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Moving On.

By Sebastian Dziallas on December 15, 2010 7:58 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Moving On
"Moving on" -- picture by .craig taken from Flickr, licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

The Short Version: As many of you might have noticed, my activities within Sugar Labs have been fading lately. I'd like to take the only responsible step and hand my responsibilities off.

The Long Version: I didn't expect to see myself writing this email. I'm currently a student at Olin working really hard to make it through finals and at the same time fighting RSI and dealing with other things (http://sdziallas.com/blog/sebastian/2010/11/a-kid-in-the-candy-store.html). But I also feel that I've been dragging this e-mail out way too long. I'm sorry. Nevertheless, I'm proud of what we accomplished over the past years.

I have great memories from the initial release of Sugar on a Stick at LinuxTag (http://sdziallas.com/blog/sebastian/2009/06/strawberries-for-everyone-now.html) and I still smile when I think of how we recovered from the ridiculous unsustainability of the second release (http://opensource.com/education/09/12/tasty-blueberry) and eventually even made the third release as a team together (http://sdziallas.com/blog/sebastian/2010/05/mirabelles-they-are-there.html). Looking back, I found myself skimming old wiki pages and blog posts (http://blog.melchua.com/2010/06/04/the-history-of-the-soas-mirabelle-release-learning-from-the-past/).

I'm particularly thankful for the experiences I had and the people I met. However, I feel that it's time to move on. I'll be unsubscribing from a couple of mailing lists, but I'll continue to work on bridging open source and education on various levels and I'm always open to direct email. Just a ping away. Email this address.

For Sugar on a Stick, Peter Robinson has alreading been leading the effort up to the latest Mango Lassi release of Sugar on a Stick and done an incredible work over the past year, leaving me confident that everything was taken care of when I had to focus on my studies (both in Germany and the US). I know from personal experience that taking on this work isn't an easy task and I don't want to assume that you're just going to continue doing it infinitely. It is your call. But you've done a great job. Thanks, Peter!

Good luck Sugar Labs. You've come a long way. Don't lose track of your mission.

Dear Intarwebz: Can Haz Teh Data?

By Sebastian Dziallas on September 12, 2010 6:23 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
So, as some of you my know, I'm as a couple of days ago a freshman at Olin College in Boston. One of the classes I'm taking there is called Modelling and Control of the Physical World, or ModSim for short. It's a great class. Actually, the professor who wrote Think Python, an open source text book on learning Python, is teaching it.

We've just been given our first project. As part of that, we're working in teams of two. My project concerns the development of primary education in developing countries (there's a project description out here, look at the first case). 

We've already been looking at the Education Policy and Data Center's website; however, I was hoping to find further data. We are looking at a variety of countries right now, as we're writing our own project description. Notable examples include Nepal and Pakistan.

We are looking for data that would help us model "the demographics of primary education in developing countries, and the challenges associated with achieving universal primary education by 2015." So statistics on schooling numbers, population and age ranges, drop out and graduation rates, ratio of funds spent on education, pupil/teacher ratio and that sort of thing would be very helpful.

Note that this is a little time-sensitive. We don't have to finish our project until October, but we have close interim deadlines coming up - so if somebody runs into some data over the weekend, this would be greatly appreciated!

Also let me know how you would like to be cited in my project so that I can properly credit and thank you for helping me find data!

A whole bunch of Sugar Activity Updates is coming...

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 31, 2010 1:20 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
...to an F13 installation near you. Soon. We need a little feedback from you, though. Specifically for the following ativities.

Since they haven't been pushed to the testing repository, yet, you can grab the builds from Koji (the links are on each update's page) or wait a few days and then run yum --enablerepo=updates-testing sugar-*. We're particularily interested whether #1900 is fixed for you with the latest Read update and whether the other activities still perform as they should.

Summer of Code: Moar Newz.

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 27, 2010 1:16 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I've been a little calm in terms of blogging about GSoC lately, since I'm getting ready for my move to the US. There are a couple of things I've been working on lately after pushing the sugar-smolt code upstream, though.

