cananian

I just finished uploading, encoding, and you-tube-izing all the video from Sugarcamp sessions on Wednesday 2008-11-19. Ogg-format video in both full and small sizes is available for download at download.laptop.org, but the YouTube playlist might be the easiest way to watch:

( Video is inside the cut. )

Included so far are talks on Desktop compatibility, "What was missed", "Activities as building blocks", Discoverable gestures, the School Server, Internationalization, and Community. (These links are to the "small" Ogg-format files, reasonable for downloading.)

And this was all just one day at Sugarcamp! More to come...

Some get-motivated reading from Paul Graham on good vs bad procrastination and working in small groups.

Looking ahead to our very ambitious goals for the next Sugar/OLPC release, I think it's important to keep Richard Hamming's question in front of us:

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

We need to take individual responsibility for the things which will make our release excellent, and find ways to shut out distractions to let us get that great work done.

Sugarcamp just finished, and gosh there's a lot of stuff to do for our next release!

One unfortunate thing I noticed (alas!) only in retrospect was that frequently projects that I volunteered to work on (or had suggested) seemed to attract few other contributors. I guess "Oh, Scott's got that covered" is a nice reaction, but somehow something got lost: when I make a working prototype and/or write a complete spec, like with the Journal, networking, or "click-to-translate" (screencast coming soon!), it's because I need help. I don't want to be the only person working on these things -- I don't even need to be one of the people working on these. Please, if you think the ideas are good, pick them up and make them your own. Or just grab a piece. Where I've made prototypes, source code is available (click2trans, journal2, olpcfs1). Send me patches! Steal my projects!

One concrete request: Vino is a very nice integrated VNC server, one piece of a synchronous collaboration mechanism for Sugar. I'd love to see someone take server/vino-input.c and tweak it to map the VNC input events to a secondary mouse pointer, using MPX. Since Vino uses XDamage already (see server/vino-fb.c), another nice extension would be to have vino restrict itself to a single window (or group of windows) so we can share a specific activity/application (even if the session owner switches to a different activity or desktop).