Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] OLPC rules out Windows for XO-3
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 7:52 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi, Linux has been running well on ARM for a long long time. Yeah. In specific, today I got Sugar running on the ARM SoC we'll be using for XO-1.75 and XO-3, and it didn't require any porting at all. It would have happened yesterday, but I had to work out how to get past the Sugar intro/login screen without a keyboard. :-) That's cool! A couple of questions What's the plan for the boot loader, is it planned to use OF still and port it to the ARM platform or is it planned to use one of the more mainline ARM bootloaders such as uboot or the like. Also what's the plan with the virtual keyboard support in sugar. It might be worth looking at the MeeGo/Moblin based VKB stuff as a basis. Its skinnable and supported various inputs via scim and integrates with that. Let me know if you need more info as I've been packaging some of this up in Fedora as part of my work with the aforementioned UIs in Fedora. At one point I had tried to evaluate the possible virtual/on-screen keyboards that could be used for Sugar, and at that time it looked like each used their own keyboard layout data format. Something which leverages existing mechanisms like SCIM/M17N/IBus/etc would certainly be an improvement. Could you point me to the source code repo of VKB - I would love to take a look. Best, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] OLPC rules out Windows for XO-3
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta sayami...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 7:52 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi, Linux has been running well on ARM for a long long time. Yeah. In specific, today I got Sugar running on the ARM SoC we'll be using for XO-1.75 and XO-3, and it didn't require any porting at all. It would have happened yesterday, but I had to work out how to get past the Sugar intro/login screen without a keyboard. :-) That's cool! A couple of questions What's the plan for the boot loader, is it planned to use OF still and port it to the ARM platform or is it planned to use one of the more mainline ARM bootloaders such as uboot or the like. Also what's the plan with the virtual keyboard support in sugar. It might be worth looking at the MeeGo/Moblin based VKB stuff as a basis. Its skinnable and supported various inputs via scim and integrates with that. Let me know if you need more info as I've been packaging some of this up in Fedora as part of my work with the aforementioned UIs in Fedora. At one point I had tried to evaluate the possible virtual/on-screen keyboards that could be used for Sugar, and at that time it looked like each used their own keyboard layout data format. Something which leverages existing mechanisms like SCIM/M17N/IBus/etc would certainly be an improvement. Could you point me to the source code repo of VKB - I would love to take a look. I'm not sure if this is the the best current upstream because of the changes in the Moblin/MeeGo side of things but the git here is relatively recent fvkbd is the actual virtual keyboard. This is also in Fedora. http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/fvkbd/ scim-panel-vkb-gtk is the scim overlay stuff. It will be in Fedora 14 and likely pushed back to F-12/F13. http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/scim-panel-vkb-gtk/ Thanks for the links. This also seems to use its own data format¹ for defining the keyboards, but it looks like it is much more mature/flexible than the other options I have seen so far. FWIW, I had written a tool² which could parse XKB layout definitions (symbol files) and produce the corresponding SCIM layouts, and I have used it to generate OFW keytables as well³. I think that this tool (with some modifications) will be able to migrate our existing keyboard layouts to the format required by fvkbd. Thanks, Sayamindu [1] http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/fvkbd/tree/layout [2] http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/sayamindu/xkb2scim/ [3] http://dev.laptop.org/git/projects/xkb2ofw/ -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] New version of Making Sugar Activities for review
On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 9:37 PM, James Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: The link is here: http://objavi.flossmanuals.net/books/ActivitiesGuideSugar-en-2010.02.15-18.18.25.pdf I finished the chapter on Making Shared Activities. I had originally planned to write a simple Activity to demonstrate DBus Tubes but instead I decided to show how to get the Scribble and Batalla Naval Activities working in sugar-emulator and described how they worked in some detail. I'd like more knowledgeable developers to check out that chapter and let me know if I hit or missed the Barco. I still can't get Salut collaboration working in Fedora 11. If I knew how to fix the problem I'd add the information to the chapter. If you are using a stock F11 install, you may need to change your firewall settings for collaboration to work via Salut. I remember having to switch off the firewall via system-config-firewall at some point. Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Video Chat, Video Editing and VOIP activities for Sugar
Hi, On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Manusheel Gupta m...@laptop.org wrote: Dear friends, 6 developers working at SEETA will be spearheading the design and development of video chat, video editing and VOIP activities in Sugar starting Feb. 15. We have been trying to arrive at a decision on the approach to be followed - designing the application and writing the code from ground zero vs. porting an existing open source application to Sugar. We have been examining a number of open source applications, and believe that it will be easier to port the following applications to Sugar than reinventing the wheel - 1. Video Chat - Pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im/) 2. Video Editor - PiTiVi (http://www.pitivi.org/) For Video Editor, you may want to take a look at OpenShot (http://www.openshotvideo.com/). I tried it out a couple of weeks back and it seemed to be quite impressive as far a basic video editor goes. Cheers, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] R: [SoaS] E-Books for Sugar on a Stick (Blueberry)
