from:"Edward Cherlin"

Re: [sugar] Human Interface Guidelines (update and hosting)

2008-12-16 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 1:13 PM, Eben Eliason eben.elia...@gmail.com wrote:
Hello everyone -

The Human Interface Guidelines [1] have been stagnant for some time,
and I'm starting an initiative to remedy the situation. This effort,
as I see it, has two components: 1) update the contents of the HIG and
2) tease apart OLPC guidelines from Sugar guidelines, and adjust
hosting accordingly.

Thanks. I have just been in a discussion of Help facilities (Yay!),
and of doubly-delayed popups (Boo!). The question is how to make as
much as possible easily discoverable, and what to do about anything
left over.

Earth Treasury is getting a textbook rethinking, redesign, and
implementation consortium together.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai/Creating_textbooks

At some point we want to write a new XO+Sugar manual that encourages
as much discovery as possible, but covers every known non-discoverable
feature in some way. But we won't stop at features. We will move on to
the non-discoverable parts of teaching discovery, collaboration, and
other Really Big Ideas.

UPDATE: The content update is something I'll spearhead myself, as I
wrote most of the current guidelines. Assistance is certainly
welcome, however, /especially/ in amassing lists of holes that need to
be plugged; I'm sure there are countless implicit guidelines we all
follow that should really be laid down clearly and explicitly.
Ideally, we should be able to answer any noob question about visual or
interaction design by pointing to a sentence in the HIG. In that
regard, there is a component for the HIG in the OLPC trac system, so
tickets are welcome. As I mentioned, a small bit of the HIG (mostly
the input methods section, but perhaps others) are XO specific.
I'll attempt to tease this apart as well.

I'll invite in some other people who know something about the matter.
I assume that we need to comb through the Sugar framework and existing
Activities to find any exceptions to documented practices, and discuss
whether to document or change them.

Thanks for your assistance!

[1] wiki.laptop.org/go/HIG

--
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] OLPC + Sugar

2008-12-12 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 3:20 PM, Michael Stone mich...@laptop.org wrote:
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 04:37:18PM -0600, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:
If Brezhnev and Nixon and Mao were able to publish joint statements, we
can too.
Let's not give up.

OK, there must be a couple points we agree on, like, to start, World Peace.

I couldn't have imagined something very solid at this stage - at this
point what I would see is a sort of a General Notes On An Agreement to
Start Conversations to Eventually Sit Down And See What We Can Agree On.

Now, if the motivation is really not there, then I guess we're pretty
much all wasting our time.

Yama,

Thanks for your kind reply. I get the impression from the people I
talked to here that they're simply buried under other issues right now.

Nicholas put it to me that he does not exist until January, and the
same for all other OLPC employees working on G1G1 or Gn.

I'm not actually sure whether that means it would be good to try again
next week, next month, or never.

January. That's what the man said.

Really, I just wanted to let people know not to hold their breath. :)

Yup. Breathing now. ^_^

Michael
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Re: [sugar] [OT] Re: [Sugar-devel] OLPC + Sugar

2008-12-04 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 6:50 AM, Yamandu Ploskonka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I did see your quotes, found a few friends there. On the one where Gandhi
mentions he is a Christian (as well as other such): I have often mentioned
that I (Yama) find Gandhi's the best example of a Christian lifestyle in
modern times. (this is the first time I put this in writing, though, and
now it will be on record in the internet. I say that is good)
This is most disconcerting to many legalistic people affiliated with that
doctrine.

Supposedly when Gandhi was asked what he thought of Christianity, he
replied, I think it is excellent. They should try it.

BTW, if I had enough strenght of character I would rather be in an ashram
environment. I am looking forward to the opportunities that doing stuff in
Bolivia will give me to go native, at least a bit.

an as total disclosure, I am an active member of a charismatic Christian
church, have had strong bonds with traditional Catholicism (Franciscan
Polish Conventual), find Zen gives many teachings I have a lot of use for.
I attempt to follow Christ, know I am too weak, selfish and coward to do a
good job at it, but I keep trying.

That's why Paul spoke of Christ living in him. Get yourself out of the
way, and let Christ do it.

Bernie Innocenti wrote:

Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:

Ed mentions three legs.
Then, in a Mandelbrothian nightmare each seems to grow quite a few more,
and it's often hard to keep track and to know who actually, if any, has any
decision-making power for any specific purpose, what are the teams, how do
they connect, where do assorted flavors of community intersect...

My favorite game on the computer is gplanarity, where you are given
increasingly complex networks to untangle. I'm up to graphs with
100,000 crossings. If you look at the network of connections on Wiser
Earth, where more than 100,000 NGOs lists themselves, it's actually
much more complex than that. I heard just recently that Google is now
indexing a trillion pages (a million million, or 10^12).

Congratulations, Yama! The above deserves being part of my personal
collection of quotes, side by side with Einstein, Gandhi, George
Bernard Shaw, Linus Torvalds...

I made a page for quotes on education, at
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai/Quotes. WikiQuote is also
your friend.

[sugar] Sugar Labs Partners (was Re: Sugar Labs introduction)

2008-12-02 Thread Edward Cherlin

 David Farning wrote:

 The second solution is official Sugar Labs Partners.  These are for
 profit business that would like to be 'Sugar Certified.'

Where can I find out more? OneVillage.biz is interested, and there are
others in my network.

 thanks
 david

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And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
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Re: [sugar] Sugar Labs introduction

2008-12-02 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 1:13 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

One thing that we need to see is about giving legitimacy to volunteers in
countries where only if you have an official piece of paper you are to be
taken into account. Right now I have an active, enthusiastic, capable
volunteer in Uruguay who is not taken into account by higher authorities
because he basically is nobody.

It is not necessary to be official to do good work. I am helping two
students at Olin College of Engineering to organize a newsletter
around two topics: What is really going on at OLPC? (the hard
question) and How can I join in? (where I have a number of ideas to
share, and others have many more). We know that we can use any set of
skills and knowledge to do something that the children need, since
they need to know about absolutely everything. So we can get anybody
started on real work, connect them with the community, and so on.

Those who want to become official within their country in order to
work with other official groups should contact Earth Treasury (me) and
Open Learning Exchange at http://ole.org/. We can work out a plan for
a group of volunteers to do anything useful as part of a larger
project to get XOs into schools, create teacher training materials and
textbooks in local languages, and so on.

A Sugarlabs credential or some sort of accreditation?

That, too.

Yama

Re: [sugar] [Sugar-devel] OLPC + Sugar

2008-12-01 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 o OLPC management and staff have never communicated effectively with
 the outside world. Not with volunteers, not with partner
 organizations, not with the public. I am working on this problem, and
 have established a tenuous connection with Nicholas and some of
 management, but don't hold your breath.

 I presume you mean to include the OLPC contractors (Tomeu, Sayamindu, Morgs)
 and the more available of the staff (Eben, for instance) in the general
 category with volunteers, since it seems clear to me that they are capable
 of effective communication, but also clear that they do not receive
 effective communication from OLPC higher-ups.

Quite right. Thanks for the more precise and more correct restatement.

 Jameson

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Re: [sugar] OLPC + Sugar

2008-11-30 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Would anyone care to start a mental map or some such easier to absorb medium
that would make it clearer for the less illuminated the assorted elements of
our Natural History?

Ed mentions three legs.
Then, in a Mandelbrothian nightmare each seems to grow quite a few more, and
it's often hard to keep track and to know who actually, if any, has any
decision-making power for any specific purpose, what are the teams, how do
they connect, where do assorted flavors of community intersect...

I haven't found it to be that difficult.

o Sugar Labs has defined itself fairly clearly.

o The OLPC volunteers are out doing software development,
localization, and other essential tasks with extensive public
discussion. It seems likely that most of the software development will
move over to Sugar Labs, leaving behind OFW, drivers, and such. People
are working on transferring some of the servers.

o OLPC management and staff have never communicated effectively with
the outside world. Not with volunteers, not with partner
organizations, not with the public. I am working on this problem, and
have established a tenuous connection with Nicholas and some of
management, but don't hold your breath.

o It would make sense to have a mind map of partner organizations. In
fact, SJ asked me to do something like this, and I have been thinking
about how. I can do some of it, and will need help from others. I can
get started at Mind42.com, which in our case will function as Mind4N.
We can publish the results in the Wiki from time to time.

Yama

I invited you as an editor. You can tell us about your Latin American
connections, and get others from OLPC-SUR to contribute.

Anybody else who wants to contribute can sign up on the Mind Map page
I just made on the Sugar Labs Wiki, and e-mail me. Let us know what
you want to contribute. I'll make you an editor on the Mind Map.

On Nov 27, 2008, at 2:17 AM, Michael Stone wrote:

OLPC remains incredibly excited by Sugar and looks forward to a long
and
productive working relationship with all the other people who share
this
excitement.

Edward Cherlin wrote:

We have a three-legged relationhip here:

OLPC Management
OLPC Community
Sugar Labs

My experience at Sugar Camp and elsewhere leads me to the notion that
Michael is correctly describing the relationship between OLPC
Community and Sugar Labs, and that there is no correct description of
the relationship of OLPC Management to anything, including itself.

Re: [sugar] Sugar on Ubuntu Intrepid broken

2008-11-27 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 7:45 AM, Erik Blankinship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Perhaps address how Activity authors might need to handle / work
around the different distro specifics on one page, unless the goal is
to have different activity releases per distro.

We think that most of the distro specifics are packaging problems,
specifically missing or incorrect dependencies. So they should be
reported to the distro concerned, except when, on investigation, some
deeper error surfaces. In this case, we have at least two dependency
problems.

o sugar.py or something like that didn't get installed
o sugar-datastore should have been removed automatically, and
python-olpc-datastore installed.

It is possible that correcting these errors will allow others to appear.

There is also an issue with etcinsvk, which does not configure
correctly, and keeps popping up to report its problem during other
installs that modify anything in the /etc directory.

The next question is the workaround for each of these problems. If I
can find out where sugar.py should go, and can get a copy, I can
possibly get Sugar running. The datastores can be dealt with manually
using the normal apt mechanism. The etcinsvk problem is fixed for
Jaunty, and the bug asks for somebody to backport it.

On 11/27/08, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I think the distro-specific issues should be delegated to the
individual distro pages. The Supported Systems page is a bit of a
tangle right now. Anyone have time to do a reorg?

-walter

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 4:09 AM, Morgan Collett
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 02:06, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Luke Faraone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 17:07, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:

[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ sugar-emulator
Traceback (most recent call last):
File /usr/bin/sugar-emulator, line 22, in module
from emulator import main
File /usr/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py, line 31, in module
from sugar import env
ImportError: No module named sugar

Edward, this is not a Sugar problem, please ask about it on the
sugar-ubuntu
mailing list.

We need a Wiki page with a detailed statement of which bugs and
support questions go on which lists. I think that the current setup
works fine for the developers working in each of the projects
involved, but is hopeless for others, especially newcomers.

I agree. I'm not sure where such a page should go - on the supported
systems page? On the page for each distro?

The plan for Ubuntu is that you should log bugs in the Ubuntu
bugtracker, https://launchpad.net - for example,
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sugar for Sugar itself.
Please log your issue there so we can track it.

In any case, how did you install sugar, exactly? It works fine for me on
a
fresh intrepid install.

I had Sugar installed, and I upgraded to Intrepid. There was one
dependency error that required me to do a manual package installation,
replacing sugar-datastore with python-olpc-datastore, IIRC.

That is a known issue which still needs fixing, ubuntu-sugarteam...

Regards
Morgan
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Sugar Labs
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[sugar] Fwd: Sugar on Ubuntu Intrepid broken

2008-11-27 Thread Edward Cherlin

FYI.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Luke Faraone [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 5:23 PM
Subject: Re: [sugar] Sugar on Ubuntu Intrepid broken
To: Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Hey,

Did you mean to send this only to me? My client doesn't say it came
through the list.

--Right.

Oh, and I added that tip to the wiki.

--Thanks.

-lf

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 16:11, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Luke Faraone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 13:52, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 7:45 AM, Erik Blankinship [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  wrote:
   Perhaps address how Activity authors might need to handle / work
   around the different distro specifics on one page, unless the goal is
   to have different activity releases per distro.

  We think that most of the distro specifics are packaging problems,
  specifically missing or incorrect dependencies. So they should be
  reported to the distro concerned, except when, on investigation, some
  deeper error surfaces. In this case, we have at least two dependency
  problems.

  o sugar.py or something like that didn't get installed

  Sugar-on-ubuntu (fresh intrepid install) works for Morgan and myself, as
  well as various other testers, so the problem is most likely one of local
  configuration.

  Please try the following:
  # sudo apt-get purge sugar sugar-\*
  # sudo apt-get install sugar sugar-activities sugar-emulator

 Thanks. It worked. Some of the Actvities that couldn't launch or
 launched but were missing essential functions under Xephyr are
 behaving now.

 We need to get this on the Wiki, then. Anybody?

  o sugar-datastore should have been removed automatically, and
  python-olpc-datastore installed.

  You've worked around that one, and it's been reported.

 Good.

  -lf

 --
 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://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai

-- 
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And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
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Re: [sugar] [Grassroots-l] [Localization] OLPC, Chile and Educalibre

2008-11-27 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 1:15 AM, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 This version of the give many program is only up for a day or so. It is
 indeed much nicer than the previous one:
 ==
 To give 100 or more laptops and direct them to a location you designate,
 send email to givemany at laptop.org

 Give 100+ $310 per laptop

 Give 1000+ $260 per laptop

 Give 10,000+ $210 per laptop

 In each case, the donor designates where the laptops are sent.

 For general information about the many ways you can give laptops through the
 One Laptop per Child Foundation, please send email to service at
 laptopgiving.org

 ==

 - Bert -

Can we confirm this with Brightstar? The starting point of this thread
was that they said the minimum order is 10,000 units.

And is it still cash in advance without a shipping date until months later?

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 (from Werner Westermann, [EMAIL PROTECTED] )

 Best regards from Santiago, Chile.

 In May of this year, we had exciting news where the ICT-Schools program of the
 Department of Education, Enlaces (http://www.enlaces.cl), asked Educalibre
 (http://www.educalibre.cl/) to propose a OLPC deployment project. Enlaces 
 previously met
 with a OLPC and Brightstar representatives asuring a total of 1000 XOs. We 
 went on to
 develop the proposal and negociate where to deploy the iniciative (Enlaces 
 required us
 to engage rural areas, outside of the Metropolitan Area, among others):

 http://wiki.educalibre.cl/index.php/Propuesta_OLPC_Chile

 Unfortunately, as you can see, the proposal was frustrated, because as 
 Brightstar
 distributor and partner of the OLPC Foundation, argued that it would not be 
 possible for
 the Chilean State to purchase only 1,000 XOs, but would consider a minimum of 
 10,000 XO.
-- 
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The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
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[sugar] Sugar on Ubuntu Intrepid broken

2008-11-26 Thread Edward Cherlin

[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ sugar-emulator
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File /usr/bin/sugar-emulator, line 22, in module
from emulator import main
  File /usr/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py, line 31, in module
from sugar import env
ImportError: No module named sugar


-- 
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] Sugar on Ubuntu Intrepid broken

2008-11-26 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Luke Faraone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 17:07, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ sugar-emulator
 Traceback (most recent call last):
  File /usr/bin/sugar-emulator, line 22, in module
from emulator import main
  File /usr/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py, line 31, in module
from sugar import env
 ImportError: No module named sugar

 Edward, this is not a Sugar problem, please ask about it on the sugar-ubuntu
 mailing list.

We need a Wiki page with a detailed statement of which bugs and
support questions go on which lists. I think that the current setup
works fine for the developers working in each of the projects
involved, but is hopeless for others, especially newcomers.

 In any case, how did you install sugar, exactly? It works fine for me on a
 fresh intrepid install.

I had Sugar installed, and I upgraded to Intrepid. There was one
dependency error that required me to do a manual package installation,
replacing sugar-datastore with python-olpc-datastore, IIRC.

 Please provide more details.

 -lf





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Re: [sugar] Default templates with Write to complex script countries

2008-11-26 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 3:22 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hello everyone,
I haven't received much feedback on this so we're going
with DejaVu-Sans for Arabic.

I recommend KACST Book.

