Re: [sugar] [Proposal] .xot bundles, for translations
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:33 PM, Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What I meant to say is that all the good things we get from a bespoke packaging format, we can get from rpm with a few conventions as to the directories where things land. A couple of additional notes from a private subthread... ...there are a few ways to use rpm/yum for unprivileged users (alternative DB, fakeroot, relocatable pkgs...), and I think we can use them for this. In fact, we could even build a simplistic rpm installer in python that handles a subset of what rpm does (hopefully this is not needed, it'd detract from the idea quite a bit) One valid criticism to using rpm - from a Sugar perspective - is that Sugar won't want to become tied to Fedora/RH. There's a case for thinking through if we can actually use rpm the way we want on Debian and/or apt on Fedora. Both rpm and apt are available in old/buggy versions in the other family of distros. Using rpm or apt Sugar would getting a bit further away from Windows (does cygwin carry either?) - a bit less so on OSX (where the fink toolchain will probably work alright, specially with translation pkgs, which are by definition noarch). cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] XO identity shared via Browse
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Sebastian Silva [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's reasonably likely that the XS will be an OpenID IDP (noting all the serious caveats around OpenID that make it a phishing-magnet), but _first_ the laptop needs to identify itself to the xS. Ok yes I did misunderstand the original problem, sorry. Please let me be of all assistance I can in integrating OpenID on the XS or trying out stuff here in Peru. This is an important part of our strategy down here. Ah, that'd be great. The identity mgmt on the XS is handled by Moodle. There's an unofficial OpenID _client_ plugin for it, but we need a _server_ (IDP) plugin. Moodle is PHP and there are PHP libs and I suspect there may be sample implementations. I know the moodle API for authentication plugins very well, maybe we can work together on this. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] XO identity shared via Browse
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:46 PM, Luke Faraone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 17:42, Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If we could switch to https easily, we could skip all this song and dance and just use client certs. Why can't we, exactly? More and more non-standardness is _bad_ for security. Note that this won't be 200% bulletproof -- we're talking about a brief reasonably secure exchange prefacing a naked http conversation. We may later use https a bit more, but it's way overkill for now. So we are aiming for moderate security. Also note that OpenID is in the conversation, and that is _not_ a particularly secure protocol (see the archive, and the many _many_ very good posts from Ben Laurie here and on his blog on the matter). OpenID is somewhat standard though ;-) Back to your good question Why can't we, exactly? [ Note - this is, again, fruit of a lot of analysis and discussion. I cannot write a huge long essay on each little point - if you wonder why a particular point is made, it might be worthwhile a quick google over the archives... let's avoid shallow conversation ;-) ] To use client certs, we have to use server certs. As I mentioned in earlier emails, at registration time, the XO gives the XS its pubkey. The XS gives _nothing_ to the XO. a - we need a server cert - the XS upon installation can generate one. How do we pass it to the XO so it can whitelist it and avoid the dodgy cert dialogues that mean nothing to a 6 year old? (Registration? see my notes below) - the XS could be preloaded with a trusted cert that OLPC distributed - if they all get the same cert, anyone can impersonate an XS at any time. If we push it to regional certs, it generates a lot of additional work for the deployment team (remember - the deployment team is usually 3~4 admins to 5K or more XSs, half of which have no internet connection). b - the XO needs to trust the XS's cert - - trust a cert received at registration? (yes, but see below...) - get it via PKI (a ton of infrastructure work, not worthwhile for moderate security) - get it whitelisted directly in the OS image - if all XSs have the same cert. - trust any cert? Woes of changing the registration process... Yep, probably the best solution is to change the reg process. However that means a lot of changes, and it means that this will require 9.1 And it's very important that we do this in a way that can be deployed on 8.2 . Many large deployments are going ahead with 8.2 soon and may not deploy 9.1 for a very long time. OTOH, they have easier means to deploy an updated Browse.xo, and may be even waiting for 8.2.1 If we are to change the protocol for 9.1 we need to - Change things on the XS and on the XO (yes) - Add a refresh/update registration mechanism - which we don't have now - Think carefully how we are going to support interop between old clients / new server and viceversa. Add that to the test matrix (ouch!). luckily, the protocol is a trivial xml-rpc. But getting it all done with good polish (think what would Apple do?) is not. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] XO identity shared via Browse
On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 3:10 PM, Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Can we please not duke out the issues with OpenID on this particular list? +1. Two quick notes to Sebastian - Ben's criteria on security and the internet is surprisingly important as he's one of the key devs behind the apache https implementation. And - if you read his posts on his blog... you'll see that the OpenID guys ended up agreeing, and working out together that a native browser implementatino is the only safe path. Those are two tidbits you'll find if you follow that (now old) conversation. ... But I've come around since then -- an XS IdP will probably mean people expect to be able to use their OpenID from anywhere, including e.g. internet cafe machines that are not their XOs, in which case the strong OOB authentication to the IdP would be absent, thus we're back down to a password, thus we go down the rabbit hole of stupidity that I was trying to avoid in the first place. Well, that scenario I think is alright -- their identity naturalyl with them if they have their XO, but without it... well, it's not. Still, it would only be with them at an internet cafe with their XO if their IDP is internet-visible and authenticates them over the Internet connection. In other words: not by default on any XS build, possibly never ;-) (hopefully something that is opt-in for the local team once the bits are in place...) For those just tuning in, the whole story of Jabber on the XO has basically been colorfully fucked, as has that of the entire collaboration stack. I suggest further proposals of actually using Jabber for anything wait until the basic XO implementation gets to the point where IRC was 20 years ago -- namely, working. Well put. There's another (offtopic) bit of news on that saga: it turns out that a part of the problem (on the XS side at least) has been because little time has been spent understanding ejabberd. Now, ejabberd has gotten significantly better lately at things that we care about, but with a bit of doco-reading-fu ejabberd is turning out to be a very reliable workhorse. Just got to know how to talk to it :-) m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [Proposal] .xot bundles, for translations
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 6:58 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have been thinking of having a separate place in the filesystem for _new_ translations, and using RPM to manage the installation and upgradation of the new translations. What is the downside of RPMs? If users edit the localisation locally, that is _fine_ and we can provide a mechanism to make an rpm easily out of it. rpm has limited support for user installable packages that are meant to be installed in your homedir. Maybe it can serve this purpose, even within its limitations? If that doesn't work properly, maybe we install the rpm as root, but invoking rpm with --noscripts, and perhaps auditing the pkg manifest to check for anything with suid flags, etc. We could even build a dumb rpm unpacker/installer but I doubt it is needed. A new bundle format makes us more incompatible with the world. Example: someone builds a localisation for us, it won't work for Fedora, and viceversa. Building bespoke sofware has a huge long term cost so when we do it, we better get a ton of value, something radically better and hopefully with immediate payoff. Installing a bunch of files in /home is not leading edge enough to justify this, IMHO. cheers, martin langhoff -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [Proposal] .xot bundles, for translations
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 6:49 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Fedora does not have a standard solution either, so I'm not sure where you're going with this. We have to invent something. RPM is not obviously the right solution. So Fedora doesn't use rpm files for localization packages? What does it use then? If I say 'yum search catalan' it returns a bunch of rpms - kde-l10n-Catalan for example. What else could this mean? Debian does the same, AFAICS... cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [Proposal] .xot bundles, for translations
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 7:34 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please re-read Sayamindu's original message. Thanks. I don't find anything too special there. Perhaps I wasn't clear earlier. What I meant to say is that all the good things we get from a bespoke packaging format, we can get from rpm with a few conventions as to the directories where things land. You can still do local user edits by either editing the files in-place, or editing a copy of the files, which is kept in a local directory that is in the 'path' for localization files. The pros and cons of both options can be argued separately, but both can work, and many additional tricks can be put into action too. So - I can't see anything that rpm can't handle, and I can't see an interesting upside to building a bespoke mechanism to deploy files. Perhaps it exists, and is really an overriding advantage that explains why we'd want to carry the significant additional long term burden (on us, and on everyone else) of a bespoke format. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] XO identity shared via Browse
