Howtos within Sugar Activities (was: [Sugar-devel] Potential volunteer offering technical writing)

2011-10-11 Thread Bastien
I have read all the interesting input regarding refreshing the Help
activity and collectively writing up new Sugar lessons.

One simple idea: why not try to put howtos *within* Sugar Activities?

For example, the Turtle Art activity would have such a folder:

  how/general-tutorial.txt
  how/drawing-a-square.txt
  how/playing-with-variables.txt
  how/...

Plain text would be nice, as it could be later exported to HTML and
displayed within Sugar when required.  Plain text is also easier to 
handle wrt translation.

There has been a lot of discussion about accessing the source and 
I see this how/ folder something that we could feed with powerful
ideas, sitting between the source code and the activity.

Also, it would help solving one of the biggest problem: having someone 
who is in charge of maintaining this documentation.

FWIW, I have updated the FLOSS/DOCS presentation in which I summarize
the background ideas and motivations for this proposal:

  http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/the-four-letters-word-of-floss-docs.html

Thanks,

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Howtos within Sugar Activities

2011-10-11 Thread Bastien
I would state Sugar's agenda like this: 

1. expose kids to powerful ideas
2. provide meaningful activities for these ideas
3. give access to reusable code for these activities

Learning is everywhere in this: learning about ideas, 
learning about activities, learning about code.

Documentation stands between (1) and (2) for pedagogical 
howtos and between (2) and (3) for technical howtos.

I'm talking about pedagogical howtos (not lessons, just
content that helps unfold the power behind learning ideas.)

Stealing from Eisenhower method, I would say that providing
reusable code is important and providing documentation
for powerful ideas is urgent -- teachers keep asking it.

How much of XO storage is dedicated to providing source code?

How much of XO storage is dedicated to providing pedagogical
howtos?

Most kids are offline.  The purpose of the Help activity is 
exactly this: provide offline help for general issues about 
Sugar and the XO.

Online-based lessons will not fix the issue of providing 
offline hints on how to use an activity, unless there is a 
plan to include this online content in the activity...

Abacus is a good example: having a simple howto in a how/
directory would be nice.  

Even for us, lucky connected chaps, most applications come
with offline documentation...

I'm done with my last 2cts :)

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Howtos within Sugar Activities

2011-10-11 Thread Bastien
Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org writes:

 We are thinking in include a minimal help, like Implode activity
 or TurtleArt are doing, But with this minimal help, the TurtleArt po
 and locale directory
 are much bigger than all the other data in the activity.

IMHO having elementary documentation within some core Activities 
is worth the storage space.

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Re: GCompris and xo-1

2011-01-31 Thread Bastien
Hi Leonardo,

I'm copying Bruno, the main developer of Gcompris.  He might surely help
with your requests.

Best,

Leonardo Rojas lro...@eduinnova.com writes:

 Hello
 First of all, sorry if my english its not very good since its not my
 native languaje. I need to modify some GCompris activies and install
 them on a xo-1 with
 Build number:852�� Sugar: 0.84.16 Firmware : Q2E45
 because the teachers dont like all the activities as they are, there
 are some activities that are easy to modify because i can do the
 changes with gcompris administration, like GCompris MissingLetter,
 but for the others i need to recompile them.� I made changes on
 several, like MemoryEnumerate, AlgebraGuesscount, Babymatch and
 others, then i run gcompris, and all the changes are there, the
 activities work as intended but when i try to install them on the xo,
 they dont start, i dont even get the

 Cannot find cached 0sugar-launch implementation. or another error� (i
 know a workaround for the 0sugar-launch imlmentation error, i get
 this error with version 13 of activities mostly, all version 12
 activities run perfect in the xo

 the icon appears then afther a while the activitie close, i tried
 using the� ./bundleit.sh and� using setup.py, tried using GCompris
 9.5 then Gcompris 9.3 (modifying the source files from the activities
 that come in that GCompris version)
 So my question is, someone knows how to compile and install a
 modified GCompris activity in this xo?, really need help plz, im
 suposed to have them installed and working on the xo next week.
 sorry for the inconvenience
 thx, bye


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Re: [Sugar-devel] Wikipedia bundle in other languages

2011-01-06 Thread Bastien
Hi Sameer,

Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu writes:

 I'd like to bundle the Hindi version of Wikipedia into an offline
 activity. 
 http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%96%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%83%E0%A4%B7%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A0
 Do we have a set process/scripts to do so?

I'm working with the developer of Kiwix¹ to help have such a process.
It's still work in progress, but I hope we'll be able to release code
soon.  Stay tuned.

¹ http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Help activity

2010-11-01 Thread Bastien
Hi Gonzalo,

Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org writes:

 Who is maintaining the Help activity?

Brian Jordan is the maintainer (br...@laptop.org, bcjor...@gmail.com)
and Seth Woodworth has commit access (s...@laptop.org).

 I have a few small patches:
 1) change in the css to better use of screen, now we can rotate screen again.
 2) replace home icon by the new icon.
 3) add a view toolbar, stolen from browse
 4) fix the icon because in F13 there are changes in the svg rendering and the
 old icon does not look ok.

I'd happy to review and apply your patches if Brian or Jordan (or anyone
who can) give me commit access.

Best,

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Edit/audit wikipedia activity

2010-10-24 Thread Bastien
Hi Martin,

Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com writes:

 Do we have any easy way to do this? Is any of the many static
 wikipedia project already working on audit/edit/polish facilites we
 can reuse (that accepts our format)?

FYI I forwarded your question to the maintainer of Kiwix
(http://www.kiwix.org/) - he is currently actively working 
on a kiwix.xo activity, and I agree your point is important.

I'll follow-up with answers, if any.

Best,

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How to create a proper fs.zip ?

2010-04-28 Thread Bastien
Hi all,

I managed to create a customized image using build.py.

I have now os802_fr.img / os802_fr.crc / os802_fr.img.md5

I tried to put this on a key and to install it on a XO-1.

It fails, the XO is looking for fs.zip, then for a school mesh, 
etc.  I have no OK prompt and I cannot use copy-nand.

How do I create the requested fs.zip?

Thanks for your help,

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Re: How to create a proper fs.zip ?

2010-04-28 Thread Bastien
Hi Daniel,

thanks for the reply.

Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org writes:

 The much easier option, and the one I'd suggest, is that you simply
 disable security on all the laptops.

Okay.

 Obtain a developer key for all laptops and run disable-security at
 the firmware prompt.

The problem is that our 100 XOs (in Madagascar) are *not* connected to
the Internet.

Is there a way to get a developer key (or to disable security) for all
our 100 (soon 160) XO without an internet access?

It would be a pity to be able to freely install free software on a free
machine only if those machines are connected to the Internet...

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Re: How to create a proper fs.zip ?

2010-04-28 Thread Bastien
Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org writes:

 On 28 April 2010 11:30, Bastien bastien.gue...@wikimedia.fr wrote:
 The problem is that our 100 XOs (in Madagascar) are *not* connected to
 the Internet.

 Is there a way to get a developer key (or to disable security) for all
 our 100 (soon 160) XO without an internet access?

 Do you have a technical contact inside OLPC?

No.  Who should I contact?

 They can make developer keys instantaneously from a list of serial
 numbers, so you'd just have to send the list.

Ok, great.

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Re: How to build an .img

2010-04-25 Thread Bastien
James Cameron qu...@laptop.org writes:

 On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 05:19:39PM +0200, Bastien wrote:
 2. I told build.py to run a script which removes the file I want to
 get rid of (which is ${imgdir}/home/olpc/.sugar-update) - but the
 script fails and complains this file is missing.

 My apologies.  .sugar-update is created by
 /etc/rc.d/init.d/olpc-configure on first boot, so you should read that
 script and patch it for your build.  Or remove the file in a script that
 runs after olpc-configure; such as /etc/rc.local.

Thanks a lot, James.  That's what I was looking for.

I'll report progress on this.

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Re: How to build an .img

2010-04-21 Thread Bastien
Bastien b...@laptop.org writes:

 How to build a modified os802_fr.img (and its friend fs.zip)?  

Ok, I made some progress.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image_builder was helpful.

I managed to create my own images (fr802.crc, fr802.img, fr802.img.md5)
using build.py script.

But I still have two problems:

1. using the G1G1/802 activities gives an error about missing licenses.
   What activities should I use in bundles/ to avoid this problem?

2. I told build.py to run a script which removes the file I want to get
   rid of (which is ${imgdir}/home/olpc/.sugar-update) - but the script
   fails and complains this file is missing.

Any idea?

Thanks a lot,

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How to build an .img

2010-04-20 Thread Bastien
Hi all,

OLPC France is creating customization keys (including the 802 version of
the OS) to help update the 100 XOs (soon to be 150) that children use in
Madagascar, Nosy Komba.

We'd like to get rid of the initial message Do you want to update the
software and the activity? - children won't be able to connect to the
internet for now (we're working on this.)

James told us to get rid of the /home/olpc/.sugar-update file, which is
fine, but how to exclude this file from the customization key?