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: It's an excellent point; after all, Mingoville http://www.mingoville.com/ based in Denmark I believe claims over 1 million users, 100+ activities for children to practice English. But there's another facet: dominant languages such as English, Spanish, French, put pressure on minority languages. Sugar has a role to play supporting many languages, not just in the interface, but in content. There have been suggestions in the past that we position Sugar as a great way to learn English, and indeed it can be (especially in a connected environment), but I feel English should not be privileged over local languages. FWIW, I have a Bengali ebook with nonsense rhymes in Bengali as a EPUB (I had hacked it together to demonstrate that Read can handle fonts embedded in EPUB files - but the fonts need to be installed in the system to render the Table of Content properly). If you want, I can polish it up and put it up somewhere by the end of this week for inclusion in Blueberry. I used Sigil[1], a Free/Open Source tool to create the EPUB file. Thanks, Sayamindu [1] http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Bookreader] Text to Speech readers for XO
Spanish lexicon and 5 word German one will follow. Norbert Rennert who compiled these, would like very much to work with other language experts to extend this effort to other languages. Some highlights of the English lexicon: screened from the CMU Sphynx corpus for accessibility to children, each word entry has frequency data from analysis with respect to a large corpus of text merged in, phoneme breakdown (used by reading curricula to decide the order in which words should be introduced or deemed decodable), etymology, semantic domain (categorization), IPA coding, syllabification and stress marking. The second release will merge in many images, though we don't expect to have a complete image-to-word mapping without a volunteer effort. We plan to create an API and a way to define a curriculum sequence for word groups once the basic database is released, to allow integration of the word bank across all the activities that are literacy related, as well as create more. We also hope to use the word bank to score texts for reading level and assist in creation of simplified version of extant texts suitable for use by emergent readers. Please read our design documents at the above site. On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Aleksey has started a very interesting new path: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-February/011470.html Gregor Kervina wrote: Hi Sayamindu, thanks for quick reply! There is a lot of text to speech software out there - I use http://www.bytecool.com/coolspch.htm that you can try trial and download additional voices, just to get a feeling, but it is not free and not for linux. Many other programs are more complex and complicated and some of them use very complex voice engines that in my opinion doesn't sound very good. (I use Mary voice with cool speech) OK I spent some time to find all TTS software that is free for linux and here are some links: http://linux-sound.org/speech.html http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/01/festival-text-to-speech-synthesis.html http://larswiki.atrc.utoronto.ca/wiki/Software - see the links under Speech section http://www.xenocafe.com/tutorials/php/festival_text_to_speech/index.php http://www.wikihow.com/Convert-Text-to-Speech-on-Linux http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/onlinedemo.html - listen to some demo voices http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhvani/ - this one not english http://sourceforge.net/projects/tts-cubed/ http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/hephaestus.html - click the links in Speech Synthesis section http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/comp.speech/Section5/Synth/rsynth.html http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/122197 - two readers - plug-ins for firefox. I can not test them because I'm not a linux user. Maybe you can modify some of these software (probably Festival) for more user friendly reading and maybe program a specific button on XO keyboard that will automatically read the selected text no matter what program is used for opening the text. Judging from google search result for DTBooks, this technology is not spread at all. The other problem is that it uses somtimes recorded audio and the size of that is too large for XO... I think the most important is that TTS works with reader that will open 1.6M e-books from internet archive http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/10/24/internet-archive-opens-1-6-million-e-books-to-olpc-laptops/(are you in this team?). Also one important thing is to add cheap headphones with laptop so children could listen to reading without desturbing others and in the noisy environments ... another advantage of audio reading is much longer battery life because you can turn off LCD monitor and audio alone does not consume much energy. Let me know what you think. All the best, Gregor On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta sayami...@gmail.com mailto:sayami...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Gregor, Thanks a lot for jumping in :-) On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Gregor Kervina gregor.kerv...@gmail.com mailto:gregor.kerv...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Sayamindu Dasgupta, SJ Klein and other members of this list, I'm a student of electrical engineering from Europe and would like to share with you my very positive experience with text to speech technology that can in my opinion significantly increase the educational potential of XO if used in the right way. For the past 12 years (since I was 15 years old) I'm daily learning from e-books and internet using text to speech software. I know this software is unpopular in developed world, many people don't even know that it exists. On the other hand many people (including me) don't like reading long