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:19 PM, Sebastian Silva [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That's a different model. We want the openID _provider_ to be either on the laptop itself or on the school server. Since the _server_ has a changing FQDN, this becomes harder. The solution would be to propose a change to the protocol or register the school servers domains (or subs) with a Dynamic DNS provider. Now we are talking, this is only a technical problem. Hi! We've discussed openid several times on this list -- do google the archives for the full argument :-) -- It's reasonably likely that the XS will be an OpenID IDP (noting all the serious caveats around OpenID that make it a phishing-magnet), but _first_ the laptop needs to identify itself to the xS. So we are talking about that first step. As you've spotted, we can't use openID there. The plans that seem viable, after a lot of consideration, are - A backchannel call using SSH - Browse.xo when connecting to something that looks like the XS will trigger an ssh connection to the server, grab a one-time-use token over the ssh connection and use it to prove its identity over http. - A challenge-response call using the fact that the XS knows the public SSH key of the XO. So Browse could request a special url, the XS respond with a random string that the XO has to sign with its key and post it back to the XS - which can verify the sig. Once that step happens, the XS hands a cookie to the XO (the process above is fairly expensive!). From that point onwards, we are vulnerable to spoofing unless we switch to https (which we will eventually do, but right now is very complicated for a long list of reasons). If we could switch to https easily, we could skip all this song and dance and just use client certs. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] XO identity shared via Browse
Thanks for your opening email - one quick comment... On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That's one example. I would also like any Web server to be able to extract the XO identity and use it in CGI (e.g. PHP) for processing. the plan for that is that 1 - the special authentication scheme we come up with is exclusively between Browse.xo and the XS -- based on a preexisting relationship (registration!) 2 - other standard webapps can recognise the identity of the XO via OpenID, a scheme whereby the XS says yes, that XO is Greg as it claims to be. An openID identity provider acts a bit as a country issuing a passport. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] notes on 8.2.0, specifically 767 (was 8.2.1)
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 1:07 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * 767 can't connect to ejabberd on XS 0.4 because they use incompatible versions of GNU TLS. H. All the XO 8.2 testing has been done againstXS 0.4 so categorically we can assert: vanilla 767 interoperates with vanilla XS 0.4 just fine. If you are seeing a problem, it's probably worthwhile to diagnose with the fine crowd at [EMAIL PROTECTED] :-) btw, it seems that this list is getting shut down - move discussion to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] ? cheers, martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [IAEP] Tentative talk schedule: Nov 19
On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 9:07 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... lots of interesting things... I'm very happy that the Sugar folks are in town -- under whatever alibi -- and I'm keen on meeting, having a beer together and perhaps talking a few technical things too ;-) After all, we've been collaborating for almost a year now, and I don't know your faces. There are a few things I'm interested in talking about so I'll try to use my slot (and the many beer rounds) for that. The xocamp later will be another chance to talk about them more formally, but perhaps we can have a quick overview of - Repeated automagic registration - so updated registration data (with perhaps more bits of data) reaches the XS. - Manually triggered actions from the control panel - re-registration, ds-backup - Browse.xo automagic authentication against XS. Also - automagic proxy config with PAC files, etc. - Service announcement (plain old DNS, mdns, avahi, carrier pigeons) - so activity and OS updates work better - How I learned to stop worrying and love ejabberd's mod_roster facilities (group handling between XS and XO) As you can see, it's fairly concrete stuff. There are a couple of blue-sky areas you can probably drag me into - - extended journal using the backup storage from the XS. - General Journal / Project diary magic UI voodoo. Now, if we can talk about at least some of these things in a parenthesis -- avoiding all the distractions -- let's do it. Otherwise, I'm happy to just have a beer with you. Let's make the most of what we have. And apologies for not sending this earlier -- cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [IAEP] Sugar Camp Cambridge 17-21 Nov
On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Switching to XMLRPC?! This seems like some massive sidestep which would break the existing stuff as well as preventing any code sharing between Telepathy apps on Sugar and Telepathy apps on any other Linux platforms. D-Bus and the Telepathy APIs are the emerging standards for accessing real-time communications functionality on Linux desktops and embedded devices. It's already in GNOME in the Empathy client, as well as part of the GNOME Mobile platform, so Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin platforms, and there's ongoing interest in using it in KDE which we hope to push forward at the combined Akademy/Guadec next summer. I actually did read Brendan's proposal as to add some xmlrpc in sugar so external components for example in the school server could interface with some aspects of it. But now I realize he said in place. Yeah - I don't think I buy into moving away from dbus. Smarter, leaner/meaner use of dbus, sure! Other aspects of Brendan's proposal were quite interesting and in line with work that is happening already, so... :-) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [IAEP] Sugar Camp Cambridge 17-21 Nov
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 8:20 PM, Brendan R. Powers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would like to propose a discussion on making the collaboration a bit more standards compliant. The idea would be to get sugar to function more like a standard jabber IM client, as well as using existing standards in place of some of the custom solutions used now (xmlrpc instead of dbus perhaps?). I would also like to talk about using the colaboration API to talk to external services not on the jabber network(a moodle server for instance). As well as a possibly a few API changes to make these sorts of services easier to access for activity developers. Having a standards base and flexible collaboration framework that extends beyond the sugar ecosystem offers some very interesting possibilities. I would also like to discuss some of the jabber scalability problems, as well as how we manage grouping students into classes, and collaborating with other schools over the internet. If people thinks this is a good idea for discussion I will add it to the wiki. I think it's a good idea and would like to hear more about how we could open Sugar up to higher levels of interoperability. I'm interested in the topic as well -- we're already mapping out the space with ejabberd scalability issues, group handling and moodle integration on the server side of things. Integrating ejabberd and Moodle seems like the natural thing to do, I have to say. And ejabberd scalability issues, I think we have them well diagnosed -- though one of them is somewhat hard to fix. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Major differences between releases
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 9:02 AM, Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've started http://wiki.laptop.org/go/API_changes to track Sugar and system API changes between releases. It's not very comprehensive so far - contributions welcome. Little nag: how about qualifiying that it's about the XO OS + Sugar (as opposed to XS :-) ) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Reducing activity sharing boilderplate code
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alternatively I can subclass Activity to SharableActivity or something like that, and add the telepathy/tubes helper code in there. Subclassing is tight coupling in a place where you definitely want loose coupling. I would keep loose coupling, the code you seem to be suggesting that can be removed this way is trivial so it seems hard to justify. Now, I know nothing of the sugar internals, so I may be completely misunderstaning your suggestion. martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Wrapping Sugar activities for other desktops
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 5:00 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sounds good, it's on the list of the things I'd really like to do but I'm too swamped to put focus on :( Ah, great to hear I'm not so lost in the woods! - journal behaviour - though it might be relatively simple Not sure about this one... Do we want to make a journal activity available or to provide compatibility with posix? Well, our journal use model says that the document is picked before the app is called, so if we support $ sugar-wrapper Write.xo mydocument.rtf then we're done. (Again, I might be extraordinarily naive about this :-) ). - naming documents that the user hasn't named explicitly Depends on what we want to do for the previous point. We can keep this part super-simple - save to a predefined directory - add something unique (timestamp? random string?) to the generic name if the user hasn't put a name in WRT random strings, one thing I've done in the past is to have a dictionary of safe words in the local language. Names of fruits, colours, simple nouns and adjectives, etc. And grab from there instead of using a fullblown random string. It is still random, but enormously more user-friendly :-) - the initial steps of sharing a collaborative activity (announcement, invites, etc) Maybe make the mesh view available as a standalone application? Yeah - perhaps something that looks and smells a lot like an IM window + desktop panel widget that knows how to blink and jump when you get an invite... - cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Postponement of XOCamp Event to January
