Planet OLPH

In Boston, March 16th-23rd

2010-03-08T19:49:51+00:00

I just got my tickets to come from Seattle to the FSF's LibrePlanet conference in Boston.

I'll be in town from the evening of the 16th till the morning of the 23rd.

Let me know if you'll be around and want to get together. And please make sure it's warm by the time I get there -- I don't even know where my heavy coat is anymore.

World Intellectual Property Day

2010-03-06T09:39:19+00:00

The themes here seem very...uncreative.

World Intellectual Property Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apparently, being on April 26th, it shares the esteemed company of Confederate Memorial Day.

Seattle's Turnpike Pizza has Daiya

2010-03-05T18:02:00+00:00

Turnpike pizza in Seattle has Daiya vegan cheese, even though it doesn't seem to say so on their (very minimalist) online menu. I ordered the veggie combo from there yesterday (delivery!), and was pleased. It's not as good as Pizza Pi, but then Pizza Pi is more expensive and doesn't deliver, so there's plenty of room for both in my life.

Hello Planet GNOME

2010-03-05T03:45:21+00:00

As a new poster on Planet GNOME I suppose presentations are in order: my main contributions to GNOME are to try to grow the Asian community and I do this by taking part in the GNOME.Asia Summit organization since its inception in 2008 in Beijing. Last year I actually even gave some talks at the Vietnamese chapter in Ho Chi Minh. Together with my friend Emily Chen we also started a GNOME User Group in Beijing after the first Summit end of 2008 and we do a lot of advocacy to get young Chinese students to take over some Gnome projects.

We’re actually in the middle of the call for host for the 2010 edition and you can find my post about the topic right here. So if anyone in Asia is interested to take up the challenge and be the lead organizer of a great Open Source technical conference showcasing GNOME technologies this is the chance. Note that the whole GNOME.Asia Summit committee will be behind you and we’re now strong of two successful years experience. So please do help spread the word.

I am also part of the localization team of a few GNOME projects especially the educational ones like GComrpis and Rur-ple. I spent a lot of time building a total FOSS solution for schools that included the OS with different educational apps for teaching and learning, tutorials for teachers, training and textbook for students. Of course we use a lot of GNOME and GNOME apps in the solution.

And when not doing GNOME things, I actually also happen to be the President of the (famous!) Beijing LUG (should you be in town please do contact me), on the board of Software Freedom International and very much involved with women in technology and students open source groups.

I hope that by now you have a better idea of who I am and should you have any idea on how to strengthen the Asian GNOME community please do get in touch. Also feel free to browse my previous post to get a better idea of the other things I’m involved with.

View from the window at the end of my hall

2010-03-02T01:06:06+00:00

It's nice to live in a place where I get to see mountains again. They are particulaly clear today, even though the pictures aren't.

Gandi giving away free as in beer domains

2010-02-26T17:48:05+00:00

I don't buy a ton of domains, but when I do, I get them from Gandi. I support them primarily because they use and contribute to free as in freedom software. Also, even though they are more expensive than other registrars, they are generally not jerks and tend to not treat their customers like garbage.

To celebrate their 10th birthday, they are giving away domains via promotion codes distributed to their current customers. So if you have a Gandi domain, you can sign up to receive your code(s). The number of codes you get depends on how long you've been a customer -- I've only been with them since 2004 so I get 5 codes; people who have been with them since 2003 or before get 10.

They don't actually give them out until March 1st. If I have extras to give, I'll say something about it here.

Showing HTML mail in Gnus

2010-02-26T17:24:14+00:00

Today I added (add-to-list 'gnus-buttonized-mime-types "multipart/alternative") to my Gnus configuration. The effect of this is to put a nice button at the top of each message I can click to view any HTML part, while keeping the default as plain text. I don't often directly read or write HTML mail, but at work I do sometimes need to proofread HTML mails.

»y*kx,µç§O yªí°ú0z·o"Ú²×æ

2010-02-24T18:55:16+00:00

I've done this manually more than a few times. Nice to have a better tool for it.

Dirpy - YouTube to Mp3 Converter

I also wrote to them to ask that they release their source code, perhaps under the GNU AGPL, and that they offer Ogg Vorbis as the converted format.

Encouraging FLOSS gets you blacklisted by the USTR?

2010-02-23T07:24:48+00:00

This is really something -- arguing that countries whose governments have pro-FLOSS policies should go on the USTR's Special 301 list because such policies are bad for the software industry and its intellectual property.

Yes, the same "property" that exists only by virtue of artificial government subsidy via temporary monopolies granted through patents and copyright.

But don't you dare give a "subsidy" for a different model of software development; certainly not one that is pro-sharing, obviating the need for these ridiculous bureaucratic processes, and is actually consistent with democratic ideals, public interest, and government autonomy.

Oh, and right, FLOSS doesn't do anything for the software industry -- that's why nearly every (perhaps every) electronic thing that people have been excited about in the last 10+ years is built on a core of free software -- TiVo, your television, the Kindle, the iPad/iPhone/iEtc, Android phones, netbooks, this company called Google, this thing called Firefox, this web site called Wikipedia, this operating system called GNU/Linux. Not like whatever makes certain people the most money should determine international policy anyway, but you get my point -- leaving aside the obvious contributions of FLOSS, even things which appear proprietary depend on or were bootstrapped by FLOSS.

Countries with pro-FLOSS public policy should go on an honor roll, not a bully hit list.

Encouraging open source could land you in trouble « TechnoLlama

As an antidote, you might like to read the FSF's comment, which I helped a bit with, and also the one submitted by EFF and Public Knowledge.

Update 2010-02-26: A recent article in the Guardian about this has been getting a lot of attention.

Ubuntu’s netbook-launcher-efl on the Gdium

2010-02-20T03:14:43+00:00

As some of you are probably already aware of, Ubuntu’s next release will feature an enlightenment based release of its netbook desktop. Initially, this was targeted for ARM devices that were not able to perform 3D acceleration and therefore run the “classic” version of the netbook desktop.
The code is available on launchpad and after building the enlightenment related dependencies (libeina, evas, ecore, eet, edje, elementary), it builds successfully on the latest Mandriva release on the Gdium, see (screenshot is clickable):

Unfortunately, the alternative theme is not working properly, it seems that moving elements are not drawn properly for the moment, I’ll have to check that into more details and see if I can find out what’s going wrong. I will also see if I can replace default icons with the icon set that is used on Mandriva’s iDesk configuration but that’s an encouraging start

Last but not least, because we are having issues with our ICP registration at greenboard.org.cn, this blog is now hosted by Fred along with a temporary mirror for Greenboard. Thanks!

OOo4kids provided as .deb archives

2010-02-17T07:52:37+00:00

Yesterday, I finally figured out what was wrong with the upstream packaging, and the .deb we build install fine and can be deinstalled fine too. Just follow the instructions

The problem is, the upstream way of .deb is not the right one, and Jose Luis Redrejo who kindly helped me, suggested to return to the right Debian way.

