[Sugar-devel] KQED: In Oakland, Mixed Results for Tech In Schools
There is no mention of OLPC or Sugar, but I think it's good background info as well as a good news story. http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201311011630/b The audio is 6 minutes. For those of you not familiar with Oakland, they have lots of troubles, close to Detroit, and the schools have their share of the problems. They talked to two schools. One thumbs up. One thumbs down due to WiFi overload. (That wasn't the only problem, but it was fatal.) The link at the bottom to more/full-story is good too. It looks like a transcript, but it's not accurate. The first half is close but the second half diverges a lot. There are lots of links. Time sink warning if you follow a good one. The Mind/Shift blog has lots of good stuff. Blended learning seems to be a buzzword. Anybody know anything about the Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation? http://www.christenseninstitute.org/honoring-clayton-christensen-with-new-name -emboldened-mission/ He teaches at Harvard Business School. His book, The Innovator's Dilemma, is famous in the high-tech world. (It's very good. I haven't read any of his other books.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Bug triaging
qu...@laptop.org said: However, don't be deceived; the number of tickets isn't a meaningful quantity. It doesn't represent anything in real life. I'm not sure about that. Dough Clark wrote a wonderful paper: Bugs are good. The context was hardware. The idea is that when you stop finding bugs, then it's time to ship. Yes, it's talking about the rate of finding bugs rather than the absolute number, but the bottom line is that you can learn a lot from bug statistics. http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2006-August/001683.html -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [PATCH] changes to Chat to support OSK and portrait mode
walter.ben...@gmail.com said: (2) The chat is displayed from the top (most recent) down so that the recent messages are not occluded by the OSK and so that the recent messages are proximal to the text entry How well does that work out? How long does it take to learn to read bottom-to-top? I'd expect troubles if you were distracted for a few lines and then tried to catch up. Is that only for XO-4 or will people with non-touch XOs have to learn to read backwards too? (Is there a word for backwards up/down vs backwards right/left?) -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Query regarding Wikipedia(EN) activity
jvo...@shaw.ca said: Are all the images stored on the same server? Is the collection of images available for download? How large is the collection? Seems like this might be a good addition to a schoolserver, enabling users the ability to view images while not really connected to the internet with a little server dns trickery on the schoolserver. All the info is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download (Searching for wikipedia dowload will find it.) -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [PATCH] SDXO#2620 Add ability to save unfinished games in Memorize.
walter.ben...@gmail.com said: Or may be ask the user (while exiting), that whether the user wishes to save the game? Not a very Sugary approach. What is the right way for Sugar to handle that problem? I get annoyed when I start an activity and it pops up in some strange state rather than the new-game I expect. On the other hand, if I was working on something when the system shut down due to battery running low or such, starting over where I left off might be a wonderful idea. I think Sugar needs either/both of: Exit/Discard vs Exit/Save Start/New vs Start/Resume -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Shared activity game - Maze
qu...@laptop.org said: You can find the version of Maze on you XO by pressing F3, then Ctrl/2, then searching for Maze. The version number is shown in a column of the result set. For 13.1.0 build 14 it is version 22. I didn't know about ctrl-2. Is there a wiki page that covers all that sort of stuff? I'm a certified geek, but far from a UI wizard. How should I pick up stuff like that? - On my XO-1 running os-14, the right hand column always says 5 years, 2 months ago. That's for maze and everything else on the screen. The up-arrow and down-arrow (pg-up, pg-dn) keys don't do anything. But if I use the cursor to scroll around, I don't see any other dates. -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2012-09-18
cjlhomeaddr...@gmail.com said: In my experience, programmers are typically able adept at thinking of variables in the abstract, thus the preponderance of foo and 'bar when conversationally describing programming with variables. I think that's misleading. I consider sensible names (variables and procedures) to be a key step in making code easy to understand. That's why we use names like height rather than j13. foo and 'bar are generally used for local variables. They are like pronouns. You have to know the context in order to figure out what they mean. -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [PATCH Browse] Cancel a download if space is very tight SL #394
martin.langh...@gmail.com said: Checking in the progress bar... it's optional. Up to you if you want to check there _as well_. Sometimes, you don't know at the start how big a download will be. In that case, if you want to stop before filling up the disk, you have to check often-enough during the download. The progress bar sounds like a good place. -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] More topics font related
