[Sugar-devel] TurtleArt problems in Ubuntu

[Edward Cherlin]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/turtleart/+bug/731133

TurtleArt 98.1, as packaged for Ubuntu, is missing essential files and
cannot start. Who is responsible for this package?

-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
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[Sugar-devel] Fwd: [Womeninfreesoftware] [x-post] Fwd: pseudo-summer of code (paid)

[Edward Cherlin]

FYI.


-- Forwarded message --
From: ॥ स्वक्ष ॥ 
Date: Sat, May 21, 2011 at 01:45
Subject: [Womeninfreesoftware] [x-post] Fwd: pseudo-summer of code (paid)
To: "Discussion re: increasing women's participation in free software"
, ilug-bengal...@googlegroups.com


Hi,
Two Internship positions:: first preference is for local (in USA)
person, but if no local people submit a competitive application they
will work with people outside the USA. The Stack:: Perl, Javascript,
BASH, SQL. And do note that the last date for application is next
week, so feel free to pass the word around.
-Vid

-- Forwarded message --

We ( http://thecsl.org ) have also suffered a bit of disappointment
this summer.  As an organization, we were rejected for official GSOC
this summer.

However, we raised $5,000 on our own. Google was kind enough to match
that.  We have two pseudo GSOC positions.

Application procedure below:

http://wiki.thecsl.org/mediawiki/index.php/Pseudo_GSOC

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Re: [Sugar-devel] [GSOC proposal]Language Primer

[Edward Cherlin]

Learning languages is an essential part of the mission, so I am glad
to see your proposal.

You don't explain how you intend to teach grammar and usage. Can you
tell us more?

Will you include practice on speech sounds and intonation?

我在英国学中国话.

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 03:04, Zhang Yao  wrote:
> Hi !
> I'm an undergraduate student from China and I want to participate in the
> GSOC 2010 for Sugar Labs. I've already written my proposal on Sugar Lab's
> Wiki and I would like to have some feedbacks from the community. I would
> really appreciate it if you could spare some of your precious time to pay a
> visit to my wiki page and please do not hesitate to give feedbacks if you
> have any thoughts or comments about it. Here's the URL :
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2010/Language_Primer
> and I am looking forward to hearing from you soon :)
> Best Wishes!
>
> --
> School of Computer Science
> Fudan University, Shanghai, China
> Yao Zhang
> e-mail:saturnt...@gmail.com
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The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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[Sugar-devel] Fwd: [Sur] Presidente Chavez, com putadoras para niños

[Edward Cherlin]

Does anybody here know about this Lemote computer from Quanta, and its
version of Debian? Venezuela is ordering lots of them. Is anybody
working on getting Sugar on it?

-- Forwarded message --
From: Luis Galindo 
Date: 2010/4/1
Subject: Re: [Sur] Presidente Chavez, computadoras para niños
To: "OLPC para usuarios, docentes, voluntarios y administradores"



En una charla en La Paz de Esteban Saavedra sobre la Lemote,
posiblemente lo conocen, dijo que la empresa venezolana que ensamblaba
estas computadoras chinas, iba a comenzar con el mercado interno,
posteriormente con los países miembros del ALBA, y después con el
resto de Latinoamérica. Eso fue lo que escuche hace como un año atrás.

Luis

El 31 de marzo de 2010 17:49, Yamandu Ploskonka  escribió:
>
> VIT, la empresa venezolana que maneja el proyecto de la Computadora 
> Bolivariana, está ya importando laptops de China y poniendo su etiqueta para 
> venderlas, aparentemente sólo para el mercado interno.
>
> On 03/26/2010 08:23 PM, cristian paul peñaranda rojas wrote:
>
> ¿Alguien sabe por que no están tomando en cuenta XOs?  por supuesto,
> aparte del hermano de Nicolás...  Y el socio de Rodrigo...
>
>
> No se si talves el gobierno venzolano esta interesado en esperar
> que poder-digital [1] este en capaciad de esamblar o almenos traer
> laptop de china.
>
> No se me occurre mas
>
> saluds
>
> cristian paul
>
>
> [1]http://www.poder-digital.com
>
>
>
>
> ___
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>
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] New Chapter in Make Your Own Sugar Activities needs review

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 16:26, James Simmons  wrote:
> This PDF has the "Fun With The Journal" chapter updated using Bert
> Freudenberg's suggestions.  I've updated Sugar Commander based on
> these suggestions and it works better than ever, and thanks to Bert I
> understand parts of my own code that were mysterious before.

Ah, lots of goodies, indeed. I have an idea that we can improve the
presentation and sequencing of ideas to make this easier on the reader
who knows Python but not Sugar. It will take me a little while to work
through it, and I have some writing of my own to catch up on. I'll see
what I can do next week.

> http://objavi.flossmanuals.net/books/ActivitiesGuideSugar-en-2010.03.28-22.20.52.pdf
>
> James Simmons
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Porting a game to Sugar

[Edward Cherlin]

Check out Make Your Own Sugar Activities!, which is currently being
written and edited. Let us know if you find any errors or omissions.

http://en.flossmanuals.net/ActivitiesGuideSugar/Introduction

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 14:19, John I. Gakos  wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> i need some help with the development progress of porting a game to sugar.
> (hangman)
> I am newbie to the community and i would like to ask for some help
> concerning the
> networking section. This is the repo i
> use. http://bitbucket.org/gakos/hangman.activity/overview/
> Kind regards,
> John
>
> --
> Gakos Ioannis
> Undergraduate student
> Computer Engineering & Informatics
> University Of Patras,Greece
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason

[Edward Cherlin]

You might find Sugar on a Stick in Virtualbox OSE to be a better
development environment than an XO. I VirtualBox to test Sugar under
different Linux distributions, and to keep multiple versions around.
Install the Guest Additions, which let you mount a real drive that you
can use for file transfers, and get a character-mode file manager such
as Midnight Commander, plus your other favorite command-line tools.

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 11:57, Chris Marshall  wrote:
> On 3/14/2010 9:49 AM, Chris Marshall wrote:
>> On 3/14/2010 1:17 AM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 20:50 +, Gary C Martin wrote:
>>>
 It feels uncomfortable that Sugar 0.84 is already a year old effort
 as of this week, from its official release, too far ahead of
 deployments?
>>>
>>> It seems we should try to shorten our "time to market". Both Fedora and
>>> SoaS have been trailing Sugar releases quite well. Instead, OLPC appears
>>> to have frozen on Fedora 11 much too early.
>>
>>  From my G1G1 "deployment" point of view, the XO-1
>> seems stuck on Fedora 9 and os767 / os802. I've
>> been making do with the OS on an SD card and turning
>> off suspend/resume to avoid killing the SD card.
>>
>> The last I heard was that the suspend-resume SD card
>> killer bug may (or was it should or supposed to) be
>> fixed. I haven't gotten up the nerve to lose my whole
>> working environment just to see if it is fixed.
>>
>> Another problem I've had with the XO-1 and the Fedora
>> 9 release was that there was some packaging problem for
>> a dependency of LaTeX and many other document editing
>> type software that prevented installing LaTeX on the
>> XO-1. The bug was a known packaging problem but there
>> never was a new package released to correct the
>> dependency problems.
>>
>>
>>> One would think that a relatively fixed platform like the XO-1 could lag
>>> behind on hardware support without consequences, but users have the bad
>>> habit of demanding that a 3G modem purchased last week would work on a
>>> version of Fedora released one year ago. So you end up back-porting
>>> large pieces of Fedora 12--breaking who knows what else--while the udev
>>> maintainer asks you to keep him informed on your progress. So much for
>>> the good intentions of stability.
>>
>> I would be happy if the existing XO-1 hardware worked well
>> enough to upgrade the base release for my family's XO-1's,
>> including
>>
>> (1) sound
>> (2) video
>> (3) suspend/resume
>> (4) compatable Fedora release
>> (5) no SD card suspend/resume bug
>> (6) activity sharing
>> (7) current Sugar
>>
>> My thought was to come up the learning curve and to start
>> developing for the XO and Sugar learning platform. As is,
>> my current Sugar hardware platform at 0.82 and os767 or
>> os802 (with its glitches) prevents me from working on the
>> XO-1 without giving up all the above features which are
>> what I would like to program to.
>>
>> Another side effect is that even lurking on the mailing
>> lists is less helpful since I am unable to follow any of
>> the current discussions as related to the software on the
>> XO-1 and Sugar 0.82.
>>
>>> Not ideal, but still better than the current situation in which we start
>>> a school year with a version of Sugar released over one year ago.
>>
>> I continue to watch the efforts to get F11 on the XO-1
>> working up to the level of os767/os802 and so more
>> general release and usability. In the meantime, I plan
>> to take another look at the above issues, the current
>> status of the XO-1 support, and what I could do to move
>> things along for the G1G1 non-deployment.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Chris
>>
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [FEATURE][DESIGN] Feedback requested for an interactive introduction tutorial to Sugar

[Edward Cherlin]

I'm working on a different approach to introducing the XO and Sugar,
by encouraging exploration rather than by explaining everything. It is
based on my Wiki page

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

You will see that a proper tutorial has to cover more than the Frame,
Views, Journal, Browse, and Write. We cannot assume that children in
developing countries know anything--not international symbols, not
mousing, not icons and menus.

There is an early partial draft posted at
http://booki.flossmanuals.net/discovering-discovery/ , which is
currently down. This may have something to do with changes for the
Alpha release of Booki.

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 01:52, Erick Lavoie  wrote:
> Following the work we have done on Tutorius in the last year, I would suggest 
> having an interactive introduction tutorial to Sugar that would be presented 
> to the user on the first login screen and in the option menu.
>
> The basic outline of the tutorial would be to present the Frame, the 
> different Views, the Journal and finally the Browse and Write activities in a 
> single tour of the Sugar learning platform.
>
> The feature is described here:
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Introduction_Tutorial
>
> Comments and questions from the community are welcomed!
>
> Regards,
>
> Erick
>
>
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Double clicks

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 07:39, Walter Bender  wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 6:34 AM, Sascha Silbe
>  wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 06, 2010 at 10:27:37AM +, Aleksey Lim wrote:
>>
>>> But looks like sugar doesn't use double clicks somewhere, was it done by
>>> intention e.g. double clicks are too complicated to reproduce?
>>
>> Please don't require multi-clicks (double, triple) anywhere (or for that
>> matter, any operation where timing is critical).
[snip]
>> CU Sascha
>>
>> --
>> http://sascha.silbe.org/
>> http://www.infra-silbe.de/
>> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
>> Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
>
> I agree with Sascha that double clicking should be avoided... Perhaps
> kids can learn it, but we will immediately make the interface unusable
> for the elderly.

Double- and triple-clicking are in a number of Sugar activities now,
with no explanation. Triple-click usually selects a whole line or a
whole paragraph. Many adults are unaware that this function is
available in their word processors or e-mail editors. For more on such
issues, see

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

> We already use modifier keys in the interface to switch to an advanced
> behavior. Why not the usual shift and ctrl clicks?

I don't mind which mouse behavior you use, as long as you provide a
way to discover it. For example, you can put the action in a menu item
along with a hint giving the keyboard shortcut. For example, Firefox
puts this on the Edit menu along with many others.

Undo  Ctrl+Z

This is not strictly correct, since this notation sometimes means
Shift+Ctrl+z. The actual shortcut for Undo in many programs is Ctrl+z.

The most common shortcut for Select All is Ctrl+a.

> -walter
>> iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJLkj20AAoJELpz82VMF3DaiC4H/06TUXkgVNTGQBbo9GCbpABB
>> fpnTp6s2bsSikltUXLlhNiNyWFrxPnbW8kdYpVWIasEKY7RxacnRA7eLjjdmDNIm
>> 2XKL0KeP53VVsZe1xk9A1s9OMOJ7errQ2p87c/pXIuHMEhM2bxwtG0cbaC7tnIT1
>> dkmSiCW3rRXAg8kFJPDa4Yc6T+MoeissRCO1+oa0qqbZq7yhytPrT81X4P7f9m+d
>> Pd74VcSf8j9Y9HrqPmCUVQfn9UYGnBTt2FOrrVkEy2boiebjy4b5QNiCS+HDCSjn
>> BBzzDZCfBraATcykI0/qj0U0rusCRb6oBUg5pUEf+2A5wINiM1RYBWCVAy/1Ibg=
>> =XUwk
>> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
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The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [Systems] Turtle Art on Activities.sugarlabs.org

[Edward Cherlin]

Not just kids. I had to do my own detective work in order to send
Walter a set of TA sessions for various lessons.

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 13:08, David Farning  wrote:
> The other day during an infrastructure meeting, Walter brought up some
> thought on how to enable kids to exchange Turtle Art projects
>
> Alsroot has been thinking about how to do this through a.sl.o since he
> became the activities.sugarlabs.org code maintainer.
>
> The high level view is that someone can easily upload Turtle Art creations
> to somewhere and then they, or others, can go to a portal to download other
> Turtle Art creations.
>
> Client side, this would require:
> 1. Adding a widget to either the journal or the TA activity to upload the TA
> Bundle.
> 2. Adding a TA bundle installer to handler TA Bundle downloads.
>
> Server side, this would require:
> 1. A place to accept TA bundle uploads.
> 2. A search-able place from which to download TA bundles
>
> We have some similar systems we can look to as examples.
> 1. Scratch -- Scratch has an upload button and users can download scratch
> projects from --  http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/browse/newest
> 2. ASLO --  Users upload XO bundles via a web interface and download via a
> web interface.
>
> My initial instinct is to see if ASLO can be adopted to fit this need.
> Primarily because we have it, it works, and it is scalable.  On the other
> hand, if the only tool in one's toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a
> nail. (How is that for over using clichés and buzzword?)
>
> Considerations:
> ASLO rocks:)
> ASLO can be adapted to handle various file types.  For example:
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:3
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:2
>
> Each file type can have a separate look and feel.
>
> Is the activity creation and upload process too complicated for young users?
>
> Moving forward:
> Would it be possible to journal or TA widget which:
> 1.  Walks the student though a upload wizard.
> 2.  Combines the TA project into a into a bundle with the metadata generated
> in the wizard.
> 3.  Sends the bundle to activites.sl.o/uploads
>
> Would it be possible to setup/adapt ASLO to:
> 1. Handle TA files types.
> 2. Accepts TA bundles+metadata uploads and inserts them into the review
> queue.
>
> david
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [POLL] Non Sugar Platform activities in Activity Library

[Edward Cherlin]

And will also be able to print out a pocket edition of my preferred
scriptures in large type, in the original languages and English or
other translation. ^_^

How big does flash have to get in order to make this a non-issue?

On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 13:13, Aleksey Lim  wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 07:01:35PM +0100, Sascha Silbe wrote:
>> On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 04:48:27PM +, Aleksey Lim wrote:
>>
>> >     bundle all dependencies
>> >     but bundle 50M(if we include ARM support it will be 75M) for every
>> >     java based activity looks overkill
>> IMO the only sane way to handle large dependencies, esp. language ones,
>> is relying on distro packages.
>>
>> >     using more flexible scheme when we have
>> >     * Sugar Platform and majority of fully bundled activities (since
>> >       dependencies were included to SP)
>> >     * minority which have non-SP dependencies, such dependencies could
>> > be
>> >       * bundled, if they are small
>> >       * installed on demand from native packaging systems
>> >       * fetched on demand
>> This looks like the way to go, esp. the "installed on demand from native
>> packaging systems" part. Rely on distro packages as much as possible,
>> you'll avoid quite some trouble the distributors have already gone
>> through for you (e.g. xulrunner paths differ on distros).
>> Distro packages are also
>> a) easily and transparently cachable on a local server (apt-cacher,
>> squid, ...)
>> b) fetched from the widespread mirror network of distributions rather
>> than the few ones hosting Sugar stuff (APT can even use bittorrent or
>> custom P2P software like apt-p2p)
>> c) usually more trustworthy than random builds from some more or less
>> anonymous source
>> d) actively maintained, including security updates (except for Ubuntu
>> universe/multiverse).
>
> +1024
>
> and 0install is so smart that it will check if required dependency
> * already installed
> * could be installed from native packages and ask PackageKit to install it
> * fallabck to prebuilt blobs
> * fallabck to build from sources in users env
> * say phew
>
> --
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [RELEASE] TurtleArt-83

[Edward Cherlin]

Thanks. Can we have a While or Until block? Also, prefix logic blocks?
Both would greatly simplify certain kinds of program. Also, how about
reading the color under the Turtle?

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 07:57, Walter Bender  wrote:
> I have a new refactored version of Turtle Art (a fructose module) that
> has many new features for the Sucrose 0.87.4 unstable release. Still
> some debugging to do, but generally it seems to be in good shape. The
> tarball is available here:
>
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/srv/www-sugarlabs/download/sources/sucrose/fructose/TurtleArt/TurtleArt-83.tar.gz
>
> FYI:
>
> New for v83
>
> * added new user-interface features
>  o support for multiple turtles
>  o expandable blocks
>  o collapsible stacks
>  o runtime block highlighting
>  o error highlighting
>  o trash palette (with restore)
>  o palette better integrated into Sugar toolbar
>  o variable-length string blocks
>  o editable string blocks
>  o paste text from Sugar clipboard to string blocks
>  o new boolean logic UI
>  o showblock to compliment hideblock
>  o fullscreen block
>  o editible macros (used for presentation blocks)
>  o labels on coordinate-grid overlays
>  o more complete support in non-Sugar environments
>  o new (and improved) sample code
>
> * completed a major refactoring of the code
>  o 90% smaller download bundle-size
>  o faster first-time launch
>  o greatly simplified i18n maintenance
>  o easier to extend with new blocks and palettes
>
> Still more testing to go before a general release--your feedback very
> welcome as always.
>
> -walter
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
> ___
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>



-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] virtual keyboard

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 08:30, Esteban Arias  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> in uruguay, we developed activity EscribirEspecial to children handicapped
> (http://activities.sugarlabs.org/es-ES/sugar/addon/4265).
> EscribirEspecial has a system scanning buttons to write and the activity
> writes on abiword.

What is the use case? What handicap calls for keyboard scanning rather
than, say, sticky keys, as in the Assistive Technologies packages in
regular Linux, or the lefthanded and righthanded Dvorak keyboard
layouts?

> Now, the idea are develop a virtual keyboard for sugar repositories (may be
> on last version or next) to write on different activities or different text
> entries of sugar.

Are you interested in supporting amputees from the Haitian earthquake
and from African civil wars, as in Rwanda? There are OLPC projects in
both of those countries.

> We started development virtual keyboard in spanish as an globalkey
> extension, with keyboard layout and keyboard type laptop xo.
> We use python-xlib to write on diferent text entries of the interface and
> gtk.dialog to show the virtualkeyboard.

Have you looked at Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface in
python-atspi?

> Someone for the sugar community may be interested continue the development
> and adapt to different languages and different keyboard types...
>
> Esteban.
>
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>



-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] 'Resume' vs 'Start a new' Activity

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 12:18, Gerald Ardito  wrote:
> Edward,
>
> I am interested in what you have about the various  click behavior on
> the basic XO.

I will be able to resume work on these issues soon. We are beginning
to settle into our new home.

> And, I can validate your estimate about the year to learn from our pilot
> program last year.

I'm not clear what you mean. I wrote about Alan Kay's estimate that it
takes a year to go from an idea for a lesson to something tested,
verified, and polished. Do you mean a year for teachers to get an idea
of what they are doing with XOs?

In fact, we can expect to go on improving these processes for decades,
perhaps centuries, considering the model of the printing press and the
profusion of kinds of publishing over the last five and a half
centuries.

> I can also say that it depends less upon prior experience
> with computers as it does with a willingness to explore and meet obstacles,
> at least the 5th graders with whom I've been working. Many times, students
> at this level with a certain amount of experience with computers don't/can't
> really generalize to a new system.

Adults are almost universally convinced that they are unable to
generalize from Word to Open Office or from Windows to Linux. Linux
Users are more able to generalize, at least in part because they tend
to be familiar with multiple distributions.

Part of the problem is the insistence in schools on Right Answers. In
order to learn something new, you have to be willing to make mistakes
that you could avoid by staying with what you know.

"Anything that is worth doing at all is worth doing wrong."

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai/Quotes#Pablo_Picasso

Pablo Picasso

* I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may
learn how to do it.

