[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2010-05-25

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. I heard a Sugar story today from a school in Oaxaca Mexico. At a
ceremony for the governor to celebrate the laptop program a young girl
gave a speech in Spanish. At the end of her speech, she launched the
Speak activity and proceeded to have Sugar give the same speech in her
native language, one of the indigenous languages of the region.

2. Futbol: I probably shouldn't say this on a public list, but I am
not a fan of Italian Football. I prefer the "beautiful game" played in
the South.

Even in the United States we know that the FIFA World Cup is coming
soon – June 11–July 11. Gonzalo Odiard from Sugar Labs Argentina has
suggested we use it as an excuse to organize a Sugar World Cup.
Beginning with the observation that many of the open bugs on the Sugar
[bugs.sugarlabs.org] and OLPC [dev.laptop.org] Trac systems are
relatively simple (most could be resolved in just a couple of hours
effort), Gonzalo is proposing we establish country-based teams that
compete to close as many tickets as we can during the same time frame
as the football tournament. For each bug fixed, a "goal" is scored. (A
bug is considered fixed when a patch is approved on the Sugar-devel
list.) Note that, like Maradona, you are allowed to use your hands. At
the end of the tournament, after Ghana wins the FIFA cup, the Sugar
Bowl will be awarded to the team that fixed the most bugs. Not only
will we fix a lot of bugs, but we will be strengthening local
development/deployment teams.

3. Congratulations to ceibalJAM for winning honorable mention in the
international Cyberart competition (Prix Ars) at Ars Electronica.

4. Congratulations of Gerald A., who defended his thesis last week.
Gerald studied the impact of Sugar on the culture of five fifth-grade
classrooms in a NY public school.

5. John Maloney has led an effort to "Sugarize" Scratch v13 (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Scratch#Download). Notably, thanks to Bert
Freudenberg, there is now support for the Journal. (I'll have to
update my review on ASLO.) In addition, Scratch read data from the
camera and resistive sensors plugged into the microphone jack on OLPC
XO computers. A tip of the hat to Claudia Urea whose persistence kept
the effort moving forward.

6. Last summer at the Desktop Summit I was asked by Linux Magazine
Espaniol to write an article about Sugar. It appeared in their print
edition in October and is finally available on line at
http://www.linux-magazine.es/issue/54/078-083_SugarLM54.pdf (in Spanish).

===In the community===

7. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés reports that there will be a Sugar Workshop
at the National
University of Asunción. See
http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org/index.php/Curso_Sugar_FPUNA for details.

8. Claudia has been organizing IRC discussion on learning (in Spanish)
on Wednesdays at 10:00 EST (14:00 UTC) at forum.laptop.org. The
English-language learning chats organized by Joy Riach are on
Thursdays at 10:00 EST.

=== Tech talk ===

9. Mirabelle has landed. The Fedora Sugar-on-a-Stick (SoaS) team,
which includes Sebastian Dziallas, Peter Robinson, and Mel Chua, has
released a new version based on Fedora 13 and Sugar 0.88. The goal of
this release was to integrate SoaS more completely into the Fedora
"Spin" process, provide a structure for longer-term maintenance and
stability. While there are only ten Sugar activities bundled with
Mirabelle, Tom Gilliard has put together a collection of activities
that can be loaded onto a separate USB key from which they can be
installed locally. For information about further customizations,
please contact the SoaS team at soas AT sugarlabs.org.

===Sugar Labs===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list.

See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-May-15-21-som.jpg

Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about
Sugar and Sugar deployments.

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