How to build a modified os802_fr.img (and its friend fs.zip)?  We don't
plan to distribute this image.

Thanks for any hint,

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Re: A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad

2010-04-07 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com writes:

 On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 7:34 AM, Carlos Nazareno object...@gmail.com wrote:
 (she had previous iPhone experience)

 That's called cheating! ;-)

Especially now that the iPad secret has been revealed:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l0bixcHAZo1qz8wm5o1_500.png

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Camera saturation - image compression level

2009-12-03 Thread Bastien
Hi,

some people in France (from La main à la pâte) designed a telescope for
the XO.  It's a cheap ad hoc device they stick close to the camera, and
it can zoom by 10x -- useful for observing, say, the moon.

At this stage of the project, they have two problems:

- shots of the moon are often saturated: how to reduce the gain
  of the camera?  Ideally one would like to do this manually...

- is there a way to take pictures with a higher resolution?  the 
  default compression level doesn't produce great pictures.

Thanks for any feedback!

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Re: Wanted: List of Sugar activities for the XO-1.5

2009-12-03 Thread Bastien
Hi all,

Reuben K. Caron reu...@laptop.org writes:

 The one question I have is in regards to localization. Can we have one bundle
 that supports localization, i.e. changes default language according sugar/OFW
 values, or would we need different bundles?

Eric will confirm this, but selecting the language from one single
bundle makes that bundle way too heavy.

For now the plan is to one version per language on ASLO.

Is that so inconvenient for massive deployments?

Best,

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Re: Wanted: List of Sugar activities for the XO-1.5

2009-12-03 Thread Bastien
Ed McNierney e...@laptop.org writes:

 Yes.  I'm not sure how massive deployments are relevant, but we
 currently have one standard software image that is installed at the
 factory on all XOs.  You are suggesting that we create unique software
 images, one for each SKU, to be managed and installed separately by
 OLPC and Quanta for each deployment.   

We are miscommunicating, I guess i used the word bundle 
out of its normal context.

I was just suggesting to have *two* Ooo4Kids activities on
activities.sugarlabs.org, one in english and one in spanish.

Trying to put both english and spanish languages in a unique
activity would make it too big I guess.

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-22 Thread Bastien
Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.com writes:

 Thanks *very much* for these explanations.

 I hope this kind of information can find its way through the OLPC blog,
 maybe with a little more context.  Then we can fight the FUD by linking
 to these explanations.

I've just written an entry about this on OLPC France's blog:

  http://olpc-france.org/blog/2009/07/sugar-mauvaise-presse-et-mise-au-point/

Sorry, this is in french and I don't have time to translate it now.  
But basically it tries to do this:

1. to clarify what is Sugar;

2. to explain what was the process of developing it for the XO, then for
   any hardware -- this explanation giving hints on why (1) is sometimes
   hard to understand and why NN comment needs clarification;

3. to tell (again) what is OLPC/Microsoft all about.

I have pointed to some of the messages from this list.  I hope this post
can help in getting rid of disinformation.

Thanks,

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Carlos Nazareno object...@gmail.com writes:

 The thing is, most of the people on Slashdot (aka the Internet
 Geek/Nerd Community) who post about OLPC topics know nothing about
 what's going on as they just get their info from 3rd-hand sources and
 haven't even touched an XO.

That's my point.  We can fix this issue by raising an army of small
hands that will vote on your (correct) slashdot comment, spread the
correct vision, etc.  Or we can hope that OLPC will fix this issue by
taking care of what people imagine and try to deliver strong messages
on what's really going on.

The first fix isn't worth the energy - because of course, everyone
claims to know about what's really going on.

The second fix would be the best one, but OLPC is in a position where
any advice coming from the community is not heard.  Maybe there are too
many of them.  Or maybe OLPC turned a bit paranoïd about the community.

 Since we know a little bit more, it would be very informative to the
 world at large to set the story straight at these forums.

Yes.  But what would be the information?

  OLPC supports both the use of free and proprietary softwares on its
  hardware.

Nothing really new, and nothing that prevents nerds from taking it in
the wrong sense.

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Thanks *very much* for these explanations.

I hope this kind of information can find its way through the OLPC blog,
maybe with a little more context.  Then we can fight the FUD by linking
to these explanations.

Coyping sj, as I think he's responsible for OLPC's blog, but I might be
wrong about this.

Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org writes:


 Now AFAIK, there's little to no Windows work being done in-house by
 the OLPC team, and it's all or mostly at Microsoft's side that the
 work's being done.
   

 At the moment, OLPC is doing approximately zero work on Windows.  That 
 wasn't true last year.  I spent several months last year making it 
 possible to boot Windows from Open Firmware.  The reason I did that was 
 to prevent Microsoft from taking over the XO machine.  Their plan was 
 to purchase machines and instruct the factory to reflash their SPI FLASH 
 boot ROM with a conventional BIOS - which would have prevented OLPC's 
 Linux from working.  It would have been possible to boot a different 
 Linux distro from that BIOS, but it would not have been bootable from 
 NAND FLASH, the OLPC security would not have been available, OLPC's 
 special power management would not have worked, and the OFW-resident 
 management features like diagnostics and NAND update would have been 
 lost.  Essentially it would have been a one-way ticket to Microsoft land.

 That one-way road was unacceptable to Nicholas.  He insisted that, if 
 any machines were to be able to run Windows, they must be able to dual-boot.

 Microsoft already had the one-way solution working, with only the barest 
 amount of involvement from the OLPC team - essentially, I answered a few 
 questions that Microsoft's rep posed to me.  The time I spent doing that 
 was comparable to the time I spent answering similar questions from 
 people porting other operating systems, such as Minix, Plan 9, and ReactOS.

 The big chunks of time that I spent on Microsoft-related stuff were not 
 to make Windows run on the XO - that was already a done deal.  I spent 
 the time to enable OFW to dual-boot Windows and Linux, thus preventing 
 Windows only XOs.

 That work paid off in another way for XO-1.5.  The ACPI infrastructure 
 necessary to run Windows on XO-1 let us to use a more standard Linux 
 kernel for XO-1.5.  That's good in that it helps our chances of meeting 
 our tight schedule with our modest system software resources, and 
 reduces the amount of upstream merging that we must do.  It's bad from 
 the standpoint that XO-1.5 is looking more and more like a conventional 
 PC, thus bringing it dangerously close to the black hole of the PC 
 industry that sucks everything into the commodity ecosystem in which 
 Intel has near-total control over the evolution of the system architecture.

 It's possible - even likely - that I will have to spend some time in the 
 next few months to make Windows boot on XO-1.5.  I expect that will go 
 quite quickly compared to the last effort, as the XO-1 work should carry 
 over.

 Mitch

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com writes:

 On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 8:01 PM, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote:
 That's my point.  We can fix this issue by raising an army of small
 hands that will vote on your (correct) slashdot comment, spread the
 correct vision, etc.  Or we can hope that OLPC will fix this issue by
 taking care of what people imagine and try to deliver strong messages
 on what's really going on.

 The first fix isn't worth the energy - because of course, everyone
 claims to know about what's really going on.

 Why not? Does anybody wait for Linus Torvalds before fighting anti-linux FUD?

Sorry I meant: it's not worth trying to make everyone fix this
communication bug.  But of course, individuals are welcome to fix it!

 The second fix would be the best one, but OLPC is in a position where
 any advice coming from the community is not heard.  Maybe there are too
 many of them.  Or maybe OLPC turned a bit paranoïd about the community.

 Or maybe OLPC is a tiny *tiny* group of people, utterly swamped with
 HW, SW, deployment efforts, manufacturing logistics, working with
 governments, etc...?

Yes - that's why I said that there were perhaps too many advice to sort
out the relevant ones.  Still, my point was not to criticise but to try
to understand.

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Carlos Nazareno object...@gmail.com writes:

 I'm more than happy to post stuff, having a Slashdot account. I just
 don't know what to post exactly as stuff is not yet clarified.

Mitch just posted useful information.  Still, having a link to a blog
post would help clarifying stuff.

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com writes:

 On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote:
 Carlos Nazareno object...@gmail.com writes:

 I'm more than happy to post stuff, having a Slashdot account. I just
 don't know what to post exactly as stuff is not yet clarified.

 Mitch just posted useful information.  Still, having a link to a blog
 post would help clarifying stuff.

 Right! Do you have a blog? :-)

I meant: http://blog.laptop.org

PS: I might write a blog entry in french for OLPC France...

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
CC'ing SJ this time...

Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.com writes:

 Thanks *very much* for these explanations.

 I hope this kind of information can find its way through the OLPC blog,
 maybe with a little more context.  Then we can fight the FUD by linking
 to these explanations.

 Coyping sj, as I think he's responsible for OLPC's blog, but I might be
 wrong about this.

 Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org writes:


 Now AFAIK, there's little to no Windows work being done in-house by
 the OLPC team, and it's all or mostly at Microsoft's side that the
 work's being done.
   