> Thanks again.
> Gerald
>
> On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 12:21 AM, Edward Cherlin  wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 19:14, Gerald Ardito  wrote:
>> > Edward,
>> >
>> > This is very helpful.
>> > Thanks.
>>
>> My pleasure. I have lots more of this sort of thing in draft. Let me
>> know of any other such issues you have run into, and I can give you
>> what I have, or think about it further. There are numerous uses for
>> left-click, double-click, triple-click, click-and-drag, right click,
>> hover, and in some systems mouse gestures. I use a four-button
>> trackball, and my son uses a special game control mouse, but we don't
>> have to get into all of that with Sugar. ^_^
>>
>> It will also be helpful, if you try my suggested process, to document
>> how long it takes for children in a given class to catch on to an
>> idea, and how long it takes for it to become automatic. I don't know
>> how we can instrument such a study, but I expect that someone here
>> will have an idea. I expect to see variations by age, by prior
>> computer experience (positive or negative), and by cultural and social
>> factors.
>>
>> BTW, nobody should suppose that this succession of ideas is finished
>> and perfect. No amount of sympathetic imagination can substitute for
>> classroom experience, any more than a battle plan can survive contact
>> with the enemy. I want to hear suggestions for improvement, and I want
>> to hear about other issues that arise. Alan Kay has said that it takes
>> about a year to polish a math or physics lesson, and I will be
>> surprised if it is very much shorter for each of the key issues in
>> Sugar.
>>
>> > Gerald

-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] 'Resume' vs 'Start a new' Activity

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 19:14, Gerald Ardito  wrote:
> Edward,
>
> This is very helpful.
> Thanks.

My pleasure. I have lots more of this sort of thing in draft. Let me
know of any other such issues you have run into, and I can give you
what I have, or think about it further. There are numerous uses for
left-click, double-click, triple-click, click-and-drag, right click,
hover, and in some systems mouse gestures. I use a four-button
trackball, and my son uses a special game control mouse, but we don't
have to get into all of that with Sugar. ^_^

It will also be helpful, if you try my suggested process, to document
how long it takes for children in a given class to catch on to an
idea, and how long it takes for it to become automatic. I don't know
how we can instrument such a study, but I expect that someone here
will have an idea. I expect to see variations by age, by prior
computer experience (positive or negative), and by cultural and social
factors.

BTW, nobody should suppose that this succession of ideas is finished
and perfect. No amount of sympathetic imagination can substitute for
classroom experience, any more than a battle plan can survive contact
with the enemy. I want to hear suggestions for improvement, and I want
to hear about other issues that arise. Alan Kay has said that it takes
about a year to polish a math or physics lesson, and I will be
surprised if it is very much shorter for each of the key issues in
Sugar.

> Gerald
>
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 9:27 AM, Edward Cherlin  wrote:
>>
>> Excellent post. We need lots more like it to give us real-world
>> information on children's learning issues.
>>
>> I am documenting these problems in [[The Undiscoverable]], and working
>> on a guide for teachers to introduce and reinforce whatever children
>> have trouble with. It has been on hold during my move from California
>> to Indiana, but I can resume work now.
>>
>> Have you tried giving explicit lessons on Start New and Resume as part
>> of larger lessons? Something like this, perhaps:
>>
>> Class, we worked on [activity, function] yesterday, and we wanted to
>> know how to [other function]. Let's see if we can discover how to do
>> that in [activity]. First, right-click on [activity name] and select
>> New to start a new session. Then click the [tab name] tab, and look
>> at the controls. Do any of them look as though they do what we want?
>> What happens when you try them?...
>>
>> At the end of the session, have students exit and give the session a
>> meaningful name related to the idea you were teaching.
>>
>> Later:
>>
>> Do you remember what we did with [new idea from yesterday]? [Responses
>> from class] Now go to your Journals and click the [name] session to
>> resume it.
>>
>> Do this as often as necessary in different activities until you are
>> sure that the students remember it. Let me know how this works.
>>
>> I used to do this as the very first lesson in teaching adults word
>> processing and text editing.
>>
>> 1. Start program. (Most apps give you an empty document by default. If
>> not, create one.)
>> 2. Save empty file in specified directory with any name.
>> 3. Type something.
>> 4. Save again.
>> 5. Close file, or create new document.
>> 6. Re-open file.
>> 7. Exit program.
>> 8. Find file, and click to resume.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 03:09, Simon Schampijer 
>> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I have observed certain difficulties with the 'resume' and 'start a new'
>> > activity concept. At the moment we have the following situation:
>> >
>> > *** Current Situation:
>> > In the Home View you can resume an activity and start a new one. The
>> > option to start a new activity is in the palette of the activity icon. A
>> > list of last entries from this activity type is present in the palette
>> > as well. When you click on the icon with the left mouse button, the last
>> > activity is resumed by default. Clicking with the right mouse button on
>> > the icon does reveal the activity palette. The activity is revealed
>> > after a delay when hovering over the icon, too. Since version 0.86 when
>> > you hold the alt-key pressed and click on the activity icon you can
>> > start a new activity. This is visually guided by the uncolored activity
>> > icon.
>> >
>> > In the Journal you can resume activities. There is no option to start a
>> > new activity from within the Journal.
>> >
>> >
>> > *** Background:
>> > I teach a Sugar class of

Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] 'Resume' vs 'Start a new' Activity

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 05:39, Gerald Ardito  wrote:
> I am interested in this discussion.
> I am managing a deployment of 140 XOs/SOAS (mostly XOs) and this issue comes
> up a lot with the students. A couple of classrooms are just finishing a
> project with EToys and Resume was a big problem for us.
> In EToys, you seem to have to rename the project in the Journal. So, every
> Journal entry says, by default, "EToys Project." So, time is lost trying to
> find the right one (until the students get the naming thing).

In my draft guide to Discovery, I am suggesting that teachers
explicitly tell students how to name sessions for the first few days,
with decreasing guidance as students get the idea.

"We are going to save our work now. Click the stop sign, everybody. Do
you see that the name "Etoys Project" is highlighted? That means you
can just start typing your own name for your session. Type the name
[name] in place of "EToys Project". Now click OK.

"Save your work, everyone. Does anybody remember how?" "Click the Stop
icon and give the session a name?", some student asks. "Right."

"Now save your session. What should we call it?" Accept a suggestion
and write it on the board.

"Now save your session, and remember--" "To name it!!" they all shout.

> The idea of having some Journal icon in the toolbar seems good. I would also
> appreciate any feedback about EToys.

The Tutorials are excellent. Perhaps we could mock up Sugar in Etoys
and use the same techniques to teach Sugar controls.

> Thanks.
> Gerald
>
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 2:56 AM, Simon Schampijer 
> wrote:
>>
>> On 01/07/2010 05:19 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
>> > Simon Schampijer wrote:
>> >> When they resume a previous activity, and they wanted to start a new
>> >> one, I have seen learners erasing the previous content and keep on
>> >> working in that activity.
>> >
>> > This is the purpose of resume-by-default. The idea arose in response to
>> > feedback from Uruguay, where students routinely filled their disk.  The
>> > situation became so severe that, infamously, children in Uruguay began
>> > to
>> > memorize the shell commands required to erase the Journal by force.
>>
>> I meant that: You click on the turtle in the home screen. Last week you
>> did lesson 1. The kids want to do lesson 2 with has nothing to do with
>> lesson 1. They erase all the blocks they had and begin doing lesson 2.
>> Hence they lost lesson 1.
>>
>> > If you are working on systems with larger than 1 GB disks, or students
>> > who
>> > do not use the machines full-time, then you will of course be far less
>> > likely to encounter this problem.  This is not to say that I know what
>> > the
>> > right solution is; I'm not at all sure.
>>
>> Of course, I see the point of limited space, and I am aware of why we
>> choose to have resume by default. The problem I see is unclaerity. Just
>> look at the home screen. Do you know what will happen when you click on
>> one of those icons? What are the expectations. Maybe there are better
>> ways of displaying the options you have in the home view to the user. I
>> guess that is what I am looking for :)
>>
>> Thanks,
>>    Simon
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>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
>
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>



-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] 'Resume' vs 'Start a new' Activity

[Edward Cherlin]

Excellent post. We need lots more like it to give us real-world
information on children's learning issues.

I am documenting these problems in [[The Undiscoverable]], and working
on a guide for teachers to introduce and reinforce whatever children
have trouble with. It has been on hold during my move from California
to Indiana, but I can resume work now.

Have you tried giving explicit lessons on Start New and Resume as part
of larger lessons? Something like this, perhaps:

Class, we worked on [activity, function] yesterday, and we wanted to
know how to [other function]. Let's see if we can discover how to do
that in [activity]. First, right-click on [activity name] and select
New to start a new session. Then click the [tabe name] tab, and look
at the controls. Do any of them look as though they do what we want?
What happens when you try them?...

At the end of the session, have students exit and give the session a
meaningful name related to the idea you were teaching.

Later:

Do you remember what we did with [new idea from yesterday]? [Responses
from class] Now go to your Journals and click the [name] session to
resume it.

Do this as often as necessary in different activities until you are
sure that the students remember it. Let me know how this works.

I used to do this as the very first lesson in teaching adults word
processing and text editing.

1. Start program. (Most apps give you an empty document by default. If
not, create one.)
2. Save empty file in specified directory with any name.
3. Type something.
4. Save again.
5. Close file, or create new document.
6. Re-open file.
7. Exit program.
8. Find file, and click to resume.


On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 03:09, Simon Schampijer  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have observed certain difficulties with the 'resume' and 'start a new'
> activity concept. At the moment we have the following situation:
>
> *** Current Situation:
> In the Home View you can resume an activity and start a new one. The
> option to start a new activity is in the palette of the activity icon. A
> list of last entries from this activity type is present in the palette
> as well. When you click on the icon with the left mouse button, the last
> activity is resumed by default. Clicking with the right mouse button on
> the icon does reveal the activity palette. The activity is revealed
> after a delay when hovering over the icon, too. Since version 0.86 when
> you hold the alt-key pressed and click on the activity icon you can
> start a new activity. This is visually guided by the uncolored activity
> icon.
>
> In the Journal you can resume activities. There is no option to start a
> new activity from within the Journal.
>
>
> *** Background:
> I teach a Sugar class of 15 students (5th and 6th grade) in a German
> primary school [1]. The classes are on a weekly one hour basis. They had
> 10-15 hours of Sugar by now. We use Sugar 0.84 on Fedora 11. I explained
> the concept of the Journal, repeated several times how to start a new
> activity and how to resume one. I explained them that revealing of the
> palette is quicker when using the right mouse button.
>
>
> *** Disclaimer:
> The information below is not meant to be hard data. There are
> differences in backgrounds (cultural etc), ages and quite importantly: a
> difference between a first time user, a regular user and a daily user.
> Some might as well question if I have chosen the right methodical way to
> explain things, and be sure sometimes I do question myself, however the
> data gathered might be a good basis for discussing this issue and maybe
> others will provide some data, too.
>
>
> *** Observations:
> Most of the kids click on the activity icon when they want to start a
> new activity. Since there is a delay to reveal the palette, the learner
> does not see the other information in the palette.
>
> When they resume a previous activity, and they wanted to start a new
> one, I have seen learners erasing the previous content and keep on
> working in that activity.
>
> Nearly all the kids do not use the right click to reveal the palette.
> They wait for it to appear.
>
>
> *** Survey:
> Last class I asked the learners in a small survey the following questions:
>
> A: How do you do a new drawing in TurtleArt?
> R:
> Some: Nothing, or did misunderstood the question.
> Some: I click on TurtleArt.
> One said: One clicks with the right mouse on TurtleArt and clicks with
> the left one on New.
> One said: Go on TurtleArt, wait, click New.
>
> A: How do you edit a previous drawing in TurtleArt?
> R:
> Many: Go to the Journal and resume there.
> One: Go to Journal or right click and choose the one one want to resume.
> One: Go on TurtleArt and choose the name one wants to resume.
> Some: Nothing / did not understand the question
>
> A: Is there a difference between the right mouse click and the left
> mouse click?
> R:
> One: it is quicker to use the right mouse button.
> Some: you get a new field/list.
> Many: Nothing / did not understand the q

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar Development

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 13:50, Mark Symmonds
 wrote:
> Hello!

Welcome!

> I am a freelance developer and LAMP architect with over twelve years
> experience.  I would like to get involved in the OLPC development
> project where my skills may be of best use.  Please let me know if there
> is anything I can help with.

You asked for it, you got it.

> Here are a few of my skill sets which may be beneficial in the Sugar and
> Sugar Activity development effort:
>
> Languages: Python, Ruby, C++ / C, Java, PHP, Perl
> Platforms: Linux (any dist. but primarily Fedora and Ubuntu), Free BSD,
> Windows

Python and Fedora Linux are the most broadly useful here, unless you
happen to understand Ubuntu and Debian packaging. We would like to
encourage a BSD version of Sugar, but we have not heard of anybody
starting one. There are pages in the Wiki pointing you to tasks and
projects needing help or someone to start them.

What parts of education, current or possible in the future, interest you most?

> Best regards,
> Mark Symmonds
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-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Religious/Spiritual Text

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 09:45, Art Hunkins  wrote:
> It has recently been suggested to me that the religious/spiritual text in my
> OurMusic and OurMusicMC activities may not be well received by some, and
> that the text may hinder chances for deployment and even potentially cause
> individuals (or Sugar Labs) trouble.

Two concerns.

o We are sending Sugar to Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and
(officially) atheist countries, and to populations practicing a wide
variety of indigenous polytheisms. Christianity will be taken by many
as cultural imperialism, Crusading, or worse, given the history of
supposedly Christian imperialist theft, enslavement, and genocide.

o We are in a life-and-death fight over Creationism in the US.
Demographics says that the Creationists will lose the political and
educational fight definitively in the next generation, but why fan the
fires?

I will leave it to other Christians to criticize your theology in
accordance with their own.

> Needless to say, I'd like to avoid
> these eventualities if at all possible.

You have two choices. You can abandon your Judeo-Christian material,
or you can provide equivalent material for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists,
and atheists. I see on your Web site that you have materials for
Judaism, Islam, and multiple kinds of Christianity. A good start.

(BTW, I believe that your title YVWH is an error for YHVH. Also that
ALPHA ET OMEGA might be better as ALPHA KAI OMEGA. I would also
recommend that you look at the Creative Commons license page. You have
attempted to specify a set of rights very similar to CC-By
Attribution.)

I have proposed that we expand the Sword Bible reader to include
scriptures of all world religions, since the software is agnostic and
only the texts are denominational. I know where Free electronic
versions are for most of them.

> (For perspective on the relevance of
> this text to me, please see my list of "Recent Compositions" at
> www.arthunkins.com. These activities are the final manifestations of a
> long-term project.)
>
> The current text is:
>
> A Creation Story:
> On the sixth day I was created. God said I was very good.
> On the sixth day We were created - my friends and I. God said We were very
> good.
> On the sixth day my Family was created - my loved ones and I,
>  together with all the other creatures. God said my Family was very good.
> God saw that everything He made was very good.
> He was so pleased He decided to take a holiday, and joined us in play.

I wish Christians would act as though they believed this. As Gandhi is
supposed to have said, "Christianity is excellent. They should try
it." In what is sometimes laughingly known as reality, many Christians
believe that your notion could only have applied before the Fall, when
there were no children, and that children now are born in a state of
Original Sin.

> A possible alternative text (equivalent, and equally acceptable to me - but
> expressed in more "universal" language):
>
> One day long ago I was created. Spirit was delighted with me.
> One day long ago We were created - my friends and I. Spirit was delighted
> with us.
> One day long ago my Family was created - my loved ones and I,
>  together with all the other creatures. Spirit was delighted with my
> family.
> Spirit, delighted with everything Spirit had made, decided to take a holiday
> and join us in play.

According to the Bible, God was later appalled at his Creation, and
decided to wipe out humanity (and leave the world to the fishes).
According to Chabad and other versions of Chasidism, this is the ninth
world that God created. The previous eight were total failures.
According to Buddhism, God is deluded in thinking that he created the
universe, when in reality both God and the Universe were the results
of pre-existing karma from a previous version. According to a Hindu
myth, a column of ants several feet wide and miles long was made up
exclusively of reincarnated Kings of Gods. According to a number of
dualist religions, material reality is inherently evil, and our aim is
to escape from it into the spirit world.

> I'd greatly appreciate *any and all* comments, especially from those with
> backgrounds and concerns different from mine. I'm eager to hear from as many
> of you as are willing to share your views and "on-the-ground" insights.
>
> TIA,
>
> Art Hunkins
>
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-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Future of Zero Sugar

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 06:09, Daniel Drake  wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 06:07 +, Aleksey Lim wrote:
>> * as a 3rd party developer, I don't see such teachers requests listed
>>   somewhere on wiki, that let me see what can I do and peek most
>>   interesting/suitable-for-my-skils/etc task
>
> There's enough going around that you could work on which would be a huge
> benefit to deployments. Here are a few ideas.
>
[3G, bugs, more]

> Documentation: there's very little good documentation on how to deploy
> sugar in a classroom scenario. If you were to start some documentation,
> not only would it be a huge help for deployments, it would also make you
> think more about the real-life challenges which may lead to some
> development projects.

I'm working on documentation of the points where children will not be
able to discover how Sugar works on their own, and how to integrate
demonstrations of those points into lesson plans. See
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_Undiscoverable for an early version
of the list. My family and I are currently preparing to move house
from California to Indiana. After we get settled there, and after the
holidays, I plan to finish a draft of this material and circulate it
for trials and comments.

I would call everybody's attention to the growing movement to replace
printed textbooks with electronic learning materials. Significant
amounts of grant money are becoming available from the US Government,
the Shuttleworth Foundation, Spain, and elsewhere.

[more ideas]
-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Future of Zero Sugar

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 20:31, Bryan Berry  wrote:
> I strongly agree w/ tomeu on this.
> Making Sugar easier to contribute to isn't anywhere near the top of the list
> of requested features by our kids and teachers in Nepal.
> The far and away most requested feature by teachers in Nepal is a mechanism
> for kids to "turn in homework."

Can you set up Moodle instances for them? Do we need Nepali or other
localizations of Moodle?

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Translation#Creating_a_new_language_pack

I see nine Moodle sites listed in Nepal, including several at
Kathmandu University School of Education Distance Program.

There has been talk from time to time about putting a homework
submission capability into Journal. I have no idea how far that idea
has gotten, but I would give it a high priority if I could.

> I am not talking about invasive testing
> here. The typical Nepali teacher just wants to know which students out of
> 50-70 kids are failing to understand basic concepts.

Also, Bryan and his team would like to know which are the critical
conceptual and skill blockages for Nepali children so that the team
can create appropriate learning software. I have heard Bryan talk
about one such program that helped children advance several years in
math skill in a few months, catching up in many cases to grade level.

> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:25, Benjamin M. Schwartz
>>  wrote:
>> > Aleksey Lim wrote:
>> >> So, I have
>> >> strong intension to switching development focus from core team,
>> >> which develops sucrose - glucose(core) and fructose(some core
>> >> activities) to wide range of developers/doers thus some kind of
>> >> decentralization of development process.
>> >
>> > I agree. I think this has been a central part of the Sugar design
>> > philosophy from the beginning.  I think your message is very much on the
>> > right track.
>>
>> While I think this is in the spirit of my vision for Sugar, my
>> experience with how Sugar is being used and deployed _today_ makes it
>> quite uninteresting and too invasive to consider for the near future.
>>
>> The current barriers for people to contribute to Sugar development and
>> share their work are mostly cultural. We can make the technology a
>> thousand times easier to modify, but if people still think that they
>> can be only users, we won't gain anything.
>>
>> If we really want more people to realize their power and modify sugar
>> and share their work, we need to, in order:
>>
>> - show how the community can address some of their needs, as perceived by
>> them,
>>
>> - show how they can better address the rest of their needs by working
>> within the community.
>>
>> The rest is just icing on the top, IMHO.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Tomeu
>>
>> > [snip]
>> >>   * I hope to see many shell forks with implemented features like new
>> >>     sugar themes(wallpapers support, new icons etc.), Actions view
>> >>     implementations from non-core development/doers. The benefit they
>> >>     will have after 0install integration is more useful method to share
>> >>     these forks - just a regular entity on Activity Library that brings
>> >>     new shell to user environment
>> >
>> > I don't think this part will work as "a regular entity on Activity
>> > Library", for security reasons.  Any "Activity" that hooks so deeply
>> > into
>> > the shell is no longer safe to run.  It is running with the full
>> > authority
>> > of the user and can violate the user's privacy or interfere with the
>> > user's actions.  In orders to encourage users to become doers, Sugar is
>> > designed to make sure that Activities are always safe to run (thanks to
>> > Bitfrost/Rainbow protections).
>> >
>> > I would of course support an effort to "wall off" parts of the shell in
>> > a
>> > secure fashion, but so far almost no work has been done in that
>> > direction.
>> >
>> > --Ben
>> >
>> >
>> > ___
>> > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> > i...@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
>> What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
>> Farning
>> ___
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>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] discovering open clip art library

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 20:12, Christoph Derndorfer
 wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 5:31 PM, Bryan Berry  wrote:
>>
>> > The describtion of their dms is also so short that I'm not sure what
>> > to make of it?
>> there are a lot of notes farther down the page
>
> But the top of the page clearly says that the section is deprecated. Also
> the information that is there doesn't contain enough beef for me to
> understand whether the solution meets our requirements. Plus it doesn't look
> like it's available anywhere...

Take a look at the openclipart package in Ubuntu, and presumably in
other distros.