One big issue, e.g., is that if you want to install Writer only, this is unclear with the current dependencies scheme, and needs to be seriously improved. Other issue, is there are not "Section" and "Priority" sections in the existing control file.

So, this must be changed, and we agreed to use the upstream way until 1.0 output, and then change for the real Debianization just after 1.0 is out (current milestone in progress is 0.9)

Experimental packages can be provided on demand. Either ask us the info by email, or (better) ask on IRC.

Last but not least : .rpm will follow soon if we find a volunteer.

Channel : #education.openoffice.org
Server : irc.freenode.net

See you

OOo4Kids 0.8

2010-02-15T07:14:56+00:00

The current version of OOo4Kids is 0.8

If you want to help us, to find resource and contribute back to improve OpenOffice.org, via the OpenOffice.org Education Project, donations are welcome at this URL

OOo4Kids is made for Educational purpose, has been thought to work with students, making them discover OpenOfice.org source code, without constraints, but just code, and having Fun.
The promise is, when the code is good enough, it is proposed for integration into OpenOffice.org.

OOo4Kids is a 7-12 years children Office suite,
based on OpenOffice.org source code.
This means OpenOffice.org has some features OOo4Kids has not(like Base and Java). And if you need those features, please use OpenOffice.org, that you can download at : download OpenOffice.org

Please do not forget that the software is provided as it, and that you will use it at your own risks. Do not forget to do a backup either.

The latest essential changes since 0.6 are

- New Start center (new design by Ben Bois)
- Ooo4Kids is now based on OOO320_m11 OpenOffice.org source code (m12 for trunk)
- default user interface scale is now 115% by default (better adaptated for children)
- modified toolbar with 3 new buttons added (Writer, expert mode)

The latest biggest bugfixes since 0.6 are :

- several crashes when launching Ooo4Kids in command line are fixed
- Windows : directly launch any application is now supported (no more crash)
- Fixed the crash, when clicking on the icon, while OOo4Kids is already launched
- mismatch with color/security tabs in preferences issue is fixed
- Mac OS X : the new Apple remote (metallic, 2009 model) works

For further information, please read the changelog

Last but not least, don't forget that we propose a portable version for Windows

Reminder : Education Project objectives and Mission

2010-02-14T17:01:27+00:00

Just back from holidays, I thought it could be a good idea to make a point about what is Education Project, as reminder, and to avoid confusion with what we can read sometimes ...

Back to the point: the objectives of the Education Projects are extremely precise, and well defined on the OpenOffice.org wiki. This is written since at least two years, means since I'm Education Project Lead ...

Let's verify ... reading the OpenOffice.org Wiki page : The Education Project aims to create a bridge between Educational World and OpenOffice.org Project

More precisely, the OpenOffice.org Education Project mission is explained there : Education Project Mission

Shortly, our Mission in 3 points :

- Provide a place for OpenOffice.org users, in Education context: discuss about adapt OpenOffice.org to your pedagogy, your needs ..etc (all levels of Education are concerned )

- Provide and promote tools adapted to pedagogical use, around OpenOffice.org

- Write code together : we can teach you everything about OpenOffice.org code and how add your: just go ahead

Any help is welcome, and Alexandro Colorado (Education Project Co-Lead) and me, will be glad to welcome you :)

As conclusion : please do not trust everything people wrote about the Education Project, and if you have some doubts, feel free to ask me directly ;-) (e.g. join #education.openoffice.org on irc.freenode.net server if you want to discuss with me directly)

NetHack (console) port for Nokia N900

2010-02-05T07:41:34+00:00

I've made a simple start at porting Debian's NetHack packages to Maemo 5 for the Nokia N900. For now there is just the console interface. It and the nethack-common package are now available in the extras-devel repository.

http://maemo.org/packages/view/nethack-common/

http://maemo.org/packages/view/nethack-console/

The packages are "optified" so they don't occupy space on the root partition.

Note that right now the default shell does not include /usr/games in $PATH, so you'll need to either add that or just start it with /usr/games/nethack.

Bugs can be filed and files downloaded at the Garage project page.

OOo4Kids et OpenOffice.org Education invités aux JD2L 2010 de Beauvais

2010-02-03T13:06:00+00:00

Merci à Marc Hépiègne, et à Oisux de nous avoir invités aux aux JD2L 2010

En plus, ça tombe bien, car j'aurai plein de choses à montrer avec la nouvelle version 0.8 d' OOo4Kids sortie hier :-)

Le programme devrait être le suivant (sauf changement ) :

PLANNING

CONFERENCES (Salle Agnès Varda)
VENDREDI 26/02
18h00 cérémonie d'ouverture (avec trublion)
18h15 Scratch (présentation puis atelier à la salle de réunion)
18h30 Joomla (présentation puis atelier à la salle du Bar)
18h45 Scribus (présentation puis atelier à la salle du Labo)
19h00 Synapse-Picardie (présentation puis échange avec la salle)
19h30 Intervention des organisations APRIL, LDH, FDN, AFUL
(présentations puis échange avec la salle)

20h00 Restauration légère

Soirée projection/débat sur les Libertés Numériques
20h30 Court-métrages
21h15 Intervention de Jean-Claude Vitran (LDH)
21h45 Débats dans la salle
22h30 Poursuite des échanges autour d'une boisson chaude ou froide et
d'un en-cas


SAMEDI 27/02
10h00 ouverture de la journée
10h01 April
10h15 Scratch (puis atelier à la salle de réunion - 11h00-12h00)
10h30 OOo4kids
10h45 U-Ludix (Oisux)
11h00 Abulédu
11h15 Accessibilité (ASH)
11h30 Wikipedia
11h45 Accessibilité (APRIL)
12h00 Créations Numériques du Labo
12h15 Système d'exploitation Haïku (Oisux)

12h30 Restauration légère

14h00 April
14h20 Scratch (puis atelier à la salle de réunion - 15H00-16h00)
14h40 OOo4kids
15h00 U-Ludix (Oisux)
15h20 Abulédu
15h40 Accessibilité (ASH)
16h00 Wikipedia
16h20 Accessibilité (APRIL)
16h40 Système d'exploitation Haïku (Oisux)
17h00 Créations Numériques du Labo


ATELIERS (sur inscription)
Joomla : vendredi 19h00, samedi 10h00 et 14h00
Scratch : vendredi 19h00, samedi 11h00 et 15h00
Scribus : vendredi 19h00, samedi 12h00 et 16h00

LINUX-PARTY
toute la journée du samedi

STANDS
April
Abulédu
OOo4kids
Groupe Accessibilité de l'APRIL
Wikipedia
Oisux/U-Ludix/Haïku

=> le programme complet

À bientôt !!

--
ericb

Basic rules for FOSS Localization

2010-02-02T03:03:43+00:00

I have been spending some time reviewing a few FOSS educational software translations over the last months. Localization is a commitment if you want to do a good job; badly localized software leads to poor experience (people simply won’t use the software) and gives the wrong message that FOSS applications are just bad software. So if you thought localization was just pure translation, then you need to think again! Hopefully my experience will help more people to start a localization effort well prepared and be proud of the work they did.