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 2:52 AM, Ed McNierney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The OLPC XOCamp event being planned for November 17 – 21 is being postponed until January, 2009. The Fedora FUDCON conference is in Boston on January 9 Oops. I kind of saw that coming when fudcon was postponed. I'll sort my stuff out to try and be there for mid-Jan but it's a bit of a curve ball for us overseas travellers to be changing these things back, forth, and then back again. And kinda spoils our chances to get cheap tickets. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:31 AM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 8:57 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: can's mdns/avahi help with discovery? it'd be a shame to have to manually configure a server address or name. DNS-SD is the Right Answer (which is not exactly the same thing as mdns). But getting a standard one school server, and a classroom of XOs solution in place for 9.1 using a standard name (printer, say) would be a good first step; we can handle autodiscovery (via CUPs or something else) for 9.2. For the 9.1 timeframe we have several services that we'll want to coordinate XS and XO so we need a reasonably good answer at least. I hadn't heard of DNS-SD so I'll make sure we check it out. ... We should not ignore the fact that OLPCs are deployed in places like Birmingham and Montevideo, which have abundant access to paper and printers. Ah, yes. On this thread people are arguing quite strongly for their personal (and opposed) views, I can't quite figure out why. We'll add a tool, and people will be smart and use it where appropriate. And whether they print or not, the world won't end. One thing I do want to mention -- an overly simplisting printing tool will land us in hot water. If we do printing, we better pay attention to the standard dialogs and provide most of the options in there, lest we replay the Torvals-vs-gnome flamefest. (Now, flag this point for _later_ discussion. What optiosn to provide and not provide is a big flamefest of its own, but let's have it a bit later. ) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
Ok - I had missed the whole thread in my earlier reply. On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 9:24 AM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: *But*, we should be able to: * Print postscript (or pdf, or whatever, just pick *one*) to school server via CUP (IPP?), and install a decent selection of printer drivers on the school server. Control panel for 'default printer name', fixed to 'XS' by default. Ok - adding the XS side of this is something we can do in the 9.1 lifecycle. As I mentioned in my other email, the mechanical part of getting printing done is not the most interesting part of the job. It's the social issues around it -- handling of quotas, priorities, etc that I think deserve most attention. Paper, ink and printer time are extremely valuable. So far we have not built anything yet to share handle limited resources across users yet -- and doing it across something so lumpy as printing resources it going to be an interesting exercise in building social software. Jim talked quite a bit about this back when I was first @ 1CC, and I've seen it firsthand in many schools and tertiaries. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:03 AM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think we're on the same page here. For 9.1, what's the *least* work we can do to get *something* done on the printing front? Fantastic! Once the basics are out there, hopefully we'll have community motivated to take it the rest of the way, whatever that is. Hmmm, this needs a serious think and a design. It's not an incremental step-at-a-time progress thing that we can expect the community naturally take on. Strong design-and-code leads emerge less frequently, and this is an important aspect of getting this feature to work well. OTOH, would love to see someone prepared to prove me wrong :-) On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 1:57 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: can's mdns/avahi help with discovery? it'd be a shame to have to manually configure a server address or name. I definitely want to have a service announcement scheme for the XO to discover: - what services are offered in the network - by which server - some additional arbitrary metadata (version, supported extensions for example) - reasonably scalable - chatty stuff squandering network resources is something we cannot have - optionally non-trivially-spoofable (not sure if this is reasonable to expect) in short, something a notch or two up from hardcoding local dns names. Douglas has been looking into mdns/avahi (for the activity installer control panel) -- and from what he saw in the initial review I'm not 200% convinced. By which I mean I want to review it a bit more, perhaps it's indeed the best scheme, but it sure looked chatty. So I guess that's one proposal for this 9.1 series. The printing proposal would then use this service (or DNS if we fail to deliver!).The XS side needs a fully fledged automagically configuring cups setup which is not entirely trivial. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [Server-devel] 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 3:05 AM, Jeff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please stop imagining that lowest-spec, cheapest hardware and crippleware is the answer - or that 3'rd World countries will never progress towards a reasonable standard. That attitude is patronizing and demeaning. And wrong. Hey - I'm familiar with a lot of variety and I'm working towards options and flexibility as much as I can. But I'm shorthanded as hell, so help is appreciated in *getting things done*. And no -- server-devel is not about crippleware. It's just not very far along. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Narrative.
On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for learning. [1] I am catching up with this. What Bryan writes is correct, but I am confident we are in the right direction - Sugar supports the user interaction - the narrative belongs elsewhere. Narrative is a basic component of much educational material which Sugar ought to 'natively' recognize, respond to, and manipulate. No, Sugar is a bit lower layer than that. Sugar supports sw that can drive the narrative, and that is the way it should be. You would not want a webbrowser that dictates a path through a website - some websites have navigation optimised for 'random access' and others for sequential access. cheers, [2]: Bryan is currently encoding narratives in HTML and is attempting to use Offline Moodle to make this cheaper to support. And that is a reasonable path. Moodle has _some_ support for narratives (and then again, sanely refuses to put too much emphasis in them). Reading the concept of 'narrative' liberally, one possible tack would be to suggest that Sugar could support a degree of hyperlinking inside activities as a means of defining narratives flexibly -- that's the strategy the web has shown to be the winner. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Narrative
On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 9:11 AM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Offline moodle needs a lot of work to get working properly and really doesn't receive the attention it deserves. Not yet :-) but attention to Offline Moodle will increase... Offline moodle currently does not work very at all I would almost say that it doesn't exist :-) but I am working at this time to increase awareness. You will notice that all the moodle conferences this year have an offline moodle talk that shows a few bits and pieces already in existence (mostly - proof-of-concept stuff), and then talks about the plans. Having good planning conversations with MartinD and the rest of the core team. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Restoring journal entries (was Re: [Server-devel] Backup And Restore Feature Documentation)
On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 9:34 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: these questions depend on the actual code that performs the restore. I'm going to comment on what happens when the user clicks on an entry from Browse (the only restore mechanism that is available today). Tomeu and I had a quick chat about this. A 'full restore' could be done from Journal via rsync+ssh with no changes on the XS side (at least for some scenarios). If we are going to do it for 9.1, we should be doing it now, not later... I am not sure how or when things will get prioritised for 9.1, but if 'full restore' is a high priority ticket (which I am not sure about) then we'd need to hear from Greg on this track, and have a bit of a catch up to flesh it out. For some cases the XS will need changes, so it might be a good idea to involve me as well (bear in mind I am in a tight release cycle right now though :-) so my time's a bit squeezed...) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Fragmenting or providing a foothold?
On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 8:13 AM, David Farning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: With this in mind, the goal of creating new mailing lists is not to fragment the existing community. It is to create footholds for other communities to develop around the central learning platform. It's about economies of attention. Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler are probably the most insightful thinkers/writers on the matter. The bottom line is (in my reading and experience): - do not split the meeting point until the signal/noise becomes uneconomic for _most_ (not just for a loud minority) - do use tools that help individuals forage information better, so that the split point happens later in time In any case, communities are fragile and this is risky. Build up your own community and then try to split it. Splitting the lists built around laptop.org is going to be a lose/lose scenario, and you are playing with a social environment that has strong cohesion around laptop.org . In some aspects, it's like proposing a split in a political party. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [PATCH] screenshots hurt
On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 5:57 AM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK I think I get it. Isn't the Icon in the journal always the same for any given activity? They are talking about _documents_, not _programs_. The word activity is just wrong here to designate either :-p The screenshots are to show a nice thumbnail for each document in the journal. (OT: Can we drop the use of 'activity' in technical discussion? It's so ambiguous that it's sometimes very hard to keep track WTH is being discussed.) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] commanding what the screen should show
On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 6:14 AM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It seems to me that the XO had stacked my last keypress (the F3), and upon resuming Sugar had fed in that stack. I've seen this too, and been annoyed by it. My theory is different - X is catching the /release/ event of the F3 key. If I release F3 quicky, it doesn't switch to the Home view. This is easier to test with an external usb keyboard - the time it takes to release the key on the XO keyboard is longer. If this guess of mine were correct, that might explain overshoot of a cursor movement I suspect cursor issues are a completely different thing. m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Please help test our new 8.2.0 weekly beta, joyride-2263!
On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Kevin Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: want to update them. I tell it to install/upgrade them all. It says Downloading but the progress bar never progresses, and it appears to be doing a whole lot of nothing. FWIW, it worked for me. One of the activity downloads (TamTam Edit?) takes *ages* to complete, with little feedback, so I did think it was jammed. Eventually it completed. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Please help test our new 8.2.0 weekly beta, joyride-2263!