"The Open Clip Art Library is a collection of 100% license-free,
royalty-free, and restriction-free art that you can use for any purpose."

Or at these.

http://www.freebyte.com/clipart_images_photos_icons/

> Christoph
>
> --
> Christoph Derndorfer
> co-editor, olpcnews
> url: www.olpcnews.com
> e-mail: christ...@olpcnews.com
>
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The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] OT: Thesis: OLPC Evaluation with Usability Engineering

[Edward Cherlin]

This is wonderful. I have been tackling the problem of Usability from
a different direction, Discoverability, as you can see on my Wiki page

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

I am in the middle of greatly extending that study. I am also,
unfortunately, in the middle of moving from California to Indiana,
about 2,000 miles/3,000 km. I intend to sort the topics I find
according to their dependencies, and work out how to introduce each
idea in some context of interest in some subject matter area. I will
need my work tested and improved by teachers and students.

2009/11/23 Carlos mauro :
> Hi friend
>
> I invite you to attend the exposition of my thesis OLPC Evaluation with
> Usability Engineering (Evaluación de la OLPC con Ingeniería de Usabilidad).
> Tomorrow 24 November at 1pm or 13:00 (GMT -5).
>
> Blog:
> http://unimauro.blogspot.com/2009/11/sustentacion-de-tesis-en-vivo.html
> Streaming: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/unimauro
>
> Abstract:
> This thesis is a study of the Usability of Software Sugar from the OLPC
> project. The problem taken the  negative expert opinion about the lack of
> usability studies of the interaction of Sugar with children, the procedure
> is to evaluate the Sugar, with the method of usability testing conducted at
> the National School Julio C Tello located in the district of San Juan de
> Lurigancho in Lima Peru to 12 children between 5 to 7 years in a period of
> eight months with collecting data from three versions of Sugar and five
> activities or programs. The revised thesis was with a multidisciplinary
> work, with elementary school teachers, statistical professionals, developers
> and virtual communities. The conclusions and recommendations can by cover
> the void of the lack of usability studies with the their target populations
> and their object the project: Integrating children excluded from the world
> by generating wealth from knowledge.
>
> Resumen:
> Esta tesis es un estudio de la usabilidad del software Sugar del proyecto
> OLPC. El problema tomó la opinión de los expertos negativos por la falta de
> estudios de usabilidad de la interacción de azúcar con los niños, el
> procedimiento consiste en evaluar el azúcar, con el método de las pruebas de
> usabilidad llevado a cabo en la Escuela Nacional de Julio C Tello, ubicado
> en el distrito de San Juan de Lurigancho en Lima, Perú a 12 niños de entre 5
> a 7 años en un período de ocho meses con la recopilación de datos a partir
> de tres versiones de azúcar y cinco actividades o programas. La tesis fue
> revisada con un trabajo multidisciplinario, con los maestros de escuela
> primaria, profesionales de la estadística, los desarrolladores y las
> comunidades virtuales. Las conclusiones y recomendaciones puede cubrir el
> vacío de la falta de estudios de usabilidad con las poblaciones meta y
> objeto del proyecto: La integración de los niños excluidos del mundo
> mediante la generación de riqueza de conocimiento.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> http://forpapers.blogspot.com/
> http://unimauro.blogspot.com/
> Creemos en el amor de los Seres Humanos
> Carlos Mauro Cárdenas Fernández
> Egresado en Ingeniería de Sistemas
> 4582877 980525716
>
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>



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Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Sharing in Terminal

[Edward Cherlin]

Excellent ideas. I would like to see the same option for programming.
There are doubtless applications for joint programming, but RO would
be great for XP pair programming and for code reviews.

Now if we can integrate all of this with chat...Have a look at the
Write interface in Floss Manuals. http://en.flossmanuals.net/write You
have to log in in order to see the chat box activated.

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 13:20, Sayamindu Dasgupta  wrote:
> Hello,
> While going through  Ben Schwartz's Shared Term feature proposal
> discussion page
> (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Features/Terminal_Sharing), I
> started to wonder if we could somehow implement "readonly" mode for
> sharing in the Terminal activity.
> After a weekend of hacking : I have managed to come up with the following:
>
> * First user shares Terminal - nothing in the UI changes
> * Second user joins - and gets a split screen: on the top, the shell
> running in her own machine, and the lower half showing a read only
> version of the Terminal Activity canvas in the first user's machine
> * Third user and so forth get the same experience as the second user.
>
> http://people.sugarlabs.org/sayamindu/shared_terminal.ogv shows a very
> barebones implementation of this. I was wondering if this would be
> useful, and if so, what would be the extra UI elements ? Probably
> there should be some way of showing the first user who has joined (in
> the activity itself), and for the other users, there should probably
> be some way to indicate/differentiate the read-only part and the
> read-write part.
>
> Of course, this has got a lot of limitations (the major one being that
> only plain text elements can be transferred, etc). I'm using the
> accessibility features of the VTE widget to scrape the screen and then
> sending the data across.
>
> Thanks,
> Sayamindu
>
> --
> Sayamindu Dasgupta
> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
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The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Testing changes (was Re: RFC: Kill the delayed menus for good)

[Edward Cherlin]

Nobody has taken up my offer, so it is now dormant until I hear
otherwise. I did not intend my suggestions to replace whatever is
needed in the meantime. As I said, don't take anything personally.

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:14, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
> 2009/11/5 Edward Cherlin :
>> We need at least one more hat (in addition to those described below),
>> which I am willing to put on. Somebody needs to coordinate field
>> testing and feedback, so that we have data to make decisions from, or
>> we can get appropriate data when they are not yet available.
>>
>> It is not enough to have a coordinator, of course. We must have
>> populations of users (various ages, various countries, in some cases
>> various disabilities) approved for testing (at least by themselves, by
>> their teachers, and by any administrators with responsibility for
>> them). We must have people willing and able to install, de-install,
>> and monitor changes. We must have a place to put raw data and results.
>> We may occasionally need a tool built. We seem to have no shortage of
>> ideas, or even patches, but I am willing to hear more on that point.
>> There is more, but that would be sufficient for getting started.
>>
>> If the developers are willing to get their part organized, I will take
>> this question to  iaep and grassroots, and to management, and see
>> whether we can get covered at the user end or anything else that
>> people think of. Oh, yes. Experiment designers and the like from Ed
>> schools.
>
> Having someone coordinating this area would be of great help, but I'm
> worried about forgetting that perfect is the enemy of good. As
> starters, I think we just need to get some opinions from deployers,
> developers, testers and UI designers and make sure that any technical
> decision (such as pushing code) is made after taking into account that
> feedback.
>
> Once we have this working, we can start thinking about how to make the
> feedback we get from those groups more relevant and of more quality.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> I'm delighted to see these discussions making progress. I have long
>> detested the unfolding hover menus. Keep it up, but please don't take
>> any of it personally.
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 10:44, C. Scott Ananian  wrote:
>>> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Michael Stone  wrote:
>>>>> ps. I've found the discussion of ideas here much more interesting than
>>>>> the finger-pointing.
>>>>
>>>> Understandable; thanks for providing this feedback. Are there specific
>>>> ideas that have come up in this thread other than the one that Wade
>>>> supplied that you have found particularly thought-provoking?
>>>
>>> In general, revisiting the "why" and attempts to discover different
>>> solutions which achieve the original goals.  Like Martin Dengler, I
>>> find myself convinced all over again when I revisit the original
>>> motivation.  Real world feedback indicates, however, that the current
>>> behavior frustrates some users, despite "best laid plans".  It's
>>> obviously time to return to the "why" and come up with different ways
>>> to accomplish those goals.  (Discussion which is simply "I want X"
>>> without a consideration of how this relates to the design goals is
>>> much less interesting -- I won't say useless, but it begs for someone
>>> to contextualize it and provide the missing rationale before it fits
>>> well into the conversation I would like to be having.)
>>>
>>>>> Attempts to shift responsibility (it's my patch,
>>>>> YOU have to prove that it's wrong -vs- it's my design, YOU have to
>>>>> prove that it's wrong) are productive/necessary to some degree, but a
>>>>> family matter you guys should take out back somewhere to hash out.
>>>>
>>>> Do you have a recommendation on where "out back" would be? Some other
>>>> mailing list? Private conversation?
>>>
>>> If it's a truely personal matter, private email (or some physical
>>> location where you can sit down together for a beer).  If it's about
>>> hashing out a philosophy of participation, then mixing it together
>>> with discussion of UI changes is not helping either conversation
>>> progress.  Sometimes you can't do two things at once, but you can do
>>> them separately.
>>>
>>>> I understand you to be saying that we should be listening to peop

Re: [Sugar-devel] Tutorius Demo and Meeting

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 09:11, Erick Lavoie  wrote:
> As discussed before, Tutorius is a project done by 9 students from
> Université de Sherbrooke (Québec, Canada) aiming to integrate interactive
> tutorials inside Sugar to guide Sugar users in learning the platform and its
> activities.  Our goal for december is to be able to cover most of the
> content of the Floss manual.

I have started writing a new manual, tentatively Discovering Discovery
on the XO. It is based on the material in my Wiki page,
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_Undiscoverable. The introductory
material and the first few topics exist in draft form. I am currently
sorting obstacles by dependencies. Then I intend to create a sequence
of topics in dependency order exploring each obstacle. The intention
is to cover everything that an average student will need in order to
be able to use all of the Sugar software at grade level.

Then we have to work on the topics appropriate for each school
subject, and propose a few new subjects that are essential for
achieving the Millennium Development Goals, building a functioning
society and economy, and rebuilding the environment.

> We are doing this along 3 axis:
>
> Execution: Add the mechanisms needed to Sugar to support execution of
> tutorials

What do you need besides existing activities and programming
environments, particularly TurtleArt, Pippy, Scratch, and Etoys?

> Creation: Provide tools to create tutorials from within Sugar in a GUI
> environment

Same question.

> Sharing: Provide a platform to share tutorials on the web

Definitely.

> We have shown demos in the past of basic capabilities (in chronological
> order), here, here and at a presentation given last April.
>
> Next Friday, we will hang around on IRC at 13h EST and give a live demo of
> the current state of the project using Yuuguu or something equivalent, with
> an execution engine running in a separate process than the activity, an
> overhauled tutorial creator (still running inside the activity process) and
> maybe a quick overview of the sharing platform based around the addon
> sharing platform from Mozilla.
>
> We would like to exchange ideas with people and discuss technical matters
> with the following goals:
>
> Receive feedback on the work done so far
> Discuss the possible integration of our system with Sugar, the SugarLabs
> sharing platform and the official release cycle
> Anticipate possible evolutions
> Exchange ideas and pointers to similar work and papers to inspire ourselves
> and avoid duplicating research efforts
>
> Our team will disband around mid-december, but I'll keep maintaining the
> project and there might be possibilities for another team of 6-8 people from
> Université de Sherbrooke to push the project further in January for another
> year. It would be really exciting to see a collaboration with SugarLabs
> continue in the future!
>
> For those interested in a more technical view of the inner working of the
> system, see Tutorius Architecture, especially the Component section.
>
> See you on IRC on Friday at 13h EST!
>
> Erick Lavoie
> for Tutorius
>
>
>
>
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Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [OLPC-SF] Sugar packages for Karmic

[Edward Cherlin]

If you keep good notes, I will turn them into better documentation
than we have now. I have been distressed by the lack of working Ubuntu
Sugar packages for the last six months.

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 17:58, Grant Bowman  wrote:
> This is great news!  David Farning at Sugar Labs is beginning work on
> official Ubuntu packages.
>
> Grant Bowman
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam
>
>
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: David Farning 
> Date: Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:24 PM
> Subject: karmic packages available.
> To: ubuntu-sugarteam 
>
>
> Thanks to Alsroot we now have karmic packages available for ubuntu.
> These packages are available from his ppa at
> https://launchpad.net/~alsroot/+archive/sugar-0.86 .
>
> To install these pachagesjust go into synaptic and add
> ppa:alsroot/sugar-0.86 to your repository list.  It strikes me that
> Sugar Labs' biggest blocker for adoption is the lack of ubuntu
> packages.  As such I have stepped down from my other roles in Sugar
> Labs to work on packaging for Ubuntu.
>
> My plan is to take Alsroot's root packages and Create official
> Packages for Ubuntu.
>
> I am doing my initial work at
> https://launchpad.net/~dfarning/+archive/sugar/  Once the packages
> stabilize, I will move them to
> https://launchpad.net/~sugarteam/+archive/ppa for wider testing.
>
> From there we can move the packages into 9.10 backports.  I am very
> new at Ubuntu packaging so I am intentionally limiting the initial
> scope.  Once the backports are ready, I intend to focus on Sugar .87+
> for Ubuntu10.04.
>
> Please be patient.  This process is probably going to take at least 6
> months.  I personally need to:
> 1. Learn ubuntu packaging.
> 2. Create high quality packages for ubuntu
> 3. Become a MOTU so we can review and upload new package updates for 
> ourselves.
>
> david
>
> --
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Re: [Sugar-devel] RFC: Kill the delayed menus for good

[Edward Cherlin]

I'm extracting some of the for [[The Undiscoverable]].

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 9:39 AM, Eben Eliason  wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Simon Schampijer  
> wrote:
>> On 10/13/2009 04:36 AM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Michael just passed by the Acetarium and, since the dinner was late, we
>>> found the time to test and review his latest prototype^W patch.
>>>
>>> I'm loving how the menus suddenly are now snappy and responsive. Please,
>>> test it yourself and report back. If we like this change, I think we
>>> should go on and also kill the code that this patch makes redundant.
>>> (please, let's not add another configurable knob!)

Works for me. I hate hover menus.

 From 83ef08969ed7bee08f90c12bfa1eedcb7fb0500c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>>> From: Michael Stone
>>> Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:33:12 -0400
>>> Subject: Make various palette animations happen more quickly.
>>
>> Can you describe what the patch will change from the user point of view?
>> Is this to get rid of the delayed build up of palettes when hovering
>> over icons?
>>
>> You can use right click to get the menu immediately. The delay is on
>> purpose.

Yes, that's in [[The Undiscoverable]]

> We should definitely get feedback. I wouldn't be entirely opposed to a
> change, but I do want to make sure that we make such a change for the
> right reasons, and that it's actually the right change to make.
>
> The initial design intent was to develop a system which worked in a
> sufficiently complete manner without needing palettes at all. Kids
> should be able to start activities, resume activities, join
> activities, write, paint, stop, etc. without ever seeing a palette at
> all. [1]

That's fine, if

1) Everything is discoverable.
or
2) Teachers have guidance on what is not discoverable and how to
introduce it, and on children's use cases and on how to handle those
use cases efficiently.

We have neither. I'm working on 2. Anything that improves 1 gets +1 from me.

> This is the "low floor". For kids with more experience or
> curiosity, we decided to provide contextual palettes which grouped
> related actions and provided more complex interactions with the
> system. This is "no ceiling". Furthermore, we wanted to help introduce
> kids to the availability of additional options in a discoverable way,
> which is why the hover effect was chosen to provide increasing levels
> of detail and interaction for a given object.

Was the discoverability of hover menus tested with children? I didn't
discover it, and I'm a born lever puller and button clicker.

> Finding that many kids were actually waiting for the palette to appear
> always, instead of, for instance, simply clicking on an activity icon
> to join it, encouraged us to INcrease the delay on the palettes to
> help emphasize this as a secondary mechanism for interaction.

A case of treating the symptom rather than the ailment.

> A agree
> that hovering in one place to click in another isn't great; but that's
> also not the intended primary means of interaction, and should only
> really be done when one of the secondary actions is desired.
>
> Removing the delay pushes us, I fear, even farther away from an
> interface in which nice friendly large clickable icons can be directly
> manipulated and encourages every action to be done through a
> contextual menu with a bunch of text in it. Is that really what we
> want kids to face?

I don't see the problem. The nice friendly large clickable icons will
remain where they are. You either have to create and *demonstrate* a
path to *equal* discoverability, or you have to think about helping
teachers help children with what they don't discover.

> Just for fun, I might suggest an alternate possibility which actually
> decreases the discoverability of the secondary palette.

Not my kind of fun.

> We could
> reveal the primary palette (label) on a delay as we do now, with some
> indication of "more options" that can be clicked to expand the menu to
> reveal the secondary items. This would provide the (essential) primary
> palette as a label and introduce kids to the existence of more
> controls without encouraging them to use this as a primary method of
> interaction. Advanced users, of course, could still right-click to
> invoke the full menu in one shot.

I don't like to hear children divided into advanced and non-advanced
that way. If we get a series of lesson plans together on all of the
known non-discoverable elements of Sugar, we should be able to get
this difference down to two or three weeks max. Then we can talk about
advanced children being the ones who have developed skill in what an
Activity is for, not in knobs and blinkenlights.

> Eben
>
> [1] Incidentally, one of my major complaints with the "resume by
> default" behavior is that it makes starting new activities hard to do,
> and virtually impossible to do without using a secondary action, which
> is the wrong approach in my mind.

I want to know what is in the chi

Re: [Sugar-devel] XO emulator for Linux

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 5:57 AM, Walther Neuper  wrote:
> Hi Tomeu,
>
> thank you for your mail !
>
> You ask:
>> Can you give us some more details about what do you plan to develop
>> and how do you expect it to be deployed?
> Christoph Derndorfer established a project in Austria, where 25 kids of
> 8-9 years got XOs in 2008. And our Institute will contribute with a new
> activity requested by the teacher of these kids
> http://www.ist.tugraz.at/projects/isac/rp/reckonprimer.html
>
> Last summer semester 1 student built a prototype, and there are several
> students (a selection from those listening cc) who want to contribute to
> this activity during this winter semester.
> Time scheduled for this is not much more than 100h, thus it is too short
> to build up a complicated development environment, and too short for
> getting familiar with complicated things.

Note that you can build materials inside many Sugar Activities,
including Turtle Art, Etoys, Scratch, Pippy, the MIDI music apps, and
others, and you can build lesson plans around others, including
Measure and Record for scientific data acquisition and so on. I will
be happy to assist your students in exercising their imaginations in
these directions.

I am currently designing a gravity/relativity exhibit for a contest
organized by The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. Mythbusters
just did a show on this very subject, testing whether a bullet fired
level from a gun will hit the ground at the same time as a bullet
dropped from the same height. This and the fact that the parallel
projection of a parabola is a parabola are both aspects of Galilean
relativity.

http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-simultaneous-bullet-release.html

> But we would like to have
> # our repository somewhere at http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/
> # a test-driven development, having something like
>   /usr/share/activities/ReckonPrimer.activity
>   /usr/share/activities/ReckonPrimer.tests
> # ??? presently I have no more ideas what details to mention.
> Most students have Linux (Ubuntu etc) on their computers, some Windows.
>
> Any suggestions are welcome !
>
> Walther
>
> PS: About deployment: our present focus is the school teaching the 25
> kids mentioned. If our product will turn out interesting for others, we
> would be even more motivated !
>
> --
> 
> Walther Neuper                          Mailto: neu...@ist.tugraz.at
> Institute for Software Technology          Tel: +43-(0)316/873-5728
> University of Technology                   Fax: +43-(0)316/873-5706
> Graz, Austria                             Home: www.ist.tugraz.at/neuper
> 
>
>
> Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>> Hi Walther,
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 12:56, Walther Neuper  wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> following the instructions on
>>>
>>>       http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Quick_Start/Linux
>>>
>>> leads for Linux users to
>>>
>>>       olpc-redhat-stream-ship.2-devel_ext3.img.bz2
>>>
>>>            29-Feb-2008 19:49  206M
>>>
>>>    olpc-redhat-stream-ship.2-build-659-20080229_1949-devel_ext3.img.bz2 
>>> 
>>>                                                29-Feb-2008 19:49  206M
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Christoph Derndorfer pointed out, that both are an outdated versions.
>>> Where can we get the actual version for Linux ?
>>> Or askel more generally: What kind of development environment would you
>>> recommend for Linux ?
>>>
>>
>> There are many versions of Sugar, and the differences matter depending
>> on what kind of development you want to do.
>>
>> Can you give us some more details about what do you plan to develop
>> and how do you expect it to be deployed?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Tomeu
>>
>>
>
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] High School Programmer Volunteer?

[Edward Cherlin]

I can give it a go. I'm planning a sequence of lessons on Python using
the programmable tiles in Turtle Art, ranging from simple function
calls to whole programs calling various libraries.

Does this student have a project picked out, or is he willing to take
on whatever we have for him? Which version of Sugar does he have
available?