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] Forrester: e-reader sales exploding (1m units for holiday season, 6m units projected for 2010)
Hi, On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,53825,00.html This report is being widely reported in the tech and mainstream press, e.g.: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSEAAZS_Y9QD8xiVACWhSDFzHXQQ http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idCNN0853892120091008?rpc=44 There's an improved Kindle offer, Barnes Noble (a major US bookseller) will offer an Android-powered reader, and rumors are thick about an Apple unit in early 2010. I'm tempted to put a spotlight on Sugar's e-reader capabilities for the Blueberry launch planned for late November. To do so, I need to understand better the format issues, which I'm a little confused about. Is ePub best, or something else? The major advantage of Epub over others is that it is reflowable. Traditionally, PDF and other formats have had the problem that when you zoom in to increase the font size/better adapt to your reader, you would often have to scroll horizontally as well. Epub is being adapted at a rapid pace by major players - Google (http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-over-million-public-domain.html), Internet Archive (not officially announced yet), Sony (http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3834431/), Project Gutenberg (http://www.pg-news.org/20090320/epub-books-now-available-at-project-gutenberg/), O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com/ebooks/epub/), etc. Moreover, there are sites dedicated to producing very high quality Epub files, like feedbooks.com and http://www.epubbooks.com/ Right now, I'm quite happy with the level of support Read offers for Epubs from various sources, though it can be improved a lot. More help is needed in testing how Read renders Epubs from various sources and in various devices (I have primarily limited my testing to XO-1(.5) and sugar-jhbuild). As far as annotations go, we only support bookmarks and notes associated with the bookmarks (this is applicable to _all_ fileformats), but I'm currently working on epub specific annotation features such as highlighting portions of the text and associating notes with highlighted portions, etc. http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/09/28/23918/ offers some interesting viewpoints on what is needed from a electronic book reader. Epub, of course is only one part of the equation. Another yet equally important part of the puzzle is book acquisition (both from the Internet and from the local school server). James Simmons's Get Internet Archive Books activity handles that part. Now that the 0.86 release rush is over, I'm extending that activity to support the upcoming OPDS standard, which will probably become the standard way for ebook distributors to publish their catalog online. This means that apart from the Internet Archive, the activity will be able to query and download other vendors like feedbooks, etc as well. At some point, my plan is to implement a OPDS server system/local cache system for the school server so that we can address bandwidth starved use cases. Let me know if you need any more information. (I really need to do a proper blog post about all this.. :-( Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Cannot Create User Account in translate.sugarlabs.org
Hi Dane, When did you try ? It seems to be working now. Could you please try again and if it does not work, please let me know (try to use ASCII only username for now - utf-8 should work, but causes oddness at times) Thanks, Sayamindu On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 10:44 AM, danedane.sa...@digitaldividedata.com wrote: Dear Sayamindu, Sorry for disturb, but your response is really appreciated. At the outset, I see you as a contact person of sugarlabs.org, so I decide to write this email to you for a reason. In fact, I’m trying to register at http://translate.sugarlabs.org/register.html on purpose to translate for the project OLPC into Khmer language, but unluckily I got error page indicate something like “Error, 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)” and a back button. Therefore, I’m writing this email asking for help and your ideas whether or not I am at the right place. Regards, Dane -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [DESIGN] control center proposal for GNOME
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hi, Sun proposed this experience for a rework of the preferences system in GNOME: http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/ControlCenter Might have interesting ideas for the future of the Sugar settings panel? I like the way they are handling subitems: http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/ControlCenter/Sun/FrontPage?action=AttachFiledo=viewtarget=PP-D6b.jpg http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/ControlCenter/Sun/FrontPage?action=AttachFiledo=viewtarget=PP-D6c.jpg This is sorely needed - eg, for the keyboard section I am working on, adding anything other than the layout[1] would make the section terribly cluttered. However, at some point we would probably want to see customizable short-cuts, behaviour of special modifier keys (Meta, Super etc) and maybe things like key repeat rate, etc. Thanks, Sayamindu [1] http://people.sugarlabs.org/sayamindu/cpanel_kbd.png -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] segregated activities from the sugar platform
Hi,
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 14:42, Walter Benderwalter.ben...@gmail.com wrote:
..snip snip
I had set up Turtle Art to be able to run outside of Sugar. It has a
.desktop file and should install under the Applications/Education menu
on the desktop. Or run it from the shell from turlteart.py.