cjlhomeaddr...@gmail.com said: One element that is critical in all of this, of course, is taking some care to investigate the range of languages that any given font can represent. I'm sure that much of the discussion will focus on Latin-based alphabets, which is fine as far as it goes, and they will often cover Cyrillic as well; but I think an absolutely clear understanding of the language coverage offered by a particular font is essential before making any 'default' choice. Good point. Thanks. I can easily imagine that country A would prefer font X and country B would prefer font Y. Is it easy to configure the font for a particular distribution? If not, how much work would that be? -- In addition to the font name, the size and modifier are also important. I'm not sure what the right font-geek word for modifier is. I'm thinking of things like bold, narrow, italic... I've seen a few setups where shifting from font-x to font-x-bold made things much easier to read. The details of the monitor (brightness, contrast) and environment (ambient light) may be important. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] New genealogic activity for Sugar
Many wives is not a problem but brothers marrying with sisters (b) is not supported thought I saw it too on Egyptian Pharaon dynasty. Accidents happen. Software should not set policy. Stick to a model based on evidence rather than a model based on assumed reality. Don't overlook same-sex parents. The world is changing. I think it's for the better. That case could be a wonderful opportunity for education or a nasty way to offend the locals. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Customized Sugar
On the laptop, it would be easy to set up a quota for the datastore in which the demon could remove documents from the local store on an LRU basis when the datastore exceeds the quota. This would avoid having the student get involved in managing the Nand. I'd be really annoyed if some chunk of software that I didn't even know about deleted a file that I wanted. Some concepts associated with using a computer are important. I think it would be a mistake to try to hide them. What's a non-computer analogy to running out of disk or memory? I see two issues: 1) disk space is limited, and 2) it is shared by various activities. (If you save a lot of pictures or download a lot of music, you may run out of room for your school work.) -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel] Fwd: Testing Summary - Wellington, 9 Oct 2010
- Discussion on using luggage tags so that we can identify which computer belongs to who from the outside A magic marker works fine. (Or Sharpie or whatever they are called in your location.) You want the permanent kind. Non-permanent ink may get smudged off. If you don't want to mess up the exterior of your XO, open up the battery compartment and write your name/initials/whatever in there. You can also use the labeling tapes. They probably won't stick well to the textured surface, but there are smooth surfaces inside the battery compartment or on the inside after you open the lid. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Etoys 4.1
No activity allows a user to destroy old version, I assumed destroy meant overwrite the old name with new data. I think there are 3 possible actions when exiting an activity: update an old name with new data save the current state in a new name discard the current state The save-to-old-name case will probably save to the name the activity was started with. I find it frustrating that I can't just exit from Browse without saving anything. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Enhancing Sugar to support multiple users
d...@laptop.org said: When we discussed this while I was in Peru, one requirement they identified is that the kid would log onto an XO one day and do some work, and then log onto another XO the following week and continue the same work. Assuming this still stands, this strongly calls for a network-based home directory system with some kind of network login service (but someone with experience in such areas should comment). This would require a number of changes at the OS level and server level, but Sugar would be left untouched, as far as I can think. I think there are two approaches. One is for /home to live on the file server and XOs to access their files via NFS. There may be interesting alternatives to NFS, but I'm not familiar with any of them. The other is to have a working copy of files on the local machine and manually slosh files back and forth, probably using a program to automate things. I don't think either would be great, but both could probably be made to work. Both depend on reasonable network support. Somebody would have to do some experimenting to see how many users the typical WiFi setup can support. I've worked at two places that mounted /home on our personal workstations via NFS. We did occasionally login from other machines but the main reason for using NFS was for sharing and centralizing the backup. Both worked, but there were lots of quirks, and nobody tried to take their machines home at night. Note that in addition to /home, you have to keep /etc/passwd and various other files synchronized. Another consideration when using NSF is security. It has a long history of weak security. At both of the places where I used NFS, we lived with it. (We were all mature adults