I've setup a section on the Write wiki where people can fill in the best
font for their Language.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Write#Description_.26_Goals

I added lots more languages and fonts, based on my own opinion of the
available Free TrueType fonts. I tried to select the most readable of
the traditional fonts in each case. My impression is that we will need
more fonts for more languages soon, with expanding deployments. At
some point we will run into the need to handle minority languages and
the languages of history, commerce, and religion needed by each
community. That could include Greek, Hebrew (with Aramaic, and
possibly Yiddish and Ladino), Church Slavonic, Armenian, Syriac,
Coptic, Uighur, and several more Mongolian writing systems, plus many
more extensions of Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic. But perhaps most of
those can wait until the successors of the XO have more storage.

Look in the section under Localization.

Please folks, fill in your font for your Language.

Thanks!

Martin

On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 11:20 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
Hi Everyone,
Currently Write ships with a set of templates that define
the default fonts. Currently every single one of these templates uses
DejaVu Serif as the default font family.

DejaVu Serif is great for Western European based Languages but has no
glyphs for complex script languages like Arabic, Hebrew or any of the
Indic countries.

DejaVu Sans has much better glyph coverage, especially for Arabic,
however there may be even better font families for Arabic and there
certainly are for many other languages.

OK my point about this is in order to provide the optimum experience for
children in these countries we would like to know which family provides
the best fonts for those countries.

If we don't get this info the next best thing is to change the templates
to use DejaVu Sans to countries where we know DejaVu Serif doesn't
work.

Does anyone have objections to this?

Cheers

Martin

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Re: [sugar] [Grassroots-l] [Localization] OLPC, Chile and Educalibre

2008-11-26 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I suggest you approach Chuck Kane at OLPC directly. If for some reason
he cannot accommodate the request, then we should discuss alternative
means to deploy Sugar.

-walter

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
(from Werner Westermann, [EMAIL PROTECTED] )

Best regards from Santiago, Chile.

In May of this year, we had exciting news where the ICT-Schools program of
the
Department of Education, Enlaces (http://www.enlaces.cl), asked Educalibre
(http://www.educalibre.cl/) to propose a OLPC deployment project. Enlaces
previously met
with a OLPC and Brightstar representatives asuring a total of 1000 XOs. We
went on to
develop the proposal and negociate where to deploy the iniciative (Enlaces
required us
to engage rural areas, outside of the Metropolitan Area, among others):

http://wiki.educalibre.cl/index.php/Propuesta_OLPC_Chile

Unfortunately, as you can see, the proposal was frustrated, because as
Brightstar
distributor and partner of the OLPC Foundation, argued that it would not be
possible for
the Chilean State to purchase only 1,000 XOs, but would consider a minimum
of 10,000 XO.
Faced with this sudden change of turn and the impossibility of buying that
quantity
off-budget, Enlaces decided to discard the possibility that the XO came into
the hands
of our children.

This is perfectly idiotic. The Give Many page

http://laptop.org/en/participate/give-many.shtml

says

The Give Many program allows donors to bring one laptop per child to
whole classes and schools, and includes Give 100 and Give 1,000
programs. It offers hundreds of students a new way of learning that is
creative, collaborative and self-empowered.

* - $219 per laptop to OLPC partner countries and LDCs
* - $259 per laptop to the rest of the world

Every donation of 100 or more laptops includes spare parts. Donations
of 1,000 laptops or more are eligible for in-person assistance from
OLPC staff.

To become a Give Many donor, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with your
project timeline, and with details about the receiving school or
group.

Doesn't anybody at OLPC pay attention to what they tell the public?

Seeing pilots open in Latin America (Paraguay, Colombia, Nicaragua) promoted
by NGOs or
other non-profit institutions, we are once again dreaming of implementing an
OLPC pilot
in Chile. Educalibre has been formalized as an NGO Corporation and also has
the support
of other NGOs that relate to free culture
(http://www.derechosdigitales.org/) and
pedagogical universities (http://www.ucsh.cl/). We have certainty of being
able to
gather the financial and human resources to successfully depploy OLPC in
Chile.

How and through what channel we can raise a formal proposal to deploy OLPC
in Chile?

To whom can we turn for this possibility?

With harmless envy, we watch (and also colaborate) how OLPC can be a real
strategy to
transform education, teaching, and especially, children's learning. From
here we want to
join and contribute in that process. I look forward to your contact.

Best regards,

Werner Westermann Juárez
ONG Corporación Educalibre
http://www.educalibre.cl
(+562) 632 3660
(+5609) 7 805 7501

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Re: [sugar] Fwd: Web site content

2008-11-25 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 7:00 AM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 -- Forwarded message --
 From: Christian Marc Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Date: Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 8:12 AM
 Subject: Web site content
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Cc: Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 Hi all,

 I am sending out another call for website content! We need one
 volunteer per section (or more) to help us generate content for the
 upcoming (static) website that will precede the wiki. Each section
 should be short (ca. 1-2 paragraphs + up to 1/2 dozen images), and
 will link to specific areas of the wiki.

 Please put your name next to the slot on the wiki:
 http://sugarlabs.org/go/MarketingTeam#Sugar_Labs_website

  1.  Homepage [Christian]
  2. Audience-specific Landing Pages
1. Contributors [your name here]
2. Teachers [your name here]
3. Parents [your name here]
4. Learners [your name here]

I'm working on messages for all of these audiences anyway, so I'll
take them. Other ideas still welcome, of course.

  3. Subpages
1. Download [your name here]
2. Deployments [RafaelOrtiz]
3. About Sugar [your name here]

Is that a vision statement (end poverty, war, and oppression through
improved education, or something like that) and a mission statement
(build the best education software we can, and get on every platform
we can, or something like that)? And then who and how and where?

 Thanks,

 Christian

 --
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com

 917/ 575 0013

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Re: [sugar] [IAEP] list of complaints from sugarcamp community building talk

2008-11-24 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 2:15 AM, Simon Schampijer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Definitely a problem. We are thinking about having a landing page
similar to the one in http://www.eclipse.org/ that hopefully will give
a way for everybody to find how to better interact with us depending
on their role. The idea is that a prospecting developer would just
click on one of those icons and would find a simple explanation of the
first concepts that need to be grabbed in order to move forward. How
does that sound?

olpc-dev list emails are kind of over my head

Yeah, we should understand better this issue. Is a coder-newbies
mailing list a valid suggestion?

Hmmm, I think we should not split those up. In my opinion all we can do,
is to point out clearly that all contributions and questions as easy or
as hard they are, are valid and welcome. We all started there, and I
understand it is not always easy to ask 'stupid' questions, but I think
it is important to produce a culture and atmosphere where this is possible.

A FAQ will help a lot, particularly if somebody takes ownership and
makes sure to capture questions and get answers from the experts.

A set of introductory programming manuals on Python, PyGame, SciPy,
and Etoys will help more. We can discuss this with FLOSS Manuals. Let
Adam Hyde and me know which ones you would like to have, and which
ones others ask you for.

I am working on creating a newsletter for those interested in joining
Sugar work. We have two volunteers so far from Olin Coll. of Eng.,
motivated by the fact that they can't find the news on OLPC (Who can?)
and that they have had difficulties finding out how to participate.
Articles on elementary Sugar programming and on opportunities for
activities will be welcome, as will progress reports whenever you have
a significant accomplishment or need help. I sent over my links to
laptop news sources, and some references on a multitude of games that
people can program if they like. We will collect many other resources.

We will also include suggestions for curriculum, textbooks, and
content. The idea is that anybody can participate, because everybody
knows something that the children need. In particular we need
subject-matter experts (SMEs) in every school subject and every kind
of business, research, government, or whatever. Also artists, writers,
reviewers, testers, localizers, translators, and so on and on.

So I argue, to please use sugar-devel for those discussions.

+1 unless the Sugar Newbies tell us otherwise. We also have other
lists appropriate for content and the rest.

Simon
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Re: [sugar] Default templates with Write to complex script countries

2008-11-18 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 7:20 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi Everyone,
Currently Write ships with a set of templates that define
the default fonts. Currently every single one of these templates uses
DejaVu Serif as the default font family.

DejaVu Serif is great for Western European based Languages but has no
glyphs for complex script languages like Arabic, Hebrew or any of the
Indic countries.

DejaVu Sans has much better glyph coverage, especially for Arabic,
however there may be even better font families for Arabic and there
certainly are for many other languages.

I put a list of Debian Linux fonts at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Fonts#Debian_Linux_fonts. It states the
package name, the languages and writing systems covered, and the names
of the fonts. There are similar RPMs, but I don't have the list.

OK my point about this is in order to provide the optimum experience for
children in these countries we would like to know which family provides
the best fonts for those countries.

I can answer that question for some writing systems, and tell you whom
to ask for the others.

If we don't get this info the next best thing is to change the templates
to use DejaVu Sans to countries where we know DejaVu Serif doesn't
work.

Does anyone have objections to this?

Cheers

Martin

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Re: [sugar] Sugarcamp planning status

2008-11-14 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I noticed that I have a half an hour on Wednesday morning on something
very related to what I have scheduled in Tuesday, so if we cannot figure
out something better you may take a half hour on my slot on Tuesday. I
really want to see more of the sugarstick and ltsp, it deserves some
prime time

Yama

May I have a slot to talk about dealing with out-of-scope issues?
Nicholas and I had a good talk about it a few weeks ago, and as far as
I know, nobody else knows what we concluded. A large part of the Earth
Treasury mission is dealing with essential issues, projects,
proposals, partners, on all of the out-of-scope issues that loom as
holes in the entire enterprise.

Brendan R. Powers wrote:
I should be arriving late afternoon on Monday, and probably leaving late
afternoon on Friday. So the sugarstick/ltsp talk could happen any time
there. It seems Wednesday is completely full, so Tuesday, Thursday, or the
morning on Friday would make sense.

Tuesday may make sense because a few of the ltsp issues are collaboration
related, but i'm not sure how much time the talks for that day will take up.

---
Brendan Powers
Resara LLC

1.888.357.9195
www.resara.com

- Original Message -
From: Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Sugar Mailing List sugar@lists.laptop.org
Cc: Brendan R. Powers [EMAIL PROTECTED], Caroline Meeks [EMAIL
PROTECTED], Mel Chua [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 12:19:15 PM (GMT-0500) America/New_York
Subject: Re: Sugarcamp planning status

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 6:17 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

* Need to convince Mel to lead Contributing to Sugar brainstorm and
to schedule time (proposal Fri 17-19)

Done! Mel accepted :)

Marco

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Re: [sugar] Collaboration day!

2008-11-14 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 10:48 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 edited
 http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp/Schedule#Tuesday_the_18th

 with this data

 Maybe it'll end up being Content  Collaboration day
 I for one see them very, very related and dependent on each other.

 Sounds great! We have the 15:00 slot free, Edward is that good for your talk?

Excellent. Lots happening to tell you about.

 Who is planning to present for OLE?

 Marco




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And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
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http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai
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Re: [sugar] [IAEP] Sugar on Edubuntu

2008-11-05 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 5:35 PM, David Farning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 7:18 PM, David Van Assche [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:

The problem here is that edubuntu and its packages are in Ubuntu Main,
and for sugar to be in there, there must be no non-free software in
it, and squeak is not totally free. Apple fonts not being modifiable,
iirc. Its pretty much the same policy as debian. Scratch was recently
rejected from MOTU for the similar reasons.

David Van Assche

Is the issue where squeak was originally licensed under a non-free Apple
license[1] and the squeak foundations can't locate all of the original
contributors[2] to convert it to an mit license?

1. http://www.squeak.org/SqueakLicense/
2. http://netjam.org/squeak/contributors/missingSignatories

david

That was the problem. My understanding is that it has very nearly been
dealt with. Yoshiki and Robin will know much more than I.
=
As mentioned in the leadership discussion minutes from Craig, the
plan now is as follows:

- Make Squeak version 4.0. This is based on the 3.11 effort but
get rid of or rewrite code that are not relicensed and make a
fully relicensed version relatively conservatively. Etoys 4.0 is
now fully relicensed, and we can bring the removal and rewrite
changesets from that stream.

- Craig continue to work on the Spoon based system. It is dubbed
Squeak 5.0. (My personal opinion is that because it is fairly
different, it could have a different name, but...)

BTW, during the Etoys' relicensing effort, I made a little web app
that lets you view *all history* from Squeak V1 to the latest version:

http://tinlizzie.org:8080/seaside/examples/authorship2

I can make a similar page for 3.10 or such, and also give a tool to
check the unlicened code in a particular code base.

Ken and Mathew, how does it sound?

-- Yoshiki
=
Robin Norwood
to fedora-olpc-li.

Aug 11

Hi,

For the few of you who aren't on the extensive Cc list, we've had a
discussion about the Squeak license with Fedora legal (Tom Callaway)
and VPRI (Kim Rose and others).

To summarize:

o As of this moment, there is probably still some code in Squeak that
has not been properly moved to the MIT license. (Mostly because the
original contributors can't be found).

o Fedora can't accept code that is in this state.

o Kim Rose says:

My colleagues, Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert Freudenbeg (along with a few
others) have been reviewing all code and our signed Relicensing
Agreements for the past week or so. I believe they are stripping out
any code that still remains in the image for which we do not have
signed agreements to cover. I will meet with them upon my return
from vacation week of August 18th to see exactly where we stand.

So, it looks very hopeful that squeak will soon be entirely safe to
include in Fedora, and we'll know more after the 18th.

-RN

--
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone.
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching

Re: [sugar] [IAEP] November conference (meeting notes)

2008-11-05 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 4:54 AM, Mel Chua [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Sounds like an *excellent* plan to me! I'd be certainly glad to
 participate and I'm sure will be the same for Tomeu. We can also
 involve some Boston local activity authors to help out mentoring.


 Great! So if Tomeu or any other core Sugar dev can commit to being a
 second, I'll lock in the date, get a place, and start the gears in
 motion. (I'm already starting to look for locations and the like right
 now, but nothing firm yet.)

 Sounds very good, you can count on me as well.

I'll be there M-F, except when running around to meet other people.

Mokurai

 Thanks,

 Tomeu
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Re: [sugar] [IAEP] November meeting

2008-11-03 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 7:48 AM, David Farning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 In light of the cancellation of the formal XO meeting that was tentatively
 scheduled for November.  It make sense to have an informal community meeting
 instead.

Indeed. I booked a flight the day before the cancellation, so I will
be there. I have a lot of other things worth doing in any free time,
if this doesn't work out.

 Micheal Stone and C. Scott have taken the initiative to start arranging a
 community SugarCamp.  I would like to leverage on their work and propose the
 follow schedual for a November physical meeting.

 Nov 17-18 Sugar upstream/downstream coordination and planning
 Nov 19  General Sugar technological discussion
 Nov 20-21 Sugar strategic planning
 Nov 22-23 Hackfest

 In light of this being a developer driven event, I would also like to
 propose that the event be informally coordinated by the developers
 themselves.

 thanks
 david

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Re: [sugar] USB Based Community Access - What could work technically?

2008-10-31 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Caroline Meeks
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi,

This is a request for technical assistance for Sugar on a Stick.

It looks like we have a pilot school for our USB boot project,

Earth Treasury is making arrangements for two more, in Ghana and
Uganda. Perhaps we can work together on this.

Our use case is one donated desktop computer at school, and one at
home, per student, with transfer of work over a network or on USB
stick. Students should also be able to carry their work with them, and
plug in a USB stick to boot Linux+Sugar on any computer they are
allowed to use.

We are told that the computers plus local network and other
peripherals are available in Africa for the cost of trucking them to
the site. OneVillage Foundation Ghana and Winneba Linux User Group
will join in to provide wireless networking, and Fantsuam Foundation
for microfinance. We will need to provide primary electricity
(probably solar) for one site, and backup power for both. We will work
with University of Education Winneba on teacher training, curriculum,
and teaching materials.

Once we get through these pilots, we expect that we can expand this
program, at a very low cost per student, to whatever extent that
funding can be arranged, and that companies will donate their used
computers when they upgrade.

and a grant
proposal in so I am trying to think through various use cases around
creating ubiquitous access with a USB storage device. I've written up some
use cases here:

http://www.sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam/School_Key#Vision_of_different_ways_the_USB_might_work_in_the_students_environment

I'd love thoughts on what is feasible, how hard, and how much benefit would
each scenario actually provide.

