OSSPACK

Well, here it is. Another conference has come to a close, and it is time again to try to make sense of all the amazing things that were seen and discussed. Overall LCA was a great meet-up, although there was one big negative: there were so many good sessions to hit that it was impossible to not run into at least some scheduling conflicts. Of course the good news there is that the volunteers are working to get slides and video up for as many of the sessions that they were cleared to. One things are up, I'm sure I'll find even more to ponder.

Probably the first thing to hit is the topic I came down to speak on: Color Management. My presentation went pretty well, and I had a few people talk to me about it later (and that was despite being scheduled right next door to the Linux powered clarinet playing robot). Additionally Carl Worth introduced me to someone who has started poking around in Cairo, seeing about hooking in color management. We also got a chance to go over what's needed to get things hooked into Cairo and get some nice CMYK PDF output. The next step is to collect up some representative use cases so we can figure out exactly what the API changes will have to be supported. I'm going to be pestering the Scribus guys to see what they know of, but if anyone out there has any experience or needs of going to print, send off an email or comment so that we can be sure to cover things well.

Next up is extended input. I attended a talk by Peter Hutterer (of MPX) that went over a bit of the state of things and then the new changes that have been going in. Over the course of the conference I had ended up chatting with him a few times, and verified that I am on track with where I'm working on taking the new extended input support (good support will need to leverage D-Bus and HAL). He also had poked around for a couple of weeks with Wii remotes, but had since moved on. That actually was a fairly common story, and it seems that it's up to me to address the GUI and application levels.

And to keep things short for now, there's one last point I want to cover: technical drawing. Of people I talked to who were not using Inkscape or not using as much as they could, the most common question seemed to be with technical drawing. We could probably pick up a good usability boost and garner another user segment if we just tune up things to make technical drawing and diagramming better. Most of what we need to do is probably already well known to us. However, we could benefit from a quick review and a little refocusing. I think one person's question really summed up the viewpoint we need to use when looking into this: “So, will Inkscape let me finally move off of Xfig now?” The people we could help with that are probably using Xfig or Dia (or nothing yet) for simple charts, diagramming, home layout and the like. Perhaps focusing down on some casual use-cases like that will help us sight some low-laying fruit and get a jump up in this area.

As usual, I'll send out more info as I digest things and get them settled out in my head. In the mean time, feel free to ask about any specifics you might care about. Perhaps Peter or Andy or some of the other Inkscapers who were there might chime in also.

Many Australians and New Zealanders want to get access to an OLPC XO device, and up until recently this has been really hard! Now there are new initiatives which make gaining access to XOs and to the software they run much easier! Please check out our resources page for links about user guides, developer information, deployment information, teacher information and more.

Before outlining how you can get an XO, it is important to understand that these computers are not like normal laptops, they really are specialist collaboration devices meant for children aged 5-12 to be used in the classroom as part of their normal education process. They won’t necessarily make great gifts in isolation, because most of the value comes in collaborating and sharing with others, particularly in an educational setting. If you think an XO would be a great gift, please consider talking to the child’s school, and helping arrange a trial or deployment. If you want an XO for development or demo purposes, there are also some free options available to you.

Borrowing an XO

Loaning an XO is a great way to access the device for development, for a demo, to see whether it meets your school’s needs, or to run an event involving the XO. Today there is a small pool of laptops available with OLPC Friends’ community members, and we are in the process of setting up OLPC Library, which will automate the process of people borrowing (and loaning) XO laptops, as well as volunteers for projects, and useful resources.

You can also go along to community events to see and play with an XO (as well as catch up with other local community members). Check out the usergroup links here.

Buying an XO in Australia/NZ

If you really want to buy an XO in Australia/NZ, then you have a couple of options:

• Change the World - You can purchase laptops in minimal orders of 100 or 1000, useful for people looking at doing deployments. Laptops are USD$259 each, which includes postage and spare parts. You can easily coordinate your own orders by getting together with friends or other schools/deployments.
• Purchase Pool - OLPC Friends has a wiki page for people to add their name to a purchase pool (limited to Australian/NZ), and everytime numbers hit 100, an OLPC Friends volunteer will coordinate a purchase for the community. It will cost the normal “Change the World” USD$259 per laptop, plus an additional AUD$15 for local distribution.
• Australian G1G1 - There is an Australian G1G1 program being run by a local company called OLPC Australia. Australian G1G1 Laptops cost USD$468.95 and it pays for one laptop for you, and one for someone else. More information on their website. Update: shortly after posting this story the OLPC Australia page to their G1G1 program became password protected and they have not let us know whether the program is running or not.

Running the XO software on your normal computer

If you want to check out the software that runs on the XO, you can run it on your normal computer. You can either install Sugar (the user interface for the XO) directly on a variety of platforms including a bootable CD (information available here), or you can run the XO specific software under a virtual environment or using a LiveCD (information here).