It has its problems: no access to the toolbar and no access to the
journal or sharing. But it runs.
We have quite a bit of work until we can get it to work, but it's
doable to have everything working out of the Sugar shell.
Attached is a written in half an hour python script, which runs most
of the activities installed in my system (not the jhbuild ones - but
the ones installed via yum groupinstall sugar-desktop)
It has probably got the highest possible number of bug per line, and
does no error checking of each kind, but it's a start. I don't know
when I'll be able to put more effort into this - but if anyone else is
interested, please feel free to go ahead.
Run it in the form of
run_activities_in_desktop.py Jukebox /home/sayamindu/abc.ogg
(note that Jukebox is case sensitive)
There is no way to view the neighbourhood, and there is no way to see
the journal, and for all I know, the journal service does not run in
the background as well - so objectchooser won't work.
Thanks,
Sayamindu
--
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
#!/usr/bin/env python
# Description: Crude script to run Sugar Activities inside traditional desktops
# Author: Sayamindu Dasgupta sayami...@sugarlabs.org
import os, sys
import gtk
import sugar.activity.activityhandle
import sugar.env
from sugar.presence import presenceservice
from sugar import util
import ConfigParser
ACTIVITIES_DIR = '/usr/share/sugar/activities'
def create_activity_id():
Generate a new, unique ID for this activity
pservice = presenceservice.get_instance()
# create a new unique activity ID
i = 0
act_id = None
while i 10:
act_id = util.unique_id()
i += 1
# check through network activities
found = False
activities = pservice.get_activities()
for act in activities:
if act_id == act.props.id:
found = True
break
if not found:
return act_id
raise RuntimeError(Cannot generate unique activity id.)
def _set_env(id, name, path, root, version):
os.environ['SUGAR_BUNDLE_ID'] = id
os.environ['SUGAR_BUNDLE_NAME'] = name
os.environ['SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH'] = path
os.environ['SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT'] = root
os.environ['SUGAR_BUNDLE_VERSION'] = version
def _init_theme():
s = gtk.settings_get_default()
s.props.gtk_theme_name = 'sugar-100'
s.props.gtk_icon_theme_name = 'sugar'
if __name__ == '__main__':
if len(sys.argv) 2:
print 'Please mention at least the activity name'
sys.exit()
_init_theme()
activity_name = sys.argv[1]
if len(sys.argv) 2:
uri = sys.argv[2]
else:
uri = None
activity_dir = os.path.join(ACTIVITIES_DIR, activity_name+'.activity')
activity_info_path = os.path.join(activity_dir, 'activity', 'activity.info')
config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
config.read(activity_info_path)
try:
service_name = config.get('Activity', 'service_name')
except ConfigParser.NoOptionError:
service_name = config.get('Activity', 'bundle_id')
try:
klass = config.get('Activity', 'class')
except ConfigParser.NoOptionError:
klass = config.get('Activity', 'exec').split(' ')[1]
name = config.get('Activity', 'name')
version = config.get('Activity', 'activity_version')
id = create_activity_id()
root = os.path.join(sugar.env.get_profile_path(), service_name)
try:
os.makedirs(os.path.join(root, 'data'))
os.makedirs(os.path.join(root, 'instance'))
os.makedirs(os.path.join(root, 'tmp'))
except:
pass
_set_env(service_name, name, activity_dir, root, version)
icons_path = os.path.join(activity_dir,'icons')
gtk.icon_theme_get_default().append_search_path(icons_path)
os.chdir(activity_dir)
sys.path.append(activity_dir)
exec('import %s' % klass.split('.')[0])
handle = sugar.activity.activityhandle.ActivityHandle(id, uri = uri)
exec('activity_instance = %s(handle)' % klass)
activity_instance.maximize()
activity_instance.show_all()
gtk.main()
___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Cleaning up 0.86 Roadmap page
On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Christoph Derndorfere0425...@student.tuwien.ac.at wrote: Caroline Meeks schrieb: ==Avoid surplus Activity launching== Don't let the user keep opening activities until the machine crashes or is driven to its knees. Make it less likely that a user who is impatient will end up opening multiple copies of an activity. * Priority C for GPA +1 In my (very) limited classroom experience this is quite an issue and out of 20 children you will always have 2~3 which have launched several activity instances bringing their XO to an absolute standstill. Restarting Sugar takes quite a bit of time and very much disrupts the classroom workflow. From a technical perspective, could we use libunique[1] here ? -sdg- [1] http://live.gnome.org/LibUnique -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sharing Images in the neighborhood
