[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-06-23

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest===

1. A dear friend and mentor, Henry Aristide “Red” Boucher
[http://community.adn.com/adn/node/141909], died yesterday at the age
of 88. Red taught me never to say never. His energy and enthusiasm
were infectious and his capacity to do the right thing was boundless.
I'll miss him.

2. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Sebastian Dziallas and the
Sugar community, Sugar Labs announces the availability of Sugar on a
Stick, codenamed "Strawberry". It features the latest version of the
Sugar desktop environment—Version 0.84—and a number of additional
activities, providing a great learning experience for new and
experienced users. For more information and instructions—how to put
SoaS on your USB key or how to deploy it—please refer to our release
notes, [[Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry|]].

===Help Wanted===

3. Lionel Laske has asked for help with the French version of the
Sugar FLOSS manual. He is happy to announce  the results of their
efforts: [http://olpc-france.org/docs/OLPC%20Guide%20de%20l'ordinateur.pdf].

4. There is a new page in the wiki, [[What could I do in an hour?]],
for collecting ideas for quick contributions. Please add your ideas.

===In the community===

5. Coming up this week: Sugar at Linuxtag [http://linuxtag.org] (24–27
June in Berlin). The marketing team has made a great banner
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/39656470@N02/3650748717/] to draw
attention to our booth.

6. Also, Sugar at FOSSED [http://www.fossed.com/] in Bethel, Maine,
24–26 June. Caroline Meeks and I will be running a three-hour Sugar
workshop for teachers.

7. And Sugar at NECC [http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2009/] in
Washington DC, 28 June–1 July. Mike Lee, Jeff Elkner and others from
the Washington DC area will be representing Sugar Labs.

8. Squeakfest [http://squeakfest.org] will be held in Los Angeles
10–12 August and in Porto Alegre 23–25 Julho (starting today!).

9. There is an on-going discussion] about setting up a program similar
to the to help facilitate more community involvement in Sugar. Sugar
"Facilitators" would:
* Represent Sugar to the wider public
* Help spread the word about Sugar
* Be a point of contact for local community members and channel the
feedback to the Sugar community
* Help recruit contributors
* Think of creative ways for promoting Sugar in your region

===Tech Talk===

10. Tomeu Vizoso has been making great progress on improving support
for Gnash/Flash based activities
[http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/05/progress-on-sugar-activities-with-swf.html]
within Sugar.

11. David Van Assche started a thread on personalization and
collaboration. The gist of the discussion is that we should be able to
enhance many of the collaboration and evaluation scenarios by
capturing and sharing information about user preferences and
activities. Please join the discussion as this could be an important
topic for Sugar 0.86.

12. A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Nexcopy had donated a USB
replicator to Sugar Labs. Caroline and I have successfully used the
replicator to make Sugar on a Stick keys—we'll be bringing the system
with us to FOSSED this week. We plan to use it at the Gardner
Elementary School this summer as well.

13. Eric Bachard reports that starting in July there will be a new
collaboration between OpenOffice.org Education Project and Epitech
Paris. Thomas Fontenay, Abdelkader Bellabes will work on a forked
version of OpenOffice.org, named OOo4Kids for performance improvement
on powerless machines, like XO or gdium.

14. Manusheel Gupta reports the release of SocialCalc 0.8.3g for the
Sugar environment. Please try SocialCalc.xo
[http://seeta.in/wiki/index.php?title=SocialCalc_on_Sugar#Downloads]
and share your feedback. Many thanks to Dan Bricklin, Luke Closs, K.S.
Preeti, Nicholas Doiron, Claudia Urrea, and Vijit Singh.

Note to developers: K.S. Preeti has compiled a manual for programmers
[http://seeta.in/wiki/index.php?title=Guide] for SocialCalc.

15. Last week, I mentioned that I had modified Mitchel Charity's Ruler
activity to look up the screen resolution so that it would render
properly on non-OLPC-XO displays. I had been parsing xdpyinfo to get
the display resolution. Tomeu recommended that I use
gtk.gdk.screen_width_mm() instead. Alas, it turns out that neither
method is returning the proper screen resolution (either from within
Sugar or otherwise) on any of the machines I have been using. Back to
square one.

===Sugar Labs===

16. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2009-June-13-19-som.jpg).


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