I've done tests to show that Home and Grandma's are feasible. I'm
curious as to whether putting some of the boot files on the hard drive (Zoo)
could reduce boot time or have any other advanatages as most of our donated
computers will likely have working disk drives. I wonder if combining with
a LTSP or other virtualization scheme is possible (YMCA/School).

Note all scenarios are fictional.

Write your ideas here or on the Wiki page as you see fit.

Thanks!
Caroline

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[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Re: [sugar] [Localization] 9.1 proposal: Language learning on the XO.

2008-10-30 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Yamandu Ploskonka
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Please be _very_ careful on any thought about teaching English with the XO.

It is a requirement in many countries. We don't have a choice.

Enemies of the project everywhere are just waiting for a chance, any
chance, to call us yokels of the imperialist empire, and they would have
a field day if the XO delivered EFL.

The defense against this nonsense is to provide courses for as many
languages a possible, and toolkits for people to develop their own for
languages not currently popular in the textbook industry. Also, to
encourage schoolchildren to learn how to record and preserve their
linguistic heritage everywhere.

Of course we know that many locally parents want EFL, as they want Math,
but there is a weird layer of opinion that would just be so happy to
ruin the whoile project for short term political gain.

Pay no attention to the naysayers, Yama. By their fruits ye shall know them.

To develop _tools_ for language learning is _very_ good, as a general
concept.

Aymaran kids need to learn better skills in Aymara, and such tools would
be useful, Castillian speaking kids skills in Castillian and would
benefit to learn Aymara and Quechua also, but proposing Aymara and
Quechua kids to be assisted to learn Castillian using the XO is already
a delicate matter, proposing English is a definite no-no in these times.

In many countries English or a former colonial/imperial language
(French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian) are required for all
children. In the Netherlands, for example, students get 12 years of
English. English is the only language that people can agree on in
India, and is the language of almost all higher education there.

_We_ are not going to impose anything on the children. We are going to
make tools available.

Since all of this is a local decision anyway, I know of a deployment
that, at the request of local parents and with local workers is
developing EFL materials.

Tell us more.

What I suggest is that as a team to focus in the _tools_. Dictionaries,
interactive tools (HablarConSara, etc). Those can then be loaded with
local language packs, and eventually, and as a local decision, other
languages, which of course are not limited to English.

I see that we agree on the principles, and we are discussing
presentation more than substance.

I listened to an
NPR report the other day on how fashionable it is to have pre.schoolers
learn Mandarin nowadays.

Yes, we have Chinese immersion in elementary schools and preschools
here in Cupertino.

Yama
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[sugar] Fwd: 9.1 proposal: Language learning on the XO.

2008-10-28 Thread Edward Cherlin

Sorry, this got away before I added the rest of the recipients.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:25 PM
Subject: Re: 9.1 proposal: Language learning on the XO.
To: Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:46 PM, Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hi,

 I'm learning Spanish at the moment, and I wish the XO made it easier
 for me.  I don't have any knowledge of what the right way to do either
 conventional or constructionist language learning on computers is; if
 anyone has much experience with either, I'd love to hear about it.

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/une.education.pour.demain/materiels_pedago/sw/swprese.htm
Caleb Gattegno: The Silent Way

The Silent Way is the pedagogical approach created by Gattegno for
teaching foreign languages; the objective is for students to work as
autonomous language learners.

 I have some obvious candidates for software that could be produced in
 mind:

   * A method -- similar to Scott's recent GtkLabel overlay for allowing
 strings inside Sugar and activities to be translated -- that does a
 dictionary lookup of a word on the screen and overlays the
 translation of that word into a local language.  This should be
 activity-agnostic, if possible.  For bonus points, translate
 phrases instead of just words.

I worked once for Sentius Corp., which had such software for providing
either translations or definitions through pop-up portlets. This
kind of software is in wide use.

Sites such as translate.google.com and
http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal_e.aspx or http://www.rikai.com
offer various ways of doing this, including copy and paste, or
entering a URL to get a version of a page annotated dynamically.

   * Perhaps some kind of Pronunciation Activity that gives you words
 in the target language, speaks them to you, explains what they
 mean in your local language, and asks you to speak them back,
 perhaps grading your response?  (All but the last part is already
 possible to do manually in the Words activity, but not in a
 structured way.)

Our text-to-speech engine will be available for all Activities. In
addition to speaking selected text in any supported language, it will
highlight the point of pronunciation as it reads. It can be adapted to
a language lesson Activity.

   * Is there any free content that matches iconic images to words,
 so that language vocabulary could be taught even without textual
 translation to a local language?

We ought to be able to combine Google Translate and Google Images
using Google APIs.

There are a number of picture dictionaries or visual dictionaries, in
which all of the parts of an object are labeled in the target
language. We could ask for a license, or create our own. We could
throw a draft together out of free clip art in fairly short order, and
get our artists to do something even better for global publication.

 Feel free to come up with questions/ideas around language learning on
 the XO in general in this thread, and they'll make it into the
 conference talk.

There is a substantial body of Free Software for language learning,
and other Computational Linguistics software that could be adapted to
language learning.

o Content: Literature; man pages and other documentation; localization files

o Dictionaries

o Typing tutors for various writing systems

o Kana drill and practice

o Flashcard programs usable for vocabulary, simple grammar drills
(plurals, genders, tenses) and somewhat more.

o Spelling and grammar checkers

What we need most is a Transformational Grammar engine to drill more
advanced constructions.

From simple transformations, such as I am going out.--We are going
out. to such things as counterfactual conditionals. He went.--Had
he gone... or If he had gone..., including different patterns for
the formal, even the old-fashioned (to prepare students for
literature) and the more colloquial. Or dialect. If'n he went..., if
a student so chooses.

A quite decent summary of some of the development of this field is in
From algorithms to generative grammar and back again
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/goldsmith/Papers/CLS2004Algorithms.pdf,
by John Goldsmith, The University of Chicago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Goldsmith
http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Webpage/index.html

The author describes one of his research interests as unsupervised
learning of morphology. Unfortunately for us, that means unsupervised
computers attempting to analyse word structure, with a 70-80% success
rate measured by words in the corpus. It has nothing to do with human
learning or the grammar of sentences.

An algorithm for the unsupervised learning of morphology
http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Papers/algorithm.pdf

 Abstract

This paper describes in detail an algorithm for the unsupervised
learning of natural lan-
guage morphology, with emphasis on challenges that are encountered

Re: [sugar] XO evaluation paper

2008-10-19 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 4:27 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Am I the only to have missed this paper?

Could be. ^_^ It's listed on

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

 http://www.teachingmatters.org/evaluations/olpc_kappa.pdf

 The bits about the Journal makes me think that it's really the right idea,
 and it will rock as soon as we have a decent implementation of it. Also see
 the section about what they disliked... our roadmap is very much on target!

Yes, a good study. I was particularly interested in their take on
providing Internet access from home.

 Marco

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[sugar] 9.1 Proposal: Textbooks (was Fwd: Call for Proposals for OLPC miniconference November 17-21, 2008)

2008-10-18 Thread Edward Cherlin

As requested.

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 11:52 AM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I would suggest that people cc' devel@ and sugar@ as well, so that we
 can see what has been proposed (and encourage people to make proposals
 who have not already).

-- Forwarded message --
From: Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: Call for Proposals for OLPC miniconference November 17-21, 2008
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 An OLPC miniconference will be held November 17-21, 2008 at our
 Cambridge offices (10th floor, 1 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, USA)

 This week-long event will help frame our long-term software development
 efforts. In addition, we will work on prioritizing requirements,
 features and goals for the next major feature release called XO Software
 Release 9.1.0.

I think I can attend.

 Please submit proposals for topics to cover. These may include, but
 are not limited to:
 - Top concerns and requirements of users and countries including reviews
 of available feedback
 - Learning priorities and tools needed to support them
 - Technologies, applications and software design proposals
 - Process and infrastructure proposals
 - Current and needed research

 For details about the event and submission process, see the XOcamp
 description online. [1]

 Please submit  200 word descriptions of topics or sessions on the
 event page [2] or by emailing your ideas to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .

What does an electronic textbook look like?

Since the 1960s there have been experiments in high-powered
educational software, but not a lot of textbook development that
integrates this software into the text, and very little classroom
experience. This session will look at the available materials, the
types of software and content available, and the implications for
future curricula.

What do we know? What examples do we have and what do they show us?
What opportunities can we see? How do we make this happen? What
questions should we ask next?

Examples:

o Edison Talking Typewriter to teach reading and writing to pre-school children
o Ken Iverson's textbooks, Arithmetic, Algebra, and Calculus
o Smalltalk and the Dynabook concept
o Matlab, Mathematica, and other powerful software
o Notebook and workspace formats and capabilities
o Teaching programming to children: Smalltalk, Logo, APL, others

 Thanks,

 Greg Smith
 OLPC Product Manager on behalf of the OLPC development team

 [1]  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp
 [2]  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Sessions
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Re: [sugar] [IAEP] Narrative.

2008-10-11 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 8:34 AM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 What if Activity and Content bundles were one and the same. You could
 have bundles that just hold an Activity to install, or just have
 Content for the library, or more interestingly have it hold both an
 Activity and library Content.

 There exist CLI scripts (e.g., sugar-install-bundle) that handle
 Activity bundles (which install Activities), but currently support
 for Content bundles (which install Collections) is thin.

 What I wish for is that Content bundles were not second-class
 citizens.  The entire Home View is devoted to presenting Activities
 for launching (or deletion).  But Collections currently are
 presented only within the left-hand panel in Browse.  To be viewed,
 they have to be downloaded by Browse to Journal, and then manually
 launched (from Journal).  [Deleting of Collections from the panel
 shown by Browse is done only with manually issued CLI commands.]

 Activities are verbs.  Collections are nouns.  Sugar should make
 the getting_to/using of nouns as easy as that of verbs.

So Browse has the unnamed function of turning nouns into verbs then?
Well, I suppose we could talk about the infinitive, as in _to_ Google.
The reverse of the gerund -ing that turns verbs into nouns.

We get this in some languages constructed for greater grammatical
generality, including Lojban and the later transformations of APL,
such as APL2, SAX APL, and J. Variable--Noun; Function--Verb;
Operator--Adverb, and so on.

 mikus

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Re: [sugar] [IAEP] Narrative.

2008-10-09 Thread Edward Cherlin

I posted a comment on Bryan's call for textbook/narrative creation.
http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/scaling_constructionism_with_dynabooks.html

Let's do this, Bryan.

Where should we set up the workshop? What tools do we need? Wiki,
mailing lists, forums, repository...? I and others have plenty of
ideas for textbook replacements using Etoys, Measure, and other Sugar
Activities in pretty much every subject. What we need is a place and a
process, not only to write, program, and otherwise create learning
materials, but to get them tested in classrooms, refined, and put into
new curricula.

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 6:34 AM, Bill Kerr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Bryan Berry wholly captured my attention tonight when he said (in
 summary):

   Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to
   manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for
   learning. [1]

 This statement seems to me both indisputable and damning; if true, it
 strikes to the core of the claim that Sugar is appropriate for learning.

 Even though Bryan has already found some partial solutions to this
 problem [2], we should take time to debate the more primitive thesis
 that:

  Narrative is a basic component of much educational material which
  Sugar ought to 'natively' recognize, respond to, and manipulate.

 so that we may decide whether this issue should receive a greater share
 of our limited design and implementation resources.

 Regards,

 Michael

 [1]: Sugar presently records actions which may occasionally be
 decomposed into narrative or situated within an external narrative;
 however, Sugar is presently blind to these relationships.

 [2]: Bryan is currently encoding narratives in HTML and is attempting to
 use Offline Moodle to make this cheaper to support. I decided to write
 this email because I believe that it might well be worth our time to
 either give him a hand with his effort or to bake support for similar
 use cases directly in to Sugar.

 bryan's ideas are explained more fully in this article on olpcnews:
 http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/scaling_constructionism_with_dynabooks.html

 the comments there are worth reading too

 it's hard to discuss without having the ideas spelt out
 narrative is good is not really a sufficient basis for a discussion but
 bryan's article has more detail

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Re: [sugar] Sugar Digest 2008-10-06

2008-10-06 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 8:33 AM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 === Sugar Digest ===

 2. Narrative: Bryan Barry and Michael Stone have initiated a discussion
 about inadequacies in the Sugar tool chain (See
 http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-October/008863.html and
 http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-October/008864.html).

  Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to
  manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for
  learning.—Bryan Barry

  This statement seems to me both indisputable and damning; if true, it
  strikes to the core of the claim that Sugar is appropriate for learning.
  —Michael Stone

 I questioned the dichotomy between manipulating narratives and modes for
 discovery. When I think about Sugar, I think about its providing a
 scaffolding for discovering, expressing, critiquing, and reflecting.
 Manipulating narrative seems to cut across all of these area (as does
 collaboration). We don't yet support (natively) much in the way of
 organizing data to make an analysis or argument. But it seems overstated to
 say that these deficiencies mean Sugar is not appropriate for learning.
 There is certainly a paucity of lesson plans developed around Sugar to help
 teachers answer the question of how one best leverages the Sugar toolkit for
 learning. And undoubtedly, there is a dearth of readily packaged and
 categorized content. But I don't see these as fundamental flaws in Sugar as
 much as a place where more effort needs to be invested; Sugar is reaching a
 point of maturity where such investments make sense. Sugar is an appropriate
 component of what needs to be a larger learning ecosystem.

Gutenberg slammed for inventing movable type, new press, but not
newspapers, novels, scientific journals, textbooks, and tabloids! Film
at 11!!
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Re: [sugar] Sugar on Mandriva

2008-09-29 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 4:51 PM, David Farning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Does anyone on the list have contacts at Mandriva.

I know Pablo Saratxaga, their localization guru. I'm copying him.

Pablo,

Kaixo!

We have just heard of a sizable education project using a Portuguese
Linux distro based on Mandriva, by the name of Caixa Magica. We would
like to get the OLPC Sugar software for education into Mandriva and
this other distro. We have it running on Fedora. Whom should we talk
to?

 http://www.caixamagica.pt/pag/a_index.php

 Not very informative to techies.

 It's based in Mandriva, maybe we can make sure Sugar is there?

 A little more information.
 http://distrowatch.com/index.php?distribution=caixamagicamonth=allyear=all

 kernel 2.6.22

 Originally based on SUSE, now on Mandriva.


 I'll start the process
 of pushing Sugar through Mandriva.  I have very little experience with the
 Mandriva community.

 thanks
 david

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Re: [sugar] G1G1v2 Activities

2008-09-19 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hi All,

 We need to pick the activities we ship with 8.2 when its manufactured
 for G1G1 users. Management needs to sign off on the final list as early
 as next week.

 Its not definitive but we want your input on what we should include.

 What do you think are the most important activities to include?

 Please pick up to 10 and put them in order of priority.

 We will tally the votes and use that as input to the decision.

 Thanks,

 Greg S

 PS this is not a scientific voting system like used recently in the
 sugar vote. I accept Arrow's impossibility theorem
 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem) and my
 math foo is weak so I'm not going to try and justify the methodology.

1. Measure
2. Etoys
3. Turtle Art with Sensors
4. Scratch
5. xo-get
6. Dr. Geo II
7. E-Paati/E-Paath
8. Record
9. TamTamJam
10. TamTamSynthLab

There are several others that I can't recommend until I try them, or
some other features are added. E-Pals is at the top of that list.
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Re: [sugar] Sugar on the BeagleBoard using the OpenEmbedded toolkit.

2008-09-05 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Koen Kooi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Op 3 sep 2008, om 22:14 heeft Edward Cherlin het volgende geschreven:

 On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 3:57 AM, Koen Kooi [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:

 Op 22 aug 2008, om 02:29 heeft David Farning het volgende geschreven:

 Welcome to the Sugar on the BeagleBoard project.  It seems that we have
 all of the pieces in place to do a port.

 Very good. Thank you.

 snip

 I assume that OE is intended to be all Free Software

 OE is 'merely' a buildsystem (something like gentoos portage or GNOMEs
 jhbuild) and its metadata is MIT licensed.

OK. What are your intentions, if any, for builds made using this
system? Is it simply up to the builer? Have any projects announced
licensing plans?