On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 5:15 PM, Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: is there a better / handier way? On first boot, it found my local School Server and up a big Software Update window popped, and said do you want to install all these activities. Colour me impressed. Bravo! Now, who's coded this up? I am keen on devising a way to fetch the activities locally (if an XS is present) via http or rsync. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] video bleeds through somewhat between sessions
On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 5:43 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Quoting Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED]: There is probably a bug in the mplayer wrapper (are you using an mplayer 'activity' wrapper?) in that it's not getting rid of the overlay setup when it loses focus or is minimized. This is not a bug, at least in the case of losing focus. The mplayer activity - as it's running on Sugar, should know that there are not overlapping windows here. I am not sure what event the vm is sending when the app loses foreground but a sugar app should stop the overlay, move it off-viewable screen, etc. it is unnecessary in our single-window UI. Exactly, it is pointlless work. The activity can perhaps stop playing, and resume when the user returns, with the appropriate time offset, hiding from the user that it stopped playing the video. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list
On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 12:45 AM, Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In my experience the activity developer community has lost many participants already. Perhaps they weren't going to stay anyway, beyond an initial ... I personally found the best approach was to follow all communication channels to try and figure out what worked and what didn't, and what Good point. As mention, there are a lot of things to keep track of. At the moment, that is the nature of the beast - the platform has a high rate of change. Once the rate of change slows down, it will be easier for activity authors. Right now, well... Those are both high traffic lists, with a lot of traffic not relevant to activities, as Martin Dengler has analysed: ... I can't believe I did this, but I went through the July sugar@ messages and categorized them into ones I thought would be appropriate for the AA list and ones not (thus for the current sugar@ list). Totals: 808 messages AA - 293 messages 36.3% SS - 515 messages 63.7% Sidenote: I think *any* developer these days is used to lists where they are interested in only a % of the traffic. If you are a lead or core dev of a small project, your project's list is probably 100% for you, but in *every* other case, you read 10% of the emails. I read 100% of server [EMAIL PROTECTED], 20% of [EMAIL PROTECTED], 5% of [EMAIL PROTECTED], 5% of moodle.org list traffic, 2% of fedora-devel-list, etc. It would be wholly inappropriate for me to complain on those lists about irrelevant traffic -- every reader slices and dices them in their own way. Some activity authors need to keep track of camera bugs. Others are sensitive to timing issues (realtime-ish needs?) or storage (large media?) or touchpad bugs, or multi-touch plans. Or specific library changes. cheers, martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Faster - how do I bypass look, ma - no hands ??
Hi Mikus, just to clarify: you are playing with *alpha*, *proof-of-concept* software that Scott is spinning just to test the waters. I am not sure if you are kidding, but your email sounds pretty short-tempered. Open mind, a sense of humour and a where can I help attitude welcome when looking at these builds. In fact, any and all builds coming from OLPC should be treated with kindness. Thanks! cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list
On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:47 PM, Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am happy to take on making this communication happen but I really think we need this list. FWIW, Sugar + activities are still somewhat tightly coupled, as Sugar and the underlying OS API are changing. As long as that is true, to maintain an activity to a good standard, you have to keep an eye on devel@ and/or [EMAIL PROTECTED] My rule of thumb is to try and keep people together -- recommending filters sometimes -- until the traffic gets so heavy *and* a distinct subcommunity can be split off. IMHO neither is true here (yet!). The flip side is that offering a new ml to a small/medium sized group is a great way to *kill* that group. It is an excellent troll mgmt strategy. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] What are the minimum requirements to use ejabberd with the XO's
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 11:56 PM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We are trying to lock down the firewall on the XS to only allow the services which are needed. For whatever reason we can no long access ejabberd from the XO's 1. the fully-qualified ejabberd name is correct on the XO's 2. the network services are working correctly 3. Pidgin (GAIM) on __my laptop__ can connect to the ejabberd server no problem Can anyone tell us which particular ports and services the XO's need to connect to the ejabberd server? We are allowing 5222 The XS has 2 interfaces, WAN and LAN. My advise would be to block incoming connections on the WAN side completely and leave the LAN open, or mostly open. IF you want to lock down the LAN interface, you'll want at least 5222, 5223, 5280, dns, ssh, http, https, rsync, dhcp, 8080... and the list will grow as we add services. Try `netstat --inet --listen -pe` as root to see what is listening where. If you do lock down the LAN, and have trouble log the denied connections on the fw to see what's happening. Do the XO's require IPv6? particular routing rules? pls advise. thanks No IPv6, no special routing. The XS is pre-configured to act as as NAT'ting router. HTH! cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Your journal is empty
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Recently, I have on two occasions with Joyride (2229+, 2232) pressed ctl-alt-erase in order to restart Sugar. Both times. when Sugar came up, the Journal screen told me 'Your journal is empty'. If unwanted emptying of the Journal were to be experienced by others (in addition to me), then I think this problem should be a SERIOUS blocker to 8.2. You might know this - but just in case and for others reading: if the datastore fails to come up for any reason, the datastore storage dir (~/.sugar/default/datastore) gets moved aside and a new one is created. If you lost your journal this way, the files are in ~/.sugar/default/datastore.XXX . It will be interesting to know why ds failed to come up and file it as a bug if relevant. Do the logs in .sugar/default/logs say anything interesting? cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use
On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 1:39 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jerry Williams wrote: | Seems like this problem for linux was solved with RPM. | With rpm if something is missing for something you want to install, it | complains and won't let you install it. That's not really the problem we're discussing. We're talking about the case in which you try to install an old bundle onto a new build, or vice versa. RPM solves this problem by just not letting you do that. You can't install a rh9 RPM on FC8. Yes you can. It will be prevented only if specific versioned dependencies prevent it. I don't think many people around here would be happy to require all new .xo bundles for every release. I don't have a solution to suggest, but I don't think classic dependency management is going to do the trick. Yes, classic dependency management would help. Unfortunately, rpm and dpkg have several shortcomings of their own when you try to apply them to the XO case. It would be mighty interesting to see a 'userland' adaptation of rpm, supporting user-friendly features such as relocatable packages, while still taking advantage of the OS-wide rpm (for checking dependencies, for example). cheers. m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Performance
On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 10:16 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just got word from a decision maker in Uruguay that they are very concerned about performance. They say that Sugar is slow. I'm probing to get more details but I want to evaluate the options in parallel. While I think people do have a few ideas as to what areas we are hurting in, IME the end user / client is usually looking at something _different_. I have worked a lot in performance around various systems, and a good part of the problem had to do with the end users looking at something completely different from what the core team was looking at. Can we get from the Uy crowd concrete examples, specific actions with (however rough) timings and what use cases they affect? ... I'll come back with more details on their specific concerns as soon as I get it. Yes please! cheers, martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: After mild provocation, Marco and Tomeu asked me to publish some of my reactions to sugar's architecture, design, and implementation. Here are a few initial comments. Excellent analysis. +1 on it, and a couple of minor notes... Aspects of #1 and #6, specifically: 1) Sugar could better hold contributors if it (and its web presence) were designed to be extended and to highlight external contributions. vs 6) Sugar was not built with compartmentalization in mind. All its functionality runs with the full privilege of the human operator and it has very coarse process-level memory protection. ... Evidence: Sugar's process-level boundaries (e.g. shell, DS, PS, telepathy CMs, rainbow, activities) seem to me to be strongly correlated with the existence of cliques of the developers who built them. Modularity and security compartamentalisation go hand in hand, and are a social aspect of software. If we have more of what you want in #1, we will see more of #6. 3) Sugar is built on technologies which encourage excessive layering. +10. 5) Sugar is built on technologies that incentivize its developers to recompute prior results which could be cached across boots. ... Evidence: Also, OLPC's shipping JFFS2 implementation does not support writable mmaps or uncompressed inodes. Missing writable mmaps is a real problem - lots of applications are just not possible to accomplish with adequate performance without it. Evidence: Python lacks support for loading data without unmarshalling it from bytestreams. The way you've written this strikes me as overbroad, but I think you've answered that elsewhere. Unmarshalling costs around IPC do seem to be significant for the bits of code I've looked at. IME, IPC is fantastic to deliver tiny bits of data that says hey, here's the real thing with a file path, shmem address or similar . 7) Sugar prefers IPC techniques with inferior human interfaces (DBus, X) to IPC techniques with superior human interfaces (HTTP, 9P, environment variables, well-known files, process arguments + status codes + man pages). I wouldn't encourage http :-) cheers, martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I regard fully pythonic python data as a subgraph of a reference-counted object graph. So far as I know, Python has lots of interesting ways to parse bytestreams into object graphs, but no great way to read an object graph directly into memory without the overhead of parsing or to save an subgraph of its object graph directly to a bytestream. This makes it hard to use pythonic data via shared-memory or to pull it quickly off of a filesystem. None of the dynamic languages I am used to can do this - Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby - even with locks or read-only shmem arrangements. Whenever I've used a shmem arrangement in any of them, it involved marshalling/unmarshalling, which of course is a huge perf drag. Which makes me suspect that there's something else that is tricky there -- things in that shmem space do have references to the private mem of the originating process (pointers to the class code perhaps). I understand the PHP and Perl (circa P5.0005) internal memory handling. YMMV. In other words, it's in the way-too-hard-and-brittle basket, barring an execution-engine redesign, that might incorporate some changes. OTOH, ISTR reading that Erlang's odd all-variables-are-constants scheme makes this easier. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Activity versioning schema