 At the moment, OLPC is doing approximately zero work on Windows.  That 
 wasn't true last year.  I spent several months last year making it 
 possible to boot Windows from Open Firmware.  The reason I did that was 
 to prevent Microsoft from taking over the XO machine.  Their plan was 
 to purchase machines and instruct the factory to reflash their SPI FLASH 
 boot ROM with a conventional BIOS - which would have prevented OLPC's 
 Linux from working.  It would have been possible to boot a different 
 Linux distro from that BIOS, but it would not have been bootable from 
 NAND FLASH, the OLPC security would not have been available, OLPC's 
 special power management would not have worked, and the OFW-resident 
 management features like diagnostics and NAND update would have been 
 lost.  Essentially it would have been a one-way ticket to Microsoft land.

 That one-way road was unacceptable to Nicholas.  He insisted that, if 
 any machines were to be able to run Windows, they must be able to dual-boot.

 Microsoft already had the one-way solution working, with only the barest 
 amount of involvement from the OLPC team - essentially, I answered a few 
 questions that Microsoft's rep posed to me.  The time I spent doing that 
 was comparable to the time I spent answering similar questions from 
 people porting other operating systems, such as Minix, Plan 9, and ReactOS.

 The big chunks of time that I spent on Microsoft-related stuff were not 
 to make Windows run on the XO - that was already a done deal.  I spent 
 the time to enable OFW to dual-boot Windows and Linux, thus preventing 
 Windows only XOs.

 That work paid off in another way for XO-1.5.  The ACPI infrastructure 
 necessary to run Windows on XO-1 let us to use a more standard Linux 
 kernel for XO-1.5.  That's good in that it helps our chances of meeting 
 our tight schedule with our modest system software resources, and 
 reduces the amount of upstream merging that we must do.  It's bad from 
 the standpoint that XO-1.5 is looking more and more like a conventional 
 PC, thus bringing it dangerously close to the black hole of the PC 
 industry that sucks everything into the commodity ecosystem in which 
 Intel has near-total control over the evolution of the system architecture.

 It's possible - even likely - that I will have to spend some time in the 
 next few months to make Windows boot on XO-1.5.  I expect that will go 
 quite quickly compared to the last effort, as the XO-1 work should carry 
 over.

 Mitch

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Christoph Derndorfer christoph.derndor...@gmail.com writes:

 On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Carlos Nazareno object...@gmail.com writes:

  I'm more than happy to post stuff, having a Slashdot account. I just
  don't know what to post exactly as stuff is not yet clarified.

 Mitch just posted useful information.  Still, having a link to a blog
 post would help clarifying stuff.

 I hope I find the time to write an olpcnews story based on the information 
 that
 Mitch posted earlier.

That'd be great indeed!

 Maybe I missed it before but I'm really very surprised that this is the first
 time I'm hearing this angle of the story in such detail. IMHO it would have
 made a lot of sense for OLPC to say exactly what Mitch wrote here when the
 Microsoft s*** first hit the fan in May 2008.

+1

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
James Cameron qu...@laptop.org writes:

 On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 10:50:33AM +0200, Bastien wrote:
 Mitch just posted useful information.  Still, having a link to a blog
 post would help clarifying stuff.

 Here you go ...

 http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-July/025132.html

 Not exactly classical blog format, but very efficient, since the
 interface is SMTP rather than HTTP for posting.

Thanks.  But a blog entry would still look more official, and would have
more context explaining why those explanations are necessary.

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com writes:

 On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 12:12 PM, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote:
 Thanks.  But a blog entry would still look more official, and would have
 more context explaining why those explanations are necessary.

 If you are going to wait or an official Linus Torvalds statement on
 things, you're going to wait a long time. Same with expecting SJ to
 write something up -- he doesn't answer my emails either :-)

 The not-so-hidden message from James, me and everyone is: to be an
 effective participant in this community, you have to *not* wait on
 others. Use non-blocking IO. Get stuff done.

 If we told you what to do, you wouldn't like it either ;-)

Well, you just told me what to do, right? :)

To make things clear: I'm doing all what I can to get things done
regarding this OLPC/MS-FUD issue.

My point is just to say that having an official blog entry would 
help a lot.

The two things are not incompatible.

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com writes:

 If you are going to wait or an official Linus Torvalds statement on
 things, you're going to wait a long time. Same with expecting SJ to
 write something up -- he doesn't answer my emails either :-)

Btw, linux was successful because Linus was paying attention to the
contributions of its users, and because he was actually maintaining 
a rich relationship with them.


A while ago, OLPC was advertizing a Director of grassroots job
opportunity -- who took this job?  Who is responsible for a rich
relationship between OLPC HQ and the grassroots?

When I saw this job announcement I thought it would actually be
something useful to have.  

For example in this case, this director would be able to deliver 
a strong message to the grassroots on how to deal with this FUD.

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Ed McNierney e...@laptop.org writes:

 When we're finished clearing up the confusion about what OLPC is really doing
 (and has been doing for a long time), we can move on to proving that Apollo 11
 really did land on the Moon, Barack Obama was indeed born in Hawaii, and Lee
 Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Point taken.  

Oh and please don't tell the Slashdot crowd that there is no trace of
Apollo 11 when looking at the moon from the Moon activity...

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-21 Thread Bastien
Ed McNierney e...@laptop.org writes:

 When we're finished clearing up the confusion about what OLPC is really doing
 (and has been doing for a long time), we can move on to proving that Apollo 11
 really did land on the Moon, Barack Obama was indeed born in Hawaii, and Lee
 Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Point taken.  

Oh and please don't tell the Slashdot crowd that there is no trace of
Apollo 11 when looking at the moon from the Moon activity - otherwise
they will start looking for Obama-biography.xo.

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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

2009-07-20 Thread Bastien
Hi Carlos,

Carlos Nazareno object...@gmail.com writes:

 (The title is bad FUD from OLPC News -- it's actually Negroponte
 saying that Sugar should have been run as an application instead of
 the main OS layer/frontend and not Sugar itself as the mistake.)

This is actually very bad FUD.  The original article over-simplifies
what NN said about Sugar, and olpcnews over-amplifies this error.  

 Now everytime there's a piece on OLPC at Slashdot.org, it seems 30% of
 the comment traffic is composed of bashing OLPC for caving in to
 Microsoft and Windows.

I guess 30% of /. comments are just about Ranting For Nothing ©.

 In this case, OLPC is not really in bed with MS but is more of
 allowing MS to run Windows on the OLPC the same way users can install
 any software they want on their PCs.

 Am I correct in this assumption?

I can't speak for OLPC but this is also my understanding. 

 I'm sick and tired of the this OLPC-MS FUD (Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt) on
 Slashdot (one of the highest-traffic websites, so high that getting
 linked on the frontpage is like being DDOSed) and it would be great if
 the record on this could be set straight so that the MS FUD inanity on
 Slashdot can be ended as it's destroying the image of OLPC.

I'm sick of it as well, but I think there is nothing to do.

On a bigger scale, there is a problem in over-repeating that OLPC is an
education project while not supporting the software it must run and the
content it must have to truly become an education project.

OLPC now only sells machines and alternative ideas about education, but
the gap between these ideas and the machine is just huge enough so that
traditional habits about ICT in education can look more successful.

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Re: SocialCalc 0.8.3g version release

2009-06-23 Thread Bastien
Claudia Urrea clau...@laptop.org writes:

 Congratulation on a great work. I look forward to the localization in
 Spanish.  You will be hearing from me soon!!

And I look forward the translation in french!   I looked into the code,
but wasn't able to find any po/ directory -- hope this will be available
soon... 

In the meantime, I've uploaded a tiny screencast here:

  http://vimeo.com/5291250

It doesn't really explore SocialCalc, it just exposes it to the eyes.
But still, some eyes can't *believe* things until they are shown them.

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Re: Videos of XO 1.5 in Taipei

2009-06-02 Thread Bastien
Or maybe olpc.tv can send its videos to our contact at Dailymotion? 
They can encode it in ogg and make them available for kids at:

  http://olpc.dailymotion.com

Don't hesitate.

rihowa...@gmail.com rihowa...@gmail.com writes:

 It would be nice if olpc.tv used ogg vorbis.   Is there any way to get the
 videos of XO 1.5 in Taipei, etc. posted in a linux friendly format?   XO users
 are excluded from viewing material about the XO.  Where the FOSS are you!!

 In other words FOSS you..tube, use Ogg Vorbis!!

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Re: Building an OLPC kernel

2009-03-17 Thread Bastien
Guys, please strip olpc-france@ mailing list from english conversations,
this is confusing.

Thanks!

Scott Douglass sc...@swdouglass.com writes:

 On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 11:54 +, Rekik Hanen wrote:
 Hi,
 I found this link http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Kernel_Building and I
 tried to follow it. But when I run tar zcvf kern.tar.gz
 arch/i386/boot/bzImage System.map /lib/modules/$VERS, I got this
 error tar: error exit delayed from previous errors.
 Note that I use ubuntu 8.10 machine.
 Can anyone help me !!!
 thanks.