working for the same company and such. Personnel and payroll were on different systems. ...) In the context of schools, it might get interesting if the teachers are storing their files on the same server. -- It's been a long time since I worked with a slosh by hand system. I've forgotten all the details. We were happy with it, but we weren't switching workstations often. I'd expect there are lots of modern software packages designed to keep laptops synchronized. One of them might fit the XO usage pattern. With the right wrapper, one of the source-control packages might work. It might be reasonable to modify the current backup/restore code to do the sloshing. One catch for an XO is that the file system is tiny so you would have to delete the previous user's files to make room for the next user. NB: You really don't want to delete them if they haven't been copied back yet. Another possible problem is that the network load is likely to be synchronized, say at the beginning of the school day when the machines get handed off from one user to the next. -- What's the backup mechanism on current school servers? If the truth lives on my XO and the school server is just a backup, I might be willing to not backup the school server. On the other hand, if the truth lives on the school server, I'd really want another layer or two of backup. Here is another alternative... Give each child their own SD card. Patch Sugar to look there. Or patch the system to mount /home/olpc there. ... -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Home button in Browse
Go-home would be the button I press most often, to counteract auto-resuming. FWIW you can hold Alt while clicking on the activity to start a new instance instead of resuming the most recent one. Neat/thanks. Where is that documented? What else have I missed? It didn't work for me. Is that a recent change? I'm running os852 which has Sugar 0.84.16. I get the last instance of Browse that I had saved, the same thing I get without the Alt key down. But if I wait a few seconds with the cursor over the globe, it first gives me a pop-up with Browse and the name of the most recent instance, and after a few more seconds, it gives me a bigger popup showing all the saved names and a slot at the bottom saying Start. Is there a way to get out of Browse without saving anything? Auto-save saves the the current URL on top of the old name. That gets me out quickly, but if I've clicked around like I normally do, that probably breaks the name/URL binding I had setup. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Clocks on XOs
On top of that, ntpd doesn't get along with power saving mode. I haven't noticed anything odd. Either it's been fixed in the meantime or it was only subtle misbehaviour. Do you have a ticket number or link to a description of the problem that has been experienced before? Are you running XO-1s with power saving enabled? Last I knew that didn't work and recent OSes ship with it pre-configured to off. With power saving disabled, ntpd works as expected. doesn't get along may be too strong. The symptoms were that the clock drifted wildly. I'll dig out some data if it matters, but that was with the old kernel from Fedora 9, when power saving worked. I don't have a ticket number. Linux seems to break things when somebody cleans up something in this area. I think there has been more work in this area recently, but it may not be that recent. I'm procrastinating until power saving works again. Clocks are hard. Clocks on XOs are doubly hard because you don't have anyplace to stand when the CPU and its clocks are powered down. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Clocks on XOs
Was: Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Caacup=E9?= war bullettin -- day 1 ber...@codewiz.org said: * Date not being updated One laptop booted with clock set to the Epoch. Is that one of the old XOs that had troubles with the tiny battery feeding the TOY/RTC clock when the main battery and wall power are both disconnected? I forget the details, but I think there was a problem with the battery holder. Oddly, the lease was accepted anyway. We need to figure out why the clock is not being updated from the network. NetworkManager used to call ntpdate when it setup a connection. Was that an OLPC addition? I think this area gets tangled up with security and lease checking. Do we want/need two separate modes, one for the secure case and another for developers without a school server? What are the school servers doing to keep their clocks reasonable? Why aren't we using ntp? ntp is probably overkill for XOs. Besides, who would want to give up that much ram? On top of that, ntpd doesn't get along with power saving mode. Aside from quirks like this one, is time on the XO normally good enough? -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and Pippy today. I don't want to spoil the party, but what are you going to do if that works and kids from around the world start bombarding sugar-devel with their changes? I've heard the term success disaster used for problems like this. The idea is that you can ignore a potential problem for now because if something like that really does become a serious problem, that's because the project as a whole was successful and (somehow) it will have picked up adequate resources to fix the problem. Still, I'd be happier if we avoided scaling problems as much as possible. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Hypothetical sugar-0.90 material, draft 1.