Hi, On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 8:16 AM, Caroline Meekscarol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Today we wanted to take pictures the teacher had taken with a camera and share them with the class. This turned out to be much harder then I expect. It turns out you can't just share something from your journal into the neighborhood. So we tried opening it in image viewer. Then share to neighborhood. Other person clicks on it. They get a popup from the journal asking what they want to open. Never shows what the first person opened. Is this an image viewer bug or was it designed to work this way? Can you tell me which version of ImageViewer is this ? The latest version supports sharing of images (as you expect). Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Village electricity and Internet
On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 1:31 AM, Edward Cherlinecher...@gmail.com wrote: From my daily Google alert on OLPC, two of the essential pieces of the Earth Treasury mission. I have been wishing for a way to get these services into every accessible refugee camp and region of oppression, and here it is. I have called him to discuss how Gnuveau/SolarNetOne might collaborate with the profusion of OLPC projects around the world. Hi, For the connectivity aspect, you may also want to look at http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_viewnewsId=20090630005312newsLang=en The article describes a device which lets you combine multiple cellular broadband modems together. In countries like India, EDGE connections are getting cheaper (eg: I pay around 4 USD a month - no caps on data transfer). Of course, EDGE has not reached everywhere, but basic GPRS is available even in places like the Sundarbans (the inhabited portions), and EDGE is spreading fast (this especially true for the private network operators, who are a bit more expensive than the govt owned company). CDMA is also spreading fast in India - I think the Khairat school pilot was being provided connectivity through a single CDMA modem. Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Get Internet Archive Books Activity available soon
On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 4:51 AM, Jim Simmonsnices...@gmail.com wrote: Sayamindu, On the OPDS issue with only linking to PDF the Internet Archive uses some pretty rigid file naming conventions, so if you want a DJVU and the URL for PDF is given it could be as simple as changing the filename suffix from .pdf to .djvu. Yes, indeed - it looks that way :-) I especially hope that you will have time to give my Activity a try. I'm also interested to know what you think would be possible with OPDS that I'm not already doing. I was dogfooding Sugar yesterday, and did try out your activity. I think it can be used nicely as a basis for what we are trying to build eventually. Some of the problems I have been thinking about include * Searching by various metadata elements: eg Search by Genre, Search by Author, etc * Combining feeds from various sources : eg what if we want to merge the data from Project Gutenberg and IA and then provide a single data set to the user * Caching and updating (crucial for limited bandwidth situations) Project Gutenberg has a huge XML file in Dublin Core format that tells you everything about their books except the URL to download them from, which makes their far simpler offline catalog a better deal for what I'm trying to do. I'm a lot better pleased with the IA Advanced Search. It seems to give your everything they have, though at times I wish that was more. For instance, they have a field publication date. But it isn't the *books* publication date, it's the date the *ebook* became available. And some of the books have decent descriptions but most just say who scanned and uploaded it and where they got the original book. http://ia331315.us.archive.org/3/items/artofcaricaturin006061mbp/OMETA.xml seems to provide a digitalpublicationdate element and a date element. Dublin core normally handles this in the form: dc:date opf:event=original-publication1869/dc:date dc:date opf:event=ops-publicationThu Jan 11 14:59:08 +0100 2007/dc:date PG's contents are also available through the Internet Archive, so it might be possible to use my new Activity to download PG books in epub format, when you have that working. I read a book last week about the MIT Media Lab written by Stewart Brand back in the 1980's and back then the buzzword was convergence. That's how I feel now: lots of stuff *that close* to converging. And when it does look out. We'll bury those kids in books. Yes - and that is what I'm slightly worried about :-) Having a way to easily search through and categorise these books is important, and as part of Sugar/OLPC - we have the additional unique challenge of doing this keeping in mind low bandwidth or even 0 bandwidth or sneaker-net type situations. Thanks, Sayamindu James Simmons On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Sayamindu Dasguptasayami...