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Caroline Meeks
 wrote:
> I have a volunteer high school student who needs to do community service for
> school. He's done a bit of python and would like to help us with a remote
> programming type task.
> Does anyone want to mentor?  This might be a nice thing for a slightly more
> experienced person also new to the project or an activity maintainer who is
> feeling short on time but might have time to guide and check someone's
> work?
> I don't know the students' skill level, perhaps if there is a mentor we
> could set up a trial period so if he is not up to the right level there is a
> way out of the relationship.
> Thanks,
> Caroline
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> carol...@solutiongrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Fwd: Your message to Sugar-devel awaits moderator approval

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Peter Robinson  wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Luke Faraone  wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 10:19, Peter Robinson  wrote:
>>>
>>> I think most mailing lists (at least the ones I'm subscribed to) set
>>> the reply to header as that of the mailing list so by default the
>>> reply goes to the list.
>>
>> This breaks multi-list communication and cross-posting, as well as
>> replies-directly-to author.
>
> It doesn't break multi-list comms with the way fedora has it
> configured, but yes, replies direct to the author take more work, but
> then it also encourages to keep the conversation on list.

This is a decades-old rwar.

> Peter
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[Sugar-devel] Development Bank seminar (was Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-09-16)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Gerald Ardito  wrote:
> Walter,
>
> Your report from the meeting from Washington is inspiring. Particularly, the
> "what are we waiting for."

+1

> As you know, I am in the process of documenting similar outcomes as part of
> a doctoral study for a deployment here in the US.

But I didn't. Wonderful. What information can you share? I'm talking
to Gov. Pat Quinn's office in Illinois about such projects.

> It would be great, though,
> to work with these folks to see the bigger picture of what's happening.
>
> I also think the total cost of ownership piece is particularly eye-opening.

I intend to write a refutation of several armchair analyses done
without any notion of in-country costs, like $31/year for public
Internet.

> Gerald
>
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 10:26 PM, Walter Bender 
> wrote:

Walter, is there a proceedings volume from this meeting?

Are there presentations online? The agenda is at

http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache%3AGaKi4FLCAAkJ%3Awww.iadb.org%2Fdocument.cfm%3Fid%3D2139732+%22Pinto+Digiovanni%22&hl=en&gl=us&pli=1

Publications referenced?

Can we talk with the presenters about, say, MIT Press or FLOSS Manuals
putting out a book?

Can we see about getting some of these people invited to education,
tech, green, and ICT4D conferences in the US and elsewhere to spread
the word? (I'm on staff for PyCon. I'll talk to them.)

Do you have contact information for the presenters?

>> === Sugar Digest ===
>>
>> 1. At the urging of Yama Ploskonka,

+1 Thanks, Yama.

>> I went to Washington to the
>> Interamerican Development Bank (IADB) to attend a seminar
>> [http://www.iadb.org/news/detail.cfm?Language=English&id=5654],
>> “Reinventing the Classroom: Social and Educational Impact of the
>> Incorporation of Technologies” as part of an ICT for education
>> program.
>>
>> The stated workshop objectives were: " (i) Understand development
>> experiences and case studies national projects for the integration of
>> Information Technology and Communication in education systems, (ii)
>> Discuss how these projects impact on student learning and in
>> developing countries, and (iii) Share about challenges of evaluation
>> and monitoring initiatives at national and regional levels."
>>
>> My objective was to catch up with people leading the various efforts
>> in the region in order to acquaint them with what we are doing at
>> Sugar Labs.
>>
>> I missed the opening remarks, but was able to attend the panel
>> discussions: one about implementations and one about “lessons and
>> challenges.”
>>
>> It seems that still too many people see ICT as a goal of rather than a
>> means to learning, but it was nonetheless great to get a clearer
>> picture of the various projects in the region.
>>
>> Miguel Brechner, director of LATU and the force behind Project CEIBAL
>> [http://www.ceibal.edu.uy/] in Uruguay,

http://www.uruguaydailynews.com/news.php?viewStory=3607
Several Countries Interested Plan Ceibal
Posted: Monday, August 17, 2009 11:20 am

Governments and universities in several countries are interested in
learning about Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, which distributes free laptops
to school children, said the plan’s director Miguel Brechner.
Authorities in Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, Haiti and Rwanda expressed
interest the program. Brechner recently visited Rwanda to display its
achievements.

>> gave a passionate talk about
>> all that they have accomplished. The bottom line: It is possible, so
>> what are the rest of  you waiting for? Among Miguel's “Lessons from
>> Uruguay” was a detailed break down of the total cost of ownership
>> across four years: US$ 276. This includes the cost of the laptop,
>> connectivity—every child in Uruguay gets free Internet access
>> ($31/child/year), servers, spares, maintenance, logistics, delivery,
>> operating costs, et al. Uruguay has already distributed 380,000
>> laptops to more than 2000 schools and trained more than 18,000
>> teachers. They have 500 support teachers and 1500 support volunteers
>> helping with training and deployment. In terms of evaluation, there
>> has been little opportunity to report any longitudinal assessments of
>> impact of the deployments are relatively recent, but the early
>> indicators are worth noting:
>>
>> * The teachers are driving the change;
>> * There is an increase in attendance;
>> * There is an increase in overall motivation ;
>> * There is more motivation to do homework ;
>> * There is less time spent watching television;
>> * There is an increase in parent involvement ;
>> * There is more motivation to go to school ;
>> * There is an increase in self-esteem ;
>> * There is an increase in interest in learning.;
>> * There is a dramatic drop in repeated grades;
>> * There is an increase in basic skills to use computer;
>> * There is an increased trend to collaboration and sharing ;
>>
>> 220,000 homes now have computers through Project CEIBAL. Computer
>> penetration in the the poorest households exceeds

Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 89 (SoaS performance/hard drive swapping)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Bill Bogstad  wrote:

> As for swap, if you are repurposing discarded machines on any kind of
> scale you are going to end up with non-functional machines which are a
> great source of parts.  Strip the RAM from the dead machines and
> upgrade the rest.  This is something that even 10-12 year old kids can
> help with and probably enjoy.  If it's part of a project where they
> get to take the machines home afterwards they will be even more
> motivated.

Don't forget that SoaS makes driveless used computers usable. Right
now, the leftovers from installfests all get recycled as scrap. I am
thinking about giving students one diskless computer at school and one
at home.

> Bill Bogstad
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Re: [Sugar-devel] #606 UNSP: SoaS includes lots of fonts that don't work in Write (Soas2-200903211320)

[Edward Cherlin]

The fonts in your list that render as "tiny letters that all
overprint" are mainly fixed-size bitmap console fonts that should not
be used in a GUI.

I don't understand why Lucida Typewriter would have a problem, nor do
I understand why only one Lucida font is inclueded in SOAS. The Lucida
family of TrueType fonts is usually distributed with Sun Java, in the
sun-java6-jre package.

Hershey is a family of PostScript fonts for ghostscript. They don't
render correctly onscreen in Gnome Character Map on Ubuntu, either.

We need to check whether the two failing Symbol and Dingbats fonts are
in the correct font format. MT Extra and the math fonts render
correctly, but are evidently not Unicode fonts.

The cmmi math symbol font is intended to be used without spaces
between characters. It is behaving as defined. However, none of these
TeX fonts should be on the menu in Write. Aren't they there for MathML
in Browse? (BTW, there are some characters missing for MathML).

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 7:18 PM, SugarLabs Bugs
 wrote:
> #606: SoaS includes lots of fonts that don't work in Write 
> (Soas2-200903211320)
> --+-
>    Reporter:  garycmartin                |          Owner:  sdz
>        Type:  defect                     |         Status:  new
>    Priority:  Unspecified by Maintainer  |      Milestone:  Unspecified by 
> Release Team
>   Component:  SoaS                       |        Version:  Unspecified
>    Severity:  Unspecified                |       Keywords:
> Distribution:  SoaS                       |   Status_field:  Unconfirmed
> --+-
>  Just wanted to run through the fonts currently installed in Soas and
>  indicate the ones that render correctly in Write, and the ones that don't.
>  I'm sure OLPC's distro has a set of fonts that all functioned well in
>  Write and very likely supported more language scripts (will go look-up
>  that list following this ticket):
>
>  Bitstream Charter = good
>  Century Schoolbook L = good
>  Console = tiny letters that all overprint
>  Dingbats = Just Prints Uue Code For All Keys I Tried
>  Fixed = tiny letters that all overprint
>  Hershey-* (all 9 of them) = badly corrupted characters and broken line
>  spacing
>  Lucida Typewriter = tiny letters that all overprint
>  MT Extra = good
>  MiscFixed = tiny letters that all overprint
>  Nimbus Mono L = good
>  Nimbus Roman No9 L = good
>  Nimbus Sans L = good
>  Standard Symbols L = just prints UUE code for all keys I tried
>  URW Bookman L = good
>  URW Chancery L = good
>  URW Gothic L = good
>  URW Palladio L = good
>  Utopia = good
>  cmbx10 = good
>  cmex10 = good
>  cmmi10 = no spaces work
>  cmr10 = good
>  console8x8 = tiny letters that all overprint
>  eufm10 = good
>  msam10 = good
>  msbm10 = good
>  wasy10 = good
>  Times New Roman = good
>
> --
> Ticket URL: 
> Sugar Labs 
> Sugar Labs bug tracking system
>



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Re: [Sugar-devel] [Design] ColorButton

[Edward Cherlin]

Added to [[The undiscoverable]].

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:54 AM, Simon Schampijer  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> currently the ColorButton is not fully clear in it's behavior (see
> http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/388). Click outside the palette to close
> it etc.

The problem in the bug is that clicking outside the palette but in the
editing area deselects any selected text without applying the color
first. A workaround is to select text, select color, click anywhere on
the toolbar. I added this in a comment on the bug.

> Benjamin suggested to have an ok/cancel button to make the end
> of the selection clear http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/388#comment:7

I assume that you mean something like the palette controls in Paint.
(Screenshot attached.) Would we want to unify these palettes?

If Write can apply the color before deselecting the text, or without
deselecting the text, users will have a much easier time. But that may
not be what users want. Should clicking outside the box mean OK or
Cancel? I consider it fundamental to UI design that clicking to get
focus in a window or remove it from a dialogue box should not trigger
any action in the window being activated.

> Do others agree? Other thoughts?

Do we have any way to ask the children's opinion on such design issues?

> Thanks,
>    Simon
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[Sugar-devel] Negative press (was Re: Sugar Digest 2009-09-11)

[Edward Cherlin]

Oh, don't fret. How about the good, even overenthusiastic, press (off
by one on the version)? ;->

XO 2.5 out

Fudzilla

This newest laptop from OLPC features the VIA C7-M a 1GHz variable speed
processor, which can manage full screen video playback, offering faster
etoys and and scratch animation, larger offline library and storage
capacity, better image capture and remixing and better Java tools.

What is also interesting is that the machine was a doddle to overclock
and managed a blistering 500 Mhz. OK not that fast but better than a
pock in the eye with a short stick.


See all stories on this topic:


Anyway, well done. I either comment or send an author query whenever I
see such ill-informed articles.

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 6:55 AM, Walter Bender  wrote:
> === Sugar Digest ===
>

> 2. There has been a great deal of negative press about One Laptop per
> Child of late--much of it based on misinformation and poor
> fact-checking. I decided to respond to one blog
> [http://www.undispatch.com/node/8859], a particularly disheartening
> one by Alanna Shaikh on a UN Foundation-sponsored site:
>
> I am writing in response to Alanna Shaikh's 9/9/09 article, "One
> Laptop Per Child - The Dream is Over".
>
> Not only is the dream not over, the OLPC project has created an
> opportunity for the pursuit of more dreams by many more people.
>
> I was Nicholas Negroponte's partner in founding One Laptop per Child.
> As Nicholas has elegantly stated in his response to Ms. Shaikh's blog,
> we spawned the netbook market, which is bringing the price of
> computing within reach of millions more people. In addition, we launch
> a free software initiative, Sugar Labs, that is putting educational
> software into the hands of children.
>
> Sugar Labs (www.sugarlabs.org) is an independent outgrowth of OLPC. We
> are a global community of volunteers—teachers and software
> developers—whose mission is to bring the advantages of the Sugar
> learning platform to children everywhere, on any computer. Sugar was
> designed specially for children and offers a better alternative for
> young learners than traditional “office-desktop” software. Indeed,
> nothing in our children's future has anything to do with office work
> from 30 years ago.
>
> Ms. Shaikh is mistaken in her assertion that OLPC has abandoned  “the
> special child-friendly OS.” More than 99% of the OLPC laptops in the
> hands of children run Sugar. Governments prefer Sugar because of its
> superior quality, openness, built-in collaboration, easy
> internationalization and localization to indigenous languages, and
> unbeatable price (free).
>
> Sugar on a Stick, our latest initiative, allows children fortunate
> enough to have access to a computer at school, in the community, at
> home (or only the occasional access to a computer in an Internet café)
> to benefit from Sugar with a simple USB stick, which costs less than
> US $5. Sugar on a Stick runs on netbooks, but it also runs on
> hand-me-down computers, typical of those found in schools, that can
> only limp along running Windows.
>
> We invite you to contact as we will be pleased to answer any of your
> questions about Sugar, the free learning platform used in schools
> every day in countries around the world.

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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-09-03

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Walter Bender wrote:
> === Sugar Digest ===
>
>
>
> 1. The car allowance rebate system (CARS), more commonly known as the
> “Cash for Clunkers” program, was used to bail out the US auto
> industry. People who had purchased gas guzzlers were rewarded with
> $4500 towards the purchase of a more fuel-efficient car.  Of course
> there was no subsidy for those of us who commute by bicycle—I could
> use some new panniers.
>
> Maybe it is time to bail out the US education industry. When will the
> US government announce the "Sugar for Clunkers"? It would work a bit
> differently than the car program in that with Sugar, there is no need
> to subsidize the purchase of replacement hardware—we'll have to find
> another program to bail out the computer industry. Simply replace the
> clunker software that most schools are using—Windows 2000 or Windows
> XP—with Sugar.  Sugar is, of course, free—as in speech and as in beer.
> Any government subsidy could go towards teacher workshops. “Yes we
> can!”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been going on about the $90
billion for education in the stimulus bill. Have you looked?

> -walter
>
> --
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> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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Re: [Sugar-devel] updates and testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Dan Bricklin wrote:
> Edward,
>
> Thanks for doing the testing. Here are some answers to some of the questions
> you asked or things you found undocumented.

Thanks. I believe that you are right in your comments below, that the
Open Document spec, manuals for other software, and your video will
enable us to create an excellent manual at FLOSSManuals.net. Would you
like to join us when we do the Book Sprint?

I am thinking about what we might add to the Help in SocialCalc,
allowing for the tradeoff between space and completeness. Adding links
to existing documentation will provide a sufficient backstop, but I
think that there are several places where just a few words will make
all the difference for beginning SocialCalc users, particularly for
harried teachers. I don't want to make them learn too much themselves,
or to have to tell children to rely too much on external resources.

I'm sure that we can find a suitable balance on these questions.

> The database functions, like all of the functions, are pretty much the same
> as the functions by the same name in Excel and many other spreadsheets (many
> going back to Lotus 1-2-3 and even sometimes VisiCalc). They are defined in
> the Open Document Format specification. The same is true of all of the
> financial functions. (There used to be an Open Formula specification, which
> I think got moved into Open Document Format. I coded the functions looking
> to the Open Formula specification.) The built-in SocialCalc doc does not
> provide more than the simple explanation for all functions to save space and
> since they are well documented with other spreadsheets.

Of course, our target users (students and teachers) do not have local
access to this other software. But we can put it into a manual.

>Most of the
> SocialCalc documentation is about what is special to SocialCalc. Also, the
> code itself documents what it does, including, with the financial functions,
> a reference to the Wikipedia entry that helped in their specification. I
> assumed that others can read that to produce appropriate written
> documentation.

As a mathematician and programmer, I can, if necessary.

> (I think there is a reported issue that SocialCalc's IF
> function only takes the 3 argument form, not the 2 argument form. It also
> evaluated all arguments unlike many other IF functions.)
>
> The toolbar buttons, including the two types of move and swap colors, as
> well as the sheet settings, names, and more are explained in a video I
> created. The 54 minute Flash video, created with Camtasia, goes over many of
> the features of the main SocialCalc engine that the Sugar version of
> SocialCalc is built upon. (For example, that version does not have the
> Sugar-specific graphing tab.) You can view the video at:
>
> http://www.peapodcast.com/sgi/socialtext/sctraining1/

Perfect. I'll report on that soon.

> Note that the value format specification language, used to define numeric
> formatting, is similar to that used in most spreadsheets, including Excel.

Right. I didn't have any trouble with it.

> You can learn much of it by looking at the samples already built into the
> product (set a format and the choose Custom to see the definition). This can
> be used when customizing the product for other locales to, for example, have
> different currency symbols and placement. Custom formats are demonstrated in
> the video.

I tried it in Cyrillic briefly without problems, but I cannot type
other currency symbols such as € or £ within Sugar. I will have to do
much more language and locale testing.

> Thanks again for taking time to work with SocialCalc so we can help provide
> this functionality around the world through this platform.
>
> -DanB
>
> Edward Cherlin wrote:
>
> I ran through all of the basic functions of SocialCalc, including
> every icon on every tab. I have tested some but not all of the 109
> functions provided, with good results so far. Although there are
> functions I could wish for, the only real deficiency I have found is
> in the documentation.
>
> I have created a page for elements of Sugar that children are not
> likely to discover on their own,
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_undiscoverable. I recommend it to
> developers who want to think about whether more of Sugar can be made
> discoverable, or whether we need to write lesson plans for the
> features that cannot be made obvious to the novice. I will put in a
> section for SocialCalc. These are not bugs in the sense of incorrect
> behavior or missing explanations, so I omit them here.
>
> Here is a summary of the other issues I have encountered.
>
> o The database functions are severely underdocumented. What database?
> What are databaserange, fieldname, criteriarange?

Re: [Sugar-devel] updates and testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD

[Edward Cherlin]

I ran through all of the basic functions of SocialCalc, including
every icon on every tab. I have tested some but not all of the 109
functions provided, with good results so far. Although there are
functions I could wish for, the only real deficiency I have found is
in the documentation.

I have created a page for elements of Sugar that children are not
likely to discover on their own,
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_undiscoverable. I recommend it to
developers who want to think about whether more of Sugar can be made
discoverable, or whether we need to write lesson plans for the
features that cannot be made obvious to the novice. I will put in a
section for SocialCalc. These are not bugs in the sense of incorrect
behavior or missing explanations, so I omit them here.

Here is a summary of the other issues I have encountered.

o The database functions are severely underdocumented. What database?
What are databaserange, fieldname, criteriarange?

o Where does Paste Formats get its formats from?

o What does Swap Colors do?

o The financial and statistical function definitions in the Help might
be clear to one who uses other spreadsheets a lot, but certainly are
not to a beginner.

o More explanation is needed on angles in degrees and radians.

o I understand Move From and Move Paste, but not Move Insert.

o I see how to set names, but not what to use them for or how.

o I don't see the Sheet setting control on the Format tab that the
Help refers to.

o I found the OK and Sort... buttons on the Sort tab confusing. It has
since become clear to me. Perhaps OK should be renamed Set Range.

Not bad for a beta.

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Manusheel Gupta wrote:
> Dear community members,
>
> We are preparing for the next release of SocialCalc on Sugar. Localization
> infrastructure, canonicalization of the save format and collaboration will
> be the key features available in the next release. We are also looking
> forward to develop interoperability between SocialCalc format and a number
> of other spreadsheet formats like .wk3/.wk4/csv/excel/open office
> spreadsheet. We have recently received a number of requests on developing
> interoperability between SocialCalc and .wk3/.wk4 format, which has been a
> challenging problem to work on. Hope to get this feature ready before the
> next release.
>
> Lately, I have been testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD, and have run
> into issues. I can't seem to get SocialCalc to start.  I fired up the Sugar
> LiveCD, and opened up the USB icon in my journal.  I can see the file
> SocialCalc.xo on my USB stick.  When I click on it, I get a start button,
> but then nothing happens.  Below is a gears image, which starts something
> that looks like a developer interface. Not sure, where I have been going
> wrong. Any help on this issue is highly appreciated.
>
> Please visit the SocialCalc on Sugar page at
> http://seeta.in/j/products-and-services/socialcalc-on-sugar.html. The
> activity is available for download both from the SEETA website
> (http://seeta.in) and from activities.sugarlabs.org. If you have any
> questions, or would like to add suggestions/comments/feature requests,
> please do so here.
>
> Thank you for your continued support.
>
> Regards,
>
> Manu
>
> ___
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>
>



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Re: [Sugar-devel] updates and testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD

[Edward Cherlin]

I downloaded SocialCalc from the Activities subdomain to the journal,
where it installed and ran with no difficulty. I will give it some
serious testing soon.

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Manusheel Gupta wrote:
> Dear community members,
>
> We are preparing for the next release of SocialCalc on Sugar. Localization
> infrastructure, canonicalization of the save format and collaboration will
> be the key features available in the next release. We are also looking
> forward to develop interoperability between SocialCalc format and a number
> of other spreadsheet formats like .wk3/.wk4/csv/excel/open office
> spreadsheet. We have recently received a number of requests on developing
> interoperability between SocialCalc and .wk3/.wk4 format, which has been a
> challenging problem to work on. Hope to get this feature ready before the
> next release.
>
> Lately, I have been testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD, and have run
> into issues. I can't seem to get SocialCalc to start.  I fired up the Sugar
> LiveCD, and opened up the USB icon in my journal.  I can see the file
> SocialCalc.xo on my USB stick.  When I click on it, I get a start button,
> but then nothing happens.  Below is a gears image, which starts something
> that looks like a developer interface. Not sure, where I have been going
> wrong. Any help on this issue is highly appreciated.