 This page is the best one related to building the OLPC kernel:

 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Rebuilding_OLPC_kernel

 You may find cloning my git repo will be slightly more entertaining
 though:

 git clone git://dev.laptop.org/users/scott/fedora-kernel

 Here you will find various things: a couple of pre-built good OLPC
 kernels (2.6.25 and 2.6.27) for reference, and a simpler way of building
 the kernel RPMS based on the OLPC source. Also some Makefiles for
 building OLPC drivers outside of the kernel source tree, so you can use
 them with Fedora kernels too.

 Ultimately, I intend to port the OLPC kernel changes into a Fedora
 kernel. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Re: [Sugar-devel] instructions for flashing SoaS on a XO

2009-03-10 Thread Bastien
Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com writes:

 +1

http://sugarlabs.org/go/Translation

Maybe Translation is not the best choice for naming this page.  
Feel free to modify it.  

I tried to figure out where to put this in the To Do list page,  
but couldn't find anything really useful.

 First on the list is the Downloads page itself.

http://sugarlabs.org/go/Downloads/lang-fr

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Re: [Sugar-devel] instructions for flashing SoaS on a XO

2009-03-09 Thread Bastien
Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org writes:

 http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Installation/OLPC

 Thanks a lot, have improved a bit the Spanish translation, though help
 is needed to further polish it.

I just added a french translation.  

It would be nice to have a page on the SugarLabs wiki listing the pages
that need to be translated.  Shall I open it? 

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Re: [Sugar-devel] instructions for flashing SoaS on a XO

2009-03-07 Thread Bastien
Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com writes:

 I tried it (from Ubuntu instead of F10) and it seems to work
 flawlessly!! I've documented what I did in the wiki:

 http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Installation/OLPC

This is nice.  

I'd like to translate this page into french - any way to host a
translation on the SugarLabs wiki?   (Maybe something similar to  
what wiki.laptop.org offered?)

best,

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Re: XFT emacs rocks on the XO...

2009-02-11 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com writes:

 Getting vim-enhanced takes 22MB more, which is a fair bit for
 something 99.9% of our users won't want or need.

99.9%

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Re: wiki.l.o down?

2009-02-06 Thread Bastien
Yes, still down.

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Re: status of OLPC project

2009-01-25 Thread Bastien
C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org writes:

 On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote:
 Victor Lazzarini victor.lazzar...@nuim.ie writes:

 [...] In other words, it would be useful to get a who's who for the
 project.

 +1

 Please have some consideration for the recently unemployed.  

(Sorry if my +1 sounded a bit rough, that was not my intention.)

I hope we can have an exhaustive who's who on the web soon.  Every
single community I know out there uses the web the make everyone know
who does what.  I wish the same can be done with OLPC HQ.

Regards,

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Re: status of OLPC project

2009-01-25 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com writes:

 just wanted to know who is taking care of what now.

 that's fair enough, but it'll take some time to settle. Maybe post to
 de...@l.o and the sugar devel list and hope whomever is looking after
 component X to answer?

It's now two weeks since that message.  

Anyone volunteering to build such a who's who at OLPC HQ?

Thanks!

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Re: status of OLPC project

2009-01-09 Thread Bastien
Victor Lazzarini victor.lazzar...@nuim.ie writes:

 [...] In other words, it would be useful to get a who's who for the
 project.

+1

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Re: G1G1 updates, Lennon video and other vids

2008-12-30 Thread Bastien
Yoshiki Ohshima yosh...@vpri.org writes:

   I like some of the songs, and I don't oppose to progressive art and
 their activities, but I feel it awkward if people treat Lennon as a
 big symbol for practical world changer and not to mention for
 education.)

Yeah.

Too bad OLPC didn't make an animated movie with Socrates using a XO!

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Re: G1G1 updates, Lennon video and other vids

2008-12-28 Thread Bastien
Samuel Klein s...@laptop.org writes:

 Has that white-on-black version of the logo appeared anywhere else?

I don't know...

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Re: G1G1 updates, Lennon video and other vids

2008-12-27 Thread Bastien
Samuel Klein s...@laptop.org writes:

 The Lennon video that's been murmured about for weeks has been
 released.  I'm curious to see reactions from the list.  

I only like the beginning - flying XOs...  the first attempt for a
forthcoming screensaver activity?

For the rest of it, it sounds fake, it's too short, what we see and 
hear is nothing but a distraction from the core message.  Looks like
people have been playing with a beautiful idea, but ended up with a
toy-movie.

My favorite so far is Waveplace's one:

  http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=Py3wB-7JeOE

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Re: The new OLPC ads

2008-12-16 Thread Bastien
Hi Jean,

Jean Piché j...@piche.com writes:

 http://www2.infopresse.com/blogs/actualites/archive/2008/12/15/article-29417.aspx

This article is in french - maybe you better want to send this to the
french OLPC mailing list: olpc-fra...@lists.laptop.org

Regards,

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Re: The new OLPC ads

2008-12-16 Thread Bastien
Ties Stuij cjst...@gmail.com writes:

 On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote:
 Hi Jean,

 Jean Piché j...@piche.com writes:

 http://www2.infopresse.com/blogs/actualites/archive/2008/12/15/article-29417.aspx

 This article is in french - maybe you better want to send this to the
 french OLPC mailing list: olpc-fra...@lists.laptop.org

 But then the amount of people that understand some french is bigger
 than the amount of people signed up for the olpc-france mailing list
 perhaps. And it's got nothing to do with France. It's in fact a
 Canadian publication. Writing about a 'world-wide' campaign. I'll stop
 now.

Take it easy.

I just assumed the OP did a mistake.  

No matter whether there are more french-speaking readers on devel@ than
on olpc-france@, french articles are more relevant to olpc-france@ than
to de...@.  Especially when the article has nothing to do with xo/sugar
development!

Regards,

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Someone to take over maintainance of OLPC:News?

2008-12-13 Thread Bastien
Hi all,

I've just updated http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC:News 

I'm not interested in maintaining this anymore.  
Someone to take over?

PS: the page is way too big and the first job should be to split it and
to make it more readable...

Thanks!

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Re: Clone a whole dir from dev.laptop.org/git ?

2008-12-09 Thread Bastien
Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 How about:

scp -r [EMAIL PROTECTED]/git/activities .

 ? (Or were you saying that you need a real shell on dev?)

Actually, I don't (think I) have a shell on dev. 

Is a shell really required for this?  
If so, I'll ask one to Henry.

Thanks!

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Re: spell checking in activities

2008-12-06 Thread Bastien
S Page [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Bastien wrote:
 When designing a spell-checker, we should keep in mind that the
 spell-checker should always suggest correct spellings, and never
 underline errors.

 I disagree.  I think the standard red dots spell checking that AbiWord 
 and Firefox do is extremely useful.

It might seem extremely useful for adults who already know how to spell
words, who only do typos.  But it is misleading for children who *learn*
how to spell; it exposes their memory do the wrong spelling.  If you're
interested, I will try to provide pointers to some cognitive researches.

Regards,

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Re: spell checking in activities

2008-12-06 Thread Bastien
Hi Carol,

Carol Farlow Lerche [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Please provide the pointers if you would be so kind.  

Will do, when I have it!

 English has too many words that don't follow rules, so if writing were 
 deferred
 until spelling of each word could be perfect, young children would not be able
 to write substantive compositions until later grades.  No doubt other 
 languages
 are taught differently.  

Spell-checking is just a possible feature of a software.  I expect such
a feature will only be useful for certain teaching contexts and methods.

For a given context in which we assume that the feature is relevant,
there are good and bad implementations.  For example, in order to teach
the correct spellings of words to a kid, I think MS-like spell-checkers
are bad.  

As an alternative, I suggest to use a very minimalistic spell-checker,
which will automatically replace typos by the correct spelling when the
replacement is 99% predictable.  Or something along this idea.

(I'm not arguing on how writing should be taught...)

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Re: xo activity idea

2008-12-03 Thread Bastien
Yifan [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 I had an idea for an activity, something like a write activity with a
 constantly updating spell checker that displayed spelling suggestions as you
 typed

When designing a spell-checker, we should keep in mind that the
spell-checker should always suggest correct spellings, and never
underline errors.  In this respect MS Word spell-checker (and a 
few others I tested) is just a disaster: it helps people remember 
errors.

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Re: XO OS name

2008-10-08 Thread Bastien
Carlos Nazareno [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 A spinoff from the name Sugar? Before Sugar was spunoff to run on
 other platforms, I think journalists kept calling the XO's OS Sugar.

 Mmm. Sugar-XO?

Xugar?

  -- Bastien (who just agree a short sweet name would do.)
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Re: [sugar] notes from the field - Mongolia

2008-10-07 Thread Bastien
Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 6:33 PM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 In my mind the fundamental problem is that users aren't required to
 fully qualify names for their work.  Doing so seems to lie outside of
 one of the core points of Sugar's design (There are no files, folders,
 or applications. -- http://sugarlabs.org/go/Main_Page).  Is it
 conceivable that we could change this feature of the system in future
 releases to clarify data management on Sugar-running XOs?