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 2:31 AM, Jim Simmonsnices...@gmail.com wrote: I uploaded the first version of Get Internet Archive Books to ASLO about an hour ago, so perhaps by the time you read this it will be available to try out there. I'm sending this email to IAEP because I'd like some feedback from those who might use the Activity. What this Activity does is to provide a front end to the Advanced Search function of the Internet Archive website. In essence it gives you a nice GUI to search through the archive, get information about books, then download the books you choose to the Journal. It's very similar to the offline catalog feature of Read Etexts, but better, because it has much more information on the books. The screenshots at ASLO tell the story so I won't give more details here. Suffice it to say if you are looking for books with pictures, or books in languages other than English, then this Activity will be of interest. If you've ever dreamed of reading the works of Jules Verne in Yiddish then this Activity will make those dreams come true. Currently the Activity can only download the DJVU format. This format is an alternative to PDF for documents consisting of scanned in book pages. It gives better results than PDF in less than half the disk space. You can use Read to view these files. Unfortunately, Read's support for DJVU is flaky, at least in .82 on the XO, I'm pretty sure I'm downloading the books correctly, but it's possible I'm to blame for this. I'll need to do some more testing to know for sure. Future versions will support downloading PDFs and other formats offered by this website. http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/Read-56.xo will give much better performance in 8.2.x OLPC OS releases. On a related note - you will probably be interested to know that the Internet Archive has started work on experimental OPDS support: http://bookserver.archive.org/ (unfortunately they only link to the PDF variants from that catalogue) Cheers, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings
Re: [IAEP] Get Internet Archive Books Activity available soon
On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 2:31 AM, Jim Simmonsnices...@gmail.com wrote: I uploaded the first version of Get Internet Archive Books to ASLO about an hour ago, so perhaps by the time you read this it will be available to try out there. I'm sending this email to IAEP because I'd like some feedback from those who might use the Activity. What this Activity does is to provide a front end to the Advanced Search function of the Internet Archive website. In essence it gives you a nice GUI to search through the archive, get information about books, then download the books you choose to the Journal. It's very similar to the offline catalog feature of Read Etexts, but better, because it has much more information on the books. The screenshots at ASLO tell the story so I won't give more details here. Suffice it to say if you are looking for books with pictures, or books in languages other than English, then this Activity will be of interest. If you've ever dreamed of reading the works of Jules Verne in Yiddish then this Activity will make those dreams come true. Currently the Activity can only download the DJVU format. This format is an alternative to PDF for documents consisting of scanned in book pages. It gives better results than PDF in less than half the disk space. You can use Read to view these files. Unfortunately, Read's support for DJVU is flaky, at least in .82 on the XO, I'm pretty sure I'm downloading the books correctly, but it's possible I'm to blame for this. I'll need to do some more testing to know for sure. Future versions will support downloading PDFs and other formats offered by this website. http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/Read-56.xo will give much better performance in 8.2.x OLPC OS releases. On a related note - you will probably be interested to know that the Internet Archive has started work on experimental OPDS support: http://bookserver.archive.org/ (unfortunately they only link to the PDF variants from that catalogue) Cheers, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Logic simulator
On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 2:39 AM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Noticed this Flash based logic simulator: http://joshblog.net/projects/logic-gate-simulator/Logicly.html Would be quite a simple sandbox activity to make (python, gtk+, ciaro); but before I burn time (well add to my future todos list), do teachers on this list think it is more than just a geeky play-thing, or does it have educational merit? FWIW: it could do with a few more input/output and processing devices (sensors, buzzers, coloured leds, motors, counters). And, hey if time is no obstacle, perhaps make it a split screen view, holding a physics sandbox with the logic driving/animating simple little motorised constructions. Sounds like a fun project :-) http://sourceforge.net/projects/tlogsim/ is a GTK+ based tool for this - maybe we can reuse it ? Cheers, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Priorities and Ideas (for GSoC)