Have you tried copying it to the journal and then bringing up the menu?

> Please visit the SocialCalc on Sugar page at
> http://seeta.in/j/products-and-services/socialcalc-on-sugar.html. The
> activity is available for download both from the SEETA website
> (http://seeta.in) and from activities.sugarlabs.org. If you have any
> questions, or would like to add suggestions/comments/feature requests,
> please do so here.
>
> Thank you for your continued support.
>
> Regards,
>
> Manu
>
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>



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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] FSF attitude to xo and sugar

[Edward Cherlin]

I am in personal contact with Stallman (rms) on this. Who else here
knows him? We have met several times at computing events, and
discussed other questions in e-mail. I was a factor in his choice of
the XO as his main computer, which unfortunately lasted only a short
time, because he was unaware that Nicholas had Mitch working on a
GPLed BIOS replacement.

rms is talking nonsense still, but there remains the possibility of
progress. I'll let you know more if I hear anything positive. Our
correspondence will appear in OLPC News as an Open Letter with
whatever followup is appropriate.

I have looked through the rest of this thread. I don't have time to
reply in detail, but I have raised all of these issues with rms, and
asked him why he won't take Yes for an answer. ^_^

You should understand that _we_, all of us, have failed to communicate
with the public, with the press, and with our natural allies. It isn't
just Nicholas. We need a way to put out press releases when Nicholas
says something dumb, or the Wall Street Journal runs a completely
false op-ed about our work. We should be able to get a pro bono
account at PR Newswire or some such service.

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 2:33 AM, Bill Kerr wrote:
> n Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 7:20 AM, Walter Bender 
> wrote:
>>
>> === Sugar Digest ===
>
> 4. The recent FSF campaign condemning the use of Windows 7 in
> education (See http://windows7sins.org/) imputes OLPC in complicity
> with Microsoft. It is disappointing that the FSF is not making any
> constructive arguments in favor of free software alternatives to
> Windows such as Sugar on GNU/Linux, which is currently shipped on
> every machine distributed by OLPC.
>
> http://windows7sins.org/#1
> When I first saw it I interpreted that page as contrasting the xo as a
> positive alternative to Windows (and still think that is a valid
> interpretation)
> When I read what walter wrote above later I was shocked to realise that it
> could indeed be interpreted the way walter has, as well
> On revisiting I can't see any clarifying text there
> If walter's interpretation is the correct one, which may well be true, then
> it's a bad choice of graphic - they should have shown windows running on the
> xo screen,  not happy smiling children
> from this 2008 article RMS is supportive of sugar but ambivalent about the
> xo:
>
> Sugar is free software, and contributing to it is a good thing to do. But
> don't forget the goal: helpful contributions are those that make Sugar
> better on free operating systems. Porting to Windows is permitted by the
> license, but it isn't a good thing to do
>
> http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/can-we-rescue-olpc-from-windows
>
>
> ___
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> i...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
Edward Mokurai Cherlin
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name, and
Children are
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Re: [Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[Edward Cherlin]

2009/8/29 Tomeu Vizoso :

> Ok, so the idea is to focus our resources on the distribution level?
> I'm not very fond of that because:

> - polishing a distribution is _lots_ of work. Canonical, Novell,
> Redhat, etc. are putting lots of resources into there. I think that a
> small set of people can take one of those distros and make it work
> better for a specific use case, but we aren't going to outrun the big
> players in a generic, polished distro.

Does that mean we should be talking to these organizations about a
commitment of resources commensurate with a target user base of a
billion children?

-- 
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[Sugar-devel] OCR?

[Edward Cherlin]

I was at a presentation last week of Abbyy OCR software, which works
on pictures taken by mobile phone cameras in more than 100 languages.
The company wants to give away software (though not source code) in
was that will get the company good publicity. So we are talking about
using their software with the XO camera to read signs or full pages in
books. Also whether we can add languages.

This would mean making the OCR engine a separate download, the way we
handle Adobe Flash.

So is this likely to be worth the effort?

Is there a Free Software OCR engine of adequate quality?

Any other questions?

-- 
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Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name, and
Children are
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Re: [Sugar-devel] The ARM is near

[Edward Cherlin]

We're going to do all of this for the XO-2 (ARM, dual haptic
multitouch screens), and as with trees, the sooner we plant the
better.

Can we get a virtual ARM running on a Linux X86 system? It seems
likely. QEMU has some form of ARM emulation. Also,

https://wiki.cse.buffalo.edu/services/content/virtualmhz-arm-vm-arm
The VirtualMHz for ARM (VM-arm)

Virtera is shipping a free tool that can simulate a 217MHz ARM
processor and embedded Linux system in real-time. The VirtualMHz for
ARM (VM-arm) uses dynamic instruction compilation, rather than the
interpretive simulation techniques used by competitors.

Has anybody seen it? Tried it? Liked it?

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Ton van Overbeek wrote:
> There have been demos to run Sugar on a Nokia N810 (ARM based)
> starting from the Debian Armel packages.
> Probably a good idea to check with the Debian folks. Debian supports
> multiple architectures for their
> distributions.
> I do have a N810 myself, but I will be very busy the next few months
> (relocating back to Europe),
> so I will not have much time to contribute (and yes, touchscreen,
> stylus, virtual keyboard, etc. are
> problematic with Sugar).
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Re: [Sugar-devel] erasing the journal and config

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Daniel Drake wrote:
> 2009/8/27 Sameer Verma :
>> We have a lending library at SFSU, ready to go, but we need to have a
>> way to erase the config and journal every time the XO comes back from
>> a borrower.

> In my opinion, this is silly. Teach them how to run a script, teach
> them how to reflash or tell them to stop being difficult.
>
> As for the borrowers end - this is sillier. What are you expecting the
> borrowers to actually do with their XOs? It's for generating
> contributions to the community, right?

It is a fundamental principle of Customer Relations that you don't
tell users what they want to do with your product. If people have a
security concern, you deal with it or risk losing them and their
friends etc. permanently.

If you need to be convinced, ask any librarian about National Security
letters demanding a patron's reading list. You will get an earful.

> Daniel
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Who's interested in testing a new installer for SoaS?

[Edward Cherlin]

I can test in several distros in VirtualBox.

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 9:00 AM, Sebastian Dziallas wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I'm looking for some volunteers to test the hard disk installation with
> the latest SoaS snapshot and newly designed installer. Since this
> upstream project is really in the early stages of development but also
> concerns a pretty critical part of SoaS, I'd prefer getting some testing
> before throwing it in a snapshot and possibly breaking stuff.
>
> If you're interested and aware of the risk, please drop me a line.
>
> Thanks,
> --Sebastian
> ___
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> i...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



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Re: [Sugar-devel] [Turtleart] Quesstions and Issues w Journal

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Andrés Arrieta
Perréard wrote:
> Hi,
> We've been testing turtle art and there is a menu called keyboard (at least
> in spanish). But there are som things we do not understand what they mean,
> like the block with a star.

In more recent versions of Turtle Art, that icon has been replaced by
the Pippy icon, a python. It lets you run code from the file
tamyblock.py, which you can open from the Journal to edit.

> Here's the image of the menu:
> http://dashwire.com/alphinux/image/ckEuBcGSir3OodadbiFPIU/keyboard-menu
>
> Can some one explain me what does each new block does?

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art#Programmable_Brick
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art/Sensors

> The other issue is when adding the journal block and try to access it like
> so:
> http://dashwire.com/alphinux/image/ctf7roGSir3R3kadbiFTTI/menu-usb
>
> No matter which USB you try to open it always shows the same files:
> http://dashwire.com/alphinux/image/ccbPCgGSir3OfYadbiFTTI/usb

I'm not clear what you mean. Are you are asking about the Journal
Entry Block on the Templates palette?

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art/Templates

As I understand it, you can only select Journal entries for it, not
files on a USB drive.

> Sorry for the resolution my cell is not that good :)

See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art#Palettes

> thx for the help,

A pleasure.

> --
> - Andrés Arrieta Perréard (XE1YAA)
>
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Reviving the Deployment Team

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 4:37 PM, David Farning wrote:
> The first step, from the implementation, side is going back to the
> basics; focusing on easy technical bugs and easy usability bug.  The
> goal is establishing respect and trust between the deployment team and
> the developer team.

This is good, all of it. We also need to consider creation of content,
not just software. Actually, we have to think about something in
between static content and Activities--something that can represent
lesson plans, projects, and the like, with the ability to draw on any
of Sugar. Models built in Turtle Art or Etoys connected with
observations; data sets with processes attached for data extraction,
analysis, visualization, and so on; interactive explorations of
various kinds; frameworks for guided discovery.

We are going to be making a lot of this up as we go along, so we need
ways to validate our work in the classroom and get feedback for
improvement.

> If we reflect on went well and what did not go so well last year.
> Not so well:
> We lost some of the passion because we focused on 'nut and bolts'
> rather than big ideas.
> We lost contact with students, teachers, and deployers by focusing on
> the platform.
> Well:
> Built core community which practices constructionism.  The release
> cycle is fundamentally a constructionism cycle. As a community, we
> come up with feature requests, technical shortcomings, and usability
> shortcomings.  Then, thorough collaboration on the mail lists we came
> up with testable solutions.  After a release, there is a period of
> reflection on how well those solutions worked.
>
> Established a strong culture of mentoring over telling, leading over
> managing,  _doing_ what we can do over _talking_ about what we should
> do.
>
> Established a culture of participation over producer/consumer.
>
> Looking forward:
> Use what worked well to make progress on the parts of the project
> which did not work so well.  High level-- try to create a deployment
> team which shares the overall mission, vision,  values, and culture of
> Sugar Labs.
>
> Concrete step to make this happen:
> 1.  If you are at a deployment please start sending bug reports about
> minor issues.
> 2.  If you are not at a deployment please act as a bridge between
> deployments and developers.
> 3.  Everyone can monitor Sur, ieap, and sugar-dev; whenever you see a
> issue come in please engage the reporter to help him or her turn the
> issue into a good bug report.
>
> Reporting minor issue might seem counter intuitive when looking at it
> from a bang-for-buck pov.  But, from a community pov minor issues are
> easy to report, easy to turn into bug reports, and often easy to fix.
> By starting small we can learn and gain confidence that the process we
> are creating work.  Once we have confidence in the process we turn
> 100% of our energies towards solving those hard problems.
>
> hope that helps
> david
>
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:36 PM, Caroline Meeks 
>> wrote:
>>> Let me know how I can help!
>>
>> Likewise.
>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> CAroline
>>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 2:47 PM, David Farning 
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> It looks like we have enough sustainable contributors to revive the
>>>> Deployment team!
>>>>
>>>> The existing deployment team information is at
>>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployment_Team .  I would like to begin
>>>> by slightly narrowing the deployment teams mission to:
>>>>
>>>> The mission of the Deployment Team is to enable Sugar deployments to
>>>> participate fully in the Sugar community by organizing forums for the
>>>> exchange of experience and needs between Sugar users and Sugar
>>>> developers.
>>>>
>>>> Once these tasks are well under way we can expand the mission as needed.
>>>>
>>>> Maria del Pilar Saenz of SugarLabs Colombia has offered to be the
>>>> initial co-ordinator for the team.  Maria is both close to deployments
>>>> and quite articulate and knowledgeable about our high-level goals.
>>>>
>>>> Over the next couple of weeks, I hope we can revisit the team's
>>>> roadmap, resources, and TODO list to start minimizing the
>>>> communication barriers between deployments and developers.
>>>>
>>>> In order, to get this started Tomeu has mentioned that he is willing
>>>> to shift his Sugar Labs time from working on new features to fixing
>>>> bugs.
>>>>
>

Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Reviving the Deployment Team

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:36 PM, Caroline Meeks wrote:
> Let me know how I can help!

Likewise.

> Thanks,
> CAroline
>
> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 2:47 PM, David Farning 
> wrote:
>>
>> It looks like we have enough sustainable contributors to revive the
>> Deployment team!
>>
>> The existing deployment team information is at
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployment_Team .  I would like to begin
>> by slightly narrowing the deployment teams mission to:
>>
>> The mission of the Deployment Team is to enable Sugar deployments to
>> participate fully in the Sugar community by organizing forums for the
>> exchange of experience and needs between Sugar users and Sugar
>> developers.
>>
>> Once these tasks are well under way we can expand the mission as needed.
>>
>> Maria del Pilar Saenz of SugarLabs Colombia has offered to be the
>> initial co-ordinator for the team.  Maria is both close to deployments
>> and quite articulate and knowledgeable about our high-level goals.
>>
>> Over the next couple of weeks, I hope we can revisit the team's
>> roadmap, resources, and TODO list to start minimizing the
>> communication barriers between deployments and developers.
>>
>> In order, to get this started Tomeu has mentioned that he is willing
>> to shift his Sugar Labs time from working on new features to fixing
>> bugs.
>>
>> david
>> ___
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>> i...@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>
>
>
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> carol...@solutiongrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] What is your favorite application for use in CS classes?

[Edward Cherlin]

1) I am currently working on CS, math, and science lessons for primary
school classes based on Turtle Art in Sugar education software,
originally for the OLPC XO but now available for multiple versions of
Linux.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Gravity.odt

Tile-based programs click together to create program trees independent
of any linear text-based programming languages, thus eliminating
syntax errors. In conventional programming, the user is two levels
(lexical analysis, parse) away from the parse tree that the compiler
uses for semantic transformations and code generation. A further
advantage is that tiles have different kinds of connectors, preventing
type mismatches between Booleans used in flow control, text or numeric
values, and program steps.

Tile-based programming is also available in Etoys (Smalltalk), Scratch
(Multimedia) and other software.

2) We are not yet ready to use the Parrot VM as a foundation for CS at
a higher level. At some point it will make it fairly easy to implement
a wide range of dynamic languages, by providing the foundations such
as on-the-fly garbage collection, concurrency and object structures.
This will allow language designers to work at a higher level. Current
trial versions of languages are available from
http://www.parrot.org/languages.

3) My principal interests in CS are in making clear how wide the range
of useful languages and models of computation is, what their
foundations are in mathematics, and how to turn complex mathematical
ideas into readily-applied language features, libraries, and the like
(where possible). I follow AI researcher Marvin Minsky.

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way."

Most programmers have almost no exposure to these concepts, and most
CS researchers restrict themselves to a very small range of models. I
have not yet had a chance to try out Oz and Mozart, which are designed
to expose multiple models of computation, so I can't say yet whether
they will become favorites. See Concepts, Techniques, and Models of
Computer Programming, by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi.

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Sebastian Dziallas wrote:
> No matter what it is, please tell us! Why? Because we in Fedora's
> Education SIG [1] are looking for ways to make your life easier.
>
> We are currently working on a development environment both for students
> and teachers, to give them an easy start into open source communities.
> The very first version has been announced and distributed for POSSE [2]
> and we're now looking for ways to improving it.
>
> So if you've any application you're excited about, please let us know!
>
> Thanks,
> --Sebastian
>
> [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Education_SIG
> [2] https://fedorahosted.org/education/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] GPA Class Notes July 22 - GS

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 5:44 AM, Greg Smith wrote:
> Hi Gary,
>
> Thanks for the comments and follow up!

> Addressing two points below from two of your responses:
> 1 - Name in Journal of file saved from browse
> I may have mixed two issues. This one is not tagging. The work flow
> for this is as described in lesson #2 here:
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Gardner_Pilot_Academy#Social_Studies_and_History
>
> After saving a file from wikipedia then opening Memorize and clicking
> to load an image from the journal, the files are hard to find in the
> journal, especially if you saved a couple of them. The journal shows
> something like: http:/nnn.nn.nn [image size] [more text]. Its just
> hard to see which one is Texas and which California.Maybe it an issue
> with interpreting the URL wikipedia uses. It would be better if we
> could name the journal entry with say the alternate tex (e.g. Map of
> the United States with Massachusetts highlighted) but that may not be
> good in all cases. I'll get the exact syntax of what the Journal shows
> and try to figure out why its hard to interpret tomorrow. A thumb nail
> of any images would be very helpful too.

Workaround:

Save file(s) in Browse.
Go to Journal.
No previews (Ticket #1106), so open and quit each image to create them.
Looking at each preview, edit Title, Description, Tags.

There is no agreed scheme for naming files on the Web or for alt-text
contents, so there is no automatic way to generate a meaningful name
for a download. It might be possible to find a solution for just
Wikipedia. For example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_USA_CA.svg

> Thanks,
>
> Greg S

> Regards,
> --Gary
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Activity as regular objects proposal

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 11:39 PM, Daniel Drake wrote:
> 2009/7/28 Aleksey Lim :
>> The problems that 0.84 has in case of activity versions are:
>>
>> * it can't upgrade activities if they were pre-installed from
>>  native packages; it makes process of upgrading activities
>>  from .xo impossible
>
> In reality Sugar's message is confusing here and I don't think any
> distributor will mix-and-match the two ways of installing activities.
> (either they'll use distro packages and disable .xo, or they will
> exclusively use .xo e.g. OLPC).

Sugar on a Stick currently presents this problem, where stock
Activities are installed from packages, but I can use .xos for
anything else. I found that I could go to the Activities directory,
delete a preinstalled Activity directory, and install a later version
by downloading. I wrote this up on [[The undiscoverable]].

> Daniel
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Re: [Sugar-devel] GPA Class Notes July 22 - GS

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Greg Smith wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I posted the full notes here:
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Gardner_Pilot_Academy#Class_notes

Thanks.

> Three high level points:
> - Kids have no trouble finding new activities (e.g. Write) and they
> want to have more to use.
> - Its still hard to task switch (we may try teaching them alt - tab
> next week), find thing son the journal and move data from one activity
> to another.

I'm putting tips like that on [[The undiscoverable]].

> That brings up the question of how they can tag the items they want to
> easily find them later. That is, as they look around on Wikipedia or
> elsewhere and find text and images they want to use, how do we collect
> them and show them (and only them) on a clean journal view later.

It's clumsy, but after you save an image file you can go to the
Journal to change the title in the main Journal view, and add a
description and one or more tags in the detail view. Then you can
search in the Journal for a tag, and get a list of titles.

Downloaded images do not show a preview. This is a bug. The workaround
is to open the file and quit the session immediately.

You will want to work out a reasonably efficient workflow. For example,

o Save lots of images.

o Go to the Journal, and open and save each image.

o Now that you can see a preview of each image, go into each preview
and edit the metadata.

I recommend having a separate lesson on images in the Journal before
you undertake a project using downloaded images.

> URLs
> and downloaded images are very hard to find in the Journal. We should
> use the URL name (not sure of the right technical term but I mean the
> short name you see in browsers, e.g. www.google.com appears as Google.

That's Title in HTML, but it's the title of the page. Unfortunately
for your idea, images on Web pages usually don't have titles of their
own.

> That or anything that is more intelligible than what you see by
> default. Will file a bug when I have a chance unless someone beats me
> to it.
>
> I welcome any suggestions on tagging and collecting items. I believe
> its just careful use of tagging and filtering but details on expected
> work flow can save us some time.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Greg S
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Re: [Sugar-devel] TuxPaint and saving to journal (Was: Duplication of effort)

[Edward Cherlin]

Actually, I see Sugar API documentation at

http://api.sugarlabs.org/

including Module dbus_helpers.

Does this help?

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 5:29 PM, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> If those who know where things are and how things work are willing, we
> can create proper Sugar API documentation. I'll help.
>
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Ton van Overbeek wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 7:43 PM, Luke Faraone wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 19:36, Ton van Overbeek 
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I need the low-level dbus interface to the journal (or glib-dbus
>>>> interface).
>>>> This does not seem to be documented anywhere.
>>>
>>> Isn't http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_DBus_API#Keeping_and_Resuming what
>>> you want?
>>
>> Yes, but it was/is not clear to me if this up-to-date. I also would
>> have hoped/expected
>> that this type of information would be available on wiki.sugarlabs.org
>> instead of
>> wiki.laptop.org.
>> Anyway, for keeping/resuming I would need the equivalent C/C++ interface,
>> but by following the python code I can probably figure it out.
>> (Tried to look at Etoys, but I do not fancy to leam smalltalk ;-))
>>
>> Ton
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>
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] TuxPaint and saving to journal (Was: Duplication of effort)

[Edward Cherlin]

If those who know where things are and how things work are willing, we
can create proper Sugar API documentation. I'll help.