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 4:54 AM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What _should_ be happening in this thread is the collection of use cases. For a small selection of the issues involved, please refer to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Bundles_1 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Bundles_2 I fail to see what makes the XO case different from the rest of the software world - from the pages you link - We need to identify feature vs bugfix revisions, which is something that versioning can do - Keep track of whether we are opening an existing document with a different program version, in that case, perhaps deal with capabilities - this is orthogonal to versioning, and similar to the provides field in deb packages. - If network interop between differing versions of tools is an issue, we could recommend an on-the-wire preamble where versions and optionally capabilities are exchanged, giving peers the opportunity to refuse to interact. Orthogonal to version numbers, however. These are well understood issues. Yes, we can write use cases, and argue the business case, and define a procedure around it. So as soon as we get our shipment of infinite time and resources, I _promise_ I'll get on to it. In the meantime, a simply obvious solution that meets our needs is standing in front of us, glowing warmly . grab it martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Activity versioning schema
On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 10:51 AM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Version (activity_version) is just some sortable entity to be agreed Please do read back on this - now lenghty - discussion. Unfortunately, any monotonically increasing version does _not_ work, thanks to the magic of maintenance releases. Let us bow collectively to the wisdom of distro maintainers who are smart and have been doing this job for far longer than us. In other words, let us do the same thing that rpm and dpkg do. It gives you both more expressive power, and a stupid 1.1.0.9z is older than 2.0-alpha cmp function for whenever you need it. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Activity versioning schema
On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 3:28 PM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK, sorry, I've clearly accidentally wandered in to a room full of hardcore :-) Sorry about the dry tone of my reply. I was trying, perhaps too hard, to avoid this thread regressing into silly-land. The current scheme is just using an int (wiki is correct here), which is insufficient, and we need to do something smarter. But people started reinventing perfectly good wheels, proposing that they'd be octogonal and stuff. Chocolate gun, see? (bites chunk off handle) hmm, tasty. m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Activity versioning schema
On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 6:17 AM, Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There was an extensive discussion on this topic a while back on IRC, Version numbers are used to communicate API/ABI compat and degree/type of changes to users. Later in this thread Eben suggests what everyone else in the industry is using: major.minor - sounds good to me. Even better - and more prevalent in OSS - is major.minor.bugfix . In any case, this issue does not seem to deserve such a colourful thread. Maybe we can save our time and effort for other stuff? After all, if an activity writer wants to use Klingon characters for versioning, hey, let them go wild! cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Activity versioning schema
On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would be happy to whip up a universal approximate ordering for version strings in a few lines of Python. My emphasis here is on _approximate_; nothing should depend on precisely correct interpretation of version strings. I would say - don't, unless you are doing it for the fun of it. Steal the RPM code - see my earlier reply to Scott as to why this is a better idea. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] ssl authentication [was (another) WebKit port of Browse]
On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jul 12, 2008, at 11:59 PM, Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote: Which IDMR - the sun one with all the usual/heavily standardized industry protocols - or something OLPC specific ? It's not a protocol, just a small Python script that does some XML-RPC nonsense from what I recall. Was there a better design described somewhere? The server-side code for idmgr needs a rewrite, so the opportunity is there if you can point me to an outline of a saner protocol. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] OLPC/Sugar related MIME Types...
I am going to add some MIME types for Apache on the XO - application/vnd.olpc-sugar xo - application/vnd.olpc-content xol - application/vnd.olpc-journal-entry xoj The above list comes from a bit of Googling about. Are there any other mime types that we care about? cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] gears and greasemonkey to take wikipedia offline
On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 5:32 PM, David Van Assche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There is an interesting article on google's code site about using Google Gears and Greasemonkey to take wikipedia and make it work offline... This I am in general interested in that track, though it is hard to beat what cjb has done with his wikipedia activity. The whole thing gets compiled, QAd and compressed in one place, rather than doing it on a per-client basis. Let' s look at it after we have Moodle covered :-) m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] (another) WebKit port of Browse
On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:37 AM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: a) SSL overhead being impractical? Come on. You can use SSL on the browser today; there is no perceptible speed difference. I agree that client certs may be impractical, but it won't be because the XO can't handle the computation. Scott - please! We need to raise the level of discussion here. SSL overhead on the *network* and on the XS cpu, though Carol rightly points out we don't need to carry that in all the traffic. There is a _ton_ of work on the PKI side, and she's volunteered to work on that though :-) The real question to me is whether there are size The REAL question here is how do we stop this list being armchair quaterbacking, and start fostering coding work. This thread is a bad bad start. Someone has done a TON of work on Browse, and here is a ton of people ready to throw it out hte window based on opinions. That is *stupid*. Consider replacing it when someone comes up with *working code*. Wake me up when someone has working code - the rest is *noise*. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] (another) WebKit port of Browse
On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 8:47 PM, Carol Lerche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Martin -- You state that ssl at the network layer is significant. The question is when and how much must ssl be used to authenticate with client certs? I believe it only needs to be used during initial authentication and again when properly designed cookies expire. Since each XO only That's a good point. As to the PKI infrastructure, I don't think it is any harder to work this out than any of the other key management issues already in play. Well, it's a ton of work, and if I can take you on your offer of patches... we cannot provide a PKI infrastructure as a significant proportion of schools is disconnected, and we are not keen on imposing a complex school server setup procedure. So, assuming each XS does the classic self-signed-cert creation, what we want to do is to follow the current trust model, which is dead simple: the XO trusts the XS that it is registered to. During the registration, the XO gives the XS its public SSH key. We need to - change the Registration protocol to grab the public part of the self-signed cert, and add an exception to the PKI checks in Browse. The registration stuff is implemented in a tool called idmgr (XS side) and in Sugar profile (XO side). If you looking at idmgr is horrible enough that you want to help me reimplement it, I have further notes on that track ;-) We also need to tackle the protocol change in a reasonably backwards compat manner. - figure out a way to use the existing SSH key that the XO has as the SSL client cert, and to detect it, and match it on the server side. The server-side apache-embedded code we are doing with mod_python handlers, and this is a perfect fit for an authen handler. Counting on your help to break this silly thread with actual working code :-) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] (another) WebKit port of Browse
On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 1:32 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can also anticipate Javascript performance may become an issue as its use continues to increase. Confirming this - to work with XS-based tools nicely, JS and related tools (gears) support is a must. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] (another) WebKit port of Browse
On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 2:27 PM, Carol Lerche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can certainly produce a proof of concept for the first, using client certs via Scott's Firefox 3. I don't think it is as hard as you think, and I promise to provide something concrete by the end of the weekend. Thanks! [ but do see my note at the end ] I am puzzled about the PKI infrastructure you envision. I envision having a private certificate authority that runs on the teacher's XO and keeps its keystore on a USB thumb drive. So my favorite CA tool is TinyCA (currently version2) which is written in Perl. This works very well for me, it has a GTK interface and does its PKI using OpenSSL like everyone else. This is what I am going to use and document to create the certs. That seems to require a fairly complex setup, and is vulnerable to losing the usb drive. - change the Registration protocol to grab the public part of the ... Please point me to your notes on this, if you would be so kind. There aren't any, unfortunately. I had to read idmgr to understand the protocol - so read the source. It is a trivial xml-rpc. - figure out a way to use the existing SSH key that the XO has as the SSL client cert, and to detect it, and match it on the server side. There are a couple of ways this can work. I will implement this in my POC. Cool. The server-side apache-embedded code we are doing with mod_python handlers, and this is a perfect fit for an authen handler. Not promising to do the Apache side in Python for the POC. I write in Perl by choice, so hold your nose. But are you planning to use Apache or lighttpd for the lightweight XS? I am a happy Perl hacker in Python land too, and I finding that mod_python hacking is similar to mod_perl hacking. Anyway, if you can sort out the rest, I can probably deal with the mod_python bit :-) And yes - using apache so far. Counting on your help to break this silly thread with actual working code :-) I'm happy to oblige! At last a project that doesn't require me to create a GUI. Brickbats regarding this plan of action are gratefully accepted. Note: The only thing that saddens me is that basing it on FF turns your help into more of a political wedge than technical help. The two issues (auth, browser) are orthogonal. Short term, we need the authentication stuff. Scott's mumblings are about future scenarios, and are missing a lot of aspects - see jg's post. In the best of cases, it is a medium-term thing. And it is odd timing to be talking about ah, let's change the browser when everyone tries to focus on 8.2.0. For example, if you do it on Browse instead of FF, and it is a neat patch, we could argue for inclusion in a minor update (say, 8.2.1) as it enables proper operation of the restore part of backup :-) And that means proper backup/restore is in the hands of thousands of kids many MANY moons earlier. Just to put the jockeying in perspective. m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] (another) WebKit port of Browse
On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 3:07 PM, Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please point me to your notes on this, if you would be so kind. There aren't any, unfortunately. I had to read idmgr to understand the protocol - so read the source. It is a trivial xml-rpc. Ah, apologies, wrong answer. I do have some mental notes, but you might want to read idmgr before getting both of us into such trouble :-) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] ssl authentication [was (another) WebKit port of Browse]
On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 6:31 PM, Carol Lerche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is an assertion, not an argument. It is also factually incorrect. And needless to argue over it if we can get instead some working code. :-) m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Relationships w/ upstream.