 You keep repeating this and it makes no sense. As Eben said we need to
 encourage people to tag and name things. Saying that it's outside the
 Sugar philosophy is nonsense.

I think we could have two modes: the one Sugar currently uses, where no
specific name is required to store a journal entry, and one in which the
user is required to name the journal entry when the activity is storing
it for the first time.  

For example, in the first mode Atl-1 would do a screenshot as it does
right now.  In the second mode Alt-1 would bring up a window querying
for the name of the screenshot.  

Whether users are encouraged or not to actually name and tags things 
on the XO can be influence by such UI features - no?

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Easy USB Install Sugar + g1g1 activities

2008-10-07 Thread Bastien
I've updated my page:

http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/olpc_install_sugar_activities_usb.php

This now uses joyride-2511 and 767.  The G1G1 activities are those
listed on this page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/G1G1

The script I run to build the zip files uses this directory for G1G1
activities: http://relire.org/xo/g1g1_activities/

Enjoy,

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Re: New release8.2 build 764

2008-10-01 Thread Bastien
C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 But it appears that the Help activity (for example) is not listed in
 these pages.  What URL should I use?

 You should use the URL listed on the [[Activities/G1G1]] page.  The
 data is machine-readable; there is a parser at:

   
 http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/sugar-update-control;a=blob;f=bitfrost/update/microformat.py;h=4104bfdae43532125fbd1a94faf4ce489a6359ea;hb=HEAD

 and the format is described at

   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_microformat

Thanks.  IIUC I should use microformat.py functions in my (customized)
create-customization-key to scrap the HTML page containing activities,
and load them from there - is that right?

Sadly enough, I don't speak python yet, and I don't know how to update
create-customization-key to make it aware of microformats.  

Did anyone take this route?  Or can someone give me some more hints on
how to do this?

Thanks,

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Re: New release8.2 build 764

2008-09-30 Thread Bastien
C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Do you mean the activities listed here:

 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/G1G1/8.2

 The /8.2 version of the page are the 'stable' versions.  When we get
 into 9.1 development, the [[Activities/G1G1]] page will contain the
 latest 9.1 or development versions, while [[Activities/G1G1/8.2]] will
 only be updated monthly or so, with those activity versions which are
 expected to work well on 8.2.  At the moment, they should be
 identical.

All right, thanks.

I was in the process of updating my scripts to make the USB-ready zip
files contain the G1G1 activities.  To including activities in the
stable and joyride zips, I respectively use these two pages:

 stable: http://mock.laptop.org/repos/local.update1/XOS/index.html
joyride: http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/repos/joyride

But it appears that the Help activity (for example) is not listed in
these pages.  What URL should I use?

Thanks again,

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Re: What is the URL of the community-created G1G1 QA database?

2008-09-29 Thread Bastien
Mel Chua [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 (Moving to devel at Wad's request, ccing support-gang as they're likely 
 to know the URL that I'm referring to.)

 Brian (currently at the Rwanda deployment) suggested a knowledgebase for 
 XO troubleshooting - iirc, a knowledgebase was started by a volunteer 
 during the G1G1 last year. It was not a forum, it was not a wiki or a 
 chat... interface-wise, it reminded me a little bit of digg. The front 
 page listed common QAs on XO usage, and people could post new questions 
 (and answer-responses to said questions). I think that they were 
 ranked/sorted by popularity or maybe some sort of vote.

 This is a terrible description, but does anybody know the URL of what 
 I'm talking about? See below thread for more context. Feedback on how it 
 worked and how v.2.0 could be improved (and whether such a thing would 
 actually be most useful - maybe there's a better solution) would be 
 great as well.

Maybe something like Stack Overflow?

  http://stackoverflow.com/

Or maybe tags could group XO|Sugar-related questions on Stack Overflow?

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Re: New release8.2 build 764

2008-09-26 Thread Bastien
C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/olpc_install_sugar_activities_usb.php

 Please ensure that your activities and content list matches
 [[Activities/G1G1]].  

Do you mean the activities listed here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/G1G1/8.2

?

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Re: New release8.2 build 764

2008-09-25 Thread Bastien
Build Announcer v2 [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/xo-1/streams/8.2/build764

 Changes in build 764 from build: 763

To download and install it through USB:

http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/olpc_install_sugar_activities_usb.php

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Re: Expected date for 8.2.0

2008-09-10 Thread Bastien
Chris Marshall [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Also, what happened to the white circle around the network circle in
 the Neighborhood to indicate which was connected?  I liked that visual
 confirmation.  

+1

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Re: AC not present?

2008-09-08 Thread Bastien
Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Well, even spelling it external power required is better than the  
 cryptic AC not present.

+1

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Re: How did the testing go on 8.2-757?

2008-09-04 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Thanks for your feedback. As of today, please use 759, which was just
 published. (It hasn't been fully smoke tested yet so I'm not ready to
 send it out to the wide world, but I'm pretty sure it's going to pass.)

 Good hint! We'll use 759 then.

I've juste updated the easy-usb-install page:

 current stable: os711
current testing: 8.2-759
current joyride: jr2388

http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/olpc_install_sugar_activities_usb.php

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Re: [Techteam] Weekend Report - due today

2008-09-03 Thread Bastien
Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 The first point seems solvable if they just install Java afterwards. 
 Then we don't need to worry about licenses. Its a big install but 
 probably not a deal breaker. The performance may be challenging but 
 again I think we can make it fit.

(Several persons in the learning team are interested in knowing how a
Sugar XO can effectively run java-based applications... I expect this
will be way too slow but I'd love to be wrong.)

 I'm not sure what free but not open source means. 

It generally means that it's free of charge, not free of use.  
Use = study, modify, redistribute, redistribute modified versions.

 [...]

 The pedagogical specialists here tell me that concept maps are pretty
 hot in education right now. They also pointed me to a commercial tool
 which some schools use: http://www.inspirationsoftware.com/

 Does anyone know of an open source solution in this area?

Freemind comes to my mind (because it also runs on wikkawiki
plat-forms), but there are a few others:

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

Online (not FLOSS) tools: 

http://www.spinscape.com/
http://www.mindmeister.com/
http://www.mindjet.com/
http://www.thebrain.com/

All this being really too sparkling for my old-fashioned linear
shabby brain.

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Re: [sugar] Survey of activity authors

2008-09-01 Thread Bastien
Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 It would also help if there were a compendium of contact information
 available.  As it is, one has to search in the Activity's wiki page. [For
 instance, what is the address of the Map activity maintainer?]

 In the interests of not increasing their unsolicited mail, I'll
 refrain from posting my list of email addresses on the wiki, but this
 is a good point: it was not a trivial exercise to get the addresses
 together.

I still don't understand why it is so hard to have the contact addresses
directly in the git page of each activity.  If I were to collaborate to
a project, this is the place were I would go.

 I'll work on an expanded list of recommendations including a better
 way to publish contact details for activities.

 We still need a decent activity portal. I know a couple of people have
 looked at the codebase behind addons.mozilla.org, but that didn't get
 far yet.

+1

We are holding a development week-end in mid-november in France, and if
there is no such portal we may as well develop our.

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Clock activity? Activities about time?

2008-09-01 Thread Bastien
Dear Chocolate Frosted Sugar Geeks,

is there a Sugar activity displaying a simple clock?

What activities can be used to teach things about time?  (seconds,
minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries...)

Is there a simple calendar activity?  Can we manipulate the earth 
and visualize earth enlightenment depending on the position and the
hour of the day?

Any hint welcome.  Thanks!

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AC not present?

2008-09-01 Thread Bastien
Hi all,

I just upgraded a XO from 656 to 711 using a USB key (fs.zip +
os711.img + G1G1 activity pack).  The upgrade went fine but the 
computer won't boot and bites like that:

,
| Got firmware version: CL1 Q2E12 Q2E
| Checking integrity...
| Updating firmware
| AC not present
`

Any help would be *much* appreciated as I promised to send this
computer to a professional translator for reviewing the kreyol 
translation...

Thanks!

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Re: AC not present?

2008-09-01 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 n Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Bastien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 | AC not present

 Plug it to power to complete the firmware upgrade step...

AArghh!  Thanks.  For me AC/DC has never meant anything else
than classical music.

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Re: #8041 HIGH 9.1.0: Sugar lacks a Trash/Recycle bin system

2008-08-20 Thread Bastien
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 does the journal have a similar way of marking entries
 as feel free to delete this if i need the space?  i think
 giving it hints as to what's expendable would be important.

That'd be better than no trashbin, but feel free to delete this if I
need the space sounds too abstract to me: it involves hypotheses on
possible situations, which the user don't really want to make.

With a trashbin, there is no such hypotheses, just simple actions:

- delete (put in the bin)

- recover (fetch from the bin)

- click yes when prompted whether it's safe to delete everything in
  the trashbin (the system decides under which conditions this happens)

This actions are accessible to the user in circumstances that the system
decides.  The user has not to consider what are the possible circumstances
under which she wants the system to take some possible actions.