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Ton van Overbeek wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 7:43 PM, Luke Faraone wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 19:36, Ton van Overbeek 
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I need the low-level dbus interface to the journal (or glib-dbus
>>> interface).
>>> This does not seem to be documented anywhere.
>>
>> Isn't http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_DBus_API#Keeping_and_Resuming what
>> you want?
>
> Yes, but it was/is not clear to me if this up-to-date. I also would
> have hoped/expected
> that this type of information would be available on wiki.sugarlabs.org
> instead of
> wiki.laptop.org.
> Anyway, for keeping/resuming I would need the equivalent C/C++ interface,
> but by following the python code I can probably figure it out.
> (Tried to look at Etoys, but I do not fancy to leam smalltalk ;-))
>
> Ton
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Duplication of Effort: Don't do it.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Benjamin M.
Schwartz wrote:
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA1
>
> I have lately seen a lot of duplication of effort in Sugar.  I think this
> is bad.  The success of Sugar demands discipline and careful planning from
> its developers.
>
> In particular, I am arguing that supporting Qt or Webkit would be a
> terrible idea, and that neither should be permitted to be a dependency of
> the Sugar platform.  However, my argument is certainly more general.
>
> 1. Bloat is bad.
>
> Efficiency is one of the main goals of Sugar.  Sugar was created to
> fulfill a vision of the original Hundred Dollar Laptop Project:
>
> "We will get the fat out of the system.  Today's laptops have become
> obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third,
> which mostly does the same functions nine different ways." [1]
>
> It's true.  99.99% of all deployed computers running Sugar are XO-1's, and
> will soon be XO-1.5's. These are strongly resource-constrained machines,
> and they cannot tolerate inefficiency in the use of disk, CPU, or RAM.
> Outside of OLPC, we continue to target low-end hardware where efficiency
> is key.
>
> If we allow Read to depend on Webkit, but Browse uses Gecko, then to use
> them both, the operating system must load two entirely separate rendering
> engines into memory.  On an XO-1 this may be impossible; it will certainly
> lower the threshold for OOM behavior.  Similarly, loading both the Qt and
> GTK libraries into memory at once dramatically increases memory usage, and
> wastes valuable disk space.
>
> Don't do it.

I can see the points on both sides of this issue.

Putting on my market research hat, I evaluate possible futures for XOs
on the basis of a four-year lifetime. Many XOs will be replaced after
three years, but it would be a problem to leave children on an XO-1
for five years. Nevertheless, XO-1s will not simply disappear when
replaced in the classroom. Some will be put to use by other people,
perhaps pre-schoolers, or may be put into data acquisition and control
applications such as environmental monitoring, irrigation, and the
like.

So we can certainly raise the floor on core Sugar capabilities with at
most a four-year delay from any Moore's law increment in capacity and
speed. In that context, I would say not to add any large frameworks to
the core until we and the countries agree that everybody will have
room for them.

On the other hand, if an activity would require functions not present
in Sugar as it is now, I don't mind introducing new package
dependencies that would not have to be on every XO. I would still
argue that those should be kept to a minimum. If it's a necessity,
fine. If it's a nice-to-have, maybe not.

Any argument about recruiting developers should focus on educational
needs, not maybes.

So let's hear from those who want to bring in Qt.

o What specifically does it let us do that we can't do now?

o What does that add for the education mission?

o Would we be better off adding those functions within gtk, say by
modifying a Python library for Qt?
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Cannot resume/install .xo bundles in Journal

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 12:24 AM, Aleksey Lim wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 12:19:52AM -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>> The Wiki entry
>>
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Journal_Activity#Installing_activities
>>
>> says
>>
>> .xo bundles that are downloaded from the Browse activity are stored in
>> the Journal. By resuming the activity from the Journal entry will both
>> launch it and install it on the taskbar.
>>
>> However, Resume does not appear in the menu for any .xo bundle I have
>> downloaded to the Journal. Is there something I'm missing?
>
> Do you have any version of downloaded activity in /usr?
> 0.84(and current 0.86) can't install .xo in that case.

Yes, it's in /usr/share/activities. So what should I do? I can't
delete it from the Home view, either. Should I do that through
Terminal? Will the Resume item appear on the menu?

> --
> Aleksey
>



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[Sugar-devel] Cannot resume/install .xo bundles in Journal

[Edward Cherlin]

The Wiki entry

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Journal_Activity#Installing_activities

says

.xo bundles that are downloaded from the Browse activity are stored in
the Journal. By resuming the activity from the Journal entry will both
launch it and install it on the taskbar.

However, Resume does not appear in the menu for any .xo bundle I have
downloaded to the Journal. Is there something I'm missing?
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Re: [Sugar-devel] New activity Graph

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 1:44 AM, Xenofon Papadopoulos wrote:
> I have added a new activity I'm working on to the git repository, name is
> Graph, it is plotting graphs of 1st and 2nd degree polynomials.

Have you seen the plot() function in Calculate? It can plot a wide
range of expressions.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_undiscoverable/Calculate

I have a program in Turtle Art that can graph any Python numeric
expression, using one of Walter Bender's programmable tiles.
Screenshot attached.

> It is
> (initially) being developed for the students of a high school in the Greek
> village of Sminthi, where some XO-1s will be deployed in a couple of months.
> Since I am new to sugar programming, any comments would be welcome. There is
> a wiki setup at http://olpc-gr.wikia.com/wiki/Graph_Activity and a small
> demo (text in Greek) at http://umbra.edu.teiath.gr/olpc/graph.htm
>
>
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preview
Description: Binary data
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Language control panel broken: Chinese + Russian displayed

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 2:58 AM, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 01:54, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>> There are serious bugs in language switching in My Settings (the Sugar
>> Control Panel).
>
> Would be better to track each of these issues in individual tickets at
> dev.sugarlabs.org.

I filed four separate bugs on Language setting issues.

#1080   My Settings: Language setting does not always take
#1081   Mixed languages in Sugar UI 
#1082   Control Panel/Language: Add button not available in English
#1083   Control Panel/Language: Cannot set to current selection on
multiple menus.

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Language control panel broken: Chinese + Russian displayed

[Edward Cherlin]

Your supposition turns out to be incorrect. (below)

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 5:35 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 01:54, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>>> There are serious bugs in language switching in My Settings (the Sugar
>>> Control Panel).
>>
>> Would be better to track each of these issues in individual tickets at
>> dev.sugarlabs.org.

Will do.

>>> One is that switching to a language can result in bits of some other
>>> language appearing, and switching back does not necessarily restore
>>> the original language entirely. I have attached a portion of a screen
>>> shot showing mixed Russian and Chinese, even though English is set.
>
>> Maybe these languages have poor 0.84 coverage and you have set them
>> one on top of another so when a string is not found in a language, it
>> tries to find it in the other one?

I forgot to mention that I got this without setting Chinese at any time.

> Yes - I think that is the likely explanation.
>
>>> Also, if you add another language menu with the button provided, and
>>> select two different languages on them, it is not obvious how to
>>> switch. It turns out that clicking on the menu showing the desired
>>> language, and reselecting the displayed selection, is not interpreted
>>> as a request to change languages. It appears to be necessary to select
>>> something else, and then go back and select the language desired.
>>>
>>> Third, the + button sometimes disappears.
>>
>> Not sure about these two, perhaps Sayamindu can comment.
>>
>
> Please file a bug for the second one with exact steps to reproduce
> (eg: with example language names, etc)
>
> Regarding #3, I think the + button will disappear when you choose
> English(USA), since English (USA) does not have any translation (as in
> translations in PO files) and will invariably cause a fallback to the
> second language. Are there any other cases where you are seeing this ?

That's true. But now I have a new symptom. I changed to Russian. No
problem. I changed to English (USA). Now it displays Russian, but
claims to be in English. And the + button has disappeared.

OK, I'm off to Trac now. I will provide screenshots for each bug.

> Thanks,
> Sayamindu
>
> --
> Sayamindu Dasgupta
> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]

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[Sugar-devel] Language control panel broken: Chinese + Russian displayed

[Edward Cherlin]

There are serious bugs in language switching in My Settings (the Sugar
Control Panel).

One is that switching to a language can result in bits of some other
language appearing, and switching back does not necessarily restore
the original language entirely. I have attached a portion of a screen
shot showing mixed Russian and Chinese, even though English is set.

Also, if you add another language menu with the button provided, and
select two different languages on them, it is not obvious how to
switch. It turns out that clicking on the menu showing the desired
language, and reselecting the displayed selection, is not interpreted
as a request to change languages. It appears to be necessary to select
something else, and then go back and select the language desired.

Third, the + button sometimes disappears.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Share sugar objects on a standalone server

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Gary C Martin wrote:

> Test case:
> 1) Create a new TurtleArt activity
> 2) Upload the new entry to the SL wiki using Browse
> 3) Use Browse to download the entry back to Journal
> 4) Resume it from Journal

Thanks. That's something I missed. I'll add it to [[The undiscoverable]].

However, when I tried uploading a TA session, the Wiki said,

".gtar" is not a permitted file type.

Did we change from .tar.gz to .gtar in the Journal, or something like
that, but not coordinate properly?

> This should ideally work for all Activities, then folks can actually
> start creating and distributing content/activities directly using
> Sugar, for other Sugar users.

+1

> Regards,
> --Gary

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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Share sugar objects on a standalone server

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Aleksey Lim wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> One of lacks that sugar environment has is simple way to share sugar
> objects for broad audience i.e. like scratch community has[1]
> (thanks to davidmorris form #sugar).

Yes, teachers and content developers need this, in addition to
children. I can of course transfer objects from the file system, but
then I have randomly named objects. I have to either rename them
manually, or create a browser to read the metadata files. (Good idea,
anyway. The Journal doesn't count, because you have to look at a
separate screen for every entry's data.)

> So, I've created [2]. Original idea was having highly integrated sharing
> features into sugar shell but looks like we can do simple things first
> and even utilize only Browse for browsing/download/upload sugar objects.
>
> The problem is - what web engine we should use.
>
> * Utilize AMO[3] engine which is used in activities.sugarlabs.org
>  in that case we can create something like library.sugarlabs.org to not
>  mess it with ASLO
> * School Server
> * Moodle
> * ...
>
> Suggestions are welcome.
>
> [1] http://scratch.mit.edu/
> [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Server_Objects_Sharing
> [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/
>
> --
> Aleksey
> ___
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> i...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



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[Sugar-devel] Empty HTML from Turtle Art

[Edward Cherlin]

I have tried saving to HTML in several versions of Turtle Art up
through 51, but have gotten only HTML files with empty bodies.




Is the code there?

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Re: [Sugar-devel] [RELEASE] Turtle Art-54

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Sugar Labs
Activities wrote:
> Url:
> http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4027
>
> Release notes:
> http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4027#release-notes

There is nothing in the Release Notes.

"Version 54 — July 13, 2009 — 3,330 KB"

What was changed?

> Reviewer comments:
> Trusted activity
>
>
> Sugar Labs Activities
> http://activities.sugarlabs.org
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Initial implementation of toolbars design

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 7:24 AM, Walter Bender wrote:

> One comment re Write toolbars: there are numerous reports from the
> field that we don't support bulleted lists, et al. I think the
> pull-down menu on the style tab is not discoverable (in fact pulldown
> menus in general in Sugar are difficult for people).

I'll add those to [[The undiscoverable]]. I think part of the problem
is that when unformatted text is selected the menu appears with only
one item visible: None. Unless the user notices the little up
arrowhead and moves the cursor up to reveal the rest of the menu,
Styles remain a mystery.

Is there some reason why we don't show the whole menu with the current
style highlighted? This would mean not having Heading 1 pop up right
under the cursor.

Which pull-down menus in other activities have problems?

> Be great to turn
> those options into buttons.
>
> -walter
>
> --
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Nobody understands "Keep"

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 2:28 AM, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 05:41, Eben Eliason wrote:
>> On Thu, 2009-07-09 at 10:45 +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:
>> > On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 09:52:23AM +0100, Daniel Drake wrote:
>> > > Nobody in the world seems to understand the Keep button. People think
>> > > it's for regular saving and you should do it before you close or 
>> > > switch
>> > > away from your activity.

>> As far as I understand it, Keep is useful for these types of scenarios:
>> - you've done a lot of work but now it's time to refactor/reorganize the
>> whole thing. However you want to keep a copy of the rough version you
>> have now, as "insurance" or perhaps for reference while you re-mangle
>> the work.
>> - you've made a template for something, now you want to save that
>> template (as a blank template) before starting on a version where you
>> fill in the content.

I use Keep in Turtle Art when I am building multiple programs that I
want to use in lessons. When I have one working as I want, I click
Keep. Then I can edit the program to create something related, or toss
it and start fresh.

It makes sense to Keep the framework for a project as a template, so
that you don't have to start fresh each time, and you don't forget any
of the bits.

There are other use cases.

>> I urge again that "keep a copy" is not what is intended, in the long
>> run. Without proper versions, of course, this is effectively how it
>> behaves. Therefore, it's no surprise many saw it this way. But with
>> versions, the "keep" button is actually a "keep new version" button.
>> As mentioned before, a "new version" retains the tree_id, whereas a
>> true "copy" does not.
>
> But are you meaning that we should name the current one "Keep a copy"
> and when we have versions add "Keep"?

I don't think that the name is the problem. This needs to be added to
the list of things that aren't inherently discoverable, where we
should help the teachers to know when and how they can show their
students the extra power available to them. I have started a Wiki page
for such things, [[The undiscoverable]].

> Regards,
>
> Tomeu

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Haiti dormant (was Re: Sugar as desktop os)

[Edward Cherlin]

2009/7/10 Philippe Clérié :
>> Did the laptops get distributed first? If not, where are they?
>
> No the laptops were not distributed as far as I know. As to where
> they are, the information is not public so I don't know.
>
>> Excellent. I had a hand in getting Kreyol localization started.
>
> It's such a small world. :-)
>
> I got involved too at the beginning but the effort seemed to have
> fizzled very quickly, based on zero activity on the mailing list.
> Perhaps the effort went elsewhere and I did not notice.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle
[ht] — Haitian Creole language — kreyòl ayisyen
TA  Edward MokuraiCherlin   Pootle: mokurai
TA  Bastien Guerry  Pootle: bzg
TRA Jude AugusmaPootle: jude
O   Alexander Dupuy Pootle: Dupuy
TRA MasterChes  Pootle: Masterches
TRA lacrete Pootle: lacrete

MasterChes is also involved with Ubuntu localization.
> --
>
> Philippe
>
> --
> The trouble with common sense is that it is so uncommon.
> 

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[Sugar-devel] Haiti dormant (was Re: Sugar as desktop os)

[Edward Cherlin]

2009/7/10 Philippe Clérié :
> We're located in Haiti.

Excellent. I had a hand in getting Kreyol localization started.

> Sorry I left that off. And before anyone asks
> :-) we're not part of the pilot that was scheduled to begin in Haiti
> last year. I briefly worked with them. As far as I can tell, after
> the last cabinet shuffle, the project has gone dormant. Officially, I
> don't know why. Unofficially, the new Minister of Education does not
> like anything started by the previous one. Or so it seems.

Did the laptops get distributed first? If not, where are they?
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Problems running Sugar under Jaunty (9.04)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Frederick Grose wrote:
> A new entry today
> on http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Community/Distributions/Ubuntu:
> (from) Neil Mayhew 16:28, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
>
> I was able to make the sugar packages work by adding a gconf setting:
>
> gconftool-2 -s /desktop/sugar/desktop/favorites_layout -t string ring-layout

Doesn't work for me.

> I think this will be fixed by adding the right gconf schema to the package,
> and hopefully will be fixed in version 0.84.
>
> There are still lots of non-fatal error messages in the terminal, but it
> looks like these can be ignored. I used sugar-emulator --dpi=200.

I tried that, too. No luck. It still gets to the Sugar cursor and hangs.

> Logging in
> to a Sugar session from gdm worked too.
>
> Previously, it was thought that a problem with Xephyr and dbus was at fault,
> but the above workaround shows that it's a Sugar packaging problem.
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar as desktop os

[Edward Cherlin]

2009/7/10 Philippe Clérié :
> I am looking into implenting sugar for a Montessori school.

Maria would be so pleased. +1

Where is your school? Is there a Sugar/XO user group nearby?

> The
> current plan is to start with 10 to 20 (depending on budget)
> computers for a group of about 100 students from 6 to 13, and usage
> would be on a rotating basis by groups.
>
> At this stage, there is no plan to supply each child with a
> computer. On the other hand, if this implementation is reasonably
> successful then the school will probably recommend that parents buy
> computers for their children.

I would suggest getting donations of 100  computers, and providing
Sugar on a Stick to every student. That way, they could continue at
home. Talk to any computer recycler about taking systems with no hard
drive, and to any Linux User Group that does Installfests.

> As things stand now what I was hoping to do is :
>
> - Install Sugar on each computer as the main OS.
> - Setup a server to hold the kids' home directories and provide
> other services as needed (routing and chat among other things...).
>
> I am familiar with the XO and I have downloaded Sugar on a Stick to
> try it out.
>
> My first problem with SaoS is that there is no easy way to install
> the OS on a hard disk. By easy, I mean something like a) boot the
> stick, b) click on install to hard disk, or something equivalent.

That's the hard way. Use a package manager like Synaptic to install
Sugar. You will get more Activities that way.

or

yum install sugar (Fedora)
apt-get install sugar (Debian, Ubuntu)

> (As a side note, SaoS includes none of the sound/music applications!
> That's a huge loss!)

Jukebox is included but not selected as a Favorite. There is a
technical discussion going on about sound in SoaS. When it is
finished, you can expect to see more.

> I looked at the distributions I use, Debian and Ubuntu, and at
> Fedora because Sugar is derived from it. All three seem to have
> small problems.

If so, please check and if necessary file bug reports. We'll help you.
The only issue I am aware of is that Sugar is broken in Ubuntu Jaunty.
What problems do you see?

> In addition it seems that they all require a sugar-
> emulator and it's not clear to me what is being emulated.

It's just the name of the program that starts everything. It is in a
sense emulating an XO within a separate X session. But it isn't the
fake version of some original that we're hiding from you. :)

> I'm on a short schedule (only 4/6 weeks to procure and setup) so I
> am looking for quick answers to avoid blind alleys while doing the
> necessary research.
>
> Any comments/pointers welcome. Mostly I think what I'd like to know
> is whether what I'm thinking of is even possible. Specifically, is it
> possible

There are some issues in configuring a school server that you will
need to ask about. We need the experts to write a procedure for a
reasonable configuration with Jabber and Moodle, and put it into the
Wiki.

> and how difficult would it be to have share use of a computer
> with Sugar as the only desktop OS?

It is of course possible. But it is like sharing one pencil among five
or ten students. You can't integrate it into a curriculum.

This may not be so bad in a Montessori environment, where children
don't all work on the same topic together. So if some children are
using the traditional Montessori equipment, and some the computer, you
will no doubt find a balance.

I will be interested to know what balance point the children come to.
It will no doubt vary by age and perhaps other factors. That
information would be worth an article in one of the Montessori
publications. I volunteer to write it if you and the teachers are
willing to collect the data.

> Thanks in advance!
>
> Note: The hardware I am looking at is the HP Mini 110 Mi and the
> System76 Starling Netbook.

More than adequate.

> --
>
>
> Philippe
>
> --
> The trouble with common sense is that it is so uncommon.
> 

 +1

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Nobody understands "Keep"

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 2:45 AM, Martin Dengler wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 09:52:23AM +0100, Daniel Drake wrote:
>> Nobody in the world seems to understand the Keep button. People think
>> it's for regular saving and you should do it before you close or switch
>> away from your activity.
>
> That's not far from the truth, right?  At least in any work-losing or
> surprising way...

http://en.flossmanuals.net/Sugar/ActivityView

Keep button
Click the Keep button to force an Activity to save its current
state in the Journal.

Stop button
Use the Stop button or press ctrl + esc to save the Activity in
the Journal and close it.

> In case anyone lacks context, here's what the HIG says about "keep":
> it's saving a copy/backup file:
>
> "activities can ... specify "keep-hints" which prompt the system to
> keep a copy. ... a child may choose to invoke a keep-hint by
> selecting the "keep in journal" button ..."
>  -- 
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Human_Interface_Guidelines#The_Notion_of_.22Keeping.22
>
> Are there any other discussions like "activity versioning" and "datastore
> versioning" that are relevant that people could share for context?
>
>> some kind of visual feedback (to appear after clicking Keep) that
>> makes it pretty obvious that you've just forked your work - that way
>> you'd quickly learn the true functionality and know when and when
>> not to use it.
>
> Good idea.
>
>> Daniel
>
> Martin
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Journal feature request--more data in main display

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Eben Eliason wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Gary C Martin wrote:
>> On 3 Jul 2009, at 10:01, Martin Langhoff wrote:

>>> Wishlist: "show files by size" filter or option? If the Uruguay
>>> experience is any indicator, a fact of life is that users after all
>>> *will* hit:
>
> Yes, exposing size in the main list might be worth considering.

