiz.org wrote: +1. And after dinner we could get a laptop and write down some notes on workable management practices for blessed projects like SoaS. Get onto some coding -- it's more fun and productive than policy-ing :-) m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 3:47 AM, Michael Stonemich...@laptop.org wrote: but, unfortunately, I'm now reassured that I'm right that most of the really big interesting Sugar-defining stuff like networking, collaboration, hackability, customizablility, performance, simplicity, security, etc. was delightfully labeled as either wet string or pass. :) Those are also the hardest :-/ -- both to implement and to demonstrate that the new implementation is better. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Bernie Innocentiber...@codewiz.org wrote: My initial reaction was that community projects work by employing maintainers rather than project managers. Exactly. A PM can only fire you. A maintainer/leader can show his/her priorities in showing areas of focus, encouraging some changes, discouraging others, and implementing strategies like newcomers have to maintain an unloved chunk of code for a while (and show maturity realising that a refactor may not be accepted) or before I take your feature patch, let's see that cleanup bugfix series finished first. There was an hidden assumption in my thinking that a maintainer /could not/ tell people what to do based on the fact that his workers are unpaid volunteers. Good leaders guide the project, sometimes softly and subtly, sometimes more... openly :-D At a very basic level, it's a carrot and stick thing. The job of any half-skilled project manager would be detecting these stalls and mitigate them whenever possible. With _what_ tools? A PM hasn't got the carrot (which is usually the recognition of the leader: Torvalds accepted my patch!). A PM is a manager. A manager is usually someone who can fire you if you don't do your job. A meta-comment on your post: you don't need to apologize and be shy for Um, I do. You guys are doing the work, so you know a lot more than me about how SL works, or doesn't. I've penned this reply because the SL crowd showed some agreement. If you guys tell me I am off the mark, well, I am outside and bound to misunderstand the org from here. It might tell you about external perceptions, but it would still mean that I am wrong. (And I think this kind of respect is important. All organisations are misunderstood. One only need to read olpcnews to see.) I recently got useful criticism from Bemasc, Christoph and Daniel on #sugar regarding our relationship with Deployments. Their feeling is That is interesting. I am starting to work more with deployments in LatAm, perhaps the deployments that are easier to help and easier to get help back from. Still, in general terms it might be years before deployments are in a position to repay your help. For SL sustainability in terms of effort, I'd cast a wider look. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 4:47 PM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote: I don't think we really expect to be repaid, at least my opinion is that it's sad to see so much duplicated work and wasted effort because knowledge is not where it's actually needed. Just that. Completely agree with you. My point was about Bernie's statement; below slightly edited: I'm (mainly) interested in getting *contribution* from deployments In both aspects -- in the coming months I hope to be able to help better communication between the various parties. Deployments, OLPC, Sugar. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Assessment in Karma
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 3:14 AM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: We mostly assess that which can easily be measured rather than that which relates to the important education outcomes. Yes. We mostly assess that which can be easily measured _by humans_. Imagine how it goes when we narrow that to the paltry bit that computers can assess... and computers spit out cute, glowing 3D rendered numbers. Bad practice is already entrenched in national curricula, does automating bad practice (lower order assessment) mean that it can be done in less time, leaving more time for good practice, or does it further entrench bad practice? That seems to be the central point in this discussion. I don't have an answer, but for me, automating lower order assessments would be a low priority project. I agree with your take on the discussion. But we don't automate bad practice, we make it narrower, hence worse. What we can automate is so narrow that the big numbers that come out of a tiny slice of it will overshadow everything. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.
On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 11:22 PM, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Eclipse and Apache both have criteria for becoming a official Note that Apache's reason to run this Apache Projects is to _extend the legal protection shield to other projects_. If doesn't care one zot about what the resulting software _does_. And they only looked into that once they had their main mission (the webserver) pretty much cooked. I've advised several projects that wanted to do like apache, and once they understood what apache does, they did not want to do like apache no more :-) And also... and completely from the outside... I'll apologise in advance for saying something I know might be controversial. I worry that SL seems to have -- for a external party like me -- more bureaucracy than it has people doing. IMHExperience, the projects I enjoy working on, and that I see being productive have a much lower procedure/label/committe : contributor ratio. Boards, subprojects and such are good things to remember to do when a project gets big and tensions surface (aside from some specific things you want right from the start -- license, etc). This comment is not meant as a trolling attempt (though I fear it'll end up in tears). The core of what I am trying to say is: doing these things too early has some risks -- just off the top of my head - The FOSS version of being top-heavy, the distraction - Newcomers reading all these big names (board, procedures, the board blessing the SIG) and getting the wrong idea about the project -- this can discourage the go-getters that like get-it-done environments. - Fostering armchair quarterbackers (like yours truly right now :-/ ) and endless bickering (hmm! debian-legal) -- these are attracted to big name and big infra projects. I really like GregDek's line: I would avoid elections for as long as possible. Vote with your work. Time for me to shut up. From now on I assume you know about these risks, and won't mention the topic in polite company no more. After all, I am not working my ass off on SL, you are. Thanks for your patience :-) m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Assessment in Karma