Again, I know that the new design of the next Journal will make it
possible to emulate these actions (tick-to-make-expirable, untick,
say-yes-when-prompted-for-deletion), but I'm not sure whether the UI
itself will make the user *want* (or feel the need) to delete stuff.

You only want to clean your desk and put stuff in your drawer when you
actually have a drawer :)

 - no old-and-backed-up files we can safely remove? Prompt the user

 prompt the user, interrupting whatever they were trying to get
 done?  that seems less than optimal.  if my current UI-of-choice
 implemented disk full this way, i would have long
 ago created personal mechanisms help me organize my work into
 very important, must save, would be nice to keep, but i can
 recreate it if i want, and don't really need it, but i won't
 throw it away until necessary.

That makes a lot of choices.  

At least for me, I like when organization emerges from the use of simple
actions afforded by the UI, rather than having an UI that asks me to get
a bit more organized.  Then I feel too guilty!

My 2cts

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Re: #8041 HIGH 9.1.0: Sugar lacks a Trash/Recycle bin system

2008-08-20 Thread Bastien
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 a data management UI must make these sorts of choices transparent
 and easy.

Agreed.  My concern is about low-tech environments: no XS, no USB keys,
very little care about versioning. Then the trashbin seems rather useful
in forcing the user to delete stuff safely. 

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Re: [sugar] #8041 HIGH 9.1.0: Sugar lacks a Trash/Recycle bin system

2008-08-20 Thread Bastien
Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 The issue of deletion confirmation is covered under ticket
 http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7859.  I flagged it as blocks?:8.2.0, but
 I don't think it is going to be nominated as a blocker at this point
 unless there is a strong push for it.  

I'm not fond of confirmation alerts, no problem if this is not in 8.2.0!

 This is, at least for now, independent of the trash can issue
 itself.

To me it's not completely independant: a trashbin (or an equivalent)
feature) functions as a virtual confirmation system.  I think having 
a trashbin somehow spares the cost of confirmation alerts.

 The Journal should be following a
 lazy-deletion strategy, making it really no different from the trash
 can you speak of.  

Ok, fair enough

 The only difference is how the erased but not yet
 truly gone files get represented to the user.

Yes, that the difference I'm interested in :)

 I do recognize this.  The one detail we could add to potentially solve
 this argument is a button which turns on/off visibility of erased
 entries.  

Let me guess: this button is usually what the trashbin icon does?

 That is, a button which basically shows and hides trashed
 files by toggling their visibility inline within the Journal, in
 addition to  a way to view only those files as well.

Ok, good.  The  button itself would be visible.  The trashed files
wouldn't be visible until the button pressed.  When the button is
pressed, only trashed entries are listed.

 3. Lazy-erased: file stored locally on the XO, but rendered
 differently to indicate transient state

Ok, great - for me lazy-erased files should not be displayed unless the
trashbin button is pressed (in which case only trashed files are listed.
Sorry to repeat myself...)

 If we want, we can be a bit more clever about which cases require
 deletion confirmation (based upon whether or not the action results in
 a recoverable state), but we could simply ask for confirmation all the
 time for consistency.  Or, never.

Never :)  (never as a default - maybe this could be customisable.)

If the default is to rely on confirmation, this will not encourage users
to lazy-erase their files.  With no backup system, it's becomes more
important to encourage them to be selective about what they keep,
encouraging regular cleaning up.

 I hope this clarifies my position on this subject a bit, and paints a
 picture which is really just a different perspective on the usual
 trash can metaphor, rather than an abandonment of it.

Ok, great - things are very clear now.

Can't wait for it to be implemented :)

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Re: #8041 HIGH 9.1.0: Sugar lacks a Trash/Recycle bin system

2008-08-19 Thread Bastien
Eduardo Heleno [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 But my point was that, at the moment, you can choose to Erase an item, and
 it's gone forever. I expect that many kids will do this, and will at some 
 point
 regret erasing some item.

Yes.  This is a request that has been made here in Haïti.

I'm not convinced myself, because I think the design of the (next)
Journal is neat, and the concept of a trashbin too MS-ish/clumsy. 

The only thing I find it useful for: send visual affordance to the 
user so that he *wants* to trash things (in a safe way) rather than
obeying the system when she's forced to delete stuff on a full disk.

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Re: #8041 HIGH 9.1.0: Sugar lacks a Trash/Recycle bin system

2008-08-19 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 But my point was that, at the moment, you can choose to Erase an item, and
 it's gone forever. I expect that many kids will do this, and will at some 
 point
 regret erasing some item.

 Yes.  This is a request that has been made here in Haïti.

 AFAIK, the plan is to *discourage* deletion until the disk is getting
 full. When you are getting to disk-full, trashcan doesn't help.

Yes it does: it contains entries that the system can safely delete
without forcing the user to go thru the entries and sort them out on 
the fly.

People now want deletion because the Journal is not optimal.  They want
deletion to sort out entries in the Joural and get rid of unfinished or
useless entries.  With too many entries, the (current 703/708) Journal
becomes unusable.

They will eventually forget a bit about the trashbin when the Journal
will get better.  But even with a nicer Journal, the trashbin might
still serve the purpose described above.

 When you are running out off disk space, we have two cases:

  - ds-backup has been doing its job, there's a copy of the files in
 the XS, so the journal has old-and-backed-up files that it can decide
 to rm

I'm afraid XS servers won't be of use in *many* schools.

  - no old-and-backed-up files we can safely remove? Prompt the user

I'm curious whether someone did this job of being prompted.  
How long does it take?  If you can't remember what a file contains,
checking if it's safe to delete it by trying to reopen it might be
tiring.  

The whole idea of a trashbin has its limitation, but so does our brain! 

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Sugar: USB install for dummies

2008-08-17 Thread Bastien
Trying to make it easier for everyone to install the latest joyride and
the latest activities on the XO from a USB drive, I've set up this page:

  http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/olpc_install_sugar_activities_usb.php

You can either download a zip containing sugar-stable (currently 708)
and the latest G1G1 activities, or a zip containing the sugar-joyride
(currently 2301) and all the latest activities.  

In either case, you can chose the standard or the clean install.

As I don't have bandwidth here, I cannot check that the install runs
fine.  As I'm one of the dummies I've been setting this page for, I
cannot check that all my instructions are perfectly appropriate.

If anyone could send me feedback on these two points, I'd be very
thankful!  

I will update this zip archives every week.

Hope this helps,

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Re: Project Management Tools meeting in #olpc

2008-08-16 Thread Bastien
Sameer Verma [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Sorry, but I couldn't make it. Meeting conflict on campus. Does anyone
 have notes/irc logs?

Here is what I have:

[18:03]*** You have joined channel #olpc

   *** Topic for #olpc: Web support: http://forum.laptop.org | IRC
   support: #olpc-help | Deployment:
   http://radian.org/notebook/first-deployment | GUI,
   activities: #sugar | Content: #olpc-content

   *** #olpc: topic set by neuralis, 05:44:05 2008/02/04

   *** Users on #olpc: bz_g jdub johnf garycmartin nessy dsaxena
   wcohen_ CanoeBerry Hiro2 greebo ivazquez Lerc_tablet webar7
   Sargun homunq eightdot reynaldo_ J5 faw xuxa nteon behdad
   isforinsects scorche|sh unmadindu hpachas-PE rgs_ joern aa
   pschulz01 rennj kfm82 Neskaya nullwork nullman pepe__ nealmcb
   xobot mether Kevin` dermoth _sj_ Renault mstrobert dwmw2
   blisto1 lars zmedico _bernie philipl paulproteus sjoerd RP
   cjb tarbo_ toi mako eMBee blistov svu araujo

   *** Users on #olpc: h01ger Robot101 bluehole clajo04_ bluefoxicy
   Ian_Daniher_ keithy bbs mpr scorche par gnu{- xjjk jwhite pgf
   christel fragalot mburns saigo mtd YChao_ pepse dogmeat
   kristian-m dirkx_logon sm|CPU bigeasy lkundrak ThomasWaldmann
   danjared [knurds]adc fche cassidy Zdra coderanger orospakr
   besonen_mobile__ smithbone m_stone IDoNotKnow ffm|sh shenki
   PecisDarbs nickr tglx Blaketh Lerc bdale nrp erikg
   summatusmentis dgilmore 

   *** #olpc modes: +tnc

   *** #olpc was created on dimanche 2006/11/26 01:42:47

   isforinsects good morning/evening jdub

   johnf hi all

   nessy hi :)

[18:04]isforinsects garycmartin, I'm not ignoring your last email re
   SOM's, I just haven't had time to parse the health stuff.

   isforinsects hi johnf, nessy

   garycmartin isforinsects: no worry, it's a busy timejust nowfor
   all I'm sure!

   greebo let's start, isforinsects do you want to run it or me?
   :)

[18:05]garycmartin isforinsects: excuse my missing spaces, you can
   guess mt HW :-)

   isforinsects You know more about the requirements than me.