A federal court has rejected a former student's First Amendment suit against school officials who punished her for calling them "douchebags" in a Live Journal post. Administrators are entitled to qualified immunity from suit unless they are clearly violating an established right, the court held; and the scope of student rights to online speech is a

We're pushing to get the next release of Sugar into Fedora 11, and there are a handful of Sugar activities that could really use some love. Simon has done a great job of spelling out exactly what those activities are.

The nice thing about these activities is that they really are pretty simple to package. Python, nothing fancy. An experienced packager could probably bang through a typical activity very quickly, and maintenance going forward should be pretty simple.

Sugar only has a handful of core developers, and they are working hard on Sugar itself. Continued efforts to take packagers off of their shoulders are greatly appreciated.

And a special offer to our European friends: take ownership of a Sugar package, and then come to FOSDEM and I will ply you with food and liquor and tell you stories. ;)

This article presents 50 more examples of beautiful and original 404-error-designs. Some of them look beautiful but are not user-friendly; the other ones are user-friendly, but are not really beautiful. Please use these examples as a source of inspiration - hopefully, this showcase has something for everybody.

We have been having some exciting times here in NZ. Mel Chua arrived on Monday and is here for a week, and we have had Walter Bender, sugarlabs founder here this week too. Martin Langhoff returned to New Zealand so we are looking forward to some interesting sessions in the coming weeks.

Walter Bender gave two presentations on Tuesday on sugarlabs. I learned so many things and have renewed enthusiasm for Sugar in education, and in New Zealand. At the first presentation we had a strong educator based audience. At the second presentation we had a strong programmer based audience. The presentations gave me some great new ideas and filled in a couple of gaps in my knowledge. I now see how the Tamtam suite of activities work. TurtleArt has now become a core resource for me - I have so many ideas on how to use it that I had not thought of before - from portfolio building, presenting, and skill building to etoys (Walter is now looking at an export to etoys in future TurtleArt version). The source code view in the Journal gives us lots of learning opportunities. I did not know there was a Sugar manual - now I know about it I can learn how to modify sugar (OMG there is actually a chapter devoted to modifying it, who would have thought!) and change the look to a kiwi look.

I had the pleasure of discussions with Walter and Mel over coffee too - and in a few moments we had converted the X icon in the home view to a koru - just like that we have a NZ Sugar theme. Next conversation and we have made arrangements to start the maori translation project - with the right people on board we could translate sugar in a night, then just grab activities of interest and a few hours will see them translated too.

Mel will be in attendance of this Saturday’s testing session at the Southern Cross in Wellington and has offered to show us how to build sensors for TurtleArt. I have had an offer of some solar gadget play soon too.

The developer of TurtleArt has requested us kiwis test his new TurtleArt Portfolio activity.

So, if anyone has spare time, they should come visit us! Wellington testing hot house every Saturday

One of my biggest pet peeves is this argument:

You’ve done ***************** this much “good” so you are obligated to do more (and to my benefit first). If you don’t do so the world will implode.

I especially hate it when the person making that argument benefits from that good but doesn’t think they should contribute to it.

I do however agree with this argument:

You have done ******************* this much “good” and as a result have benefited from that good on average more than others, you have an obligation to keep putting in as much as you can. I am a beneficiary of your good and will try to add to it but I may lack the ability to contribute in any meaningful way.

On the philosophical side:

Is it more moral to get paid for the above arguments’ “good”, which frees you up to do more of the “good” or to do something else for a living with results being the scope of your “good” contributions are less than they would have been?

Those questions I don’t think there is a real answer to.

And no Spot, I’m not going to suddenly quit, I just sometimes wonder why I chose to be a public free software developer when it means I have to deal with anonymous idiots or break my own moral code on censorship.

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

Just on the off chance that people read my blog but not Chris Ball's, I'll point out his recent Multipointer Remote Desktop demo. This is a key technology for improving collaboration, and I think it's relevant both to OLPC and to other little companies which might be thinking about collaboration features. Multi-pointer stuff is just a much different experience than "watching" someone else drive the display, as numerous studies (such as this one) have substantiated.

The magic of RSS just informed me that Pinot has had it's 0.90 release, fixing some of the problems with i18n and OpenSearch that I'd found in my Journal2 work, and actually implementing my tagged cd idea! Coolness. I had been thinking about Recoll recently, simply because I like its simple plug-in interface for indexing new formats, but it looks like Pinot has pulled ahead again.

Fabrice, how about importing the HTML-indexing code from Omega like Recoll does, and using the same plugin interface and filters? You'd immediately expand greatly the types of documents you can index, and make it easy for third-parties to create one ones. A plugin basically just takes the file-to-be-indexed and spits out an HTML document with the indexable text. Additional xapian fields can be specified by including appropriate <meta> tags in the output HTML. Full details are in the Recoll manual; it's a pretty straightforward scheme.

I started to take down, in Extremely-Draftlike-Alpha-Form, some notes on OLPC community from discussions during the last week. We know we're not the only people talking about this, and would love pointers to discussions on the same being held by other groups in other places, as these ideas form. Budding ideas ...