On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 5:37 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Since a conversation on IRC got unexpectedly heated, let me restate my personal philosophy for OLPC's relationships with upstream: I am surprised this got heated, you are right, and this isn't even controversial. This tension - fork / innovate ahead of upstream is a prevalent practice in FOSS. OLPC is a participant with a relatively well defined client and use scenarios/cases and we innovate and customise (at our cost) in ways that upstreams cannot or do not want to risk. If it pans out, the upstream can take it, if the feature / patch / ugly hack doesn't pan out, don't take it. Failure for free (for the upstream). Our incentives are clear - we want to bet carefully, and to win (in terms of forks that work out well enough that some version of it gets merged in upstream). To the extent that sugarlabs is going to operate as a true upstream, they need to be cognizant of the fact that OLPC will at times put its ... At the moment, I've been assured that upstream does *not* want to fork sugar, and in fact will go out of its way, making special exceptions for OLPC patches which conflict with sugar freezes. So this email is I though we were still our own upstream wrt sugar, but great to hear things are looking better for Sugarlabs. Probably means the sugar team gets larger :-) That said, forks cost a lot. Definitely. I am all for picking carefully which ones to go for :-) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Relationships w/ upstream.
On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 6:17 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think we're all agreed that even small forks have large long-term costs, and we'd prefer to avoid them where at all possible -- which we all agree seems to be the case at present. Here I disagree - small and medium sized forks can be low cost, and highly dynamic, specially when you are using a merge-friendly SCM (git!). The last 6 years of my life have been working with projects that ran ahead of their upstreams -- mostly moodle -- and things were horribly painful before git. Once git was usable, it just became a matter of a bit of discipline. - Long term forks are death, short term forks are opportunity. - Sugar isn't a forking problem :-) as olpc team and sugar team overlap significantly. - I think we are overstressing about a bunch of strings. People rightly say that forks are costly and nightmarish, but they are talking about a few thousand patches, and deltas of 10K lines, that when merged resulted in a few hundred gnarly conflicts. Strings you say? I landed 130 patches worth 4K lines of diff between 1.8 and 1.9 of moodle, rewriting one of the core libs completely :-) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] (another) WebKit port of Browse
Carol, give me some credit :-) I know that FF works well with client certs and apache has no problem with it. I've been coding apache/ssl aware apps since '98... What sort of patch are you looking for? Well, there is quite a bit of thinking that needs to happen here, and I am working on something else at the moment. So, these are quick notes - XS installs/deployments will be done in so many different scenarios that we cannot address the promises needed the conventional PKI infrastructure. We need a good strategy to sidestep the PKI requirements of full blown SSL. A few weird schemes come to mind, all nasty :-) - SSL overhead at the network layer is very significant. Network bandwidth and latency on the local link are valuable resources. - SSL CPU overhead at the XS end is moderately significant. And then there is the huge work to chop the Firefox interface into something that fits our UI guidelines (and our screen) - I don't claim to know about that part, but you can imagine that *that* part of the problem is enough to make wise hackers declare that maintaining Browse for the long term is Just Fine. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] compiling gears and rpm build
On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 5:30 PM, David Van Assche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Another thing I forgot to mention is that I go the source from the google gears svn trunk (the only place the source is available) and I'm a little unsure what to put into SOURCES of the rpmbuild, as the svn checkout contains the osx, windows, symbian, windows ce and linux code.. not to mention multiple browsers... Surely there must be a way for me to seperate just the linux source I used to build... any ideas? Great to hear you're making progress. Exciting! I'm not sure of the gears repo layout, but you can do a checkout of only a subdir - if the linux/gecko stuff is in a subdir, you could just get that subdir. Otherwise, my guess is that you'll have a core gears dir and various osx/ , windows subdirs with platform-specific glue, don't worry about that :-) Or at least, ask in Fedora-devel whether it's worth your time to worry about that :-) On another note... there is an interesting project called gears on rails, which is a mix of gears with ruby on rails allowing for a very fast and organised approach to building offline apps this could be the way to go... That's just shiny stuff, don't let it distract you :-) We don't have Ruby on the server or on the client. And we won't until there is a killer-app for it. We have an incredibly limited RAM and disk-space budget and everytime we add a language, plus all its libraries and stuff... we'll look at Ruby the day there's a compelling app for us on the XS. Could be romorrow, could be never. For the XO it's pretty nigh impossible. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] offline moodle
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 11:50 PM, David Van Assche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The developers seem highly motivated to do something that would work for olpc too, its basically their Master's thesis, and they seem to have a good Cool. It will be great if they can help :-) In terms of Adobe AIR, I think it and Flex are open source, at least Flex definitly is, and I think Adobe is moving very seriously and very quickly in the open source direction. Talking to Adobe is always an option, or perhaps I'm dreaming a little :-) Unfortunately, it's unlikely to matter in practice :-/ GG has been open sourced at last (the initial license wasn't open enough), and it's starting to gain adoption. We can only ship a limited amount of sw on the XO and GG is gathering steam AFAICS. Unless AIR is based on GG, the slot will be probably taken by GG. And it's a good thing too. Google has shown that understands FOSS and is making some long term bets on it. Adobe... well... I guess I'm going to regret this, but I'll volunteer, if you've got time to guide me in areas I need. I've got lots of experience with Moodle including teaching, and had a php based web development company for 6 years, so I guess I should be able to do this... though I hate coding... You'll have to be pretty independent (my time is very stretched atm), but if you jump on the offline moodle forum and we can start a discussion. Having said that, with time and dedication, you can probably get the core of it going :-) I've asked for the source code, so we'll se what they say... I am more interested in *this* track, something GG-based :-) Open University has a LOT of content and material concerning offline moodle and it makes sense to colaborate with them as much as possible. Yes, but note that their goals are _very_ limited. Read into the details, and you'll see it's mainly about static content. Due to various issues collaboration tools cannot run via the offline machinery with their plan. If you search in the general developer forum, we had a very long thread between Colin (the architect @ OU) and myself fleshing out the plan, and what the limits were. Unfortunately I don't have the link handy :-/ cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] offline moodle
On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 4:19 PM, David Van Assche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah, after looking a bit deeper into it, AIR isn't entirely open source, though it uses open source parts which are interesting to us (sqlite for example) Thanks for confirming that. Let's wait to see what Bryan from OLE Nepal has in mind in terms of the person he mentioned, and I can certainly help with that. I get the underlying architecture needed... and now understand why you looked into Gears for an offline app... :-) No need to wait. If you can help, feel free to make a start looking at packaging GG in an RPM for the XO. This needs to happen, and that in itself doesn't need many decisions or waiting for anyone. Have a look at how Firefox (xpi?) packages are built and configured for Fedora 9, and try to repro that ;-) If you hop on the fedora-devel mailing list, and mention you are helping olpc, people will probably be keen to lend a hand with packaging-related questions. Yep read most of the thread and understand the difference... though from a recent conversation with Colin, he seems much more inclined to do something along the lines of Gears and Sqlite now... I'll forward the mail your way so you can have a quick browse... that's good to hear :-). OU will deliver based on what they started - and that's a good thing for their users. It's not that compelling for us as we already have excellent collab tools on the XO. Longer term, I think they might hop on board the GG train too. We have to be careful to make it useful for XO and for others too, so those others help us out. cheers, martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] offline moodle
On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 4:01 AM, David Van Assche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm currently working with OLE Nepal to find the best solution for synchronising online and offline course material via Moodle. There are currently 2 projects that do exactly this via different mechanisms, though currently they use what some might consider to be a heavy memory and cpu footprint by using the same mechanisms of a regular online moodle (namely a webserver, server side scripting and database (mysql or sqlite) ) Cool. This is somewhat of a re-post of an earlier message to server-devel, IIRC. I'm glad you've done more research on the jolongo track as I hadn't heard of it before. 1. Open University Moodfle on a stick As you say, I have been involved on this track. The work OU is doing is great, and it advances Moodle in various fronts that we care about. The overall implementation of it is not a good long term bet for us. It might be feasible short term but it will surely need a ton of work to fly, including a port to sqlite and a threaded or forking webserver in pure PHP. In other words, if there's anyone interested in doing the heavy lifting, I can provide a bit of mentoring on what needs to be tuned on the PHP Moodle side. It will need a wrapper similar to the wikislices activity too. 2. Jolongo (meaning backpack in slang Latin American Spanish) also a Spanish native speaker - but I didn't know Jolongo as a slang term :-) adobe AIR That is possibly not redistributable by us :-( Is there a good explanation anywhere of what techniques are being used? My long term plans are to work on a disconnected operation based on Google-Gears or something similar. XPycom is included with Browse IIRC, but it's very hard to get traction ustream with an XO-only technology, so GG is much more likely to be a long-term viable plan. If the AIR-based code can be ported to GG, then it could be a viable track. version will be using sqlite, so that could even things out. Giving it a couple of months will allow us to see which one of these projects is the best adapted to usage by OLE and olpc. For OLPC, I suspect AIR is a no-go due to licensing reasons. Gears, on the other hand, is definitely possible. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] offline Moodle