   _sj_ hiya greebo

   greebo _sj_, heya!

   bz_g aloya

[18:06]greebo ok, how about we start with briefly isforinsects or _sj_
   recapping what hq are trying to do, then we can touch base on
   what we are tring to achieve and go from there?

[18:07]isforinsects Let's have _sj_ recap, I don't know most/any of
   the details of projectdb

[18:08]greebo isforinsects, I mean more about a recap on what hq are
trying to do with getting consistency of what the regions are
doing

   greebo let's talk about projectdb after we have a clear picture
   of what everyone wants :)

[18:10]_sj_ sure

[18:11]_sj_ olpc wants to provide a steady stream of hardware to
  contributors, esp. developers

   _sj_ including XOs and active antennas

   CanoeBerry and serial adapters

   _sj_ and to hand off the process of identifying good
   projects/conributors to the community

   *** jrb ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) has joined
   channel #olpc

   *** dwmw2 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is now known as
   dwmw2_gone

[18:12]_sj_ the current projectdb is too opaque

   _sj_ it was set up to catch personal data from contributors

   _sj_ but most of the project-definition process, including
   reviews and suggestions about where to get hardware

   _sj_ (your local community SIG, another person at your
   institution, a national chapter, via the contributors program)

[18:13]_sj_ happens before personal data is needed, and can/should be
   public

   _sj_ a larger-scope projectsharing program to help people
   announce projects, find collaborators, and work on
   testing/outreach/development with others

   _sj_ is related to this data (and sounds closely related to
   what you have in mind, pia)

[18:14]_sj_ currently we have this set of db scripts that maintains
   submissions from projectdb.olpc.at, but the code is hard to hack
   on and stored on dev.olpc.at

   _sj_ hard as in -- you have to send a privkey to one of the two
   machine maintainers, who are busy...

   _sj_ it hasn't seen many people hack on it, mainly c. hager and
   a. kaplan to date

[18:15]greebo because it is so hard to find to hack on :)

   _sj_ its other main prupose is to produce neat xml exports (and
   import shipping updates from brightstar once they confirm
   shpiment)

   _sj_ so that we have a better-ordered set of email alerts as
   the process of getting hardware proceeds

[18:16]_sj_ right now we have to confirm manually that machines have
   gone out, and that they've arrived; all of which should be
   scriptable (b* provides in the end the tracking #, 

Re: joyride images for downloading and installing them with a USB key

2008-08-14 Thread Bastien
Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Hi,

 Hi list, where can I find images of the latest joyride for
 installing it with a USB key?  Something similar to these images:

 http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/xo-1/streams/joyride/latest/devel_ext3/

Anything under this directory is now emtpy:
  
  http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/xo-1/streams/joyride/latest/

2302 is not empty, but 2303 is since midday.  Something wrong?  

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Re: joyride images for downloading and installing them with a USB key

2008-08-12 Thread Bastien
Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Hi list, where can I find images of the latest joyride for
 installing it with a USB key?  Something similar to these images:

 http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/xo-1/streams/joyride/latest/devel_ext3/

Shouldn't I use jffs2 instead?

  http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/xo-1/streams/joyride/latest/devel_jffs2/

What is os2090.usb?  Is it a standalone USB distribution of both the
system and the activity bundle?  Is this _what_ I'm looking for??

If I don't use os2090.usb maybe I can just go with os2090.img -- fine.
But what about fs.zip?  Is it safe to use the old (708) one?

 (It would be great if you could add this to the place you think it
 should be in the wiki, thanks!)

I will as soon as I'm sure where to put what... 

Thanks again!

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Re: joyride images for downloading and installing them with a USB key

2008-08-12 Thread Bastien
Daniel Drake [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 16:31 -0500, Bastien wrote:
 Shouldn't I use jffs2 instead?

 If flashing to XO nand, yes.
 If booting from USB/SD, no.

All right, thanks.

   http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/xo-1/streams/joyride/latest/devel_jffs2/
 
 What is os2090.usb?  Is it a standalone USB distribution of both the
 system and the activity bundle?  Is this _what_ I'm looking for??

 This is for the olpc-update --usb upgrade method. Not sure if that's
 what you're looking for or not.

That wasn't, but I will test this method.  

What about the fs.zip file?  Is it safe to use an old one?

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Re: [sugar] Question about clipboard service

2008-08-06 Thread Bastien
Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Can you walk me through the steps needed for that? e.g. one kid starts an
 activity then shares it, each other kid opens the activity and joins (or
 opens their own work?), then ???. How do they get their own work on the
 clipboard and how do they add it to the shared activity?

 Step by step. I limit the example to 2 kids for simplicity; the method
 scales naturally.

 1. Kid A starts an activity
 2. Kid A shares the activity
 3. Kid B joins the activity
 4. Kids A and B collaborate (synchronously) in the activity
 5. Kids A and B go home
 6. Either kid A, kid B, or both work in the activity (asynchronously)
 7. Kids A and B come back to school
 8. Kid A opens his version of the activity*
 9. Kid B joins A's version of the activity
 10. Kid B opens his own version of the activity**
 11. Kid B copies part of his own version to the clipboard
 12. Kid B pastes that clipping into A's version of the activity

About step 11: how B is to know what part of his own version he has to
copy to the clipboard?  Is this by comparing A's version with it's own?  

When the activities will re-open in the same shared-state they were when
closed, it might be very useful have a function to let A and B check for
diffs and merge their two versions - without doing manually.

There might be an easy-merge mode where conflicting changes are just
ignored, and an advanced mode where A and B can resolve the conflicts.

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Re: [sugar] Question about clipboard service

2008-08-06 Thread Bastien
Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 When the activities will re-open in the same shared-state they were when
 closed, it might be very useful have a function to let A and B check for
 diffs and merge their two versions - without doing manually.

 It still sounds like a decent step forward to me, even without
 automatic merge assistance.

Yes, it is, and the step-by-step receipe you provided is very useful.
I'll but this on the (informal) FAQ I maintain for haitian deployment.

 We should probably come back to it once we actually have the rest of
 the collaboration details taken care of.  We don't want to complicate
 things until that works predictably.

Fair enough!

Thanks,

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Re: [sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list

2008-08-03 Thread Bastien
Another simplement argument: this will be clearer for users to know
where to send feedback.  If you have a question about a particular
activity, ask on the activity list.  For other questions ask on the 
Sugar list.

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[sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list)

2008-08-03 Thread Bastien
Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 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!).

(Fair enough.  In any case, my awareness about Sugar and the activities
development is not strong enough to dispute about the relevance of such
a list -- 'was just dropping a few opinions.)

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Re: The tedium of erasing journal entries

2008-08-03 Thread Bastien
Aaron Konstam [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Unless I have missed something that is a very tedious task to lay on
 someone using the current GUI interface for erasing journal entries.

In latest joyrides, is there a way to select all entries?  (C-a)

This would be useful not only for deleting, but also for copying entries
on the clipboard or on the USB key.

 Journal entries are added at a steady rate but their removal is a
 tedious one at a time process. I can't imagine child taking the time
 to keep these entries erased routinely. Another erasure method is
 needed.

Yeah.  Adults won't do it neither, unless they get paid for that :)

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Re: The tedium of erasing journal entries

2008-08-03 Thread Bastien
There could be a default (favorite) filter for the journal entries.  
I'd suggest something based on time: the more recent the entry, the 
more likely it's you want to resume it.
 
Such a notion would also nicely combine with the notion of favs in 
the home view.  And maybe it's not that hard to implement?

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Re: [sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list

2008-08-02 Thread Bastien
Shikhar [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 My only question is whether this should be @lists.laptop.org or
 @lists.sugarlabs.org. Please comment, or I will make it the latter by
 default.

   

 I think the latter makes sense, activities are meant to work with Sugar 
 and not the XO in particular.

Agreed!

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Re: [sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list

2008-08-02 Thread Bastien
Let's say that the list will be used for:

- announce new activities
- announce changes in ownership
- check for dead/agonizing/orphaned activities
- discuss API and dependancies issues
- ...

I think there are many reasons to get such a list.

Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 If the list were moderated, to be used ONLY for announcements
 of things that break the API/ABI, then there could be some value.
 In that case, you'd need to split up Python and non-Python.
 Like this:

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 There could also be a list to announce new activities.

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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

2008-08-01 Thread Bastien
Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:40:39AM +0200, Bastien wrote:
 It's not that important anyway.  It just occurred to me that the
 dependancies management challenge could be somehow dealt with by
 delivering a set of default activities.  I'm not aware of any 
 software distribution drawing such a strong line between the 
 core system and the applications/activities.
 

 We have been managing the dependency issue by ensuring that the 'core'
 activities required for a given build all work on the system-level
 software packages we include.  

What is the set of core activities?  how does this depend on a given
build?  

Maybe what I'm suggesting boils down to integrate this core activities
in the environment so that people installing Sugar won't have to install
them separatly.  Just the same way that installing a standard Fedora
will install Gnome (will install evolution (etc...)).

