[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2008-06-16

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Milan meeting: There will be a Sugar Labs meeting in Milan on
Monday, 30 June. Please contact Walter Bender if you are interested in
participating. (Walter also will be at the University of Tampere the
weekend of the 28th—he is happy to meet with anyone interested in
discussing Sugar before or after sauna.)

=== Community jams and meetups ===

2. FOSSED: Kevin Cole is helping to promote the Free & Open Source
Software in Education (FOSSED) conference to be held at the Governor's
Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, August 4th through 6th (For
details, see http://fossed.blogspot.com/). The conference is (mainly)
aimed at introducing teachers to FOSS.

===Tech Talk===

3. Home page: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the layout for the Home
page. This week, he:
* Made "favorite icons" draggable;
* Stored the position of favorite icons;
* Made the layouts in the favorites view pluggable; and
* Implemented a random layout option.

4. Browse: The Sugar team released a new version of the Browse
activity this week (http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/Web-90.xo).
It has many interesting features; please try it and give us feedback.

5. activities.sugarlabs.org: David Farning is working on converting
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ to work with Sugar and its
ecosystem of activities.

6. Certificates: Marco Pesenti Gritti has made some progress on
support for custom certificates in the Browse activity.

7. Documentation: There are a number of complementary efforts for
documenting the Sugar API and the process for creating sugar
activities: (1) a high-level functional design of Sugar (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Human_interface_guidelines); (2) a set of
"how to's"; (3) a set of APIs generated from the actual code
(extracted through pydocs); and (4) some basic startup guides.

David Farning has spent the week cleaning up the Sugar application
programming interface (API) reference documentation at
api.sugarlabs.org. Code for the site is at
https://www.develer.com/gitweb/pub?p=users/dfarning/api.git;a=summary
and a rough draft of an API tutorial can be found in the wiki
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Tutorials/API_Documentation).
David is soliciting modules from developers to add to the build_api.sh
script, which he plans to run daily.

Faisal Anwar is writing a Sugar almanac to help new Sugar/Python
developers. He is soliciting code samples and feedback. This week, he
updated the section on how the basic activity creation tasks (Please
see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar.activity.activity). In addition,
he has written up some examples of basic datastore access. Additional
documentation can be found at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar-api-doc.

Christoph Derndorfer and the team at OLPC Austria have been working on
a handbook for activity developers
(http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook).

Meanwhile, Walter Bender is pulling together a new Getting Started
Guide based upon the one he wrote for OLPC, but that is reflective of
a variety of platforms and considers some of the new features in the
Joyride builds.

8. Read: James Simmons is working on text to speech with "Karaoke"
highlighting be a built in part of the Sugar environment (Please see
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts and download it from
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/4/44/ReadEtexts-5.xo).

9. SocialCalc: Luke Closs is seeking feedback about the
Socialcalc-xocom integration work he has done (Please see
http://github.com/lukec/socialcalc-xocom/tree/master and download it
from  http://github.com/lukec/socialcalc-xocom/tree/master%2FSocialCalcActivity-1.xo?raw=true).

10. Meta tools: David Van Assche and Martin Langhoff have been
discussing various approaches to school administration tools on the
Server Development list. Moodle, which will be bundled with the school
server by default is compatible with a number of different tools,
notably openadmin (http://richtech.ca/openadmin/). David recommends
considering using ClaSS (http://www.laex.org/class) as it is "more
targeted to just the administration of the school, attendance,
grading, reporting and general student management." Please share your
experiences with these tools.

11. Koji: Marco Pesenti Gritti, Dennis Gilmore, and Michael Stone have
been discussing how to arrange our Koji tags for the 8.2.0 release.
Assuming no serious objections, Michael will freeze the dist-olpc3 tag
in the OLPC-3 CVS branch and create dist-olpc3-{devel,testing,updates}
and dist-olpc4 tags. (OLPC-3 represents OLPC's third buildroot.
Buildroots contain the  compilers and basic system libraries necessary
to build other packages. It may be helpful to create a
dist-olpc3-devel-sugar to separate unrelated streams of development.)

* dist-olpc3-devel - the site of ongoing development (by default, your
packages will be built into this tag);
* dist-olpc3-testing - things that are ready for QA testing;
* dist-olpc3-updates - things that pass QA;
* dist-olpc4 - Fedora Rawhide tracker and buildroot experimentation
(OLPC-specific changes needed to make Rawhide-based builds).

12. Feature freeze: An update on the status of the ongoing features
can be found in the wiki
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#New_features).

13. Test plans: Michael Stone and the OLPC QA team are requesting that
each release we get in the stable build is associated with a set of
tests that they will perform to verify that things works as expected.
It is proposed that it be mandatory to have a Trac item associated
with each "news" in the git changelog and each Trac item would have a
corresponding testcase.

In parallel, we'd like to start more formal user-testing in the field
of some of the proposed Sugar feature changes. Walter had been in
discussion with the deployment teams in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru
about designating test environments. We'll likely use the new Frame
behavior as a test case for testing.

14. Developers Meeting: Simon Schampijer reports that a summary of
this week's developers meeting can be found here in the wiki
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#Thursday_June_12_2008_-_17.00_.28UTC.29).
Simon will be on a well-deserved holiday for the next two weeks; Tomeu
will be hosting the weekly meeting on irc.

=== Sugar Labs ===

15. Wiki translations: Chris Leonard has added GoogleTrans templates
to many of the pages in wiki.sugarlabs.org; while machine translation
is not yet as good as human translation, it gives a reasonable
facsimile, hence making the wiki more immediately accessible to a
broader audience.

16. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM
from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-June-07-13-som.jpg). The
discussion seems to have been focused on features ("needs") and
documentation.

-walter