 , and I see
 scattered references to GPL 2 in the Wiki, but I don't see a clear
 statement on licensing on the main page or in the FAQ. Can somebody
 write one?

 I'm unsure what is needed beyond the COPYING.MIT in topdir of the
 repository. The licensing of your buildsystem should have no bearing on the
 resulting distribution.

Well, that's in the repository, not in the Wiki. How does a newbie
know where to look if you don't have a Wiki page that lays it out?

 Also, one or more architecture pages showing the toolchain,
 relationships with other Free Software projects, and the structure of
 the resulting builds?

 As a buildsystem OE has relationships with the interpreter used (bitbake,
 hosted at berlios) and it's users (angstrom, nslu2-linux, openmoko, etc).

Fine. Let's see that. All of it. Don't assume that I or someone else
coming in new knows any of it. If you want to make assumptions about
what new people know, tell us what those assumptions are so that we
can go elsewhere and learn about them.

 I suspect you are confusing OE with a distribution (which angstrom is), it
 is not a distro, it's a distro builder :) If you aren't confusing it, please
 elaborate on what you want to know so we can send the doc team to fix it.

Just have them pretend that these are Frequently Asked Questions,
since I predict that they will be. If my questions assume what is not
stated, that means you have to make a clear statement in order to
prevent others asking the same thing.

 regards,

 Koen

Thanks.

 First, some background.

 The initial port will be getting Sugar[1] to run on the Beagleboard[2]
 using the Open Embedded[3] toolkit.

 The basics (sugar, sugar-base, sugar-toolkit, sugar-presence-services and
 sugar-artwork) are now running on the beagleboard:

 http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/sugar-running-ångström

 To build it using OE: 'bitbake sugar'
 To install it in angstrom*: 'opkg install sugar'

 The Glucose pack is missing sugar-datastore (needs a lot of python
 modules
 that aren't in OE yet), etoys (haven't looked at that yet) and journal
 (haven't looked at that either).
 The Fructose pack is completely missing in OE.

 The remaining tasks for people wanting to work on this are:

 1) add OE recipes for needed python-modules
 2) add OE recipes for remaining Glucose items
 3) add OE recipes for Fructose items
 4) build it
 5) install resulting packages and run them, see them crash due to missing
 python modules, goto 1
 6) make screenshots :)

 regards,

 Koen

 * only has armv7a packages at the moment
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Re: [sugar] Sugar on the BeagleBoard using the OpenEmbedded toolkit.

2008-09-03 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 3:57 AM, Koen Kooi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Op 22 aug 2008, om 02:29 heeft David Farning het volgende geschreven:

 Welcome to the Sugar on the BeagleBoard project.  It seems that we have
 all of the pieces in place to do a port.

Very good. Thank you.

I see that BeagleBoards list at $149. Do you have any idea of quantity
pricing? Apparently TI sells them only through Digikey, which only
gives single-unit prices on its site. I can see applications for data
acquisition and control worldwide, as well as for teaching embedded
systems development. I am thinking of possibilities for placement of
systems through microfinance, assuming that we can find and document
ways to increase income using BeagleBoard+Sugar more efficiently than
by other methods.

I assume that OE is intended to be all Free Software, and I see
scattered references to GPL 2 in the Wiki, but I don't see a clear
statement on licensing on the main page or in the FAQ. Can somebody
write one? Also, one or more architecture pages showing the toolchain,
relationships with other Free Software projects, and the structure of
the resulting builds?

 First, some background.

 The initial port will be getting Sugar[1] to run on the Beagleboard[2]
 using the Open Embedded[3] toolkit.

 The basics (sugar, sugar-base, sugar-toolkit, sugar-presence-services and
 sugar-artwork) are now running on the beagleboard:

 http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/sugar-running-ångström

 To build it using OE: 'bitbake sugar'
 To install it in angstrom*: 'opkg install sugar'

 The Glucose pack is missing sugar-datastore (needs a lot of python modules
 that aren't in OE yet), etoys (haven't looked at that yet) and journal
 (haven't looked at that either).
 The Fructose pack is completely missing in OE.

 The remaining tasks for people wanting to work on this are:

 1) add OE recipes for needed python-modules
 2) add OE recipes for remaining Glucose items
 3) add OE recipes for Fructose items
 4) build it
 5) install resulting packages and run them, see them crash due to missing
 python modules, goto 1
 6) make screenshots :)

 regards,

 Koen

 * only has armv7a packages at the moment
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Re: [sugar] A few questions.

2008-09-02 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 2:54 AM, Christopher Sawtell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Greets,

 1)  Is this the correct list to ask simplistic questions? If not could
 somebody please direct me to the correct list.

An excellent place for getting started. No, we have no separate
newbies list. We frequently put new user questions into a FAQ on the
Wiki, and you are welcome to do so yourself.

 2)  As I live in NZ a genuine hardware XO is utter vapour ware for me,

Not necessarily. There are deployments being readied all over Oceania.

 so I have to either use the sugar packages as published by the Ubuntu
 folks, or to Install VirtualBox and run an image. The question is:
 which road should I take? If you suggest the image in a VirtualBox
 route, I would be grateful as to a suggestion as to which one, there
 are _so_ many. I hope to run the XO apps. on a T41 ThinkPad.

I run on all three routes, but I am well known not to be the average user.

 3) I am preparing a simplistic little Counting Book for 21st Century
 Children. So I need to know whether the standard XO file set has a
 PDF reader as standard?

I want to see your draft. (I have a degree in math, and I have been a
classroom teacher at every level from preschool to graduate.)

What tools are you using to create it? I would like to suggest
building it as an interactive Etoys activity. We can get you
programming assistance.

 TIA

 --
 Sincerely etc.
 Christopher Sawtell
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[sugar] After release - Goals (was Re: Release cycle - Goals)

2008-09-01 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 7:42 PM, David Farning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Over the last weeks I have been looking at how we can improve our
 release cycle.

Thanks. Next we will need to look at what happens to our product. This
includes ports to other platforms, packaging (yum and apt), and
getting improvements sent upstream and adopted.

Of these, I can only comment on Debian and Ubuntu. Three of the
packages now in distribution are broken. I don't understand how they
could have made it into distribution with unfulfillable dependencies
(Write and Poll), or with a flat-out inability to run once installed
(Write, Browse, graphical xo-get). I do understand packaging
unfinished packages with usable functionality, such as PlayGo.

So the questions that arise are about

* our QA process

* our packaging process.

* Who is in charge?

I know where to report basic Sugar bugs, and Ubuntu-specific bugs.
Where should I report bugs in images for qemu and VMWare? AFAIK,
joyride images won't run in qemu, which complains about 3DNow.
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[sugar] Public_meeting !== Game_Jam (was Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2008-08-25)

2008-08-25 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 5. Learning Content: On Sunday, 31 August, at 4PM, OLPC will be
 hosting a public meeting to discuss (Please see
 http://olpcphysics.eventbrite.com):

This link points to the Aug. 29-31 Game Jam. There is no information
there on a public meeting. When was this announced? If I had known
about it in sufficient time, I would have put in to give a
presentation on adapting existing educational software, including
math, literacy, and much more.

 * Great teachers have great content they've spent their lifetime
 developing—how can they contribute to OLPC/Sugar?
 * How can engineers help teachers get set projects into motion?
 * How can we together help with the transition from paper and pencil
 to Sugar and computing?
 * What learning strategies are OLPC working on?

I would have weighed in on each of these topics, as well.

 Presentors:
 * Caryl Bigenho, longtime teacher and senior OLPC support volunteer
 * Brian Jordan, OLPC Intern, author of Physics Activity
 (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Bjordan)
 * David Cavallo, OLPC VP Learning

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Re: [sugar] Why Embedded Sugar?

2008-08-20 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 7:29 PM, Bill Gatliff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 David Farning wrote:
 It has been a bit of a plug but it looks like we have reach critical
 mass for a self sustaining embedded Sugar community.

 I love the idea of getting a critical mass around something, but I don't yet
 get it regarding Sugar for embedded work.  The problem is most likely that 
 I'm
 not thinking out-of-the-box, but if you present Sugar at ESC then you're going
 to have to really know--- and show--- the embedded itches that Sugar can 
 scratch
 to a room full of people like me.  A demo of a pretty UI on non-PC hardware
 isn't enough.

 I'm not discarding Sugar's contribution to the computing community as a whole,
 and I'm certainly not suggesting that Sugar lacks anything to offer for 
 embedded
 applications.  I just want to make sure that while your new team is busy 
 getting
 Sugar to work on beagleboard, they're also thinking about how to package its
 sell to the larger embedded audience.  Do that right, and you'll never have 
 to
 struggle for critical mass again.  Do that poorly, however, and all the effort
 goes nowhere.

 Case in point.  I happen to think Forth is cool for embedded work, but it 
 hasn't
 caught on.

Except at Sun, Apple, and OLPC in the form of Open Firmware, and in a
few other such places where the casual observer wouldn't know about
it.

 The problem isn't that Forth lacks advocacy, it's that Forth lacks
 advocacy by those who can credibly sell it as a solution that embedded
 developers need.

If I didn't have more urgent things to do, I would love the
opportunity to sell GPLed FORTH/Open Firmware plus consulting to all
of the PC board makers in place of the next billion proprietary BIOS
chips. I expect that to be one of the lucrative spinoffs from the OLPC
project, just like Pixel Qi's daylight-readable screens and the A123
LiFeP batteries.

 So we remain stuck with uBoot.  :)

Makes no sense to me. I would expect OFW to be smaller, faster, and
easier to work with. But what do I know? Ask Mitch Bradley for an
informed opinion.

 So, sell Sugar to me!

I wonder whether you are thinking only of embedded Sugar competing
with the XO in schools. Let me suggest a different scenario.

We are working on a literacy project within Sugar, combining a
multilingual text-to-speech engine with karaoke-style text coloring,
as in the Same Language Subtitling practiced in India. SLS in
Bollywood musicals and TV singalongs has proven to be a spectactularly
successful literacy program, measured in bang/Rupee. Little old ladies
who thought they were past it and would never be able to read anything
have been going to musicals six or seven times over, memorizing all
the songs, and singing along with all the rest of the audience. With
SLS they have unconsciously started learning to read. It's a real
revelation to them. Now imagine the poor man's music player with a
graphical text display, sold as a learning device, not just as
entertainment.

Another aspect of this is that XOs can read to the illiterate and
preliterate without regard to teaching reading, providing access to
all kinds of software and information.

Now consider a handheld reading device, with or without a screen.
Consider machinery that comes with spoken instruction in addition to
printed manuals. Think what people might come up with when they are
not bound to the form factors of the conventional devices of the West.
Talking POS? Talking GPS and ATMs already exist for the blind. Talking
voting machines that can read your ballot back to you so that you know
that what you picked on the screen is what will go into the ballot
box? With a bit of speech recognition and OCR to open up these and
even more opportunities.

OK, that was one piece of Sugar software. How about Measure for
Free/Open Source digital oscilloscopes? How about mesh-networked
medical equipment, like the prototype EKG currently in GSoC? Emergency
communications systems? Engineering and scientific measuring
instruments? MIDI musical instruments? A voice-chat, mesh-networked
replacement for mobile phones? If we want to get a little more
blue-sky, how about Open Source cars with built-in driving
instruction?

 b.g.
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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

2008-08-01 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 6:32 PM, Jerry Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Seems like this problem for linux was solved with RPM.

I wouldn't go quite that far. The holes in RPM drove me to Debian. %-[

 With rpm if something is missing for something you want to install, it
 complains and won't let you install it.

Apt and yum also track dependencies, both better than RPM, and rather
than refuse to install, they offer to get the dependent libraries for
you. Why aren't we using this approach with xo-get?

 It seems like a lot of the python code I have looked at assumes you have
 stuff and just quietly dies and you have to look at the log and see, oh I am
 missing some module.
 Like the Terminal activity needs python-json.
 Pacman needs pygame.

 Jerry Williams

 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:sugar-
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mikus Grinbergs
 Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 6:19 PM
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; sugar@lists.laptop.org
 Subject: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

 There was an earlier discussion of how to provide the right build
 level for users out in the field, since now Builds can be installed
 separately from Activities -- leading to the possibility that for
 someone an Activity_version on his XO will find itself *mismatched*
 with the Build_version on his XO.


 The problem is bigger than that.

 Since Joyride 2210, I have seen three of the Activities I often show
 off get broken by the *removal* of services from the Joyride builds.
 If the current software distribution process has trouble matching
 existing Activities to the services_provided_by_a_Build -- how will
 NOT YET EXISTING Activities be accommodated by the software that
 Sugar is supposed to run on top of ???

 I'm thinking of someone in a far-off land who has an idea for a
 killer Activity, to be run under Sugar.  HOW does he learn which
 (library, or kernel, or whatever) services will be available
 *everywhere* Sugar can be installed, which services will be
 available only with *specific* builds/platforms, and which services
 would *never* be available for functions fitted into Sugar ?


 mikus

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Re: [sugar] Abiword 2.6.4 on Ubuntu (was Re: Write needs your help)

2008-07-18 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 3:24 PM, David Van Assche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 This from the abiword on ubuntu webpage
 (http://abisource.com/wiki/Install_on_Ubuntu)

 At this time, the latest version available directly from Ubuntu is an
 Ubuntu-modified 2.4.6. We are working to get AbiWord 2.6 in Ubuntu
 8.04 Hardy Heron

 and adding their repo installs 2.6.4... but if you need the source
 that should work too

 I can build it without problems on my hardy system... just requires a
 lot of development library dependencies like below, you need to
 install libglib2.0-dev

 Kind Regards,
 David Van Assche

I built 2.6.4 from source yesterday on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on an
AMD Opteron 64-bit.

It does not display non-alphabetic ASCII correctly. The digits and
punctuation, and also the space character, mostly appear as Unicode
hex substitution glyphs. Armenian and Arabic display OK. Bengali
vowels do not attach to base consonants, but are displayed in their
standalone form. I'm giving up for the day.

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Re: [sugar] Abiword 2.6.4 on Ubuntu (was Re: Write needs your help)

2008-07-18 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Ryan Pavlik [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Edward Cherlin wrote:
 On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 3:24 PM, David Van Assche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 This from the abiword on ubuntu webpage
 (http://abisource.com/wiki/Install_on_Ubuntu)

 At this time, the latest version available directly from Ubuntu is an
 Ubuntu-modified 2.4.6. We are working to get AbiWord 2.6 in Ubuntu
 8.04 Hardy Heron

 and adding their repo installs 2.6.4... but if you need the source
 that should work too

I did get the repo package, and it gives me the same problems.

 I can build it without problems on my hardy system... just requires a
 lot of development library dependencies like below, you need to
 install libglib2.0-dev

 Kind Regards,
 David Van Assche


 I built 2.6.4 from source yesterday on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on an
 AMD Opteron 64-bit.

 It does not display non-alphabetic ASCII correctly. The digits and
 punctuation, and also the space character, mostly appear as Unicode
 hex substitution glyphs. Armenian and Arabic display OK. Bengali
 vowels do not attach to base consonants, but are displayed in their
 standalone form. I'm giving up for the day.

Well, today Bengali displays correctly, but Armenian is completely
wiggy. It sometimes appears correctly, sometimes blank, and sometimes
as Devanagari.

 Thanks for your testing!  Yeah, I saw your bug, that's a weird one!  It
 works for me on AMD64 with the packages I had the PPA build.  I've put
 some info requests on the bugzilla report - if anyone wants to help
 figure this out the link is
 http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11708

 --
 Ryan Pavlik
 www.cleardefinition.com

 #282  +  (442) -  [X]
 A programmer started to cuss
 Because getting to sleep was a fuss
 As he lay there in bed
 Looping 'round in his head
 was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;

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Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)

2008-07-17 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 The abi devs have also asked for help in testing Write with non-latin
 scripts, this is something of high importance for OLPC.

I can do that. OK, Cyrillic works. I just entered every key on the
layout, upper and lower case. I'll get you lots more writing systems
later today. I am _not_ going to test every Chinese character %-[.

Let me know if the abi devs have any specific tests they want done on
non-Latin characters. How do I contact them?

 Thanks,

 Tomeu
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Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)

2008-07-17 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 8:58 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 The abi devs have also asked for help in testing Write with non-latin
 scripts, this is something of high importance for OLPC.