  • One of the major obstacles for the user in terms of creating Sugar on a Stick - and we have received reports about this - is that the instructions are either outdated or confused and the interfaces very wildly between different platforms and distributions. We've started addressing the first by working on a Creation Kit for SoaS v3. This doesn't mean all is shiny now, but we're getting there. We've recommended Fedora's LiveUSB Creator over the past release cycles when possible and would to continue to build on that. Hence, I've been trying to make it easier for users of other distributions to use the LiveUSB Creator. While I haven't had much success, yet, this is something I'd like to keep an eye on.
  • I've been working with Peter Robinson on getting Sugar into EPEL. We've gotten a large chunk of packages built already in the appropriate branch. Watch out for announcements coming your way.
  • Lucian, who's also doing a GSoC at Sugar Labs and working on porting Browse to Webkit (the result being Surf), has fixed one of the major regressions that affected SoaS v3. The Read activity didn't work due to upstream changes in evince's python bindings (#1900). However, thanks to this work, I've been able to take a new activity bundle, package it, and push it as an update to F13. It's currently in testing, so if you do get a minute, please comment on the update.

Sugar Smolt is now in... Smolt!

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 10, 2010 6:00 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I've been working on a Sugar GUI for Smolt as part of my GSoC. Thanks to Mike McGrath, this code is now part of smolt's next branch in GIT. I'm pretty well on schedule with that, given that next week, midterms are happening. You can either check the code out yourself already or wait for a new release coming out. We're also looking forward to including this code in the next iteration of Sugar on a Stick, where it'll help users to submit their hardware profiles more easily.

Thank you, folks.

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 4, 2010 12:35 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
I'm going to Olin. It's the place I want to go to. I didn't imagine this to happen, but apparently, sometimes everything in the universe aligns and a lot of magic happens.

A close friend of mine once said, that sometimes, no matter how many more words one strings together, one can't get any closer to the true sentiment. He's right. So thank you, folks, for being there and making this happen. This is totally awesome.

Summer of Code: Sugar Smolt!

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 27, 2010 9:45 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I mentioned earlier that I was working on integrating Smolt into Sugar. That's still the case. However, there's now a repository and a ticket for that. And there's a real screenshot. Yez. Rly!

Sugar Smolt

LinuxTag: Recap!

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 20, 2010 10:57 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
Looks like I'm a little late at catching up with my backlog. Oh well.

I attended LinuxTag earlier this June (thanks Simon for hosting me!) and had the chance to meet and catch up with a lot of folks I hadn't seen in a while. Sugar Labs also had a booth there and it was really good to see people (especially kids) playing with Sugar. Most popular activities included Maze, Physics and Speak. However, also Walter's new Abacus activity quickly gained interest.

Sugar Labs BalloonsI also learned that waking up three hours late (when having a talk scheduled in the morning) is probably not the best of all ideas -- probably unless you ask the cab driver. Got there in time, though and gave my talk on Leveraging Communities.

Sugar Labs also announced Sugar on a Stick v.3 (Mirabelle) widely at LinuxTag. Shameless plug goes here. Was a good time.

LinuxCon: Education Summit

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 8, 2010 7:53 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
LinuxCon is happening later this year in August in Boston. We're going to run to an education mini-summit there on August 9. Are you interested in the latest updates on what Teaching Open Source, Sugar Labs and others are doing and would like to meet the people behind the projects in person or just get involved? Drop by and wave!

All interested people, especially those who're from the education sector but new to open source, are welcome: go ahead and add yourself to the wiki! (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/LinuxCon_2010_Participants)

More details and the scope of the summit live here. We're also still looking for speakers! If you're interested in presenting a project or idea of yours, please email us! The main wiki page (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/LinuxCon_2010) has more information on that.

Looking forward to seeing you in Boston!

Sugar and EL-6: It Is Real.

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 5, 2010 3:52 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
As you may know, Sugar runs on the RHEL 6 Beta. I went ahead and did an actual compose using Smock together with an updated config file for EPEL-6. The results live here and it should be possible to use them directly as a yum repo:

It's also worth noting that work is going on to make this actually happen in EPEL (kudos to Peter Robinson and others too).
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