Cultural adaptation and knowing who that software was written for are paramount in the process. I’ve put up a few rules together hoping it will help newcomers, if I missed anything please feel free to add yours in the comment section!

Know your audience (the people using the software) and pick words that they can easily understand
Have some knowledge in software terminology (if not, web search is your buddy)
Be familiar with the software (try it out before translating it and don’t hesitate to use that software when you are doing the translation)
Be more than fluent in the target language and good enough in the original language (not the other way round)
Don’t be afraid to change the meaning in order to fit cultural differences (e.g. for Rur-ple, we picked a meaningful Chinese robot name rather than doing a phonetic conversion: names must have meaning in Chinese for people and more specifically children to remember)
Use the same terms across the whole software (either by proof reading or with the help of localization tools like Poedit and OmegaT)
Have someone good enough in both languages to review your work and hopefully familiar with the software (he needs to use the software not just read the text)
Fixes, typo corrections and improvements from the source language need to be fed back to the original project in order to help improve the overall quality of the software and all its translation
Keep track of changes and reasons behind so that can be useful for other languages
Have the passion and the time to commit to do a good work

Blogging on ZDNet Asia

2010-02-02T02:05:23+00:00

Following the steps of Michael and Peter I’ve just started to blog on ZDNet Asia yesterday. My writings there will be a lot more “journalistic” than my random stories over here and covering Linux and Open Source in China, and not what I personally get involved with. Most likely I will also add the feed to the BLUG Planet but only once I’m done writing a feed filter that removes the add in the default feed. If there are any specific topic that you would like to be covered just leave a comment at either place.

The Pulse Cafe

2010-02-01T19:18:07+00:00

I'm sorry I won't be in Boston/Somerville for the opening of this new vegan cafe. I went to its predecessor (Vej Naturals in Malden), and it was tasty. I'll be checking it out when I'm in town in March.

The Pulse Cafe

L'évolution du Centre de démarrage d'OOo4Kids

2010-02-01T11:57:00+00:00

En préparant la future 0.8 (qui sortira très bientôt), j'ai eu l'idée de regarder les vieilles copies d'écran de ce qu'on voit en premier quand on lance OOo4Kids, à savoir le Start Center ...

Regardez un peu ce que Ben Bois (toujours lui :) en a fait !! => La vidéo est là !

OOo4Kids 0.8 : new Star Center

2010-01-28T17:55:01+00:00

One more time, thanks to Ben Bois who created a new great background for the future version (0.8) of OOo4Kids :

The shapes of the buttons are no longer apparent, and when you roll over one of them, a help balloon explains you which application will open. Of course, things are not perfect, and we still have some bugs to fix, but this is very promising !! (and my children love it ;-)

More information about the recent changes

IMPORTANT : the version proposed for download (0.6) below does NOT have the feature yet. The new splashscreen should be integrated in the version : 0.8, not before.

=> Download.ooo4Kids.org website

If you want to help us, to find resource and contribute back to improve OpenOffice.org, via the OpenOffice.org Education Project, donations are welcome

OOo4Kids is made for Educational purpose, has been thought to work with students, making them discover OpenOffice.org source code, without constraints, but just code, and having Fun.
The promise is, when the code is good enough, it will be proposed for integration into OpenOffice.org.

OOo4Kids is a 7-12 years children Office suite, based on OpenOffice.org ( http://www.openoffice.org ) source code. This means OpenOffice.org has some features OOo4Kids has not (like Base and Java). And if you need those features, please use OpenOffice.org, that you can download at : Download OpenOffice.org. Please do not forget that the software is provided as it, and that you will use it at your own risks. Do not forget to do a backup either.

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki

EducOO.org blog (french)

Many thanks to Ben Bois , author of the EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...

GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 – Call for Host

2010-01-27T08:05:58+00:00

As part of the GNOME.Asia Summit Committee, I would like to post the Call for Host of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 here and let all the communities in Asia know that we are looking for potential host this year. Please find below the announcement and don’t hesitate to pass the message along!

Dear GNOME friends,

We are call for the host of GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 now !

GNOME.Asia Summit is the yearly GNOME Users and Developers Asian Conference. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, and also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technology and future developments.

GNOME.Asia Summit was held in Beijing, China during 2008 and in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam during 2009. We would like to continue finding new national locations as we spread GNOME throughout Asia, and we are looking for local organizers to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed to the planning and delivery of the event.

You can learn more about GNOME.Asia Summit at our official website: http://gnome.asia

The following two links are “must read items” for organizing the GNOME.Asia Summit:

If you are interested in hosting the summit please submit a formal proposal to the GNOME.Asia Committee at asia-summit-list [at] gnome.org. The deadline for proposals is 31st March 2010. You are encouraged to ask questions before writing the formal proposal.

GNOME.Asia is much like a few trees just planted and we want to grow a forest in Asia. We are looking for local organizers in any Asian country with the desire to take on and succeed in the challenges of organizing an excellent GNOME event. We know that you will need all the time you can get to prepare a proposal but we hope we have inspired you to get started.

We are looking forward to hear from you on or before 31st March 2010.

Sincerely,

GNOME.Asia Summit committee

New phone number

2010-01-26T02:34:02+00:00

Some of you might have received a SMS from me this morning, I have switched mobile provider and therefore have a new number. I’ll keep the old one for another month during the transition period. Why did I switch? Well the main reason is that I am getting about 10 to 20 SMS and 1-3 MMS spam a day with China Mobile. Being a “Diamond member” (the highest membership level at China Mobile) I did call them a week ago to ask to solve the problem (there are many many technical solutions they could implement) but the only two things they could tell me is that they got an award for fighting spam (???) and that I should install a software on my phone to do that. Note that I started to get spam from day one with them. I suspect their staff are just selling customer data for a few bucks. I still told the customer representative I gave them a week to address the issue or else I would switch carrier. Nothing has happened, so here I come China Unicom. On top of not getting spam (at least at the beginning) I’ll get the pleasure to enjoy 3G on my phone (as China Mobile only supports the Chinese 3G standard on overpriced handsets made only for the Chinese market) and flat rate calling all over China.

I won’t post my new number here, but for those of you who know me, do not hesitate to either send me an sms or drop me an email to get the new number.

Come to anti-DRM event in SF on Wednesday 8:30am at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

2010-01-25T21:52:45+00:00

I'll be in San Francisco this Wednesday morning for the Defective By Design anti-DRM protest at Apple's launch event. We'll be out having fun handing out flyers, doing a little theater of our own, and talking to the media and people walking by about the danger DRM poses to the public's freedom and the history of Apple's support for it. We'll be focusing especially on the App Store model used on the iPhone (and possibly used on the tablet to be announced on Wednesday), which prevents users from installing any software from anywhere else.

We're starting at 8:30am (that's not our fault -- Apple is starting at 10am so people will be arriving by 9am I'm sure) outside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. A perfect time for stopping by on the way to work :).

Here's the full background info.