 I can do that. OK, Cyrillic works. I just entered every key on the
 layout, upper and lower case. I'll get you lots more writing systems
 later today. I am _not_ going to test every Chinese character %-[.

 Which version are you testing? I would say that downloading an Abiword
 binary 2.6.4 from abisource.com may be best, as that's the version
 that I hope we'll use in Write for 8.2.0.

I'll see about that. Right now I am using Write 55-0ubuntu1, which
doesn't say what version it is in those terms.
http://abisource.com/wiki/Install_on_Ubuntu is out of date. It says
2.4.6 was in Gutsy, and that 2.6 should have been in Hardy, but what I
see is Abiword 2.4.6-3ubuntu3. What actually happened?

But is the question testing stock Abiword or Write? Or do you want me
to do both?

 I hope we'll be able to
 update joyride with 2.6.4 soon so the Write there will be definitely
 the software we'll be shipping.

I'll install joyride in qemu when 2.6.4 is ready and give it a go.
Remind me when the time comes.

 Thanks,

 Tomeu

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[sugar] Abiword 2.6.4 on Ubuntu (was Re: Write needs your help)

2008-07-17 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Sorry, what I meant is that, ideally, we would be testing Write in
 joyride with the 2.6.4 version. As we don't have that version in
 joyride yet, I think the closest we can do is testing Abiword 2.6.4.

 Thanks,

 Tomeu

It appears that the 2.6.4 sources aren't configured to build correctly
on Ubuntu using configure and GNU make.

./configure reports

configure: error: No package 'glib-2.0' found

(The correct name on Ubuntu is libglib2.0-0)

Then make says:

Building AbiSuite with [ABI_ROOT=/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4]
make ABI_ROOT=/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4 -C src
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4/src'

I can't seem to figure out which platform you are using.

You should probably try using the autoconfiscated build system (rather
than this, the deprecated and unsupported diving make system) by running
configure (creating it with autogen.sh if need be) and using GNU Make.
Using configure is a requirement for all known platforms that
aren't some form
of Windows, QNX Neutrino, or MacOS X.

exit 1
make[1]: *** [fake-target] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4/src'
make: *** [compile] Error 2


Does anybody have a workaround? Would someone like to fix configure to
work on Ubuntu? Do the makefiles need any change?

So far I have the old version of Write that Ubuntu offers accepting
and displaying Cyrillic and Greek correctly. I'll wait until I have
something up-to-date to test before proceeding to the other 30+
possibilities.

Kim, should we create a process for globalization QA? We need testing
for Amharic, Arabic, Khmer,

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Re: [sugar] Abiword 2.6.4 on Ubuntu (was Re: Write needs your help)

2008-07-17 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Sorry, what I meant is that, ideally, we would be testing Write in
 joyride with the 2.6.4 version. As we don't have that version in
 joyride yet, I think the closest we can do is testing Abiword 2.6.4.

 Thanks,

 Tomeu

 It appears that the 2.6.4 sources aren't configured to build correctly
 on Ubuntu using configure and GNU make.

 ./configure reports

 configure: error: No package 'glib-2.0' found

 (The correct name on Ubuntu is libglib2.0-0)

No, I see that it is the lack of -dev packages. I am now installing
them one or two at a time. %-[

 Then make says:

 Building AbiSuite with [ABI_ROOT=/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4]
 make ABI_ROOT=/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4 -C src
 make[1]: Entering directory `/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4/src'

I can't seem to figure out which platform you are using.

You should probably try using the autoconfiscated build system (rather
than this, the deprecated and unsupported diving make system) by running
configure (creating it with autogen.sh if need be) and using GNU Make.
Using configure is a requirement for all known platforms that
 aren't some form
of Windows, QNX Neutrino, or MacOS X.

 exit 1
 make[1]: *** [fake-target] Error 1
 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4/src'
 make: *** [compile] Error 2


 Does anybody have a workaround? Would someone like to fix configure to
 work on Ubuntu? Do the makefiles need any change?

 So far I have the old version of Write that Ubuntu offers accepting
 and displaying Cyrillic and Greek correctly. I'll wait until I have
 something up-to-date to test before proceeding to the other 30+
 possibilities.

 Kim, should we create a process for globalization QA? We need testing
 for Amharic, Arabic, Khmer,

 --
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 End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
 http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
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Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO

2008-07-17 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 20:45 -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
 I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple
 development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many
 other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of
 demand for this from the field?

 -walter

 On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
  Hash: SHA1
 
  Chris Ball wrote:
  | Another useful feature would be for
  | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does.
  | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on.
 
  See also #7447.  Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all.
 

 Hi Folks,
Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we
 haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background
 colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature
 for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord
 is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write.

 I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea
 though. The document will quickly become a mess.  Though if the kids
 want to do this they can.

 Cheers

 Martin

It will be much more of a mess if you can't tell who wrote what in a
collaborative editing session. Does Abiword provide change tracking,
so that users can turn author coloring on and off at will?

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Re: [sugar] proposed addition to the Activities page templete

2008-07-16 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 12:17 AM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Why don't we add a new field in the Activities page template that
 indicates both whether or not an activity supports some form of
 collaboration and, if so, what is the supported number of
 collaborators. (The latter may, of course, be somewhat fuzzy depending
 upon the nature of the connection: via school server or under a
 tree).

+1

 We could have a simple set of options (the numbers perhaps need tuning):

 A) no collaboration
 B) pair-wise collaboration
 C) small (3-4) group collaboration
 D) classroom (10-20) collaboration

And other possibilities. For N-player games, we have discussed having
two collaboration channels, one for in-game communications among
players, and one for comments by kibitzers. I don't know of any team
games in Sugar, where we might want to add a channel for each team.

 We could break down collaboration a bit further:

 sharing

I would like to see all Activities sharable in the sense that others
can at least watch what the primary user is doing. This would be
useful for any activity accessing content on the Web, where one XO can
download it and share it with others, instead of a whole class (for
example) downloading a Web page simultaneously when instructed by the
teacher. (Local caching on the school server will also help.)

We might want to go further, and allow a discussion channel for every
shared activity. Switching between a visual session and Chat will get
old real fast, unless we provide a way to (in effect) Tivo shared
sessions.

We have had a discussion about sharing Measure channels to simulate a
multi-channel digital oscilloscope. (I checked them out at Fry's a few
days ago. Nice.)

 interacting
 ???

 and we may want to comment on, for example, how many Type A
 collaborations can be supported at once.

 An example of:
  A is Turtle Art
  B is Distance
  C is Write

There was a report of a test showing a fairly large number of
simultaneous users, so I think this may become a D.

  D is Chat

 We'd need to do some serious QA to figure this out, but I think it
 would go a long ways towards giving people a sense of what they can
 expect in terms of a robust use of Sugar.

I think we should have a brainstorming session on the complete list of
activities, present and in development, to work out what we would like
to see. Would people prefer to do that by e-mail, chat, or Wiki page?

 -walter
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Re: [sugar] [OLPC library] [OLPC-Games] Physics -- Newtonian mechanics.. for kids!

2008-07-15 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 1:21 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 At Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:58:32 -0700,
 Edward Cherlin wrote:

 On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  So we could simulate a pendulum or a Newton's cradle? How do you
  handle collisions?
 
   A pendulum for sure, but my version of three pendulums putting
  together doesn't show the expected behavior.  The elasticity isn't
  right for it, it seems.

 What does it do? Can you get it to tell you what values of momentum
 and energy are passed through from balls 1--2--3?

  Heh, of course you can try by yourself.

I want to know what happens in your code. Can you send it to me?

  But if you put a circle on
 the floor (stand still), and make another hit from the side, the
 momentum is shared by these two circles and both of them move together
 at the same speed.

That's unphysical, and I would only program that way in a fantasy
setting. In a head-on elastic collision of two circles of equal mass,
the hitter should stop dead, transferring all of its energy and
momentum to the one it hit. As any pool payer knows for the case of
spheres. In a Newton's cradle the momentum and energy passes from ball
to ball at the speed of sound in the material of the balls.

 Have you tried two pendula hanging from a horizontal string? Do you
 get the expected transfer of energy back and forth?

  Yes, but no.  I'm not sure what you mean by a horizontal string, but
 the string I made is not flexible enough to make it happen.

Tie a string between two points at the same height.

Then tie a pendulum to the string.

Then tie another pendulum of the same length and mass to a different
point on the string.

   \/
|   |
   o  o

Start one pendulum in the direction perpendicular to the plane of the
diagram. It will gradually transfer energy and momentum to the other
almost completely, and then start up again while the other slows down
and stops, and so on.

  Speaking of examples, the screenshots at
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics_(activity) aren't exactly something
 I found physics-y; these are more like story telling in picture
 books.  I made some examples (two pendula and a mesh, I did an arch
 but it is gone).  These might catch more attention from teachers and
 educators.

 -- Yoshiki

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Re: [sugar] [OLPC-Games] Physics -- Newtonian mechanics.. for kids!

2008-07-10 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 1:14 PM, Brian Jordan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hi friends!

 Physics is a physics playground for the XO currently being written by
 myself and Alex Levenson. We hope it will be a fun tool for playing
 with and learning physical concepts, and that the work of the
 Physics/Elements teams can be used as a backend for making all
 activities fun and interactive.

Excellent. I will join your discussion.

 Get it at:
 http://dev.laptop.org/~bjordan/Physics-0.2.xo (click in Browse to install)

 Join the fight against everything other than Physics!

 Wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics
 IRC: irc.freenode.net #olpc-physics
 We are having a meeting at 6:30pm EST today on #sugar
 (irc.freenode.net) with key XO-physicists. Join us!
 Git: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=activities/physics

 Physics currently supports:
 - Creating: triangles, boxes, circles
 - Drawing: polygons, magic pen shapes
 - Grabbing objects
 - Connecting objects with joints

So we could simulate a pendulum or a Newton's cradle? How do you
handle collisions?

Any idea how many objects you can simulate and render in real time?

 - Destroying objects with a fun to use red path of destruction

 Physics currently uses a default Earth-style (pointing downward)
 gravity,

Do you mean a Galilean constant-acceleration field for small spaces on
the ground, or a Newtonian inverse-square central field including
orbital space?

 friction, size-based masses

Can we add uniform density shown by color saturation or something like that?

 and a set of colors which are
 randomly picked when an object is created. We are working on
 simple-to-use contextual menus for modifying and visualizing these
 parameters in the activity.

 We are planning to add many other tools and toys in Physics, and
 encourage suggestions (drawings/diagrams!), bug reports and code
 contributions from other developers.

Can you link to Measure?

 Physics (by way of Elements and pyBox2D) uses the open source 2D C++
 physics engine Box2D2 as a back end, which has a lot of functionality
 that we haven't implemented yet.

Any thoughts about using SciPy for visualization?

 Cheers,
 Brian Jordan
 3D intern trapped in a 2D world
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Re: [sugar] TurtleArt, Logo, and XOs

2008-06-27 Thread Edward Cherlin

This is wonderful. Thank you. I have been wishing for some of these
features, particularly multiple sensor input and lower frequencies.
Many bass and contrabass wind instruments and standard keyboard
instruments go below 100 Hz.

The note A above middle C (A4, MIDI 69) is 440 Hz, so four octaves
below, the lowest note on a piano, is A0, 27.5 Hz, MIDI 21. (MIDI runs
about five octaves above and below, beyond the limits of human hearing
on the low end). It would be awesome to be able to demonstrate 32 ft
and 64 ft organ pipes, which go down to five octaves below middle C,
with a frequency of 8.2 Hz. You can't hear it, but you can feel it in
your bones. I have seen such pipes on an organ in England, where
legend has it that naughty choirboys were stuck in the very biggest to
be shot up to the top and let down again on the air blowing through.

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Arjun Sarwal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 7:14 PM, Brian Silverman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 hi

 sorry for the delay in responding... been busy.

 I hear you don't have a recent XO!   Please add yourself to our
 contributors database and we will send you a laptop asap : projectdb.olpc.at
 http://projectdb.olpc.at

 thank you for this. I haven't added myself yet but plan on doing so in the
 coming weeks.

 There's also the TurtleArt with Sensors project, which should probably be
 merged back into the TurtleArt trunk -- you should talk to arjun sarwal
 about this.

 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure#Sensor_Input_into_Turtle_Art
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities#Programming
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Turtle_Art


 Yes, we should talk about this. My preference, if possible, is to somehow
 keep the versions separate. As I'm sure you've noticed, the design aesthetic
 of TurtleArt is quite minimalist. There are a lot of possible additions that
 were obvious that I ignored anyway. Sensors are a really good idea.
 However, rather than viewing them as an extension  I'd prefer to view them
 as part of an alternative version.

 Dear SJ, Brian :

 Perhaps Turtle Art could then be the 'upstream version'  and I could
 maintain the 'Turtle Art with Sensors' fork ..?

 Thoughts ?

 ---


 Dear Community:

 I have been working on a modification of Turtle Art with sensors that
 works better than the version that has gone in Peru Activity pack. The
 earlier one needed me to do gstreamer Kungfu to get the samples of
 sensors/sound. The new version uses python-alsaaudio. When
 python-alsaaudio (#6535) is included in builds getting samples(AC/DC)
 from ADC becomes much easier and straightforward.


 Also, I have been working upon re organizing the pages associated with
 Measure Activity and Sensors with the aim that there should be easily
 accessible information for people who visit the page. For example
 educators click straight away on the educators section, people who
 want to 'hack around' have access to the appropriate links..etc.
 A very rough outline here http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure/New_temp
 We can replace the main Measure page
 (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure) once perhaps we can sufficiently


 In particular it'd be great if someone could help in --
 * pulling off all the content on Measure page or linked off the
 Measure wiki page and re-organizing it in the new format
 * giving feedback or helping in the  proposed topics/sections of the
 re-organized page
 * help add more activities / projects around Measure sensors or Turtle
 Art with (though if one sees links off the Measure page, there are
 already
 * exporting a relevant page set to sugarlabs wiki



 I hope to be doing a release soon of Measure Activity in a week or so.
 It has been almost a few months late than I had planned it to be out.
 I have been working on changes in the codebase that make it more
 easily extensible (for example displaying more than one graphs, say
 upto 5 while not letting update rate/frame rate drop too low). Other
 changes that I have been working on are making it easier to read
 values (in the previous version the calibrated values in terms of
 voltage are not fully correct), adding support for more lower range
 frequency signals to be displayed well (For example certain Health
 peripheral projects are requiring to show as low as 10Hz signals)
 In the future, I hope to release soon and more regularly with
 incremental changes rather than a lot of changes and a long gap in
 releases.




 many thanks,
 Arjun

 ps -- Sorry for this 'mashed up' email consisting of a lot of topics,
 I hope to follow up on separate specific topics in separate threads
 soon...



 Brian
 p.s. - is the XO-2 real enough yet to start thinking about?




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 http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs
 http://youtube.com/watch?v=SwcSEcfR464
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Re: [sugar] [Localization] Kreyòl Localization

2008-06-20 Thread Edward Cherlin

We need some help from people who know the Activities well.

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 5:56 AM, Jude Augusma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hi Marvin,

 I went through the 106 strings in the terminology section and all except two
 of them which I will include in my questions are easy. The terminology
 section is just regular word, I am not seeing computer programming language
 word there at all, as you can see it take me just a little while to
 translate them all.

Sayamindu generated the terminology section with a script. It actually
needs to be constructed from questions like yours, and the entries
have to provide some explanation or context. Sayamindu, how can we add
context to Pootle entries?

For the items I marked below as needing context, it will help if I
know which file they are in, so I can look for them in the
corresponding program.

 Let's take some strings I am having problem with, just some of them:

 Smalltalk code

Smalltalk is a programming language. Etoys on the XO is a teaching
environment built on the Squeak version of Smalltalk. Code is the text
of a program.

 smoothing

We need a context for this. Is it graphics or statistics or what?

 A broom to align Morphs with

This means little to me. In principle a Morph should be a shape of
some kind. If Morphs are Smalltalk objects, then they could be shapes
with methods for making variations. Aligning shapes in rows or columns
makes sense, but I would have to see this broom in the screen to have
any idea of what it is or how it works.