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Bryan Berrybr...@olenepal.org wrote: I agree that automatic assessment is no magic cure-all but it does free teachers from a lot of drudgery in grading worksheets. I understand your point, and respect your good intentions. I worry -- quite a bit -- about the outcome however... Teachers should be grading student essays not arithmetic exercises or vocabulary exercises. What I worry is that once we automated arithmetic exercises, they'll focus on that... as you say We especially need automatic assessment for contexts where teachers don't have time to grade homework, like Nepal, India, Pakistan, etc. So they don't have time for either. We automate one, and the fact that we provide easy to get, easy to use grades takes over. They still don't have time for essays. [ The sad thing I find is that they *will* find time to make pretty graphs of the paltry numbers they get. The graphs make the teacher look good and in control. ] I think that Karma is approaching from a much different vantage point than teachers in the developed world do. We are not looking to capture excellence but rather diagnose if kids are having trouble with basic skills and give kids instant feedback rather than make them wait a week to get their graded homework back, if it ever comes back. John Hattie, in pretty developed NZ, has done a lot of work on that exact track (early diagnosis of kids falling behind on basics and instant feedback). Hence Asttle. Maybe I am a luddite and it'll happen anyway. Hmmm. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] (Ab)using the Journal for stuff that the user didn't do, create, or access
On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 6:18 AM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote: The idea is that the journal would have an actions view that would be closer to what you refer to. Would contain actions that the user carried and events that happened around the user. The Journal as Sugar's documents view is heavily influenced by the core concepts in the social constructivist approach -- and this is one of the best things we have in Sugar. When it works well, it is a living document of things done, so you can go back and work more on them, and also so you can go back and see what you did and (consciously or not) reflect on your own ways of doing (learning, exploring, fooling around...) So I have to agree with Daniel -- things that are not the outcome of a user action do not belong in the Journal. They belong to the home view. This is probably a challenge in itself too, as it starts getting crowded. The Home/Activities view already has 2... um... modes? This is confusing at the moment: users that find themselves with the list mode often think they are in the journal, and hit F3 repeatedly, and complain about something not working. I suspect there is a way out of that confusion that still allows various views/modes within the home view. Funny enough, when people started looking at options of what to do with 'ring' UI widgets, we saw lots of mockups that took advantage of the circle -- radial zones demarcated by backgrounds or limit lines, various zooming options, etc. IOWs, we probably have some good options to augment the home view, options that don't involve a list view, if we rummage through the old concept drawings :-) cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] (Ab)using the Journal for stuff that the user didn't do, create, or access
On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 6:46 AM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote: I don't see where we disagree any of us, so maybe I'm explaining badly myself. Let me try again. I agree that the journal should be a journal, thus primarily about actions and events and not about static pieces of data or code. You're right, and I got lost in the description of a more granular Journal. Re-reading, it makes sense. And less directly related, I referred to a new view in the shell for the contents of the file system. This is not strictly needed by the journal concept but has been shown useful as a stepping stone between the journal and the underlying file system and for sharing files with non-Sugar systems. Having this view allows us to have a real journal without losing needed functionality. That's excellent -- with Sugar becoming more usable on mixed-use scenarios (where the user may access other desktop environments) such as Fedora 11 and recent DebianUbuntu, and OLPC shipping an OS that facilitates that switching, having a Journal that can go hunting in ~ is incredibly valuable. (as is a gnome fs plugin for the journal :-) ) m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Get Satisfaction
On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 2:03 PM, Caroline Meekscarol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: One of their features is the ability to do single sign to gather more information about the user. F Here is my idea of how it might work. Once Sugar is registered with an XS we could create a single sign on that would let us know what name and XS-url a Sugar user is from (similar to how our single sign on with Moodle works). This should basically tell us what deployment we are getting feedback from without the user doing anything. It would be a win for Get Satisfaction if we did this because it would be a great case study for them to write up. Would this be enough of a win for us to be worth doing? Any volunteers to do it on our end? I would encourage support people working on XS-based HTTP proxies that can perhaps do SSO on behalf of the local user against specific preconfigured remote servers. Having an HTTP proxy that talks with our idmgr service is good for other reasons too -- we can say only allow internet access to registered users, and further that control into Moodle, so we can use Moodle's sophisticated and fine-grained rights system to allow/ban internet access. But I would keep meticulously away from setting things up for any specific service. It is up to every school to decide what to do. The protections FERPA related laws provide are valuable and important. The goal of preserving privacy is one of our goals. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Get Satisfaction
On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Luke Faraonel...@faraone.cc wrote: I think it would be useful to expose a (optionally disableable by the school) option within the UI to report a problem, which (after gaining the - If the user can connect to the XS and Moodle (via the AP! using DNS!) - and register! (needed to login...) - and the Moodle admin UI works (Apache! PHP! PostgreSQL!) - and it can post it to a server (wooohoo! Internet!) then ummm... pretty much everything works. If _anything_ is broken, such bugreporting tool won't work. In more modest terms it would be good to have a command similar to olpc-netlog (as seen on the XO OS). Also note that apport is based on a ton of work (automated and manual) at the other end sorting useless reports. It is based on Ubuntu having lots of hands. Better to think things through before bikeshedding? m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] SoaS with SD cards irregularities
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 5:41 AM, Bill Kerrbillk...@gmail.com wrote: Variables include: ... - what is the partition table as printed by fdisk -p /dev/sdX ? - for the main partition on the USB, where the SoaS is stored (a FAT variant?) what are the fs options? (we need the moral equivalent of tune2fs -l /dev/XXX for vfat partitions...) - for the 'overlay' partition, after it has been fubar'd we need some diagnostics. Are there any? cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