If you can come out and support the effort, please let me know at info@defectivebydesign.org.

We'll be meeting up outside the Theater entrance. Stay tuned to http://identi.ca/dbd for updates. Hope to see you there, and bring some friends!

UNSW Advanced OS about L4

2010-01-22T08:18:05+00:00

For someone who is interested in OS and micro-kernel especially L4.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

Part 7:

Part 8:

Emacs installed on the N900

2010-01-22T07:29:20+00:00

I finally got around to installing GNU Emacs on my Nokia N900.

The instructions and package there worked for me. I did not find it necessary to do the maximization fix -- after turning off the tool bar, the minibuffer was visible for me.

Remapping the keyboard using the file provided does seem to cause some problems. The function key is no longer sticky, so I have to hold it down along with the letter key to get a number. That's not so possible when trying to type the number 1. Will have to look into that.

Now, to get Planner mode working well on it.

And yes, I will be trying out reading my mail using Gnus on it.

Scénari présente OptimOffice

2010-01-20T15:14:00+00:00

Ci-dessous, l'annonce de la sortie d'OptimOffice, par l'équipe de Scénari.

".. Bonjour,

L'équipe Scenari est heureuse de vous annoncer la sortie de la version 1 d'OptimOffice, la chaîne éditoriale généraliste qui permet de rédiger et publier les documents sous forme de site web, de diaporama ou de papier (rapport, dossier, note, etc.) : les avantages d'une chaîne éditoriale pour les usages bureautiques !

Vous pouvez télécharger Optim à cette adresse : http://scenari-platform.org/projects/optim/fr/pres/co/ (la documentation se trouve sur la même page).

OptimOffice tire parti des derniers développements de SCENARIchain 3.7, et de nombreuses améliorations de l'éditeur.

Scenari 3.7, version préqualifiée, se trouve ici : http://scenari-platform.org/projects/scenari/fr/download/co/test.html

Enfin, OptimOffice est le premier modèle à pouvoir être utilisé avec SCENARIstyler, le nouvel outil de stylage graphique qui s'installe comme un atelier de SCENARIchain, pour personnaliser les publications Optim (à télécharger sur la page d'Optim). SCENARIstyler, c'est une nouvelle manière de créer et déployer vos identités visuelles, sans entrer dans la complexité de SCENARIbuilder.

Au fur et à mesure de la migration des modèles sur Scenari 3.7, SCENARIstyler pourra être utilisé sur tous les modèles SCENARI.

C'est à vous !

L'équipe Scenari ... "

Bravo à l'équipe Scénari pour son travail !

2010 starting full speed

2010-01-20T14:07:42+00:00

I hope everybody had a great time over Christmas and the new year festivities. It’s not really my preferred time of the year for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean other people can’t enjoy ! So I have been focusing my time and energy on Open Source stuff, namely RUR-PLE, some GNOME.Asia related stuff, Greenboard of course, our pilots in migrant schools and Software Freedom Day planning for 2010.
On top of those activities I will start blogging for ZDNet Asia about Linux and Open Source in China, most likely organize the Beijing chapter of the Global Ignite Week with O’Reilly and the cool guys from the Beijing LUG, while trying to get a Hackerspace started in Beijing with a few other enthusiasts from various communities (but mainly from the BLUG though for now).
And finally I am happily providing hosting space for two open source projects, the Phnom Penh LUG, a growing Linux community in Cambodia, and moonOS, a lightweight Ubuntu based distribution (using Enlightenment) started by a cool Cambodian guy with whom I chat almost daily nowadays as we’re working on other open source stuff together. I’ll probably come back to all of those but for sure it’s more than enough to keep me away from writing here…

La création du design d'OOo4Kids a enfin sa propre machine.

2010-01-17T13:41:00+00:00

Grâce aux dons de Eric Bachard et de la société www.TuxServices.com, l'association www.educoo.org a pu offrir à Ben Bois notre designer d'Ooo4Kids, un MacBook Pro, afin qu'il puisse poursuivre ses travaux de création graphique et d'amélioration d'OOo4Kids... en laissant un peu se reposer son PC personnel :-)

Welcome to new students joining the OpenOffice.org Education Project

2010-01-11T12:28:01+00:00

Morgan Magnin just advertised me today : two students from Ecole Centrale Nantes(aka ECN) will continue the effort this semester (january to june 2010) :-)

Welcome to Cyril le Mat and Arthur Bonnet!

It is planned to continue to improve the HP Tablet PC use with Impress.

The great news, is that this new project will start the third year of cooperation between OpenOffice.org Education Project and ECN.

Links: see the blog entry about the previous project just finished and screenshots about "Tablet PC and OpenOffice.org (french, sorry).

Are you student in computing, and want to learn code (mostly C++), fight with well defined and mentored projects ? or simply contribute to OpenOffice.org, instead of doing dumb internal projects ? Just find a teacher, as correspondant, and join the OpenOffice.org Education Project :-)

Contact : IRC
Channel : #education.openoffice.org
Server : irc.freenode.net

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki

EducOO.org blog (french)

OOo4Kids Project

Many thanks to Ben Bois , author of the EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...

EducOOo reversing money to the OpenOffice.org Project

2010-01-03T09:16:28+00:00

The EducOOo non profit association is not really rich ( see : the Donations Thermometer for example ), but after I proposed the idea to the EducOOo Administration Council,it has been accepted.

The exact level is being discussed, and can be revised, but it should be between 10% and 15% of the money we receive (donations or partners).

As example : imagine we receive 3000 euros from some partner, or as donation : 450 euros will be directly reserved for direct help, like fund a developer (student prefered, but other cases will be studied) who cannot attend an event, or participate to buy hardware or whatever other action.

Work in progress. Stay tuned.

Renouvellement de la pétition contre les brevets sur les logiciels

2010-01-03T08:28:00+00:00

La pétition contre les brevets logiciels, n'est plus valide, et la collecte des signatures a recommencé. J'ai évidemment resigné (à titre personnel), avec autant de détermination que la fois précédente : NON aux brevets sur les logiciels.

Si vous aussi vous souhaitez signer, c'est là :

Création du journal des TICE ( association APTICE )

2010-01-01T18:41:00+00:00

Avec un peu de retard (mais il n'est jamais trop tard pour bien faire), je fais suivre le message que nous a fait parvenir Bastien Guerry. C'est vraiment une super idée ce journal des TICE (je trouve que ça manquait en fait).

Evidemment, nous souhaitons tous nos meilleurs voeux à ce Journal des TICE, ainsi qu'à l'association APTICE Voici le message :

l'association APTICE est heureuse de vous annoncer le lancement du journal des TICE

Ce journal en ligne couvre l'actualité des technologies de l'information et de la communication pour l'enseignement, en France et dans le monde.