 A UML composite state shape
 Composite State
 UML Package

UML (Unified Modeling Language) has its own terminology. Much more
information at http://www.uml.org/

 AND Gate

In logic, an AND statement is true if and only if both components are
true. In circuitry, an AND gate has two inputs implementing that AND
logic. If we represent False by 0 and True by 1, the state table for
an AND gate is

0 0: 0 Both false, no
0 1: 0 One true, one false, no
1 0: 0 One false, one true, no
1 1: 1 Both true, yes

 Another pointing hand

A pointing hand can be any of these characters: ☚☛☜☝☞☟ (Unicode
U+261A-261F) or a graphic of similar form.

 XOR Gate

In logic, an XOR (exclusive or) statement is true if and only if the
inputs have different values. One or the other is true, but not both.
State table:
0 0: 0
0 1: 1
1 0: 1
1 1: 0

 Scrolled State

Needs context

 Squeak

A version of Smalltalk. The logo for Squeak is a mouse (rodent) face.
I think we should leave it as it is, but if it is to be translated, we
want the word for the sound a mouse makes.

 STClass
 FSM ButtonBar
 FSM Flap
 Arrow Editor
 Toggle dots
 Clear clicks

Explanation and context needed.

 A handy Morph-generating button

Handy=convenient. We had Morphs above. This is a convenient button on
the screen for generating Morphs, one per mouse click on the button.

 attachmentOwnerChanged

This seems to be a piece of program code. If so, leave it as is unless
we translate the identifiers in the program someday.

 sourceConnected
 RandomConnector

Also identifier names.

 A basic Connector that bends smoothly

In a drawing program such as Microsoft Visio, or in Free Software
Kivio, there are straight line connectors, connectors that bend at
right angles to turn corners, and smoothly curved connectors.

 flap

There are several kinds of flap in English. We need context.

Birds flap their wings
Airplanes have control flaps
Various objects have flaps that fold over

 Kedema Turtle

Kedema is part of Squeak. This seems to refer to turtle graphics, as
in the Turtle Art activity.

 Some the strings like the above, I translate them but my translation does
 not make sense to me in a computer world. For example: what is a Turtle? is
 it the animal Turtle? What is a Morph? a XOR gate, Random connector? etc.

 Marvin I will call you later today, I will not be home this morning again.

 Jude

 - Original Message 
 From: Marvin Demuth [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2008 4:28:32 PM
 Subject: [Localization] Kreyòl Localization

 At 12:33 PM 6/19/2008, Edward Cherlin wrote:

This is the reason for the Terminology section
of Pootle, for example. We encourage localizers
to do the Terminology section first, and then to
use that terminology consistently everywhere else.

 Jude, I suggest that you look again at the 106
 strings in the terminology section that remain to
 be translated, do what you can with them, and
 then let's let the list participants help with the balance.

 As others has said today, every translator faces
 this same problem, especially in those languages
 that do not have technical publications.  Ed's
 example of the lack of a word for computer in the
 Kinyarwanda language is a case in point.  We may
 have to coin some Kreyòl words.

 A journey begins with a single step. -- I can
 visualize that Samy can send the remaining words
 to the 43 professional programmers on his
 list.  Those of us who do not know Kreyòl might

Re: [sugar] [Localization] Kreyòl Localization

2008-06-20 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 10:16 AM, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On 20.06.2008, at 19:07, Edward Cherlin wrote:

 Etoys on the XO

 Anyone translating Etoys should subscribe to the Etoys list.

 http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/etoys

I'll add that to the Localization Wiki page. Done.

 Etoys is more complex than all the other activities combined, and we
 are still working on improving the situation for translators (see the
 past discussions).

 - Bert -


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Re: [sugar] frame activation

2008-06-10 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Can we set up an actually experiment with some children? Uruguay,
 Paraguay, and Peru all agreed to help. This seems like a obvious place
 to start.

 -walter

Thank you, Walter. You are the first I have seen asking such a
question. I have been wondering when we would get to asking children
how a children's laptop should work.
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Re: [sugar] [IAEP] Sugar for the rich

2008-05-27 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 There are Sugar packages for
 Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu, the OLPC images, Greg livecd.

 The point of my post was that if I were living in a remote area
 somewhere, I might well have received a XO from some organization.
 I'd be much less likely to have received Fedora or Debian or Ubuntu,
 or images or a livecd.

 What do you mean with jhbuild inclusion in the mainline development?

 I quoted the post titled Sucrose 0.81.1 Development Release.  The
 only purpose mentioned in that announcement, or in the webpage it
 pointed to, was: test the release in jhbuild.  I concluded that
 what the title of the announcement meant by Release was we have
 packaged the source so it can be given to jhbuild.  If that *was*
 the purpose of the announcement, then obviously jhbuild is an
 integral (i.e., mainline) part of the (development) release process.

 

 Source code is always available, and releases are
 released to everyone who can use them simultaneously.

 The point of my post (and its title) was that if I were living in an
 economically disadvantaged region somewhere, I might well have
 received a XO from some organization.  I'd be much less likely to
 have received facilities to be able to build from source.

 you can get closer to the action (and contribute
 useful bug reports) by installing daily builds.

 Yes, please -- what is the URI for where the daily __builds__ are
 kept which include Sucrose 0.81.1 ??

All information on Sugar is (or should be) available through the Wiki page
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar

Getting Started

* Installing Sugar (on various platforms)
* Sugar Instructions, booting and getting started with Sugar

and all of the pages on installing Sugar should be listed at

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Installing_Sugar

and thus we find, with a bit more poking around,

Developers: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_with_sugar-jhbuild from
source in git.
Bleeding edge: http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/,
including joyride and faster
Update-1: http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/update.1/
Stable: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images#Latest_Stable_Build points
to http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/
Live CD: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LiveCD

I'll add this list to the Sugar Wiki page.

 mikus

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Re: [sugar] Microsoft

2008-05-17 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 7:19 PM, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 5:28 AM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Just look at the deal. Dual-boot costs $7 extra. Governments will
 not pay the extra $7 to allow dual-boot.

 No, Windows costs about $7 extra for the flash card plus $3 for the
 license. Countries wouldn't save anything by removing Linux + Sugar,
 which is all free. Dual-boot and Windows-only would have the same
 cost.

 According to the recent nytimes.com article:

 NYT: Windows will add a bit to the price of the machines,
 NYT: about $3, the licensing fee Microsoft charges to some
 NYT: developing nations under a program called Unlimited Potential.
 NYT: For those nations that want models that can run both Windows
 NYT: and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or
 NYT: so to the cost of the machines, Mr. Negroponte said.

 I can parse that two different ways, neither of which agrees
 with you:

True, but the press release is wrong, on this and on other points.

 Linux-only is $0 extra.

Correct.

 Windows-only is $3 extra.

No, $10 extra. XP does not fit in the 1G flash on the stock XO. It
requires the additional SD card.

 Dual-boot is either $7 extra or $10 extra.

$10 extra compared with Linux-only, as I said.

 (depending on if another means adding the $7 to the price
 of the laptop, or to the price after already adding $3)

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Re: [sugar] Microsoft

2008-05-16 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Seth Woodworth writes:

 So as a fair practice I think it's clear that no special actions can
 ethically be made to prevent Windows or any other OS from running on
 the machine.  So a Windows port for the XO isn't something that
 could have been preventative.

 Wrong. It's called tit-for-tat, otherwise known as fair-is-fair.
 It's perfectly ethical to defend oneself against an adversary
 who has no qualms about anything.

 Just look at the deal. Dual-boot costs $7 extra. Governments will
 not pay the extra $7 to allow dual-boot.

No, Windows costs about $7 extra for the flash card plus $3 for the
license. Countries wouldn't save anything by removing Linux + Sugar,
which is all free. Dual-boot and Windows-only would have the same
cost.

 I do believe in fairness. The XO should run Windows about as well
 as the Xbox 360 runs Linux. Note that the Xbox 360 has numerous
 hardware features which were purposely designed to impede Linux.
 Fairness mandates that we have hardware to lock out Windows.

 Hardware is costly of course. A slightly weaker solution would be
 to have the firmware use SMM/SMI tricks to regularly get a bit of
 CPU time to scan for Windows in memory. If the firmware finds that
 Windows is running, then it silently corrupts RAM. The ideal would
 be to make Windows survive about an hour before crashing.
 (keep the feature secret of course, to make debugging painful)

It would have been a lot simpler to have left OFW as it was, unable to
support a Windows boot. But the point is now moot.
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Re: [sugar] Microsoft

2008-05-16 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Sameer Verma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Morgan Collett wrote:
 2008/5/16 Nicholas Negroponte [EMAIL PROTECTED]: (word document attached)

 For those who can't or won't open the word document, it contains simply this:

 Mission statement of OLPC

 To eliminate poverty and create world peace by providing education to
 the poorest and most remote children on the planet by making them more
 active in their own learning, through collaborative and creative
 activities, connected to the Internet, with their own laptop, as a
 human right and cost free to them.
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The phrase making them more active in their own learning, through
collaborative and creative activities appears to be code for
Constructionism. Or maybe weasel-wording.

 Its nothing like what I see at http://laptop.org/vision/mission/

 Sameer

 --
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 Associate Professor of Information Systems
 San Francisco State University
 San Francisco CA 94132 USA
 http://verma.sfsu.edu/
 http://opensource.sfsu.edu/

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Quite right.

http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/new_olpc_mission_statement.html

Another New OLPC Mission Statement?!
Posted on May 16, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Negroponte

In the midst of the latest Windows on the XO controversy, Nicholas
Negroponte seems to have announced a third new mission statement for
One Laptop Per Child. From his email to the OLPC Sugar list serve he
says that the OLPC mission hasn't changed in three years, and then
points to this statement:
olpc mission

To eliminate poverty and create world peace by providing education
to the poorest and most remote children on the planet by making them
more active in their own learning, through collaborative and creative
activities, connected to the Internet, with their own laptop, as a
human right and cost free to them.

Now unless I just came down with Negropontism, the current OLPC
mission statement on Laptop.org doesn't look anything like that.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don't see any mention of free
laptops and Internet access as basic human right when I read:

OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a
product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit
organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in
even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity
to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of
ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world
community.

Let's also not forget that the current OLPC mission, whichever one it
is, was not the first mission espoused by One Laptop Per Child. The
orginal OLPC mission was much more revolutionary, and to use a word
from Walter Bender, prescriptive:

OLPC is not at heart a technology program and the XO is not a
product in any conventional sense of the word. We are non-profit:
constructionism is our goal; XO is our means of getting there. It is a
very cool, even revolutionary machine, and we are very proud of it.
But we would also be delighted if someone built something better, and
at a lower price.

I wonder, does Windows XO count as better?




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Re: [sugar] Release schedule and process

2008-05-13 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
  [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

   The question of whether activities are included by default refers either
to prefabricated disk images or packages for distros like Fedora and
Ubuntu.  Regarding disk images, the answer is clear: do both.  We should
have minimal disk images, with just the Sugar base, and also demo images
with all the activities we think someone might want.
  
Determining what to do in the case of packages for other distros, the
situation is much muddier.  The plan for Activity packaging is designed
around the idea of thousands of unknown authors writing code that installs
and runs with minimal privileges.  Users will be able to install multiple
distinct activities with the same name, distinguished by cryptographic
authorship and history, upgrade or downgrade them, and modify their source
code, all without superuser access.  It's already difficult to harmonize
this with yum/rpm and apt/deb, and it's only going to get harder with the
new Activity bundle system.  I think our best option is to let Sugar
retain control of Activity installation, even when running on a system
with its own package management.

  I think it's useful to separate distribution and development when
  discussing this.

  You are discussing several distribution models. Some of them goes
  through a no-activities state during the process, but all of them
  include activities in their final form (unless for the distro case you
  are thinking to start clean and let the user select the activities he
  wants).

There is another issue to consider. Those of us planning for a
next-generation textbook want to know for sure
what software they can count on. Otherwise, every active document will
have to be packaged with dependencies. I am considering textbooks in
drawing, music, any of the sciences that can make use of external
measuring devices, photography, math, and other subjects.

At the secondary and college levels, packaging a textbook with
accompanying software is not a problem, but in elementary school
classrooms we don't want to put the burden on both teachers and
students to deal with extra installation steps.

  To me including activities in the coordinated development process has
  two main advantages:

  1 It gives distributors a complete product they can customize and
  extend for their users.
  2 It makes developers work on a concrete, complete product, rather
  than on a set of libraries and services.

  Activities are our strength. Putting a bunch of them at the core of
  our development processes is the best way to ensure they get the
  attention they need.

  Marco


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Re: [sugar] Release schedule and process

2008-05-13 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
  Hash: SHA1

  Edward Cherlin wrote:
  | Those of us planning for a
  | next-generation textbook want to know for sure
  | what software they can count on. Otherwise, every active document will
  | have to be packaged with dependencies.

  You cannot count on any software other than the shell itself.  The Sugar
  design does not support inter-item dependencies, and explicitly allows the
  user to delete any Activity, independently of any other.

  You are welcome to propose a dependency mechanism, but we have had this
  discussion many times, and you are unlikely to discover the magic bullet
  that avoids the pitfalls of UI complexity, bundle identity, versioning,
  and location.  Rather than attempt to solve this hard technical problem,
  you are much better off simply avoiding dependencies.

  In the particular case of software textbooks, this is really not an
  issue.  If your textbook suggests exercises in a particular group of
  Activities, it should say so on the first page.

Going out of the book into the Activities isn't the model. The MatLab
or Mathematica Notebook is a starting point. Having every math
expression in the book be executable by clicking and graphable via
NumPy or Measure is good. Building in simulations rather than static
graphs takes it further. Including a kit of Smalltalk objects that can
be snapped together to build visual or computational models goes
further yet. There are many other possibilities.

 You should not feel the
  need to limit your scope to some default set; rather, you should provide
  copies of all the ancillary Activities for download along with your
  textbook.  You can even include copies of those Activities as .xo bundles
  inside the textbook, like the Library does.  Free redistribution is one of
  the beautiful things about free software.


  - --Ben
  -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
  Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux)
  Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

  iD8DBQFIKi2sUJT6e6HFtqQRAlIoAKCTGRKPxFyGc7juBGBm8JjmklmbUACglJrm
  8QKT9vc0Hi3bxk7fTSzY8CU=
  =+Mzb
  -END PGP SIGNATURE-




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[sugar] Organization was Re: A technical assessment of porting Sugar to Windows.)

2008-05-01 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Mitch Bradley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  A general observation about organizational behavior:

  Organizations do not act coherently to nearly the same extent as
  individual humans.  Individuals change their minds, act in ways
  inconsistent with their stated goals, respond to different external
  pressures at different times, etc.  With organizations it is even worse,
  and the larger the organization, the more complicated it becomes.
  Organizational leadership changes, goals and external realities change,
  internal groups vie for influence, compete with one another and work at
  cross purposes.  Different people within the organization make
  statements that are attributed to the organization.

  Expecting an individual to behave coherently over time is dodgy at best;
  expecting it of an organization is almost certain to disappoint.

  In the OLPC case, the leadership at the very top hasn't changed, but the
  second tier has changed, and the situation and external pressures have
  changed drastically.

Yes, the middle tier is now supposed to be Kim Quirk (Technology),
Robert Fadel (Administration), Charles Kane (Business Development),
and whoever replaces Walter in Deployment. Has anybody heard? The
failure to announce such things is one of my biggest complaints.

Kim and Robert are adamant about not supporting first world
deployments, although they sort of allow them. GiveMany is a joke, and
the OLPC community isn't permitted to discuss projects like Illinois
(100,000 units proposed) with the staff. I haven't talked to Charles.

That reminds me. Do we have any idea what the Boards of Director and
Advisors think about all of this?
http://laptop.org/vision/people/

Does anybody have contact information for them? I have a few e-mail
addresses. Well, I'll ask.

Dandy, Ed, Joe, Alan, Mako (all bcc) pass it on, please, and read the
thread. We think that Nicholas doesn't know what he is talking about
with this Sugar on Windows idea and dissing Open Source, that he is
and has been dangerously out of touch with staff and volunteers, and
that he is now endangering the mission. Problems like this are
supposed to be the reason for a Board of Directors to exist in the
first place, so we want to hear that Board members are taking the
issue seriously, and preferably see evidence that you are listening to
what is going on, and understand the issues. Advisers, any assistance
you can give will be appreciated. This is the time to advise, if ever
there was one.