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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

2008-08-01 Thread Bastien
Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Maybe what I'm suggesting boils down to integrate this core activities
 in the environment so that people installing Sugar won't have to install
 them separatly.  Just the same way that installing a standard Fedora
 will install Gnome (will install evolution (etc...)).

 What I'm suggesting is that this step requires global optimization wrt
 which activities are 'core'.  This is difficult, as various deployments
 have different usage patterns and require different sets of software.

Yes, I understand this, but it's quite reasonable to assume that each
deployment will like the list of activities that is listed in the Core
category (cf. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Core)

 I have often built debian systems using debootstrap to pull in the most
 minimal typically used system components.  On top of such a system
 customization is easy.  I am suggesting that we may wish to develop a
 similar system so that our downstream developers can have more
 flexibility in customizing their systems.  Activites could be Sugar-core
 and not XO-system core.

Agreed.

We could have something like:

  ~$ apt-get install sugar
 = Install Sugar with a default set of activities
  
  ~$ apt-get install sugar-extra-activities
 = Install a set of extra activities
  
  ~$ apt-get install sugar-nepal-activities
 = Install a specific bundle with extra activities
  
If Sugar installation takes this route, then there is something else
that has to be defined: the default favorite activities.  Each deb
package above should define the default set of favs.  And maybe there
could be a way of importing someone's favs easily, whatever the extra
package people installed.

My 2 cents...

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Re: [sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar

2008-07-31 Thread Bastien
Any follow-up on the idea of having a precise list of maintainers for
all Sugar activities?  Even just the email address from the git repo
would be nice.

Thanks!

Simon Schampijer [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 What I find interesting is that as well areas where contributions are
 quite easy to do (Activities) have really stagnated. At the moment we
 lack maintainers for most of them. Browse, Pippy, Chat, Terminal and
 Etoys are well covered because they are maintained by core people.

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Re: [sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar

2008-07-31 Thread Bastien
Any follow-up on the idea of having a precise list of maintainers for
all Sugar activities?  Even just the email address from the git repo
would be nice.

Thanks!

Simon Schampijer [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 What I find interesting is that as well areas where contributions are
 quite easy to do (Activities) have really stagnated. At the moment we
 lack maintainers for most of them. Browse, Pippy, Chat, Terminal and
 Etoys are well covered because they are maintained by core people.

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Re: [sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar

2008-07-31 Thread Bastien
Any follow-up on the idea of having a precise list of maintainers for
all Sugar activities?  Even just the email address from the git repo
would be nice.

Thanks!

Simon Schampijer [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 What I find interesting is that as well areas where contributions are
 quite easy to do (Activities) have really stagnated. At the moment we
 lack maintainers for most of them. Browse, Pippy, Chat, Terminal and
 Etoys are well covered because they are maintained by core people.

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Re: [sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar (kid contributions)

2008-07-31 Thread Bastien
John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 you can't just share a file, you have to share an activity, ...

Right.  

Idea for a new activity: Candy Bag.  You open a bag (i.e. you launch the
CandyBag activity), then you put journal entries in it, then sharing
this activity means that your friends can grab a candy in your bag.

 If we want the kids who *love* their machines to come to *know* and
 *evolve* their machines, there's a lot more work to be done.  

Let's not lose the focus of making the *teachers* love the machines.
And let's don't see children as small hackus homunculus!  :)

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Re: Congratulations! but Sugar sucks

2008-07-31 Thread Bastien
Let me try to prioritize this list, from what I've experienced in the
field (Haïti):

Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 1. The datastore
 2. OS Updates
 3. File Sharing
 4. Activity Modification
 5. Bitfrost
 6. Power management

I'd reorder this into:

1. Power management
2. OS Updates
3. The datastore
4. File Sharing
5. Bitfrost
6. Activity Modification

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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

2008-07-30 Thread Bastien
Bobby Powers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 recent joyrides include an activity updater which should help with this.

 And you guys could get rid of the scary red warning on the wiki :)

 on which page?

See the barking here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Update.1_Software_Release_Notes

  Activities must be installed separately.

And unless my memory is fooling me, I'm pretty sure the warning was red
at some point on this page:

  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-upgrade

  Note that in builds 700 and above, you must install activities
  separately

It's not that important anyway.  It just occurred to me that the
dependancies management challenge could be somehow dealt with by
delivering a set of default activities.  I'm not aware of any 
software distribution drawing such a strong line between the 
core system and the applications/activities.

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Re: how to get a screenshot

2008-07-28 Thread Bastien
Hello Victor,

Victor Lazzarini [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 I need to get a screenshot of an activity and I am wondering what is
 the best way:

 1. using sugar-jhbuild on fedora: the only problem here is that the
 widgets have  all wrong sizes (how to fix this?)

Don't know...

 2. using the XO: I have no idea how to print the screen.

Alt + F1 should do.

Then you can rename your screenshots from the journal.

HTH,

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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

2008-07-28 Thread Bastien
Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 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.  

Another reason why each build should come with a default bundle.

If countries develop their bundles independantly from Sugar evolution,
then the problem will just be more painful.  If countries have a default
bundle to refer to when developing their own, it could help solving
dependancy issues indirectly.

The default activities could be selected so that 90% of the dependancies
for other (known) activities are satisfied.  

At least, a default bundle combined with a nice GUI for xo-get.py would
discourage installation of old bundles on newer builds.

And you guys could get rid of the scary red warning on the wiki :)

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Re: PlayGo Patches/Commit access

2008-07-21 Thread Bastien
Hi Andrés!

I'm also a Go player and I'd really love to see this activity improve.

Is it already possible to share this activity so that children can play
together from two different XOs?  I was unable to get this working when
I last tried.  If this is not possible yet, I think this should be a top
priority, more than making it possible to play against GnuGo.

As for requests about getting commit access, I thought each activity had
a maintainer with its email well advertized, but this is not the case.

The maintainer's email could appear either on the activity wiki page
and/or in the git repository.  Sadly enough, there is no such contact
information neither on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/PlayGo nor in the git
repo: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/PlayGo;a=summary (there is
only Gerard J. Cerchio as a name...)

Another good place to find the name of the maintainer would be
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities

In other git repos, the Owner is often an email, which makes it
straightforward for anyone to jump into a project.  See for example
http://repo.or.cz/

In gitorious.org or github.com, you can send messages to the owner:

  http://gitorious.org/projects/basecms
  http://github.com/agnathan/odf2logos/tree/master

Looking forward to kibbitzing with people around here...

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Re: PlayGo Patches/Commit access

2008-07-21 Thread Bastien
Andr�s Ambrois [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

   Yes, I don't own an XO, but I've tried running two sugar-jhbuild instances, 
 and it works fine. Well, there's no turn enforcement (you can play anywhere 
 anytime, even if it's the other guys turn), and you can't really tell if 
 anyone connected until they place a stone. So its very rough around the 
 edges. 

Ok, good to know things are there and only need improvement.  
I'm in the process of learning Python, so maybe I can help at 
some point.  

 Looking forward to kibbitzing with people around here...

   The only mention I could find is on http://blog.circlesoft.com/ But
 if there ever was a maintainer, it's clear that the project is
 completely orphaned.

That is a pity, but even more problematic is the fact that one 
has to spend time in order to discover it!

Really, I'd love to see the emails of the maintainers on the git
projects webpage.  

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Re: PlayGo Patches/Commit access

2008-07-21 Thread Bastien
Hi Andrés!

I'm also a Go player and I'd really love to see this activity improve.

Is it already possible to share this activity so that children can play
together from two different XOs?  I was unable to get this working when
I last tried.  If this is not possible yet, I think this should be a top
priority, more than making it possible to play against GnuGo.

As for requests about getting commit access, I thought each activity had
a maintainer with its email well advertized, but this is not the case.

The maintainer's email could appear either on the activity wiki page
and/or in the git repository.  Sadly enough, there is no such contact
information neither on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/PlayGo nor in the git
repo: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/PlayGo;a=summary (there is
only Gerard J. Cerchio as a name...)

Another good place to find the name of the maintainer would be
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities

In other git repos, the Owner is often an email, which makes it
straightforward for anyone to jump into a project.  See for example
http://repo.or.cz/

In gitorious.org or github.com, you can send messages to the owner:

http://gitorious.org/projects/basecms
http://github.com/agnathan/odf2logos/tree/master

Looking forward to kibbitzing with people around here!

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Re: [sugar] Activity versioning schema

2008-07-16 Thread Bastien
Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 This is an important discussion about version numbers. 

Not that I want to put heat in here, I just thought you might just be
interested in this:

  http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Kernel_Release_Numbering_Redux

Quoting Linus:

  I have to say that I personally don't have any hugely strong opinions
  on the numbering. I suspect others do, though, and I'm almost certain
  that this is an absolutely _perfect_ 'bikeshed-painting' subject where
  thousands of people will be very passionate and send me their opinions
  on why _their_ particular shed color is so much better.

  The only thing I do know is that I agree that 'big meaningless
  numbers' are bad. '26' is already pretty big. As you point out, the
  2.4.x series has much bigger numbers yet.

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