Notre objectif est de rendre compte des usages en allant à la rencontre des enseignants, de suivre de près l'évolution des politiques éducatives concernant les TICE, de mettre en avant certaines ressources numériques et certaines technologies particulières, de comprendre les enjeux autour des « jeux sérieux » et de mettre l'actualité francophone en regard de l'actualité des TICE à l'international. Voici nos rubriques :

 * Témoignages
 * Politique Éducative
 * Ressources numériques
 * Technologies
 * Jeux-sérieux
 * International

Pour rester informé, vous pouvez vous inscrire à notre lettre d'information mensuelle

Vous pouvez aussi vous abonner à notre fil RSS.

Pour tout savoir sur le journal des TICE: voir à propos

Si vous avez la moindre question, n'hésitez pas à nous écrire :

 Bastien Guerry <contact@journaldestice.org>

Nous espérons que ce journal suscitera votre intérêt et qu'il permettra à l'association APTICE de nouer un dialogue avec l'ensemble des acteurs aujourd'hui impliqués dans la pratique et l'expérimentation des TICE.

À bientôt !

OOo4Kids 0.6 and Happy New Year !!

2009-12-31T12:12:56+00:00

For the new year, EducOOo and the OpenOffice.org Education Project are proud to announce OOo4Kids 0.6 is out, and can be downloaded at :

=> Download.ooo4Kids.org website

If you want to help us, to find resource and contribute back to improve OpenOffice.org, via the OpenOffice.org Education Project, donations are welcome

OOo4Kids is made for Educational purpose, has been thought to work with students, making them discover OpenOfice.org source code, without constraints, but just code, and having Fun.
The promise is, when the code is good enough, it will be proposed for integration into OpenOffice.org.

OOo4Kids is a 7-12 years children Office suite, based on OpenOffice.org ( http://www.openoffice.org ) source code. This means OpenOffice.org has some features OOo4Kids has not (like Base and Java). And if you need those features, please use OpenOffice.org, that you can download at : Download OpenOffice.org. Please do not forget that the software is provided as it, and that you will use it at your own risks. Do not forget to do a backup either.

The latest changes since 0.5.1 are:

* (experimental) Portable OOo4Kids for Windows the following locales are provided :
- en-US, fr, de, es, nl, it, pt
- zh-CN is provided too - thanks to Julien Forgeat for the translation - but not tested (can be unusable)
Please use them with caution, and report us any bug you found.

* New layout ( thanks to Ben Bois for the icons, and Vincent Ruffiot for the screenshot) :
- fixed the white effect on right
- fixed the look

* New toolbars behavior : now, the toolbars content depend on the
User's Level ( can be changed in the prefs).
See : Toolbars and User Level for
further information.

* New locales are provided :
- Italian,
- Chinese (simplified),
- Dutch
(previous existing locales : English-US, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish)

* New XO port : OOo4Kids has been "Sugarized", means it does respect Sugar tree, and the .xo archive installs like any other activity.

* More OOo4Kids icons

* Linux : .deb and .rpm buildable (yet some bugs)
* Linux : language packs buildable (will be used for XO port)

* Experimental : modified the UI in the prefs, adding the "password" feature, to protect the prefs (avoiding children doing wrong actions).
* Will be implemented in 0.7. It is scheduled that the password will be enabled by default.

* Next step :
- choose the definitive toolbars content, per level, and following the teachers recommandations
- fix more issues with .deb and .rpm
- more bugfixes
- implement the password feature

=> Further information : see the roadmap

Season Greatings, and (almost) Happy New Year to all of you !!

Poor review with heartwarming community response

2009-12-30T14:16:48+00:00

Whoa, been quite a long time since I’ve blogged last time now and the longer it’s been, I’ve felt that I’ve needed to come up with something of more interest to blog about once I finally do some blogging again… ;) Well, I read this poor review of Mandriva Linux 2010 (the only poor review I’ve

Education Project mailing list reactivation

2009-12-30T11:54:01+00:00

Below, the mail I sent to several mailing lists.

After two years of an intense activity of the french part of the education.openoffice.org project, we are ready to reactivate this international list : this is one of our objectives for 2010 !!

To subscribe, just send a mail at : users-subscribe@education.openoffice.org confirm, and that's all : you can start contributing to the Education Project !!

To become a member, please follow the instructions provided there : http://education.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectMemberList

Education Project aims to create a bridge between Educational World and OpenOffice.org Project, following 3 axes :

- create a network of teachers, using OpenOffice.org
- provide a sharing area
- provide new developers, and spread OpenOffice.org source code (teach OOo source code and coding guidelines, UNO, an so on)

Currently, this project counts around 110 members, but everybody is welcome, and there is so much to do, that any contribution is wamrly welcome too !!

Everybody is welcome : teachers, students, just curious :)

For the one willing to help us, we need people able to help us for the website, translate, manage the wiki, but not only (the list is not limited).

Other need is to compare, work together (collaborative work), and concatenate informations providing from several educational systems, and of course, share our knowledge.

Be welcome, and Seasonal Greatings to all of you !!

Eric Bachard
Lead,
OpenOffice.org Education Project

Wende School Trial – Part 5 (Localized TuxTyping)

2009-12-30T03:01:41+00:00

We have been looking for an Open Source typing application for kids for quite some time. We found TuxTyping appealing and decided to localize the interface and the 43 typing exercises that come with it into Chinese. TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin. This educational game comes with two different games for practicing typing, and allows you to create exercises according to students needs. Of course we already brought this good news to Wende School. After two hours of training, Miss Liu was already mastering TuxTyping. She will incorporate it into the school program starting from 2010.

Fred is now submitting the Chinese version upstream to make it available for everybody. The TuxTyping developers have been very responsive and helpful with our translation problems and fixing minor bugs we found. We are now even working with them to make it workable for Chinese input method, as only pinyin typing is available currently. Hopefully we will have something ready to test soon.

In no time thanks to volunteers and passionate people like us, we went from nothing available in Chinese to a great looking software that will even deal with the Chinese language specificities. That’s the reason why I love Open Source; its community and its spirit definitely ROCK!

TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin.

There are four different kids of typing games for kids to practise typing.

Tux the penguin is hungry, and loves to eat fish. But Tux can only catch the fish if you type the right letters in time!

There are over 40 exercises learning the finger position of each letter and punctuation

FreeRunner running Android in a different case

2009-12-28T02:05:37+00:00

http://hackaday.com/2009/12/27/freerunner-with-android-new-case-battery/ looks like a pretty neat hack.

OpenOffice.org Education Project and Epitech Paris students

2009-12-22T18:08:37+00:00

The great story between Epitech Paris and OpenOffice.org, for instance OpenOffice.org Education Project, representing OpenOffice.org Proejct, of course, continued this year.

What happened ?

Last year, was Pierre Pasteau, who contributed to the moz2seamonkey migration. Thanks to Frank Schonheit who helped us a lot btw.