On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 8:49 PM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I will be speaking w/ a potential full-time volunteer today who has some significant web development experience. I will discuss w/ him the possibility of working almost entirely on offline Moodle for the next 12 months. He may take you up on your generous offer of mentoring. That is great to hear! It's not an easy space though, I don't want to scare anyone, but it is a complex area to work in :-) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] feature freeze coming
On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: is there any patch I have forgotten and that should get in before tomorrow feature freeze? Also, please remind to the list any bug fixes already with code waiting to get in after the feature freeze. your datastore store metadata in CJSON files patch? I've shown it to mstone, hoping for a review from him. It's a blocker for ds-backup... cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [IAEP] OLPC's bizarre behaviors
On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You ended up with Lots of accusations :-( Have you successfully negotiated with hw vendors over innovative gear at very low cost in the past? We do make mistakes, and in some cases there are tradeoffs. It's part of doing RD and bring that to market. Grandstanding about the mistakes made cheap, with the advantage that most people aren't familiar with the issues at hand. Yes, we could have alternatives for every bit of the device - if we had infinite time. Everything else is a tradeoff. How can I show you that something is a bad idea? Showing us a better one. And explaining things carefully, in measured terms definitely helps. If you do have an important point to make, and someone doesn't seem to understand it, a bit pf patience and extra explanation might help. If it's not worth a 2nd attempt at explaining it, it's probably not that important. IOWs, there's so much trolling 'round here that just being considerate earns lots of attention points. m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [IAEP] OLPC's bizarre behaviors
Typo - I should have written: Grandstanding about the mistakes made is cheap, with the advantage that most people aren't familiar with the issues at hand. Albert also wrote Minus the dollar figures of course, getting contracts out in public would be very good for you. Groklaw would be a great place to get things reviewed. You should interpret resistance to this as an indication that somebody may be trying to put something bad in a contract. Have you ever tried something like that? Can you point out projects that have done that successfully in similar spaces to ours (leading edge tech hw)? A contract negotiation is a very tricky thing to carry out, and putting it on a public forum is one of those things that doesn't quite work well. It's a social thing - just tell a prospective employer (or employee) you are webcasting the interview and contract negotiations. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [IAEP] OLPC's bizarre behaviors
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 4:45 AM, Christoph Derndorfer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So you're basically looking for someone who doesn't mind being despised by both OLPC staff (God, s/he keeps bugging me, how annoying!) and the community (s/he knows more than s/he's telling us). Nah. We all want to pull things to the open. But naturally some discussions do contain confidential information. And to makesure it's ok to publish there's a bit of work to do, and it sometimes falls through the cracks. Someone who keeps track of those things would be great. It's a well known function, and most large open source teams that have physical headquaters have such a role. Think mozilla, ubuntu, etc. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] OLPC's bizarre behaviors
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Kim Quirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lots of things that we do don't meet any normal expectations of a 'company'. Most people at OLPC will tell you we are not a 'company'. ... I have been trying to understand it, explain it, live with it , and improve it for a year now. What I think is going on is a unique and somewhat chaotic (perfect storm?) intersection of non-profit, open source, research lab cultures with the need to ship a real product. This is excellent analysis. And I'd go a bit further than Kim actually in saying that I don't feel particularly bad that we are a bit of a mess. Being a bit of a mess means that we are breaking new ground so quickly that the ground is changing faster than the org gets used to it. Which leads to a few observations (which overlap somewhat with what Kim is saying) - IME, people complaining that we don't know what we are doing can be a positive indicator. The scenario outside the car is changing! - Learning to organise and handle new situation X is only worthwhile once we are confident that X is here to stay. - Therefore, there will be many situations that are impossible or not worth to be well prepared for. So being a constant mess is a reasonable approach. We can handle that by saying that strange new situations are common, and we have to keep an open mind and be ready to work w the team to get new and strange things done. - Prioritisation is important. Some things are too much of a distraction. Letting them go to hell can be less disruptive than an all-hands effort. This is - IME - the hardest part. When everyone is ready to take on whatever comes, it's hard to avoid getting the team distracted. Which can also be stated in more blunt terms: We are doing development of new stuff! If you want it predictable and organised, I hear EDS is hiring - the processes and procedures manual is 800 pages :-/ All of the above is from my experience in various organisations large and small, and govt and private. We are radically diffrerent from a big corp, and even from established non-profits. In this space you can expect us to be very good at a couple of very specific things, and a complete mess about a lot of other stuff. We will have to get good at some of that other stuff... in the meantime it'll be frustrating. :-/ There's a good book about this - Waltzing with Bears by either DeMarco or Yourdon, that says basically: if you are considering a project that doesn't take you into uncharted territory, *can it*. It's not worth it if it's not so new that you feel lost and helpless. It's written for big corps that are frozen in terror ;-) but it applies to what we are doing @ OLPC. Uncharted territory. So everytime we spot something in the horizon there's some fear that the earth might actually be flat. http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/EUR/2400-0070~Sailboat-and-Waterfall-at-Earth-s-End-Posters.jpg but I think we should keep sailing no matter what. m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [Server-devel] Problems with mesh OLPC Sur list / problemas con la malla
2008/5/16 Yama Ploskonka [EMAIL PROTECTED]: original message follows El problema al que hacía referencia es que conocemos el funcionamiento de la malla en sí, lo que no hemos podido lograr es realizar una actividad colaborativa tal como se supone que debería ser. Hasta donde entiendo, Uruguay está trabajando con APs convencionales. Cuánto escala el mecanismo de presencia en éste momento depende mucho de la versión del software y firmware que estén usando. El equipo de Ceibal está al tanto de ésto y entiendo que tienen planes de actualizar el software. De hecho, creo que en Uruguay hay áreas con sw más nuevo, es imposible adivinar qué sw están usando en este caso. El equipo Ceibal es realmente muy bueno, yo sugeriría es que hablen con ellos y diagnostiquen el problema con ellos primero. El chat funciona perfectamente. me conecto, veo quién está en el vecindario, lo invito y charlamos; pero es muy difícil con las otras actividades. Otras actividades transmiten mucha más información, por eso a veces el chat anda, y otras cosas no: porque saturan la red. La conexión es muy inesatable y en un grupo de 15 o 20 niños siempre hay un par de xo que no se conectan o no ven a las demás aunque estén conectadas. Lo hemos solucionado trabajando en duplas, pero si se Actualizaciones del sw deberían ayudar a llegar a grupos de 50 (aunque no sabemos en este caso si hay más laptops alrededor - cuántas laptops hay en la escuela de la que estamos hablando?). Aún con el sw más nuevo, sabemos que hay algunos problemas de escalabilidad para grupos 50, y estamos trabajando en eso. Hay que tener en cuenta que una vez que el bug está corregido, toma un tiempo en llegar a los usuarios. Especialmente en instalaciones a nivel nacional, como el plan Ceibal. abrazos, martín -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Fwd: Peru Priorities
On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 7:32 AM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A note about groups, from a discusion today: If there are multiple classes, and students figure out how to change their nick c, it would be helpful to be able to have approve-only groups to avoid griefers popping in and messing up a discussion or session and then leaving. The moodle-based group handling is intended to be teacher-managed. Of course, that's not available yet :-/ but once we get there... cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Software Status Meeting Tomorrow @ 1400 EST, #olpc-meeting, irc.freenode.org
On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We'll be having our weekly status meeting tomorrow at 2:00 PM EST in #olpc-meeting on irc.freenode.org. Alright! That's a 6AM'er for me, but I'll be there ;-) cheers, martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] where is Walter?
