[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2008-11-10

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Herramientas pedagógicas: Both Carla Gomez Monroy and María del
Pilar Sáenz have drawn attention to the efforts of Telmex to
prepare—and share—pedagogical materials for one-to-one computer and
the use of Sugar. There is a wiki overflowing with guides, manuals,
and lesson plans (See
http://www.mochiladigitaltelmex.com.mx/olpc/index.php/Herramientas_pedag%C3%B3gicas).
This is a great addition to the growing body of materials for
teachers, parents, and children. It complements materials being
prepared in Uruguay, Peru, Nepal, et al. Please link additional
materials to the growing list on the deployment page in the wiki
(http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam#Deployment_guides.2F_Sugar_manuals).
	
2. El Aula Telmex: Another public resource being sponsored by Telmex
is Classroom Telmex (http://www.aulatelmex.com). This site is not
Sugar specific, but as it grows it may too be an interesting resource
for curricular and extracurricular activities.

3. Scratch Scratch?: Bill Kerr started a discussion thread about a
change in the Scratch license (See
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-November/002414.html and
http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=76772#p76772). The
gist of the thread is that the right to modify Scratch has been
removed from the license. We eagerly await clarification the Scratch
team.

4. Making a Squeak: Meanwhile, the Squeak/Etoys team continues to
wrestle with various up-steam distribution managers regarding
inclusion "main". Squeak (which also underlies Scratch) and Etoys are
free software, but it seems that there remains some confusion up
stream regarding accessing and modifying the source of a "loose and
late binding process". I am sure we will manage to work through these
issues in order to ensure ready access to a great learning
environment.

5. SVG: Bill has written a nice tutorial on using SVG in the classroom
(See http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2008/11/inspired-by-svg.html).
Meanwhile, I've just about finished the conversion of Turtle Art to
SVG: I am hoping an SVG rebase will make it easier to maintain,
localize, and modify.


=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===


6. SugarCamp: While not all of the details are in place, we will be
holding a Sugar Camp in Cambridge the week of 17 November. We've
reserved a room at the Cambridge Innovation Center—courtesy of Open
Learning Exchange (OLE) beginning at noon (EST). The *tentative*
schedule is to hold a Sugar sprint Monday and Tuesday, followed by
lightening talks about new features beginning on Wednesday. A Sugar
planning meeting will be held at the end of the week. See
http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_proposal for details as they are
finalized.


=== Tech Talk ===

7. Network Manager: Simon Schampijer kept on working on the
integration of NM 0.7 in sugar. He finished loading and saving of the
connections, we still use the old profile format but will later
probably switch to use gconf and gnme-keyring and the WPA part. He is
preparing patches now for review and will keep on working on the open
issues like the Frame device and auto-connection to saved connections
on startup.

8. Activities: Marco Pesenti Gritti started looking into activity
startup performance. From his initial measurements, it looks as if
lazy import could make a difference as it seems that we are doing more
syncing than importing of modules at startup. Marco also suspects that
the launcher animation is slowing things down a lot.

Marco also spent time discussing (with Gary Martin, Greg
Dekoenigsberg, and Eduardo Silva) how to better handle activity
upstream releases.

9. Testing meeting: Mel Chua organized a "great" testing meeting. The
Testing Team section of the wiki is starting to come into focus.

10. LiveCD: Wolfgang Rohrmoser has made a new version of the
XO-LiveCD. You can download it from:

  ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_081106.iso

This release is based on the ext3 image of the stable 8.2 branch,
Build 767. The CD contains many activities, including all of the
"G1G1" bundle. Further information is available in the PDF document:

  ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_081106.pdf


=== Sugar Labs ===

11. Reorg: Tomeu Vizoso is now our Joyride master, while Simon
continues to lead the release team.


12. wiki.suagrlabs.org: Greg and David Farning have been making great
strides on Sugar Labs teams and the wiki. Greg had some suggestions
for better organzing the teams that have had immediate impact and
resulted in a great deal of follow-up. David has done some major
cleaning up of the wiki (as reflected in the new sidebar
organization). Hopefully it is easier to navigate, easier to find the
information you seek, and more obvious where and how to contribute.


13. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM
from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
http://sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-November-1-7-som.jpg).

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org