This year, we had two other students, Thomas Fontenay and Abelkader Belabbes, who did a great work too. The work they did, was to port OOo4Kids to the XO

Note: port OpenOffice.org directly is not an option, because an XO machine does only have 1GB of Hard disk, and 256 MB or RAM only, while OOo set is already 400MB :-)

Some will say this is not a directly visible result, but in fact, this is an extremely important result : Realize this XO port connected OpenOffice.org Community directly with XO / OLPC Community !! (like provide gdium suppport connected us to the OLPH community too)

Indeed, from one side, the .odf is essential, and from another, it must be considered that the students learned a lot of OpenOffice.org source code, in a short time. Learn the code first, is essential to my eyes. If they had to dive into QA, specs (what basically does mostly concern Sun employees), six month would have been too short. The other good effect, is that the OpenOffice.org Project yet built a strong link with an engineer school.

In fact, that's exactly what we did with Ecole Centrale Nantes, and UTBM .

The difficulty is that create such bridges with schools is extremely long, needs a lot of energy, but, in return, creates a very positive image of the project, and can really help to find developers (remember, the code is the blood of a free software, not "politics ").

Just a bit of patience, and the future will be better !

Last but not least, we received several machines, exactly 3 XO-1.5 for the next coming students. The plan is to profile and try to improve Impress performances (the request is very high for the netbooks), and propose a backport in OpenOffice.org, if the code desserves it.

Those machines are reserved to the two first students (from France prefered), able to find a prof (mandatory) to make the link with the school.

any candidate(s) ?

Ecole Centrale Nantes and OpenOffice.org Education project

2009-12-18T12:07:50+00:00

The OpenOffice.org Education Project continues the Effort. Ecole Centrale Nantes is a regular contributor, and below, the story.

How was it this year ? Well, change from svn to hg was a bit tricky (headhache caused by the rebase), but at the end, we did it. Jonathan Winandy, mercurial expert created its own repository, and we used it until the end. At the end, I pushed, with Thorsten Behrens and Rene Engelhard precious advices, all the changes into eraser01 cws.

Another part of the work is at issue 97972, but not only. The wiki too does contain a lot of information.

The students who contributed this year, are :

* Nelle Varoquaux
* Jonathan Winandy
* Leo Collet
* Remy Dumas
* Christian Jacques

And the professor who followed that is Morgan Magnin.

Many thanks to all of them !!

For the one interested, the final report is available online : ECN Tablet, final report (2009)

The feature is really great (specifications have been proposed last year) and we are preparing the cws, for the QA. It will be proposed for integration. There will not be a big change, because the option will not be active by defaut. The plan is to add other features in the next semesters.

I'll retain, like the previous time, it was a pleasure to work online with students, and to help them, to discover the OpenOffice.org source code, and more. Other important thing, is that you can work on the core, when you are enough close to the students, to mentor them, and hear carefully their problems. IRC ( channel : #education.openoffice.org , server : irc.freenode.net ) is really great for that.

Last but not least, I got a movie presenting the feature, made by Nelle Varoquaux, but I can't propose a link from there at the moment. Please click again later ;)

the 2009.1 image

2009-12-17T10:19:08+00:00

(display "hello, world!") (newline) i had a look at the 2009.1 image and installed it over the 2008 image i had (where everything worked). unfortunately this is not the case with the 2009 image. webcam and battery monitor, for example, seem to be borked. as it is, i've been configuring the debian image a bit more and find it to be very well suited to my needs, so i may stop playing around with the mandriva images anyway. i've been thinking of downloading the latest kernel from the lemote site and seeing if i can compile it and boot it. maybe i'll have some time over the festive season. on the irc channel i've just been told that updating the image will help a lot too :) i've been stuck with modem speed at home for a while, so that hasn't been a possibility. i'll just smuggle my gdium into work today and hog some bandwidth :)

Touch Typing on the Gdium

2009-12-15T07:16:36+00:00

Touch typing refers to the art of typing without looking at the keys. This is achieve though practice using various types of available software and using muscle memory. Touch typing typically involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard (the home row) and having them reach for other keys. This is a pretty convenient skill to have and many computer users today hardly use one, two or sometimes three (!) fingers out of the ten available for typing. Since there was no Open Source application compiled for the Gdium for that we just ported the latest version (1.8) of Tux Typing. The RPMs are attached to this post (one attached, and the data file which is 9.2MB is available here) and have been tested under G-Linux 2008.1. The latest version (2009.1) of Glinux should be available very soon and already incorporates Ktouch which is a different application doing the same thing (and using different libraries as well) AND Tux Typing as well. I would say that Tux Typing is more geared towards primary school children whereas Ktouch is a good application for secondary and above. But give both a try, you might just love to see Tux all smiling when you win! The RPMs should work on both 2008.1 and 2009.1 versions of Glinux.

Please help this little girl: Yi Fan

2009-12-15T05:05:29+00:00

Yi Fan is 4 years old and she is dying She has pulmonary hypertension
She loves poetry, her bunny and her Mom and Dad
Her dreams include walking in the park, roller skating and
someday going to school.

Donation website:

http://yifanfund.com/donations

怡帆的故事

如果不是因为失去了呼吸与行走的自由，即将迎来5岁生日的潘怡帆就可以像其他小朋友一样，在阳光下奔跑，呼吸自由的空气。

在她模糊的记忆里，最大的愿望是得到一双漂亮的旱冰鞋，有一天能够穿上它，自由地起舞。可是，生活留给她更多的，是无数个针头与面罩的记忆，每一个夜晚，她幼小的双手紧紧地护着氧气面罩，害怕失去这唯一维系她生命的纽带。

从来到这个新世界的第二天起，她立刻被送进急救病房，接受胸腔穿刺手术，她的呼吸出了问题，经过15天的治疗，终于回到家中和父母在一起。

她第二次入院是一岁零二个月，那时还不会走路，甚至连爬行也不会，那次是因为间质性肺炎，由于怀疑肺泡蛋白沉积，她的肺被灌洗过两次，18天后，医院放弃了对她的治疗，除了她的父母。

接她回家的时候，她的嗓子完全嘶哑，除了看到她张嘴哭泣，听不到一丁点声音。小怡帆到底出了什么问题，她的父母不知道，他们只能卖掉唯一的房子，通过多方途径尽他们的全力来帮助孩子获得健康。

他们给她配置氧气机，让她枯竭的肺得到充足的氧气，勇敢的小怡帆终于挺过那段艰难的日子，慢慢地恢复到自主呼吸状态，在她三岁的时候，可以扶着凳子挪动了。

如果一切能够延续，生命之花定将如期绽放，但是，命运之神只给了她一年的时间，她还来不及学会独立地行走，她的肺已经不能供给身体足够的氧气，正在向纤维化方向发展，需要全天带着氧气面罩帮助呼吸，行走的努力不得已终止，任何有氧活动都会给她的肺带来巨大的压力。

从那时候起，她离开氧气机的距离不超过一根三米空心送气管的长度，她的全部生活内容来源于电视，她喜欢看动画片，和动画片里面的角色一起笑，一起哭，她也逐渐懂得，什么是善良，什么是美丽，什么是勇敢，当她从电视里看到在四川地震中的很多小朋友失去了他们的家园，她知道他们更需要帮助。现在，她保存着红十字会写给她的感谢信，那是她的骄傲。

她有一个梦想，有一天能够自由地呼吸与行走，穿上漂亮的旱冰鞋，自由地起舞。

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

怡帆的爸爸是我在网上认识的朋友. 他在网上被人亲切地成为政委. 虽然我没有和他见过面,但是他在论坛中一贯的理性/乐观/从容让人想像不到他原来一直在承受着常人不能承受的家庭压力.