On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 22.04.2008 02:13, Michael Stone wrote: What in this description of events leads you to the conclusion that OLPC is shriveling up and dying? Perhaps not shriveling up, but quite a few contributors/participants from the early days (pre-A-Test till B2-Test) have left and the perceived goals and principles of the project have changed considerably as well. One major thing is changing right now -- and *is* changing the organisation deeply. Initially, it was all RD, you could change (or plan to change) anything in the system. Now, very quickly hundreds of thousands of laptops are being deployed. It is a completely different world, and different way of working. Things have changed a bit, and I expect them to change some more, based on my experience with other projects that have gone through similar (but slower) phase-changes. (In the case of OLPC, I missed all the fun RD days, but that is ok with me, I can handle the maintenance and organic evolution phase just fine. Others find the constraints of having a large installed base crippling, I find them stimulating: my changes will be in the hands of real users. Not maybe, not in a projection, but in very real life. Scary, and thrilling!) But I see a chance to bring that culture back once the immense pressure on the core team (for lack of a better name) diminishes and update.2 is released. Let's hope for the best. We are under a lot of stress with the changing times. That's spot on :-) -- but I think it's worth it. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [Server-devel] sugar roadmap
2008/4/22 Holger Levsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Ion also has an quite difficult upstream author. I'd suggest you look into awesome, see http://awesome.naquadah.org/ Looks nice. Trade difficult author for bad-choice-of-name? ;-) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [Server-devel] sugar roadmap
On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 8:29 PM, Benj. Mako Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 10:02 PM, Martin Langhoff Personally, I have been dreaming of a mix between ion3 and Sugar's 4-zoom-stages. Talking with some hard-core ion3 friends, they seemed to be convinced that it was doable as a special configuration, binding the F1-F3 keys to full screen apps, and having a nested X in F4. Yes. This would be pretty simple. I'd be happy to help someone hack this up. Ion3 is extensible in Lua and a little bit of Lua will get tihs up and running pretty quickly. The whole plan would look like - Network-pane visual app on F1 - Network-local-resources+Friends visual app on F2 - Desktop mgmt app on F3 - F4 as an ion3 managed desktop with the whole concert of things managed by Ion3. Good to know that the Ion3 Lua part is doable and relatively easy. The visual apps needed for F1/2 are probably a ton of work. H. A weekend project for next time I have a weekend (next one up: Feb 2010 I think ;-) ). Maybe next time I'm in Cambridge we can explore it together if you have time+inclination... cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [Server-devel] sugar roadmap
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 8:22 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What is the goal exactly? I can only spot two real differences from how the Sugar shell currently works: ... Is there anything I'm missing? Is the point to be able to run desktop applications? Yes. A Sugar-like ZUI for big kids that want to bridge the Gnome/KDE/XFCE world with the ion3 spartanness. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [Server-devel] sugar roadmap
On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 9:10 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | Anyhow, speaking as someone who has only very recently gotten involved | with the project, I can say that the Sugar interface was one of the | most appealing things to me. I'm sure there are other potential | contributors out there who would be attracted for the same reasons. Me too. The project was vaguely interesting until I ran Sugar in Qemu, at which point it became compelling. Personally, I have been dreaming of a mix between ion3 and Sugar's 4-zoom-stages. Talking with some hard-core ion3 friends, they seemed to be convinced that it was doable as a special configuration, binding the F1-F3 keys to full screen apps, and having a nested X in F4. h :-) m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] GVFS, OLPC, and GIT ?
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | sufficiently generic to encompass multiple versions. I do not fully | grasp the layering between GIO and GVFS. Be aware that GIO/GVFS are very high level. In other words, they work for the Gnome guys because they don't realise that not all the world links to libgnome ;-) zip and tar and rsync and amanda won't work with them. Any modern program will break trying to use a GIO/GVFS mount as their location of storage. Moderately modern interfaces like mmap - that you need to work on advanced filehandling, for example in image manipulation programs - don't work either. I expect GVFS to work well for file copy, move and for basic file viewers, not for a real read/write application. | What would you do, if you were trying to provide a version-controlled | datastore as a desktop service? Hmmm. See my notes here in a somewhat similar discussion - http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/012047.html | * Have some kind of operation that takes a versioned filesystem mount | (globally) to a different version. Look at git-fuse. | * Expose multiple versions of the same file/directory using different | names. For example each directory could have a .history subdirectory | with files like .history/filename/version which is a historic | version of filename. I think git fuse also has similar ideas. cheers, martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Mini-Conference Proposal: Toolbars Tabs (or lack thereof)
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Here I'd have to say that, despite the knowledge that all activities will run fullscreen, we should try to avoid developing to a particular piece of hardware (and it's resolution). Hmmm. That sounds impossible. Your examples show that with that layout (and a wide URL/Title widget) we are limited to 2 toolbar icons, 3 if we shrink the icons. So the app will be designed to have 3 toolbars, because the 4th will force a reflow to the next row that will be horrendously wasteful. For these kinds of reasons, in real life we all optimise UIs for actual screen sizes. Doesn't make me happy, but it's one of the constraints that hurts the most, so the best UIs are extensively tweaked to make the most of the limited resource. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Activities are recompiled on every launch
On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
# time python -c import compileall;
compileall.compile_dir('/usr/share/activities/TamTamEdit.activity/',
force=True, quiet=True)
real 0m3.902s
user 0m3.460s
sys 0m0.440s
All measurements were made multiple times to ensure cached reads. The
That's a quick turnaround ;-) Do we know who implemented the python
support for all this? It sounds like it is a safety feature - or an
avoid running stale code feature - that it won't use a pyo file from
a script named in the commandline. In other words, it should be
trivial to get Python to use it.
cheers,
martin
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Re: [sugar] Software status meeting on IRC (Wednesday, 14:00pm EST)
On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 2:37 AM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We'll be having a software status meeting on irc.freenode.net / #olpc-meeting today (Wednesday) at 2pm EST. Damn - that was right through a meeting - are the IRC logs archived anywhere? cheers, m ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