On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 3:19 AM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: I will link to this thread (in IAEP) on the GSoC project ideas page. This page is the primary location where prospective GSoC students will come to learn about out project, and so I want them to get a feel for our community discussion of priorities. So please, in this thread, try to be a little bit more explicit and foot-noted than you would be otherwise, so they can understand what we're talking about. The primary purpose of GSoC, as others have pointed out, is NOT to do the things we're too busy to get around to. It is primarily a community-building exercise: to get students engaged in helping Sugar, and get mentors engaged in passing on knowledge to new community members. If somebody develops an educational game that only blind 3-year-olds use, but FINISHES it, has a great time doing it, and becomes a long-term contributing community member, then that would be a total GSoC success. However, that being said, we'd still prefer projects that help acheive our highest priorities for Sugar. There is no absolute ordering of Sugarlabs' priorities. Different members will not agree perfectly on what steps will do more to help our educational mission. So the list below is just my version. Community: Please respond with your thoughts. Students: I'll link what I can in the list, but I can't find good links, or even any links, for everything. If one of these ideas intrigues you, please, come ask in IRC (#sugar on freenode) - we'd love to try to point you in the right direction, and help you cut your ideas down to a reasonable GSoC size. My first priority is things that will have a strong effect on the long-term rate of development of Sugar. I'd put just 2 things in that category: easier sugarizing (primarily from AJAX, Flash, and legacy Linux); and a structure for sugar unit tests (IMO we will never get good enough software quality for wide adoption, running on multiple distribution without automated testing). My second priority is things that will improve on sugar's key promises. An easier and better way to handle files: versioned datastore, improvements in creating and using tags for the journal, file picker dialogs, and home view. A simpler and safer security model: getting Rainbow into the Sugar platform and improving it's coverage of the Bitfrost ideals. A simple and discoverable, yet powerful, UI overall: improved accessibility, discoverable keyboard shortcuts. Ubiquitous connectivity and collaboration: multi-pointer sharing, auto-collaborating data structures, viral/peer-to-peer activity distribution, shared journals. Useful in the classroom: a one-click workflow for getting AND turning in homework. My third priority is activities to better cover the core functions. Reading: an improved Read, which handles true ebook formats. (PDF is made for printing, and deployments have asked for this.) Regarding support for more Ebook formats, in case it is relevant, I am working on a sugarized FBReader[1] activity at the moment. I should be able to do a preliminary release by tomorrow. (I was planning a release tonight, but my main workstation seems to be incredibly messed up, and won't boot, so I need to fix that first) Screenshot at http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/fbreader_sugar_v2.png Thanks, Sayamindu [1] http://www.fbreader.org/ -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Moon-9, almost (Re: addons.sugarlabs.org is starting to work)
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: On 18 Feb 2009, at 15:04, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Hi, as the site is becoming more functional, we are in need of feedback before we direct there the masses. Could activity maintainers register and upload their last activity bundles? Please try to also upload at least one screenshot, the site will be much prettier that way ;) OK giving up for the night :-( I've merged and built a new moon-9 with aslroots very kind addition of resolution independent scaling code, but I can't get it uploaded to a.sl.org, I thought it was a Safari browser issue, so I tested with Firefox as well, but no luck. I get as far as: http://addons.sugarlabs.org/en-US/developers/addon/submit But the 'Get Started' button does nothing. Game over. Any hints welcome, but will need to wait until tomorrow for me wake up and try again. I can confirm this. It's been happening to me as well. Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