让我们一起来帮助怡帆,因为我们不愿失去怡帆美丽的微笑. 让我们来帮助怡帆,因为我们相信爱的存在.

捐助网站: http://yifanfund.com/donations (English)

中文版网站和资料在整理中.

怡帆需要不时带着氧气机,她的肺已经不能供给身体足够的氧气

熟睡的怡帆

怡帆的红十字会四川地震捐赠证书

An event helping the Migrant Workers Families

2009-12-15T03:27:24+00:00

As a volunteer of the Greenboard Free and Open Teaching project, I was invited to join the charity event hosted by Friends of New Citizens and 10 other NGOs on December 13 Sunday. The event objectives were mainly to:

give awards and recognitions to volunteers and migrant schools teachers (and RMB 50,000 red pocket will go to 99 teachers during the coming Chinese New Year, it was announced by Mr. Xu from Narada Foundation during the event)
give subsidies to Migrant workers’ families (a total of RMB 600,000 to 300 families)
enjoy the day with nice songs and dance (it was definitely a very nice show for all of us)
panel discussions trying to solve problems

It was a very successful event with over 400 participants. The whole venue was seated with migrant workers families and migrant schools teachers as well as volunteers coming from different NGOs all focusing on helping migrant workers families. It was also full of touching stories and hot discussions about how to improve the quality of living for migrant workers families. It was very nice to see that so many organizations were concerned about this society problem. But we all know that subsidy can only help in the short term, policy and education are the only long term solution. In order to solve the root problem the society should provide migrant workers with trainings in order to be able to access better job opportunities and their children with free and decent quality education. We should definitely invite the government and Ministry of Education to participate in these kinds of events and panel discussions Yes, it’s time to nurture and be responsible for migrant workers!

Awards given to volunteers from different organizations all over China

RMB 2,000 subsidy was given to 300 selected Migrant Workers' families

Gardener Awards were given to 99 selected teachers from different Migrant Schools

Volunteers dancing with 4 volunteering children, nice performance!

A few folk songs by a Chinese famous singer

Different Panel Discussions by NGO organizers, teachers, volunteers and even media

A productive day at “Coding for Fun”

2009-12-12T09:43:41+00:00

As you may know Beijing Linux User Group has a lot of interest groups and one of the most popular groups is “Coding for fun“. The purpose is to bring together developers in an informal way to encourage them to share their projects and coding experience. It’s basically like a Hackathon, everyone hacks on their own code. Even you don’t have anything to hack on? Just look around and join anytime if you feel interested!

I personally found this group very interesting and joined numerous times already! Especially for computer science students, it’s a great place for them to learn how to get involve in FOSS projects as they can always get guidance from other experienced hackers. For other members, it’s their regular meeting place to meet and discuss about their projects. If you work alone on your own project? You can see from the pictures that the environment is very nice, it’s definitely a cool place to spend a day working there. For myself, I always work on random stuff related to BLUG, GNOME.Asia Summit, Software Freedom Day , College OSS Society and Open Source deployment in schools. My projects of the day are mainly the BLUG website news / events announcement and TuxTyping localization. Here it is, the most popular group in BLUG!

Everybody hack on their own project there

Hacking on the Linux kernel

One of the projects is "Quadcopter Open hardware project"

All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun

Python code auto complete in vim by ropevim

2009-12-11T18:45:13+00:00

ropevim introduce a one stop python code auto complete, auto import and other features to vim.
refs: http://rope.sourceforge.net/ropevim.html

I did this:

$ mkdir /home/liwen/install/rope
$ cd /home/liwen/install/rope
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/agr/rope/
$ cd rope
$ python setup.py install
$ cd ..
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/agr/ropevim/
$ cd ropevim
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/agr/ropemode/
$ mv ropemode/ropemode/* ropemode/
$ python setup.py install

And added some code in my .vimrc:


let $PYTHONPATH .= ":/home/liwen/install/rope/rope:/home/liwen/install/rope/ropevim"
source /home/liwen/install/rope/ropevim/ropevim.vim

let ropevim_codeassist_maxfixes=10
let ropevim_guess_project=1
let ropevim_vim_completion=1
let ropevim_enable_autoimport=1
let ropevim_extended_complete=1

function! CustomCodeAssistInsertMode()
    call RopeCodeAssistInsertMode()
    if pumvisible()
        return "\<C-L>\<Down>"
    else
        return ''
    endif
endfunction

function! TabWrapperComplete()
    let cursyn = synID(line('.'), col('.') - 1, 1)
    if pumvisible()
        return "\<C-Y>"
    endif
    if strpart(getline('.'), 0, col('.')-1) =~ '^\s*$' || cursyn != 0
        return "\<Tab>"
    else
        return "\<C-R>=CustomCodeAssistInsertMode()\<CR>"
    endif
endfunction

inoremap <buffer><silent><expr> <Tab> TabWrapperComplete()

Then auto complete should work automatically. But RopeRename not work, which will fill up my cpu, I think it’s ok for a beginning.

PS: hg is mercurial

First Joint Event with Beijing GNOME User Group

2009-12-09T15:10:23+00:00

Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) and Beijing GNOME User Group (BGUG), two of the most active open source communities in Beijing just celebrated their anniversary in November (one day after the other)! With 7 and 1 year of services for BLUG and BGUG respectively it was about time we organized a joint event. In fact being a core member of both groups and a close friend of Emily Chen, BGUG’s President, I can recall how it all started: in 2008 we worked very closely to organize the first instance of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing, bringing passionate GNOME people from all horizons together, discussing and willing to contribute to the GNOME project here in China. The rest happened “all by itself” and it is really nice to see BGUG growing up strong with now a few core members taking over some of the group management responsibilities!

For this joint event we presented to both groups a report of the second instance of GNOME.Asia Summit which happened in Vietnam this year. Emily, Fred, Ray and myself were giving presentation there and we gave a summary of what happened, who we met, how vibrant the local Open Source scene is and showed of course many pictures of the 3 days event. In the second part of the meeting Peter Junge, core member of OpenOffice.org community, presented his experience while representing the BLUG and attending the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) in Italy. It was really a wonderful evening flooded with event highlights, innovative technology, travel and funny stories. After witnessing the success of GNOME.Asia Summit in Beijing and Vietnam, I can’t wait to know where it will be hosted in 2010 and of course participate again!

Emily Chen, President of Beijing GNOME User Group

Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org expert, represented BLUG to join the OpenOffice.org Conference

First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!