I'm looking at the UI in Calibre, a Free Software personal document
database (home page calibre.kovidgoyal.net) that scans designated
folders, reads metadata from the files or from a server, and provides
a variety of views and sort options. It currently has an index of more
than 2,000 files on my hard drive. (I have a separate program for
cataloging my music files and maintaining playlists.)

I can enter text in a search bar, and get back any document that has
that text in any field. Columns are

o Title
o Author
o Size
o Date
o Rating
o Publisher
o Tags
o Series (Think course)

Calibre also provides individual and bulk conversion of e-book formats.

Journal could use all of those and more. Collaborators (total number,
or by name), something like a mime-type/Open With... menu, version
history, bookmarks.

>> Good point! Though arbitrary Journal sorting likely breaks many design
>> goals***,

I have heard otherwise for more than two years.

>> otherwise you'd have thought we would have the most basic of
>> features, sort by creation date, by now ;-)

Particularly if you were not aware of our painful shortage of
developers and the great long list of Things That Must Be Done First.
I'm impressed that we are as far along as we are overall, though
disappointed not to have a more useful Journal.

>> At the very least size taken by
>> an entry should be visible on the details view. Right now there is zero
>> indication other than just watching your total Journal grow in size via its
>> frame icon.

Title is what I miss most, but I would use most of the others
regularly and all at least on occasion.

>> ***Eben can you clarify this one? If locking folks into a 'view Journal only
>> by modification date' was an intentional design choice?
>
> Not at all. The proposed designs include a sort bar, which would
> function in the traditional fashion, but be sorted by date ("when") by
> default. See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Designs/Journal#03
>
> Tomeu has been working on using the standard GTK TreeView, so I think
> we're on track to add sorting by name, date, and participants (we need
> to decide what sorting by participants means...I think sorting by
> number of participants might be the useful choice, so that it's easy
> to surface the collaborative activities).

In a tree view, it would be useful to have an expandable list of
collaborators, sorted by name.

That and other sorted lists should be in correct language-specific
sorts in a suitable normalization, not a sort on raw Unicode code
points. For example, each language that uses accented Latin letters
has different rules for sorting them, and similarly for case and other
issues. ICU can deal with many of these complications. There is more
information at

http://userguide.icu-project.org/collation
http://userguide.icu-project.org/collation/faq

> If we expose file size in
> this list somehow, that would also be sortable.
>
> Eben
>
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
>>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Jaunty up and running

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 11:25 AM, James Michael
DuPont wrote:
> Sascha,
> It build and installed all according to the instructions.
> I dont have this all here at the moment as I said. If you have any
> questions, you can see my build snapshot, that contains everything.

Where? I want to link to it from the
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Emulator_image_files page.

> I have put 2 days of work and finally got it running on ubuntu, you can see
> the patches.
>
> You can find many bug reports of sugar on ubuntu and others. I dont know of
> anyone who sugar works. Everyone who tried the packages complained of
> problems.
>
> How come this is so difficult? How come you guys dont test the packages
> yourself?

It was some Ubuntu packager who failed to test Sugar for Jaunty as we
would have expected.

> Installing ubuntu takes about 30 minutes. You can run it it on a virtual
> machine.

Yes, I have done that for several distros.

> Can you tell me of sugar working on any distro out of the box?

Yes. I have Sugar working from packages on virtual images of Caixa
Mágica and Fedora. I have seen it run in Debian and Ubuntu Intrepid.
See

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Supported_systems#Sucrose

for links about various distros with instructions, bug notes, and
contact information.

> are there any success stories?
> I really cannot find anything on ubuntu except wiki pages that are out of
> date.
> Sorry, but this is very frustrating.

Indeed.

> thanks
> mike
>
> On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Sascha Silbe
>  wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 04, 2009 at 05:43:38PM +0200, James Michael DuPont wrote:
>>
>>> The report is with jhbuild on debian jaunty. I built it from scratch.
>>> Started with jhbuild run
>>
>> I guess you mean Ubuntu Jaunty. How did you build? Can you give the exact
>> commands you used to build and run, please? What does "./sugar-jhbuild
>> depscheck" say?
>>
>>
>> CU Sascha
>>
>> --
>> http://sascha.silbe.org/
>> http://www.infra-silbe.de/
>> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
>> Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
>>
>> iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKUNK5AAoJELpz82VMF3DaLTEH/16qsq91tQXDkjEXqDZNyZ64
>> vtVfD/4qw2DYLQXrXyAnnTyng0JiS7jUGrktPeD2bh5K+pGWuMv+K7f9wEP1l8t8
>> lztCXwx/bquw/5h3N7my/ERPNa4pCyiflwLNuHSnnFNv39WEt49Jazfz3eGZFOJp
>> 3g7dk+Aw1NVW32Sxk4obvy7ZzEBK78kuDdgd9pe8PcXkQ4js58GDjKWVgYeWu257
>> FNnrPsJQtCaPLamdmHmcznExO/NAJCBp1X9/fqDTcc6cQ5xGpbIxCEug0Op/qaM3
>> 4/gp7CLPDVmV5uJdeycAO1J2CrpMCSqGZGhzclTcOixA0NbBXysg3u7ei67NMrI=
>> =0g20
>> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>>
>
>
>
> --
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> Founding Board Member
> Free/Libre Open Source Software Kosova
> FLOSSK
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] The next Step: v2 Roadmap

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Sebastian Dziallas wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> so here it is, the Sugar on a Stick v2 Roadmap:
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap#Roadmap
>
> Feedback is appreciated, and as we've just entered brainstorming phase,
> please go ahead and shoot your ideas! :)

I would like to see the Bible (Tanakh and New Testament) and Qur'an
included, and a selection of world literature.

> More to come...
>
> --Sebastian
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Journal --- Sugar-Developers meeting REMINDER (2 July, 2009 - 14.00 (UTC)) --- irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting

[Edward Cherlin]

I'm expecting you all to invent Linux groups any minute now. ^_^

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Andrés Ambrois wrote:
> On Friday 03 July 2009 02:29:56 pm Eben Eliason wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Gary C Martin wrote:
>> > On 2 Jul 2009, at 14:47, Eben Eliason wrote:
>> >> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Aleksey Lim
> wrote:
>> >>> But in that case we should provide possibility to mark objects that can
>> >>> be shared(I guess sharing all local objects by default is not a nice
>> >>> idea).
>> >>
>> >> Right. This would be essential. There's definitely some thought that
>> >> needs to be done here.
>> >>
>> >> Scott had an interesting proposal which basically exposed the Journal
>> >> (or some subset of it) as an RSS feed. This was really neat, because
>> >> it meant we could build a UI for someone else's Journal in Sugar,
>> >> populating it with that data, but also that these feeds could be
>> >> shared globally, for anyone with an RSS reader to benefit from. That's
>> >> a really powerful approach in my mind, and there is some starter code
>> >> lying around as a proof of concept already!
>> >
>> > +1 to rss feed concept, makes life a lot easier in a heterogeneous
>> > environment.
>> >
>> > I'm still catching up on email so apologies if this has been mentioned
>> > already. But the UI for marking of entries as sharable does not
>> > necessarily need to be another Journal user-interface addition** In the
>> > simplest approach you could just extend the Activity "Share with: my
>> > Neighbourhood" control to mark a Journal entry as part of the RRS feed.
>> > Would need some
>>
>> The problem I see with this is that we're talking about two different
>> kinds of sharing. Just because I want to make a picture I drew
>> available for anyone to look at, or even make a "photocopy" of to
>> scribble on, doesn't mean that I want to let them into a shared
>> painting session so they can scribble on the original with me.
>>
>> This is the difference between sharing an activity with someone
>> collaboratively, and sending them (a copy of) the resulting object.
>>
>> > thought on wording, do you add more levels of sharing? Or do you just
>> > simplify the "Share with:" language language to "Private", "Share with:
>> > Anyone".
>> >
>> > **though I would like entries to visually show their sharing state, the
>> > buddy column hints at this but should be made explicit
>>
>> I do actually think that the Journal is the best place to expose this,
>> especially since the way we plan to expose the feature in the UI is
>> something like "view 's Journal." I'm not sure exactly how
>> or where that happens. Perhaps if we can abandon the checkbox for the
>> multi-selection we can use that space for a public/private toggle of
>> some kind.
>
> How about using special tags? A "Publish" tag seems reasonable for this, and
> consistent with the fact that it could live in a publish directory an HTTP
> server would serve.
>
> I can also imagine a tags used for starred entries and other metadata (in a
> general sense) used by sugar. This would make them searchable as well.
>
>
>> Eben
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>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Journal and filenames on USB disks - more leases.sig problems

[Edward Cherlin]

Better way: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities#Midnight_Commander

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Martin
Langhoff wrote:
> I am trying to get leases.sig from the XS to the USB stick. On 8.2.x,
> Browse.xo saves the file as
>
>   File leases.sig from http://...
>
> ... two possible ways to move next.
>
> Copy and rename
>
>  1 - Insert (fat-formatted) USB stick, once mounted copy the file to
> the USB stick. Check on Terminal indicates that the file has the LFN
> we expect ("File leases.sig from http://...";).
>
>  2 - Switch to the 'USB disk' view of the Journal.
>
>  3 - Rename the file to leases.sig . A check from the commandline
> shows that the file has not been renamed. Oops?. The Journal only
> renames the metadata. Bug?
>
> Rename and copy
>
>  1 - Rename the file in the Journal to 'leases.sig'
>
>  2 - Insert (fat-formatted) USB stick, once mounted copy the file to
> the USB stick. The Journal reports that the file is called lease.sig.
> From terminal I can see that the file is called lease.sig.txt . Bug?
>
> Is there a better way to do this?
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langh...@gmail.com
>  mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Journal feature request--more data in main display

[Edward Cherlin]

Oh, Michael, you're in trouble now. ^_^

You risk reinventing the data-centric Ontology in an Object-Oriented
Programming form. This is one of the worst sinks for time and mental
energy that I know of. It saps the will, because soon users become
obsessed with making the map match the territory, when in reality
everybody wants to make different maps in different territories.

Still, we have to do something along these lines. If we actually do it
as OOP, not just in OOP, so that users can redefine the classes, we
might get somewhere without turning our minds to stone. Maybe we can
make it into a pattern language?

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Michael Stone wrote:
>
> Gary C. Martin wrote:
>
>> I like the intent, but I don't think the "activity centric" view has
>> concrete enough spec to consider implementing yet.
>
> I want to convince you that we actually have enough detail to make forward
> progress with.
>
> To that end, I'm going to offer a bunch of text on how I think this display is
> supposed to work.
>
> You should go through it to identify
>
>   a) things that don't make sense
>   b) things that are disputed or where I'm obviously wrong
>   c) things that are insufficiently specified
>
> and we should try to fix those.
>
> Then we'll be ready to do another round of discussion and prototyping.
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael
>
> ---
>
> The best picture I've ever extracted from people on this subject looks like
> this:
>
>   Mental Picture of the Experience of Recording Butterflies
>
>
>                          *         - action
>                         / \
>           instance -   /   \
>                     \ /     \
>              *--/ /--*---*       - object container
>             /    |         //\\\
>         bundle   |        / | \\\
>                  /       /  | | \\
>         prototype       /   | | | \
>                        *    * * *  *    - objects

I'm with you on actions, object containers and objects, but I don't
know what the instance arrow is pointing to, nor what bundles and
prototypes would be here. Is a prototype a structure for a particular
kind of collection, such as a portfolio outline?

I would be interested to see this applied to a few dozen common
workflows, such as student portfolios, a business plan, a lesson plan,
a textbook incorporating software models, a research report, a photo
album with pictures extracted from different sessions by different
people, or downloaded from somewhere, and so on. If we knew what
workflows our teachers and students needed, we would have a better
chance of designing something that met their needs.

>   This diagram represents the action of recording a roll of 10 photos of
>   butterflies in an instance of a recording activity derived from a specified
>   bundle.

Is that an XO software bundle?

>   Key points:
>
>     * I can paint on a photo but not on a record instance.
>
>     * On the other hand, I can use the instance to
>
>         a) resume recording butterflies or
>
>         b) to locate an activity prototype suitable for beginning a new
>            recording action on a different theme.
>
>       (The instance functions a bit like a UI continuation.)

The continuation for resuming, yes, with the prototype like a factory
class, spawning instances as needed.

> ---
>
> Analyzing
>
>   http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Designs/Journal#02

Aha! The object-oriented view is just what Tomeu and I were talking
about, but better. Except that the sample screens don't have a place
for tags. I vote for objects rather than actions, which I find to be
too wordy and uninformative. I want titles of documents and other
objects. Don't tell me how I made it, let me tell you what it's for,
or about.

I also want the object view so that I can apply any appropriate
Activity to the object. I don't want it tied to the Activity used to
create it. I should be able to write a program or a Web page in a text
editor, and then run or open it. I should be able to save a PDF from
any appropriate application, and then view or edit it in some other
program. I should have an easy way to create graphic files, and then
hand them over to some bundle structure as artwork for a program. And
so on.

OOP as Alan intended it.

> we see that
>
>   * Each top-level entry in the display depicts an "action".
>
>   * Each top-level entry can be zoomed in or out (i.e. "contracted" or
>     "expanded", but as part of a large-scale zoom metaphor).
>
> When contracted, each entry displays a horizontal summary of the action
> containing:
>
>   1) the past tense of a verb
>   2) an "action resume display", consisting of
>
>        a) an initiator-colored activity icon,
>        b) a bold label with the action title, and
>        c) a resume button
>
>   3) an optional iconic summary of the actions's participants,
>
>         [Eben -- how do we abbreviate this summary if there were lots of
>          participant

Re: [Sugar-devel] Journal feature request--more data in main display

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 7:01 AM, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 20:13, Gary C Martin wrote:
>> Hi Tomeu,
>>
>> On 28 Jun 2009, at 09:59, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>>
>>> 2009/6/21 Edward Cherlin :
>>>>
>>>> We have about 60 characters worth of blank space in every Journal
>>>> entry. It would be a great help if we could display 40-50 characters
>>>> from the description field for each entry on the main page. We could
>>>> also drop off the word Activity from every Activity name.
>>>
>>> Are you sure that the description is the best use of the available
>>> space? I was thinking about displaying the tags beneath the title
>>>
>>> Would that work for you?
>>
>> +1 for tags beneath titles.
>>
>> I've just tried a quick mock-up to bounce around some ideas, Tomeu is there
>> a wiki page you're working from that this (and others) could go? Likely
>> needs more refinement but might a few more thinking on it :-)
>
> I'm afraid that would be quite a bit of work, right now I'm planning
> on just adding there the string as-they-are from the Tags field.

An excellent start, particularly if we can get the beginning of the
string-as-it-is from the Description field.

> But would be great if someone wanted to work further on tag entry and display.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> Regards,
>> --Gary
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>



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Re: [Sugar-devel] Flossmanuals?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 7:35 AM, Bastien wrote:
> I'm a bit skeptical about using flossmanuals for co-writing and
> translating Sugar's documentation.
>
> What are the real benefits over a simple wiki?

The documentation on the OLPC and SugarLabs Wikis is barely usable for
experts, severely incomplete, and not in any way usable or acceptable
for novices. They need to have a path laid out through the essential
topics, even if they choose to skip over some the first time through.

On the other hand, if you have a plan and would care to lead a Wiki
sprint, we might come out with something acceptable. I'm game.

But then, how would we turn that into a PDF or book?

> --
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Re: [Sugar-devel] picked up by [some media]

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 2:33 AM, Sean DALY  wrote:
>
> I'm sorry Jonas, I had assumed the success of our launch (3700 SoaS
> downloads yesterday) would be of interest to all Sugar Labs
> contributors, in particular those who worked so hard on it. Does
> anyone else feel it's too much information? I would be worried though
> if any contributors weren't interested in coverage, especially in
> their countries.

I'm glad to see it. It may help that my mailer dedupes the feed, so I
don't see everything once per list.

> Although most coverage has been in the online tech press, we are
> reaching out to educational publications as well; it's only a matter
> of time until we get coverage from them as well, as news of our pilot
> projects comes online.

We still have to overcome the trade press bias against
non-advertisers. I'm discussing articles with IEEE Transactions on
Education.

> You may be aware that we are battling a perception of developers
> working too isolated from the classroom. Some critics have cited our
> absence of both a feedback loop

Guess they don't read Spanish. ^_^

> and consolidated data about
> large-scale Sugar use. These are valid concerns that merit our
> attention.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic_Papers and other pages that it links to.

> In my opinion, communicating the benefits of Sugar as a Facilitator is
> something any of us could be doing. Marten Vijn spoke passionately
> about direct action recently and he is absolutely right that each of
> us should be spreading news of Sugar.

I get a Google Alert on OLPC daily, and I'm about to sign up for one
on Sugar on a Stick. I frequently comment on the Web sites of articles
that Google brings to my attention.

> Negative press means that
> activity is more difficult;

Negative press is almost always an opportunity to get positive press,
except possibly at the Wall Street Journal. The Editorial Board seems
to think that Free Software is bad for business.

> positive press means it's easier. So I
> feel it is relevant to know if we are being covered fairly, if our
> message is getting out, or if we are being heavily criticized in areas
> we need improvement, or criticized unfairly based on false
> perceptions.

But I don't mind if we pull back the notices to Marketing. Is anybody
Wikifying these items?

> thanks
>
> Sean
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> > -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> > Hash: RIPEMD160
> >
> > STP cross-posting marketing info, please!
> >
> > Great info, but not educational nor geeky, so irrelevant for those lists
> > IMHO.
> >
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> >  - Jonas
> >
> > - --
> > * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
> > * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
> >
> >  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
> > -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> > Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
> >
> > iEYEAREDAAYFAkpDO/8ACgkQn7DbMsAkQLgWHQCfbCLJVjSJG8wWBBi9CCXUuYhm
> > zBsAn1oWfLhf5AH6vVCP5ymdaiFVmKkM
> > =SN5a
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Fwd: How do I get to upload a very nice VMware appliance to sunjammer?

[Edward Cherlin]

Somebody got a VDI working. We need to spread links around the Wiki on this.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VirtualBox#Sugar_on_a_Stick
http://www.sugarlabs.org/static/soas/soas-strawberry-vdi.zip

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 8:25 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Great! I was trying to make Strawberry run in VMware but failed:
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VMware/Preparing_a_disk_image
>
> - Bert -
>
> Am 25.06.2009 um 17:04 schrieb David Farning:
>
>> Some Mac related questions from Thomas Gilliard.  He has been working
>> on VMimages for Sugar Labs.
>>
>> david
>>
>>
>> -- Forwarded message --
>> From: David Farning 
>> Date: Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 9:59 AM
>> Subject: Re: How do I get to upload a very nice VMware appliance to
>> sunjammer?
>> To: Thomas C Gilliard 
>>
>>
>> Thomas,
>>
>> I am going to forward your message to sugar-devel.  The developers
>> should be able to help you more effectively than I can.
>>
>> david
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 6:43 AM, Thomas C Gilliard
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> I have still not been able to get logged in to sugarlabs so I can
>>> upload VM Appliances.
>>>
>>> We were working together to achieve this, but I never could sort
>>> out how to get through my apple airport router.
>>>
>>> I have created a very nice Soas-strawberry appliance.
>>>
>>> My methods are detailed on the VMware page of the wiki.
>>>
>>> I sent some early appliances on DVD's to daveb last month. But I
>>> have never heard about them again...
>>>
>>> I have been working with nubae and cyberorg on #opensuse-edu
>>> testing their versions for the last month or so, but want
>>> to get back to contributing to the F11 Soas at sugarlabs.
>>>
>>> Please help me get connected. I want to help.
>>>
>>> Cordially;
>>>
>>> Tom Gilliard
>>> satellit
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>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Strawberry VDI, please

[Edward Cherlin]

Works fine on Virtualbox OSE on Ubuntu J. Thx everybody. I see several
important improvements already. More testing tonight.

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Edward Cherlin  wrote:
>
> Thank you. Downloading now. I am on a FLOSS Manuals book sprint today,
> but I can report back by this evening, and we can link to it from a
> few other Wiki pages.
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Caroline Meeks
>  wrote:
> >
> > Hi Edward,
> >
> > Can you test the one up here and let us know how it goes.
> >
> > http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VirtualBox
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Caroline
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Edward Cherlin  wrote:
> >>
> >> Several SoaS betas were made available as .vdi files suitable for use
> >> in VirtualBox. Can we get Strawberry in this form? Or can somebody
> >> tell me how to create one?
> >>
> >> --
> >> Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
> >> And Children are my nation.
> >> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
> >> http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)
> >> ___
> >> Sugar-devel mailing list
> >> Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org
> >> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Caroline Meeks
> > Solution Grove
> > carol...@solutiongrove.com
> >
> > 617-500-3488 - Office
> > 505-213-3268 - Fax
>
>
>
> --
> Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
> And Children are my nation.
> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
> http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)



--
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The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Strawberry VDI, please

[Edward Cherlin]

Thank you. Downloading now. I am on a FLOSS Manuals book sprint today,
but I can report back by this evening, and we can link to it from a
few other Wiki pages.