Nicholas's post
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/nicholas_negroponte_sugar_olpc.html

Replies and related posts

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/thread.html#13140
On Sugar (Development)
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-April/thread.html#5173 On
Sugar (Sugar)
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-April/thread.html#112
Where is Walter

http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/open_source_fundamentalists.html
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/one_laptop_per_child_off_the_track.html
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/negroponte_is_further_gone.html
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/leadership/walter_bender_resigned_from_olpc.html

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Re: [sugar] what matters

2008-04-26 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 9:25 AM, Sameer Verma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Albert Cahalan wrote:
   It's clear that we aren't all here for the same thing.
   Some wish to help all kids, or poor kids, or non-Western
   kids. Some wish to advance freedom of speech, freedom from
   EULA slavery, or freedom to learn heretical ideas.
  
   Some of us are, assuming good intentions, extremely innocent
   regarding Microsoft. The historical record shows that those
   who partner with Microsoft will be betrayed in the worst way.
   Read The Scorpion and the Frog to understand Microsoft.

He who sups with the Devil must e'en have a long spoon.

   To a very limited extent, I agree with the idea that we should
   not be pedantic about free software.

The community seems to be agreed that Microsoft can spend as much
money as it likes trying to get Sugar running on Windows, but OLPC
shouldn't divert resources from Linux to Windows unless perhaps
Microsoft chooses to pay whoever is willing, and fund the project more
broadly. As if!

  For what its worth, here's something that might help in analyzing the
  situation some more. Its an analytical approach called mission and core
  competencies (MCC) matrix.

Thanks. I don't think that we have such a complex problem. The
questions appear to be

* Should we sell in developed countries? Nicholas--Doesn't contribute
to mission; me--Of course, to build a political base for foreign
educational aid, to address our own poor, and to finance our other
work.

* Should we ally with Microsoft? Nicholas--It's such a brilliant
strategy, and so obvious when I point it out; me--no way.

* Should Nicholas discuss these matters with the community?
Nicholas--What for?; me--Yes, unless you want to see the rest of us
walk out and fork Sugar.

Anyway, nothing happens unless Nicholas decides to talk the the whole
community. Then we can discuss the other two points. It isn't a
question of who has which competencies, except for Nicholas to realize
that he can't outsmart Microsoft, and that he has tried to
over-optimize one variable out of an entire equation. And we should
hire more programmers, a doc team, and a few others that Nicholas and
the community generally agree on, and discuss what to do after that.
Then maybe Walter and Ivan and a few other valuable contributors would
be willing to discuss coming back.
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Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship

2008-04-26 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 3:14 PM, Ivan Krstić
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Apr 26, 2008, at 4:55 PM, Albert Cahalan wrote:
   Microsoft will never cooperate with dual-boot. They haven't
   ever even bothered with false promises. Forget about it.


  Actually, this is the last epic battle I fought at OLPC. To my
  knowledge, it's a battle I won.

You've either said too much or too little. Please explain who said
what to whom. The rest of us have no context for your statement.

I do recall your earlier statement that the XO would not suffer
Windows lock-in on your watch.
http://radian.org/notebook/paradox-of-choice

And Microsoft has made it quite clear that it has no interest in dual-boot.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,100121,39292078,00.htm

I have no idea where Nicholas gets the notion

  --
  Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://radian.org



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[sugar] Organization was Re: A technical assessment of porting Sugar to Windows.)

2008-04-24 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Mitch Bradley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  A general observation about organizational behavior:

  Organizations do not act coherently to nearly the same extent as
  individual humans.  Individuals change their minds, act in ways
  inconsistent with their stated goals, respond to different external
  pressures at different times, etc.  With organizations it is even worse,
  and the larger the organization, the more complicated it becomes.
  Organizational leadership changes, goals and external realities change,
  internal groups vie for influence, compete with one another and work at
  cross purposes.  Different people within the organization make
  statements that are attributed to the organization.

  Expecting an individual to behave coherently over time is dodgy at best;
  expecting it of an organization is almost certain to disappoint.

  In the OLPC case, the leadership at the very top hasn't changed, but the
  second tier has changed, and the situation and external pressures have
  changed drastically.

Yes, the middle tier is now supposed to be Kim Quirk (Technology),
Robert Fadel (Administration), Charles Kane (Business Development),
and whoever replaces Walter in Deployment. Has anybody heard? The
failure to announce such things is one of my biggest complaints.

Kim and Robert are adamant about not supporting first world
deployments, although they sort of allow them. GiveMany is a joke, and
the OLPC community isn't permitted to discuss projects like Illinois
(100,000 units proposed) with the staff. I haven't talked to Charles.

That reminds me. Do we have any idea what the Boards of Director and
Advisors think about all of this?
http://laptop.org/vision/people/

Does anybody have contact information for them? I have a few e-mail
addresses. Well, I'll ask.

Dandy, Ed, Joe; Alan, Mako (all bcc) pass it on, please, and read the
thread. We think that Nicholas doesn't know what he is talking about
with this Sugar on Windows idea and dissing Open Source, that he is
and has been dangerously out of touch with staff and volunteers, and
that he is now endangering the mission.

Problems like this are supposed to be the reason for a Board of
Directors to exist in the first place, so we want to hear that Board
members are taking the issue seriously, and preferably see evidence
that you are listening to what is going on, and understand the issues.

Advisors, any assistance you can give will be appreciated. This is the
time to advise, if ever there was one.

Nicholas's post
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/nicholas_negroponte_sugar_olpc.html

Replies and related posts

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/thread.html#13140
On Sugar (Development)
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-April/thread.html#5173 On
Sugar (Sugar)
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-April/thread.html#112
Where is Walter

http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/open_source_fundamentalists.html
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/one_laptop_per_child_off_the_track.html
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/negroponte_is_further_gone.html
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/leadership/walter_bender_resigned_from_olpc.html

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Re: [sugar] [Community-news] on Sugar

2008-04-23 Thread Edward Cherlin

 we are the same as they, and offer them the choice? That
was Jefferson's problem as a slave owner, and the problem of all the
ideologies that make some people more equal than others.

Handing the children's future to Microsoft would be a betrayal of the
worst kind. Letting Microsoft spend its own money rearranging the deck
chairs, and sticking to our own knitting, is the best we can do for
the children.

 Kids will be the agents of change and our job is to reach
 the most of them. That is not just selling laptops, but making Sugar as
 robust and widely available as possible.

Robust? Windows?! LOL

  Nicholas

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Re: [sugar] [Community-news] where is Walter?

2008-04-22 Thread Edward Cherlin

2008/4/22 Martin Edmund Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED]:

 I've stayed away from this discussion until now. But for my own part, if the
 OLPC becomes just another laptop running standard educational software of
 the kind that inhabits my daughters primary school, I'm no longer interested
 in the project.

Hear, hear!

  I really bought into the new paradigm of pervasive collaboration and
 constructionist education. I'm not particularly interested in a cheap laptop
 clone and in any case I guess my own work on Write and abicollab will be
 ditched for some stripped down version of MS Word.

  It would nice to know if this is the new vision or not. If it is the new
 vision I can stop wasting my time here.

You can join the imminent fork of Sugar, and we can continue to do it
right. It won't be the first time that an entire team has deserted an
Open Source project leader, as Bruce Perens himself can tell you. He
says that in several cases where a team left him, they were right and
he was wrong.

  Martin Sevior




  -Original Message-
  From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Stephen John Smoogen
  Sent: Wed 4/23/2008 1:18 PM
  To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Cc: sugar; devel-list; Walter Bender; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Subject: Re: [sugar] [Community-news] where is Walter?

  On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:58 AM, Stephen John Smoogen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
   On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:04 AM, Chris Preimesberger
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Walter, you have been a shining light of good information for all this
  time, and it's sad to see you pull away from the project.  Sad to see
  the project melting away, too -- at least that's my impression.

  
One standard thing I have seen is that every project goes through
these cycles. Developers/leaders leave a company, project or group
and the people who identified the project with those people post that
the project as shriveling up and dying. I remember people saying
this of Debian, early Linux kernel development, Red Hat, SuSE, GNOME,
KDE, etc. Sometimes its true, but mostly its a gut reaction because
our brains are wired to identify with 'leaders' for our survival. If
our leaders leave the tribe.. we should go with them. Its a deep urge
we all have but it is rarely rooted in 'reality' but in the minds way
of coming up with 'reasons'.
  
I am just commenting on this because its something I have seen over
and over again with companies, projects, and groups.. and it
interested me why one day I was all happy to be working for a company
and 2 days later was ready to leave because it was going to crap when
a developer I worked under left.
  
The big thing I learned was that companies, projects, groups, etc
change constantly, and people who thrive under some conditions
deteriorate under others.. and have to leave. And when that happens,
there are a lot of psychological shifts in the group where other
people stay and leave because various 'leaders' stayed or left.. in
some cases you end up with large scisms where people will no longer
talk with each other, and in other cases you have people agreeing to
disagree on where each group is going.
  

  On the other hand, comments from the AP article can make me eat crow :)

  http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hXa0O9XLMsWfaqt-sI9FqFy2IewgD9074MH82

  For about a year, however, Microsoft has been working to get a
  slimmed-down version of Windows to run on XO laptops. As a result,
  Negroponte said Tuesday that he expects XOs to soon have a dual-boot
  option, meaning users would be able to run Windows or Sugar.

  One current hang-up is whether the necessary hardware would add $7 to
  $12 to an XO's cost, taking the project even further away from its
  eventual goal of producing the machines for less than $100.
  Eventually, Negroponte added, Windows might be the sole operating
  system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it.


  --
  Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
  How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
  in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice
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Re: [sugar] The limits of Mesh View

2008-04-19 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 11:29 PM, Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 1:18 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
  [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos wrote:
| A full screen of icons would not be
| legible either, but was I just trying to explore the limits.
  
That's not exactly the limit.  Although the current designs don't call for
it, it would be easy enough to allow the mesh view to expand past the edge
of the screen, once the number of icons gets too large to show them all.
GTK has widgets designed for precisely this sort of infinite canvas.
People with whom you've communicated more recently, or people who are
geographically nearer to you, might migrate toward the center.

  Yes, this is precisely the type of scalability solution I alluded to
  before when I spoke of making the full neighborhood accessible via
  search.  Effectively, we'd like to think of the screen area as a
  viewport into the broader neighborhood, which happens to contain a
  clustering of people and activities most relevant tot he user.

  Determining the heuristic for what's relevant needn't by very complex,
  thought it could be, and will likely begin with friends, recent
  collaborators, your favorite activities, etc.  Naturally, the search
  and filter controls will serve as temporary adjustments to the
  relevance of the objects on the mesh, and so the view will change in
  response to them.  The main reason we didn't jump directly to this
  model is because we'd very much like to emphasize the notion of the
  window, and of the neighborhood as a larger continuous space, by
  sliding the XOs, activities, and devices around the screen.  This
  would also work well when illustrating XOs moving about the various
  activities on screen, but also serves as a way to slide negative
  matches radially outward, and positive matches inward, so as to always
  keep a relevant set of icons on screen at any time.

At some point it will be of interest to be able to view friends of
friends in a network view, and to have a variety of social networking
functions.

  - Eben

  PS.  I think this brings up the point, by the way, that we have two
  different kinds of scalability limits with regard to the view.  The
  first is what Pol was initially after, which is the hard limit for
  number of icons shown on a screen of a given size, and the second is
  the number of icons (and their presence info) we can realistically
  manage technically.  The latter (once we fix the jabber server)
  shouldn't pose much of an issue until we start thinking about
  inter-school or world level communications.

I'm not clear to me why we aren't thinking about that now. Earth
Treasury's mission is to link whole schools and create global
partnerships. This has educational, social, and economic consequences.
There will be hundreds of schools using XOs by the end of the year,
probably more than a thousand.

 The former, of course,
  is still worth investigating, because even with the scalability
  solutions listed above for intelligently moving icons on and off
  screen, we need to know that limit and filter only the number through
  that we can realistically show at once.

Based on my suggestions above, I would suppose that we will need a way
for users to select viewing modes and parameters themselves. I always
hate software that tries to tell me what I want.

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Re: [sugar] [OLPC-Games] Wordsmith ( Scrabble ) :GSoC application

2008-04-11 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Aditya Vishwakarma
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hi,

 I am Aditya Vishwakarma. An Information Technology student at NSIT, Delhi.

 I am working on making a Scrabble game as a GSoC project called Wordsmith.
 The wiki page is located here -
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wordsmith(scrabble)

Does Scrabble exist in Hindi or any other language of India? I know
how we could support Scrabble in any linear alphabetic writing such as
Cyrillic alphabet, but I have trouble imagining it in Arabic, Chinese,
Amharic, or Japanese kana.

 Scrabble is an highly enjoyable and social. And it puts real motivation to
 extend the vocabulary. After an online game of scrabble, the players would
 not only be refreshed, but have a much stronger vocabulary than before. I
 believe with the right implementation, this game can easily turn out to be
 one of the best games on XO laptops.

I have not found it to increase vocabulary significantly. Does anybody
know of any studies on this?

 I would love to hear your feedback and comments.


 Thanking you
 Aditya Vishwakarma

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Re: [sugar] sugar roadmap

2008-04-10 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I have looked at all 3 docs and they look good

  have some comments

  1. Who is in charge of Sugar? the team lead. I remember that Blizzard
  used to be the team lead. Is it JG now?

Actually, is there a way to find out who is in charge of _anything_?
Walter Bender tells me that he is out of the loop these days, but I
haven't heard who has taken over any of his responsibilities.

  2. Need a really easy way to play music and video files including ones
  w/ proprietary codecs. Kid finds mp3 file on the internet using browse,
  kid double-clicks file. It should open with the activity that supports
  that file type.

  Use Case:
  The kid should be able to access the same file again later from the
  Journal and open up in the appropriate activity/player (should one be
  loaded)

  OLPC won't have to pre-load the proprietary codecs for this to work.
  Leave that to deployment people like myself. just make it easy for us to
  load them using mechanisms like the customization key.

  Yes proprietary is bad but allowing kids to explore on their own -- an
  essential aspect of constructionism -- is more important. We cut off
  many avenues of exploration when we make it hard for them to access
  content that happens to use proprietary codecs -- which is the majority
  of interesting content on the Internet.

  2.1 The XO needs a rock-solid media player. To me this is as essential
  as the Journal.

Rob Savoye says that if we could provide, find, recruit...a few
developers to finish the current Gnash roadmap, we would have it. I
haven't heard anybody step up. Why?

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Re: [sugar] New Activity Proposal -- Your voice on XO

2008-04-05 Thread Edward Cherlin

2008/4/4 Alex Escalona [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
 Hi Everyone,

 I just created a page on the OLPC wiki detailing my activity proposal--Your
 voice on XO. I hope to develop this activity via GSoC 2008. A brief
 abstract of my proposal follows.

 This is a proposal for the creation of a new activity for the XO that would
 advance localization efforts in TTS development, as well as promote the
 involvement of the local community overall. Your voice on XO would consist
 of a long-term, community-based project to build and/or further development
 of a synthetic voice for the language used locally (for more on
 synthetic-voice building, see http://www.festvox.org/bsv/p710.html, and
 http://espeak.sourceforge.net/add_language.html).

 This activity would entail integrating the voice-building capabilities of
 eSpeak, or perhaps Festival, into Sugar on the XO, as well as working to
 facilitate synthetic-voice building in a classroom, or community setting
 (for an overall view of how the voice building process might proceed, see
 http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/emasters/summer_school_2005/tutorial3/tutorial.html).

 Your feedback and comments are much appreciated!

Let's get the voices of mothers and fathers, and grandmothers and
grandfathers, too. On general principles, and for reading to
preliterate children.

 Best,

 Alex Escalona
 (vergueishon on OLPC wiki, IRC)

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Re: [sugar] Typing Tutor: LetsType

2008-04-05 Thread Edward Cherlin

 already mentioned in my application about localizing the
 activity in other languages soon after the English version is complete. Your
 suggestions in this context can help me a lot.
  Thanks!
 