Actually these are the exact same problems that could be solved much better with some kind of per activity DS (not the Android one, which would be a little bit overkill). I mean that even making or not making deltas is dependent on the object the activity stores and the deltifier is also activity object dependent. Also the single file or multi files thing is activity dependent and so on. So you can implement every possible feature in a global glorified DS but I personally do not think that you will reach a really usable general DS ever. Whatever you do for the DS, it needs to be (very) easy to understand and (very) easy to explain, both to implementers and to users. Compression/delta schemes add another concept to the chain. Who is going to explain how it works to the end users? Sure, it's easy after you understand it, but there are lots of opportunities for things to fall through the cracks and the results can be nasty. Perhaps I'm overly sensitive to this area. 30+ years ago, I deleted a critical file. It was large and I needed the space and it wasn't obvious (to me) that the file was needed after step X. Things worked for a long long time. Then they broke with an obscure error message. (which was a lot better than it could have been) In hindsight, it only took a few seconds to explain what was going on. But that was after I got the right guy on the phone, stepped through the debugger for a while, and then gave him the critical piece of info about deleting the file. [Insert standard joke about fools being so ingenious.] How many ingenious fools will be using Sugar? I hope there will be a lot of them. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Storage leak in sugar-session
I often let an XO-1 sit powered up but not doing anything for a week or more. Occasionally, after it's been idle for a while and I try to do something, it acts like it's out of memory. This has been happening for a long time, but until recently, I haven't looked in the right place to get useful numbers. This one is running 140py [mur...@xo-0d-57-33 ~]$ uptime 04:58:04 up 8 days, 5:59, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 [mur...@xo-0d-57-33 ~]$ ps -eF UID PID PPID CSZ RSS PSR STIME TTY TIME CMD ... olpc 1940 1876 0 30669 100996 0 May13 ?00:10:39 python /usr/bin/suga ... [mur...@xo-0d-57-33 ~]$ uptime 01:15:42 up 12 days, 2:17, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 [mur...@xo-0d-57-33 ~]$ ps -eF UID PID PPID CSZ RSS PSR STIME TTY TIME CMD ... olpc 1940 1876 0 38761 130900 0 May13 ?00:15:33 python /usr/bin/sugar-session ... [mur...@xo-0d-57-33 ~]$ uptime 00:07:23 up 17 days, 1:08, 1 user, load average: 3.55, 2.47, 1.10 olpc 1940 1876 0 48409 164468 0 May13 ?00:31:41 python /usr/bin/sugar-session Note the load average. I could login using ssh to collect that info, but it took a long long time. Is this an interesting problem? Do you want a bug report so it doesn't get lost? I don't know my way around sugar and I've never chased a storage leak in Python. Is there something I should do to collect more info? -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] 3D engine uses in a no-nonsense GUI (was: XO Gen 1.5)
One can use a 3D accelerator to greatly improve human factors in the GUI. Smooth transitions in the GUI are vital to reducing the user's sense of disorientation and confusion. This isn't just an issue for less-clueful users; you might not realize it but poor transitions are forcing needless mental effort that eats up a tiny bit of time here, a tiny bit of time there... and it all adds up. You may feel it in frustration even if you don't spot the cause. Without the 3D engine, animations are a painful compromise. They are slow, jerky, and CPU consuming. Imagine if the frame could slide into view with fast perfectly smooth motion and almost no CPU use. Think how much more usable Sugar would be. I'm far from a UI wizard, but I think I understand a lot of the perception issues and/or I'd like to learn more. I've always thought of slide into view as annoying. I have to wait around for the thing I want to look at to finish dancing. Is there a good book or paper discussing this area? Does one of Tufte's books cover this stuff? -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [PATCH] webactivity: seed the XS cookie at startup
The fqdn from backup server or jabber server. Either will do until we fix the registration stuff. Please state exactly which one you want - I want this to be your call. How about adding a layer of indirection and letting DNS do the binding? -- I'm not a DNS wizard. DNS has C records which are roughly symbolic links. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [PATCH] webactivity: seed the XS cookie at startup
note that if the XS is acting as a proxy the cache issue can be addressed. The XS can get a copy of the XO client cert at registration time, and with it can decrypt the HTTPS traffic and cache the unencrypted version. this is a lot of cpu, but it's on the XS not the XO, so it shouldn't be as bad (and there are hardware SSL encryption cards available that can be put in an XS for high-volume situations) I'm not a security wizard, but I get uncomfortable when anybody suggests giving out copies of keys, certs, or passwords. Is this an acceptable case? Why? How would you explain the subtlies to a kid? How many adults give their passwords to phishers? -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