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Caroline Meeks
 wrote:
>
> Hi Edward,
>
> Can you test the one up here and let us know how it goes.
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VirtualBox
>
> Thanks,
> Caroline
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Edward Cherlin  wrote:
>>
>> Several SoaS betas were made available as .vdi files suitable for use
>> in VirtualBox. Can we get Strawberry in this form? Or can somebody
>> tell me how to create one?
>>
>> --
>> Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
>> And Children are my nation.
>> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
>> http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)
>> ___
>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>> Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
>
>
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> carol...@solutiongrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax



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[Sugar-devel] Strawberry VDI, please

[Edward Cherlin]

Several SoaS betas were made available as .vdi files suitable for use
in VirtualBox. Can we get Strawberry in this form? Or can somebody
tell me how to create one?

-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] BBC News!

[Edward Cherlin]

My daily Google alert shows this story on Gizmodo, MIT Technology
Review, ferarriboy.com, and gadget.us.

A Google News search turns up several more.

o tuxjournal.net (Spanish)
o neteco.com (French)
o techradar.com UK
o slashdot
o h-online.com

We are getting good coverage in the geek outlets, but nothing in
education or "mainstream". It's also on Twitter, courtesy of me.
Search for #sugarlabs, and please tag your tweets, too.

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Bastien wrote:
> Sean DALY  writes:
>
>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8117064.stm
>
> Funny how every media rushes on spreading the press release
> *before* actually testing SoaS...
>
> I guess there will be a second wave with test.
>
> --
>  Bastien
> ___
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> i...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Testing streamlined sugar-jhbuild

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Sascha
Silbe wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:18:23AM -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>
>>> As you probably all know, I do run a certain distribution different from
>>> those emphasized above.  I do not, however, trust a complex
>>> web-interacting script like jhbuild to run on my machine.
>>
>> After the problems I have had before, I agree. Now I would only do
>> such a thing in virtualization.
>
> I certainly agree that a sugar-jhbuild installation will hit a lot of
> upstream bugs and thus can be quite hard (or sometimes even impossible) to
> work with.
> But being afraid of it damaging the rest of the system is something quite
> different. If you have any particular reason for not trusting sugar-jhbuild,
> I'd very much like to know so I can fix it.

I have been warned not to run sugar-jhbuild and Sugar packages on the
same system. I have not had sugar-jhbuild wreck my system, but I have
had a lot of issues with sugar-jhbuild working one day and not the
next when I make other changes to the system.

> CU Sascha
>
> --
> http://sascha.silbe.org/
> http://www.infra-silbe.de/
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKPnDdAAoJELpz82VMF3Da9TwH/A9JvfjKoBRBLsWUBACQ0BPP
> ZNAn86i5c4TOm5RKjD+PliH+2J8xPte9LzCnfT5ILszS3fZ6tAe4UqunQZqilBpR
> CpaGMFb3NHCEaPNQuIJlam89Y+ydiBAKcN4gBlrnCPzzApemqBzH30HvtttbAZzJ
> HieXmLNQnQ4ywmulCPxH4scVQpXCaCw/3j5l24TXJJWYXXYNR9e1E1eLofgHVJj2
> HUyyJ6T0G98jq6u0KJN/LNwE2GG6BeD1tdgk/Q32sRNYpT9p8VDSwU+ZA0VXt8yi
> lBN1SYdNojmS1RYN85ovK2vdA2TAz9b5bpVCYPw8k47DbOMTetjRqlxrhT1g5Ow=
> =zJb7
> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>
>



-- 
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Customizing a Master Stick

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 2:33 PM, Walter Bender wrote:
> The user info is in .sugar/default/gconf/desktop/sugar/user
> Delete .sugar/default/gconf/desktop/sugar/user/%gconf.xml

.sugar/default/gconf doesn't exist in the SoaS image I am using from May 3.

> -walter
>
> On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Caroline
> Meeks wrote:
>> I have a cool USB Copy machine thanks to NexCopy.
>>
>> My plan for FOSSED is to create a stick, download the extra activities, etc.
>> I want, ideally add the manual pdf, and then de-personalize the stick and
>> copy it.
>>
>> Walter showed me that rm -r .sugar will take a stick back to the state where
>> it asks for your name.
>>
>> But it also clears the journal entirely.  The activities I've downloaded are
>> still there, but no longer in my favorites.
>>
>> I think I want to be a bit more selective.  What should I delete to just
>> remove the users name and colors, but leave the Journal.
>>
>> Where do I look to see the Journal contents so I can delete that which I
>> want to get rid of by hand.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Caroline
>>
>> --
>> Caroline Meeks
>> Solution Grove
>> carol...@solutiongrove.com
>>
>> 617-500-3488 - Office
>> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>>
>> ___
>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>> Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
> ___
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> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>



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[Sugar-devel] Journal feature request--more data in main display

[Edward Cherlin]

We have about 60 characters worth of blank space in every Journal
entry. It would be a great help if we could display 40-50 characters
from the description field for each entry on the main page. We could
also drop off the word Activity from every Activity name.

I am going to create dozens of lesson plans in Turtle Art soon, and I
would like not to have to fish for them. The search field helps, but
is not enough. Eventually, we will have hundreds and perhaps thousands
of Turtle Art lessons, and likewise for Etoys, Scratch, Pippy, and a
number of other activities.

-- 
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Customizing a Master Stick

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Caroline
Meeks wrote:
> I have a cool USB Copy machine thanks to NexCopy.

What is its capacity? Can some of us order sticks from you for schools
and demos? What do sticks cost in appropriate quantity?

> My plan for FOSSED is to create a stick, download the extra activities, etc.
> I want, ideally add the manual pdf, and then de-personalize the stick and
> copy it.
>
> Walter showed me that rm -r .sugar will take a stick back to the state where
> it asks for your name.
>
> But it also clears the journal entirely.  The activities I've downloaded are
> still there, but no longer in my favorites.

I believe that .sugar/default/favorite_activities may be one of the
files you want to keep. I don't know whether
/usr/share/sugar/data/activities.defaults is significant for what you
want to do, but I suspect so.

> I think I want to be a bit more selective.  What should I delete to just
> remove the users name and colors, but leave the Journal.

For this and other reasons, we need to document .sugar. For example, I
need to extract Journal entries created in SoaS running on VirtualBox,
where I cannot mount either a real or virtual USB drive.

.sugar
  debug (configuration)
  default/
cache/
com.garcmartin.Moon/
data/
datastore/
logs/
nm/
org.laptop.*Activity/
buddy-icon.jpg
favorite_activities
owner.key
owner.key.pub
terminalrc

And so forth.

> Where do I look to see the Journal contents so I can delete that which I
> want to get rid of by hand.

The org.laptop.*Activity directories have the structure

org.laptop.*Activity/
  data/
  instance/
  tmp/

Files needed by the Activity are in data/. For example, Turtle
Art keeps the .png files rendered from the .svgs in
.sugar/default/org.laptop.TurtleArtActivity/instance/.
That way it doesn't have to render them every time it starts.

Journal entries are encoded in .sugar/default/datastore/.

Presumably someone could take some of the Python code from Journal and
create a Journal browser that operates outside Sugar, and lets
developers and teachers transfer Journal entries without having to do
it by USB stick every time.

> Thanks!
> Caroline
>
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> carol...@solutiongrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>
> ___
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
>



-- 
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And Children are my nation.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Testing streamlined sugar-jhbuild

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: RIPEMD160
>
> Hi Bernie and others,
>
> [commenting since I was adressed personally]
>
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 06:46:25PM +0200, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>>we'd like to get the streamlined branch merged, but there's doubt that
>>many distributions we don't test frequently with would break randomly
>>due to older package versions or missing patches.
>>
>>If you're running a *recent* distro other than Fedora or Ubuntu, please
>>check out this repository, build, and report back:
>
> As you probably all know, I do run a certain distribution different from
> those emphasized above.  I do not, however, trust a complex
> web-interacting script like jhbuild to run on my machine.

After the problems I have had before, I agree. Now I would only do
such a thing in virtualization. If I weren't so far behind on other
things, I would test sugar-jhbuild in Caixa Mágica Linux or Debian in
VirtualBox OSE.

> I run packaged software.  Risky too, but cutting the wildest edges, I
> believe.
>
>
>  - Jonas
>
> - --
> * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
> * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
>
>  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEAREDAAYFAko6gSIACgkQn7DbMsAkQLh2dACaAzADG8GjSYz0o2FSc/SvSszR
> 0jUAoJLQaYIrDLVUV97ibeIc6PTt37pF
> =Z8/+
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[Sugar-devel] SVG problem workaround

[Edward Cherlin]

I rendered the offending tiles on my laptop, and copied them into the
virtual image. So I can start posting lessons tomorrow, barring
further interruptions.

-- 
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] learning implode...

[Edward Cherlin]

How about writing this up for OLPC News?

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 1:05 AM, Sameer Verma wrote:
> My daughter, who is 3 years and 7 months old has largely stayed away
> from the XO (or for that matter computers in general) other than
> mimicking me by turning on the XO and giving our guests/visitors an
> unexpected short speech on "let me show you this computer. This is the
> one laptop per child". She still likes her crayons and Lego blocks.
>
> She's on her summer break at home these days, which has forced me to
> get creative and keep her engaged. I introduced her to implode
> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Implode) today. I showed her how to move
> the "arrow" (she insists that I call it an arrow and not a mouse
> because calling it a mouse is just silly) start a new implode game and
> select three or more blocks of the same color. The goal is to get that
> smiley face at the end of the game. One demo, plus some hints, and in
> under three minutes, my daughter has become an implode player.
> I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-E !!! She even taught her mother how to play the
> game later this evening.
>
> For all the arm chair naysayers out there, get with the program!
> Children are amazing!!!
>
> cheers,
> Sameer
> --
> Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor of Information Systems
> San Francisco State University
> San Francisco CA 94132 USA
> http://verma.sfsu.edu/
> http://opensource.sfsu.edu/
> ___
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> i...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Physics Roadmap

[Edward Cherlin]

Did you look at my Turtle Art version of Alan Kay's third-grade gravity lesson?

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Gravity.odt

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Brian Jordan wrote:
> Attaching Sugar Devel (people who want to be involved with Physics
> development  might be on there).
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 5:28 AM, Asaf Paris Mandoki wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've managed to get my development environment working and started hacking
>> the Physics activity. I added a "pin" button and a "motor" button so these
>> features aren't hidden anymore. I wanted to add a Play/Pause button but it's
>> not as easy as I thought. It is much better to control time flow with the
>> keyboard but I think it would be good to have a way to make the feature
>> explicit. I'm planing on committing my changes to the main branch as soon as
>> I come up with a nicer icon for the motor button.
>>
>
> Commit it :)
>
> Would anyone like to help with making menu icons?
>
>> After I'm done with that I'm thinking on starting with the journal
>> integration. I will clone the main branch and work over there. I've seen
>> some suggestions for the scene file format at
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics_File_Format . Is there a handy XML library
>> I could use?
>>
>> I see the Physics component is now on dev.sugarlabs.org. I've added a bug I
>> found, should I add the features I would like to implement in the future? .
>> What is the best way for communicating regarding this project? Who are the
>> people involved right now?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Asaf
>>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Gsoc proposal: Speech Synthesis

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: RIPEMD160
>
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 12:46:22PM -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>>On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 12:03 AM, chirag jain wrote:
>>> A basic speech configuration manager has also been implemented to
>>> alter the volume, pitch and rate of the speech.
>>
>>Will it be able to handle tonal languages such as Vietnamese or Yoruba
>>(Nigeria)?
>>
>>How would this system handle creation of voices for different
>>languages? Are we at the point where we can request recordings of
>>phoneme samples for the target languages in Pootle?
>
> The project seems to be a _frontend_ for speech synthesis, not inventing
> a whole new method of speech synthesis itself (which would be far too
> much for a GSoC project).

Right. So my questions translate to

o Do we know whether e-speak can handle tonal languages?
o Is this project far enough advanced so that we should ask Sugar Labs
for a speech repository, and start recruiting linguists (to give us
the phoneme data) and native speakers (to make the recordings)?

> The code uses espeak synthesis as backend.  Languages supported are here
> (linking to a page on how to contribute additional languages):
> http://espeak.sourceforge.net/languages.html

I see. Lots still to do. I'll ask jonsd, the project contact.

> Kind regards,
>
>  - Jonas
>
> - --
> * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
> * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
>
>  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEAREDAAYFAkoxa6oACgkQn7DbMsAkQLizVwCbBHAemHthwsoYj+ThYQ24xNp1
> TdsAnidpf4rdAyLANEQ45WDW0CrNG9fg
> =rHLd
> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>



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Re: [Sugar-devel] Gsoc proposal: Speech Synthesis

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 12:03 AM, chirag jain wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I proposed for the speech-synthesis in Gsoc 09. My proposal can be viewed at :
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/speech-synthesis
>
> As a first phase of my development, I have implemented the speech and
> karoke style coloring of the text.

Thank you. I have long been waiting for this.

http://www.olpcnews.com/content/ebooks/effective_adult_literacy_program.html

> A basic speech configuration
> manager has also been implemented to alter the volume, pitch and rate
> of the speech.

Will it be able to handle tonal languages such as Vietnamese or Yoruba
(Nigeria)?

How would this system handle creation of voices for different
languages? Are we at the point where we can request recordings of
phoneme samples for the target languages in Pootle?

> It would be great if you can test the activity.
> Please download the speech-synthesis.zip from the link:
>
> http://code.google.com/p/speech-synthesis/downloads/list
>
> I have also included a detailed documentation of the activity.
>
> It would be great if you can send some feedbacks to me so that I can
> improve upon his activity.
>
> Regards
> --
> Chirag Jain
>
> Undergraduate Student
> Netaji Subash Institute of Technology
> New Delhi
> ___
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Journal files on regular desktop

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 3:16 AM, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> About a hierarchical file browser in Sugar, I think we need it anyway
> for removable devices, but I'm not sure where we would put such a
> window and how it would look like.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu

I have been using the character mode file browser Midnight Commander
within Terminal. It's more than children need, but we could do a cut
down version.

http://www.midnight-commander.org/
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities#Midnight_Commander
-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
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Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] collaboration testing session

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:09 PM, David Van Assche wrote:
> Hi folks,
>    We are having a collaborative sugar testing session next week Wednesday
> 10th June at 20:00 UTC (That is 4 pm EDT, 3pm EST, 2 pm CST, 1 pm MST, and
> 12 pm PST, most of Europe that will be 9 pm, 8 pm for the UK)
>
> So far we have 5 people signed up, but more are welcome as we really want to
> see how collaboration works on many activities where it isn't quite obvious.
> We will be taking notes and storing log files of the sessions, and will
> suggest ways in which the activity in question might be more collaborative,
> or may need less of it (who knows :-)

Sounds good. I need the results of such tests for project planning.

> We will be testing the activities that come preinstalled on the openSUSE
> sugar images, but we'd like to test various distribution methods (virtual
> appliance, cd, usb, hd) and various distros (at least Fedora SoaS, openSUSE
> sugar, Mandriva or Caixa Magica) I dont believe 0.82 images are compatible
> with 0.84 for collaboration, so am afraid this is for 0.84 only...

I run Ubuntu, and I have virtual images for Fedora, Debian, and Caixa Magica.

> Please
> post your willingness to participate so we have an idea on who/how many will
> be collaborating. We also need a volunteer to take notes, and a volunteer to
> store logs files. There will of course be a transcript of the irc session
> too (we will meet at #sugar-collaboration) We forsee this taking between 1
> and 2 hours...
>
> Here is the list of activities we will be testing, so make sure you have
> them installed if you plan to take part (not all have collaborative
> abilities, and for those that don't it can be a brainstorming session on
> whether/how we can make them collaborative:
>
> sugar-finance
> sugar-flipsticks-activity
> sugar-freecell
> sugar-imageviewer
> sugar-implode
> sugar-infoslicer
> sugar-jigsaw-puzzle-activity
> sugar-joke-machine-activity
> sugar-jukebox
> sugar-labyrinth
> sugar-maze
> sugar-memorize
> sugar-moon
> sugar-paint-activity
> sugar-pippy
> sugar-playgo
> sugar-read
> sugar-readetexts-activity
> sugar-record
> sugar-slider-puzzle-activity
> sugar-speak
> sugar-storybuilder
> sugar-tamtam-common
> sugar-tamtam-edit
> sugar-tamtam-jam
> sugar-tamtam-mini
> sugar-tamtam-synthlab
> sugar-analyze
> sugar-turtleart
> sugar-typing-turtle
> sugar-viewslides
> sugar-write
> sugar-browse
> sugar-irc
> sugar-calculate
> sugar-xomail (sugar-sweetmail)
> sugar-cartoonbuilder
> sugar-clock
> sugar-colors
> sugar-connect
> sugar-drgeo-activity
> xoEditor
> sugar-evince
> sugar-fiftytwo
> sugar-chat
> sugar-terminal
> sugar-journal
> sugar-physics
> sugar-library
> sugar-poll
> sugar-tuxpaint
>
> kind Regards,
> David (nubae) Van Assche
> www.nubae.com
>
>
> ___
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> i...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
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[Sugar-devel] FM-->DocBook (was Fwd: [FM Discuss] Fwd: Documentation ...)

[Edward Cherlin]

Here is your invitation to have at FLOSS Manuals to Docbook XML conversion.

-- Forwarded message --
From: adam hyde 
Date: Sun, May 31, 2009 at 8:17 PM
Subject: Re: [FM Discuss] Fwd: [Sugar-devel] Documentation [WAS:
Re: [Localization] Help activity]
To: disc...@lists.flossmanuals.net


not too tricky...you could try it yourself :
1. view a manual with the chapter _all
2. add the following ?skin=basic

that gives you an entire manual without a skin...then u can see the raw
html and try out some transformations on that...

im offline as i write this but i believe there is some good stuff online
about html->docbook transformations

if you can write a shell script to do it then we can hack it in somehow

adam

On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 16:12 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> How hard would it be to get the FM software to generate Docbook XML?
> That would give us several more output formats.
>
>
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Tomeu Vizoso 
> Date: Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:45 AM
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Documentation [WAS: Re: [Localization] Help 
> activity]
> To: Sayamindu Dasgupta 
> Cc: iaep , localizat...@lists.laptop.org,
> sugar-devel , "Diogo Serra @
> IPLEIRIA" 
>
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 21:47, Sayamindu Dasgupta  wrote:
> > [Jumping into the discussion midway]:
> >
> > From an l10n point of view, I would highly recommend adopting (and
> > perhaps extending) the GNOME documentation framework. It is docbook
> > based, which is a format pretty easy to pick up (and I believe
> > OpenOffice.org can also export to docbook - though I have never tried
> > it out).
>
> Well, I think it was a decision by the people who wrote the manual to
> use floss manuals, I guess it would be up to them which tool they use.
> And in the same way, translators would choose the tools that best suit
> them. I think that floss manuals has already tools for translation and
> also think that people have worked on a translation to spanish, Maybe
> we should ask to those people which was their experience with the
> floss manuals tool set?
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
> > Many programmers and documentation people should This would
> > easily let us
> >
> > a) generate PO files out of the documentation files
> > b) merge back translations easily
> > c) generate multiple format files (PDF, epub, rtf, etc)
> >
> > It would be even more incredible if our documentation system can be
> > integrated with the work being done at http://tutorius.org/ :-)
>
> +1
>
> What I have been wishing for.
>
> > A random google search brought up the story of a project which had
> > used twiki initially, and then had moved on to docbook:
> > http://www.ipcop.org/1.2.0/en/authors_guide/html/what-is-docbook.html
> >
> > Also, converting existing material might not be _that_ difficult: see
> > http://deplate.sourceforge.net/
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Sayamindu
> >
> >
> > On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
> >> [forwarding to sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org]
> >>
> >> 2009/5/14 Diogo Serra @ IPLEIRIA :
> >>> Hy there,
> >>>
> >>> Where i can find the *.po  of Help activity ?
> >>>
> >>> Thanks
> >>> --
> >>> Diogo Serra
> >>> Programação e Desenvolvimento
> >>>
> >>> Campus 5 - Rua das Olhalvas
> >>> 2414 - 016 Leiria - PORTUGAL
> >>> Tel.: (+351) 244 845 052 | Fax: (+351) 244 845 059
> >>>  | diogo.se...@ipleiria.pt | http://ued.ipleiria.pt
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> ___
> >>> Localization mailing list
> >>> localizat...@lists.laptop.org
> >>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization
> >>>
> >>>
> >> ___
> >> Sugar-devel mailing list
> >> Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org
> >> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Sayamindu Dasgupta
> > [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
> >
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>
>
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German mobile : + 49 15 2230 54563
Email : a...@flossmanuals.net
irc: irc.freenode.net #flossmanuals

"Free manuals for free software"
http://www.flossmanuals.net/about


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The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
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