  :-)
  Cheers,
  --
  Prakhar Agarwal
  Technical Head - Library RD Team
  3rd Year
  B.Tech, IT
  JIIT University,Noida
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 --
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 www.asymptopia.org
   
   
   
--
Prakhar Agarwal
Technical Head - Library RD Team
3rd Year
B.Tech, IT
JIIT University,Noida
Life is the greatest teacher
  
  
  
   --
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   www.asymptopia.org
 
 
 
  --
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  Technical Head - Library RD Team
  3rd Year
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Re: [sugar] Database Activity

2008-03-09 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 1:51 PM, 7150 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Ok, now that I have recovered from dyslexia, I find that I can access my
  database through pysqlite from Pippy. I wrote a little Pippy program to
  select various rows and it goes just fine. I can confidently take it to
  the next level.

  Except.

  Norwegian requires Å, Ø, and Æ (lower case also). So, (1) the XO cannot
  display those characters.

This turns out not to be the case. These letters are in the fonts
included with the XO.

 And, (2) I don't see Å on the keyboard. The
  other two characters are there.

The command you want to run in Terminal is

setxkbmap no

There are other options, including a Norwegian Dvorak layout.

The following examples are typed on a Norwegian keyboard in Ubuntu,
with XO equivalents that I just now verified.

æ Compose a e where a and e are in the same positions as in US QWERTY;
alt gr-a on the XO.
Æ Compose A E; alt gr-A
ø Compose o /, where / is shift-7; alt gr-o
Ø Compose O /; alt gr-O
å [ on US QWERTY; [
Å shift-[; shift-[

The alt gr key is right alt. It is a standard kind of modifier key,
meaning that you press and hold it while you enter the letter you
want. The Compose key is defined differently according to various
system and user preferences in different UNIX installations. I haven't
found it to be set on the XO.

  If I can display, I can work for now.

  Ultimately, I'll have to find a way to get the Å (uc and lc) from the
  keyboard.

You're all set now.

  I checked the Control Panel WIKI page. That does not address character set.

That's because it isn't a character set problem. It's a keyboard
layout problem, and the instructions for changing layouts are on the
Keyboard layouts page.

  I saw bug 3018 (fixed), Do I need a later build, joyride? I think I'm at
  659.

  This may go beyond UTF-8 and I may be at my road's end.

The three letters you want are in the Unicode Latin-1 block, so this
is not a UTF-8 problem. It is also not a build issue.

  Thoughts?

Enjoy.

  ---
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Re: [sugar] OLPC News 2008-03-08

2008-03-09 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Bruno Coudoin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  * We are looking for someone to Sugarize the GCompris icons;

  A little group within the GCompris community started to work on this
  but any help would be appreciated. Please contact me if you would like
  to contribute.

Anybody?

  --
  Bruno Coudoin
  http://gcompris.net Free educational software for kids
  http://toulibre.org Logiciel Libre à Toulouse

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Re: [sugar] Journal: two quick suggestions

2008-02-28 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 11:41 AM, Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  while toying around with the Journal today I had two ideas about the
  anything and anytime filter functions:
 

 Both interesting ideas...

  anything: Apart from offering activities and file-types as
  filter-options I'm thinking that it might make sense to also offer an
  option for different subjects that kids will have at school. So things
  like Maths, English, whatever... My thought is that many activities
  will be started and resumed in a certain class-context and offering
  such a filter could help them to quickly find related matters.

 One of our fears here is the proliferation of options within this menu,
 which could eventually limit its usefulness, and is the reason we chose to
 limit to some primitive types and the installed activities.

A common way to address this problem is to make the menu customizable
with user-defined filters and the ability to remove unneeded filters
(but keep the option to restore them later). Google mail is an
example, where users can create their own tags and set filters to
apply them automatically.

The usual alternative is folders, as in Moodle.

 One can
 imagine that the subject of an activity is actually subjectively defined,
 and even when it's relatively clear, we might wind up with some for each of
 math, geometry, trigonometry, algebra, etc.

 To make a similar functionality available, though, we've chosen to allow
 developers to supply a list of tags within the .info file for any given
 activities, which could include several subject related words, as well as
 more abstract or general terms like game, simulation, or language.  We
 hope that the ability to search by broad terms such as math or games
 will then turn up a list of appropriately related activities.

 Having just typed this and then reviewing the wiki, I notice that this part
 of the spec doesn't appear to be there yet!  Can those familiar with this
 respond about the presence or absence of this capability?  If this isn't
 there, it should get a ticket.  It should be a pretty straightforward
 addition and simple to implement, it seems.


  anytime: Here it might make sense to add more informal filters such
  as 5 grado, 2nd semester or something along these lines.

 This one is actually much harder to do in a general way.  We chose, on
 purpose, to treat time in the relative sense with respect to the Journal.
 Instead of seeing a story you wrote on November 28, 2007 you might find a
 story you wrote 3 months ago.  This approach was chosen, in a sense, to
 internationalize (or perhaps simply generalize) the Journal with respect to
 time, so that school systems with widely different schedules (some might
 have class daily for one of every 3 months, for instance) can all take
 advantage of it.


  Of course one could also argue that such information could be
  explicitly added via the tags but I think a more implicit mechanism
  could potentially make more sense.

 You can see how, in the former case, the tag model is still implicit, in a
 sense, when installing an activity.  In the latter case, I don't see any
 good way other than explicit tagging that doesn't have additional UI
 overhead/management to function.  I'm open to ideas here.

 Thanks for your feedback!

 - Eben


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Re: [sugar] An Update about Speech Synthesis

2008-02-20 Thread Edward Cherlin

  eSpeak was called and various parameters were passed as command line
  arguments, it surely was not very efficient wrt XO.
 
  Stability - I think the main point that I tested here was how well
  speech-dispatcher responds to long strings. The latest release of
  speech-dispatcher 0.6.6 has some
  tests in which an entire story is read out
  [http://cvs.freebsoft.org/repository/speechd/src/tests/long_message.c?view=markup].
  However I still need to run this test on the XO. I will do so once I have
  RPM packages to install on the XO.
 
  In particular speech-dispatcher is quite customizable, easily controlled
  through programming languages, provides callback support, and has
  specialized support for eSpeak that makes it a good option for the XO.
 
   All in all speech-dispatcher is very promising for our requirements wrt XO.
  While I am not able to project all possible problems that will come wrt
  speech-synthesis at this stage, it is the best option that is available at
  present as opposed to our original plans of providing a DBUS API :P. I am
  preparing myself to possibly delve deeper and test speech-dispatcher 0.6.6
  on the XO once its RPMs are accepted by Fedora Community. As we progress I
  will surely find out limitations of speech-dispatcher and would surely
  report them and/or help fix them along with the Free(b)Soft team.
 
  I hope you find this useful, I can try to answer a more specific question.
 
  Thanks!
  Hemant
 
 
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Re: [sugar] An Update about Speech Synthesis for Sugar

2008-02-18 Thread Edward Cherlin

 that would be wonderfully suited to reading
  Gutenberg etexts and no suitable program to do it with.  I have written
  such an Activity and am putting the finishing touches on it.  As I see
  it, the selling points of the Activity will be that it can display
  etexts one page at a time in a readable proportional font and remember
  what page you were on when you resume the activity.  The child can find
  his book using the Gutenberg site, save the Zip file version to the
  Journal, rename it, resume it, and start reading.  It will also be good
  sample code for new Activity developers to look at, even children,
  because it is easy to understand yet it does something that is actually
  useful.  I have written another Activity which lets you browse through a
  bunch of image files stored in a Zip file, and it also would be good
  sample code for a new developer, as well as being useful.

 Warm Regards,
 Hemant

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Re: [sugar] New activity: Speak

2008-01-10 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Jan 10, 2008 1:27 AM, Joshua Minor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hi everyone,
I made a new activity called Speak.  It is a talking face for the
 XO laptop. Anything you type will be spoken aloud using the XO's
 speech synthesizer, espeak. You can adjust the accent, rate and pitch
 of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth. This is a
 great way to experiment with the speech synthesizer, learn to type or
 just have fun making a funny face for your XO.

 I hope you like it.

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

This is wonderful, because it will allow children to experiment with
language, not just type in normal text.

In espeak, phoneme sets and orthographies can be added for any
language. Do you support this?

Can this or the Screen Reader project be adapted to reading content,
such as the children's picturebooks provided in the Library? (We would
presumably need a text file to go with each document.)

I think that it would be a great boost for child and adult literacy
both if little children could sit on their parents' or grandparents
laps and have the XO read them both a story.

In that same vein, would anybody be interested in creating a karaoke
activity? Same-language captioning of Bollywood musicals is claimed to
be the most effective literacy measure in India.

 Thanks to Arjun Sarwal, Hemant Goyal and Bernardo Innocenti for their
 advice while making this.

 Also, if anyone has experience or ideas on how to get access to
 espeak's per-phoneme timing data from python, please let me know.

 -josh

Do you want to do that while running, or would a precomputed table
meet your needs?


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Re: [sugar] status of MANIFEST file

2007-12-10 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Dec 8, 2007 4:18 PM, Christoph Derndorfer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hey all,

 Daniel and me are again having another weekend-jam working on the
 activity handbook

Excellent. Does it have a Wiki page? Would someone put a link and a
brief description on the OLPC Publications page?

Can I join in?

 and we've just spent the past half hour looking at
 different .xo packages from the git-repository to see how the MANIFEST
 file inside the .xo package is being used.

 Results really vary, some activities don't come with a MANIFEST at all,
 some only list a file or two inside the MANIFEST while others really do
 come with a complete index of all the files included in the package.

 So what I'm basically asking is what the exact requirements for the
 MANIFEST file are as activities seem to work regardless of what it contains.

 Thanks,
 Christoph
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Re: [sugar] OLPC News 2007-10-27

2007-10-29 Thread Edward Cherlin

In some Irish family and place names Kill means boy (Gilroy, Kilroy,
MacGillivray, etc. E.g. Irish Gaelic Mac Giolla Ruaidh 'son of the
redhaired lad', similar to the name of the Scottish dance tune An
Gillie Ruach, The Redhaired Boy). So Killjoy can be thought of as
fun for children, entirely appropriately for the XO.

On 10/27/07, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  14. Schedule: The upcoming releases have been renamed and re-purposed:
 
  Oct. 26:  Trial-3 (Build 622) are the bits being loaded for mass
  production. This was completed this week.
 
  Nov. 16:  Reload are bits that could possibly be loaded before
  shipping laptops to individuals. We will hand pick blocking bug fixes
  only if we need to.
 
  Dec. 07:  Killjoy (V1.0, previously referred to as FRS or First
  Deployment) is a release based on the Joyride builds. This will
  include bug fixes/minor features that are in Joyride today; and we are
  actively moving some trac items to this release based on what we know
  about in the next week. Feature freeze for this is next week; code
  freeze the week after.
 
  Q1 2008:  Future Release (V1.1) is the release after Killjoy. Not
  well defined. Right now it is where we moved all the features that
  didn't make it into Killjoy.
 
  (See https://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for more info.)
 
  As we do the triage for these builds, we'd very much appreciate
  community feedback as to what you think is important. Feel free to
  send email to Walter Bender, Kim Quirk, or Jim Gettys in regard to
  priorities.

 Not really important, but I cringe every time I read it - can we
 rename Killjoy to something more positively sounding?

 - Bert -


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Re: [sugar] Some discussion on education

2007-08-17 Thread Edward Cherlin

Just as videophones have not taken off in industrialized nations, video chat
is not a killer app. I have used teleconferencing as a business tool, and it
will have a place in the XO program. But what we really need is quite
different.

There have been computers in schools for 30 years. But they have never been
integrated into the curriculum, because it was impossible to make an
assumption about how much computer time students would get, and it was
impossible to make an assumption about what software would be available. Now
we can create textbooks containing interactive models of phenomena. We can
give children real-world datasets to analyze. We will have powerful data
acquisition capabilities using the camera (including microscopy), and using
the sound input port as a high-speed A/D converter feeding a digital
oscilloscope, and so on.

This gives us an opportunity and a responsibility to look at the curriculum
anew. The time-honored divisions of subjects and sequences of ideas that
made sense for paper-and-pencil learning do not necessarily make sense when
the computer can do the heavy lifting. Just as one example, trigonometry
used to be a semester course, and no doubt still is in many places. That
probably made sense when surveyors in training had to learn to solve dozens
of triangles a day with no greater aid than a book of function and log
tables, but it is absurd in the age of scientific calculators and computers.
The essential mathematical content of trigonometry can be reduced to two or
three pages, including proofs. (It's not my opinion. Saunders Mac Lane
complained about trig in Mathematics: Form and Function, after reducing it
to less than three pages.)

Calculus is still treated as a high-level high school subject, but primary
school children can grasp the notion of the direction of a curve: just put a
ruler up to any convex object. They can equally grasp the concept of the
area under an arbitrary curve. Draw it on paper, cut it out, and weigh it.
Leave the formulas and the proofs for later. When we have the basic ideas in
place, we can use them for many purposes. Then when the students get to the
calculations and proofs, they know what it's all about, and will grasp it
much more readily.

The Internet gives unequalled opportunities for language learning through
online literature, songs, movies, mailing lists, chat rooms, voice
broadcasts, Voice over IP, and video conferencing. We really have no idea
how to take full advantage of all this.

There is much more of this sort of thing. I think we need a separate list to
discuss it properly.


On 8/16/07, Yoshiki Ohshima [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

   Hello, Elijah,

   http://squeakland.org/pipermail/squeakland/2007-August/003717.html
  
   This discussion might make you think that claiming a video chat app as
   the killer app is not a very compelling pitch as an educational
   project...
 
  video chat alone, not so useful.
 
  video chat combined with lots of other practical collaborative tools?
  pretty great, pretty humanizing, very supportive of lots of other
  activities.

   Thank you for the comment.  While XO will have (if it is successful)
 a lot of off-school and recess time, the primary use case I thought
 should be the at school (even it is under tree).  The video chat
 wouldn't match the latter very well.  I don't say it is useless, but
 cannot be the killer app, and we shouldn't think so.

   If I understand correctly, the position of the OLPC is that making
 curriculum and organized materials are primarily the responsibility of
 the client governments.  However, we, the software developers, should
 think about making software tools for developing these materials (yes,
 that should be possible on XO), rather than simples games that are
 only useful for 5 minutes each.

 -- Yoshiki
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[sugar] Docs?

2007-07-30 Thread Edward Cherlin

Is there any plan for official software documentation? I have been a Senior
Tech Writer for the last 10 years and would be delighted to work on it
(particularly if someone like Red Hat would support me to do it 60 hours a
week *{%-{]}}} --Goggle-eyed geek in clown hat, moustache, and full
beard). Actually, I have been writing about XO software off and on ever
since the Dynabook days, when Xerox licensed Smalltalk to Apple, HP, and
others in 1981, during my market research period.

For example, I wrote in a study of so-called educational software back then
that the overpriced drill-and-practice programs of the time weren't real
educational software, and that what children need is sharp tools to do stuff
with. Commercial educational software is still a vast wasteland, with a few
honorable exceptions. Then I did a study on Personal Instruments (data
acquisition and analysis on PCs), and some other reports that touched on
education. Besides starting and managing a software project for math for
schools. And a few other things.

I have a button that says, Stop me before I volunteer again, but it
doesn't help. [sigh]

-- 
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Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit
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Re: [sugar] Rebe

2007-06-21 Thread Edward Cherlin

I have offered the I-APL math language on the devel list as a Sugar
activity. It uses a form of math notation, and is thus not
language-specific, and resides in less than 32K. I control the
licensing on the software, and on a series of math textbooks written
in the language, from arithmetic to calculus. I would be happy to GPL
the language and GDL the textbooks, if I can get some help with
turning the software into a Sugar activity and a few other things.

I also have a copy of an unpublished textbook for teachers on using
the software to teach programming, starting in third grade. I would be
happy to talk to the author about a GDL or Creative Commons license.

What I would really like is the j engine (http://jsoftware.com/), but
Ken Iverson's son Eric won't so far discuss GPLing it. There are only
commercial and freeware versions. J already has the whole math and
graphics thing done up with a bow.

On 6/21/07, Rebecca Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hey,
 Me and Eben have been discussing HTML and CSS as an option for it, with
 a mathmatics engine of course. Modifinnying zcalulator draw and Nvu
 could be what we want, adn the kids could has a WYSISWYG editor for
 HTMl, adn a way fo doing worksheets.
 ~Rebecca
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