Wende School Trial – Part 4

2009-12-04T13:37:00+00:00

Just back from Cambodia and Vietnam, I returned to Wende School to see how things were going. With the help of Julien and Jason, they already incorporated computer classes into their existing curriculum, once a week for grade 3 to grade 6 (grade 1 and 2 should have it soon) teaching children how to use the keyboard and mouse with Gcompris and giving Art classes with Kolourpaint. Miss Liu already scheduled each grade classes until the end of the school year. When we arrived grade 5 was actually using the computer lab, it was so cool! At the end of the class, we discussed again with Miss Liu and gathered more comments.

The main reason of our visit was to give formal training to the English teacher (whom I mentioned in my previous blog post). For this session, we tried to deliver a class that would enable her to teach at the end of the course. We managed to build a new 2 hours class focusing on:

Concepts of Computer, FOSS and Open Education in education (10 mins)
Hardware and Operating System introduction (30 mins)
Apps to teach English (30 mins)
Italc classroom management system (30 mins)
Q&A (20 mins)

The purpose of the shortening of the initial teacher training class is mainly due to the high turn over rate of teachers in Migrant Schools. After 2 hours of training, the teacher take the Gdium home and practices with it during her spare time. Any question is then directed to either Miss Liu who is already trained (and of course ourselves).

This time again, at the end of the training section, the Maths teacher this time popped in and expressed her interest to join the training next time. It seems that word of mouth is doing wonder at Wende School hopefully we can spread the word all over China soon!

A real computer class of Gcompris, not demo class any longer!

Teaching children how to use keyboard and mouse with Gcompris

Concept of FOSS, Operating System and Educational Apps training

Italc Classroom Management System Training

Computer classes are already incorporated in their existing school program

Happy kids in Wende School!

Software Freedom International 2010 Presidency

2009-12-04T06:56:29+00:00

Catching up with life since my return from GNOME.Asia Summit as a lot of things have happened as well last month. On December 1st the SFD General Assembly was held (IRC meeting) and as our former president Robert Schumann stepped down I was elected the new president for 2010! This is definitely a big responsibility and I will try to keep up the good work that has been carried out since 2004. The good thing is that we have more board members this coming year (some new ones and some older ones) which hopefully will help us to do more. I want to thank everyone for their support and more specifically my colleagues from SFI, our sponsors, the members of the Beijing LUG and all the SFD team leaders around the world without whom we would never have done so much. so, Thank you all!

I proposed today…

2009-11-27T13:03:14+00:00

and she said YESSSS. For those knowing us it won’t be a big surprise as we’ve been already over 6 years together. For those knowing me, it’s probably a surprise as you know what I think about “getting married” (I’ve just lost a few beers). Overall I believe it was the right thing to do and considering the YESSSS I got, definitely it did make Pockey happy!

OOo4Kids. Recent news (25th nov2009)

2009-11-25T14:42:22+00:00

Last changes for the coming 0.6 :

OOo4Kids is now localized in :

- Italian
- French
- German
- Spanish
- Chinese (simplified)
- Dutch
- english-US (default)

Note: Japanese is postponed (no demand)

A big thank you to :

* Leo Moons (nl version),
* Volker Merschmann and Florian Effenberger (German version),
* Marina Latini and the Italian Team (Italian version),
* Julien Forgeat (simplified chinese version)

On the way :

- Portuguese (missing strings in the MS Intaller)

New versions:

* XO Intel version (both XO-1 and XO-1.5) in spanish, and english (other on demand)
* Portable versions (Windows) in fr, de, es, pt, en-US

Debian port in progress. Thanks to Rene Engelhard ( Debian OpenOffice.org maintainer )

Still waiting my write access at Freedesktop ...

Open Source Education and Loongson reduce the digital divide for migrant workers kids

2009-11-25T03:01:49+00:00

After months of work from corporations, institutions, universities, Open Source communities and NGOs the first fully Open Source based lab is launched in Beijing. The purpose of organizing this Opening ceremony on November 12th is to raise concerns of Migrant Schools education from different organizations!

Everyday hundreds of thousands of children from migrant workers families who are building modern China fail to receive proper education and can’t get basic computer teaching, leaving them even more behind and increasing the digital divide. The complexity of addressing education needs for the part of the Chinese population requires a lot of problems to be solved and computer access is only one of the problems. However computers coupled with the possibilities of accessing the Internet will give them the chance to discover and access invaluable content which can secure their future and give them access to job they didn’t even know existed!

Delivering proper computer based education to poor schools issues range from electricity consumption from a full classroom (one normal PC can easily consume 60 to 200W, multiplied by 20 or 50…), teacher knowledge about IT and integration of the digital tool into their curriculum, content cost and licensing, and of course computers cost.

Today in Wende we have managed to address all the problems above thanks to technology, vision, and collaboration from various parties. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has built a general purpose low powered CPU that runs free software and which enables to consume as low as 15-17W per machine at a very competitive price, enabling manufacturers such as Lemote and Dexxon to build some of the cheapest netbooks on the market.

Thanks to Dexxon for its contributions and sponsorship of the classroom, WenDe today has a fully equipped 20 Gdiums Loongson based set up. Dexxon has sponsored Mandriva, a French Linux software company to bring the latest technology on the Loongson architecture and customized a Linux distribution for education.

Furthermore non-profit organizations such as Greenboard and LEAD have been building the education material together with teachers and released them under an Open Source license so any school can use them for free, modify and improve as they wish.

The last part has been completed by Greenboard and CSIP who are also graciously training the group of selected teachers by WenDe’s headmaster in order to get them ready to deliver the initial curriculum. LEAD is currently training some of their members to get ready to deliver the same kind of training to other migrants schools.

A special thank you goes to COPU for their support throughout the project and helping Greenboard and Dexxon to connect the dots.

So from now on the children of Wende school will be able to access the latest software and technology to become computer literate but also to improve their knowledge in general topics such as maths, English, geography, arts, problem solving, programming and much more.

The organizations involved will continue to build new curriculum, more exercise and will also get more teachers involved in the near future. One of the advantages of using a free software licensing model is that all the cost of such a solution only goes to the hardware and any school can just download, use and adapt the content to their needs. Hopefully we will soon see a strong teacher community improving this initial work and working together to create better free educational content for our children.

As a core member of Greenboard, we hosted an inauguration on 12th November at Wende School

We had people from Dexxon, Greenboard, Chinese OSS Promotion Union, LEAD, CSIP French Embassy, Beijing Normal University, Friends of New Citizens, Beijing LUG, Lemote, Wende School and other Migrant Schools!

Zhuang Xiuli, Professor at School of Educational Technology of Beijing Normal University will definitely bring a lot to the Greenboard education project helping to improve the teaching skills of Wende and other Migrant Schools teachers!

Class demonstration given by Wende teacher, students were very concentrated to learn how to paint with computer (even the room was full of visitors)

After 3 classes, primary students could paint something really amazing with Kolourpaint!

OOo4Kids now in Chinese on the Gdium

2009-11-24T18:08:44+00:00

It took around 30 hours to compile on a Gdium, several tries due to some silly mistakes but, finally, I got OOo4Kids (Open Office For Kids) running on the Gdium, in simplified Chinese. OOo4Kids is an office suite based on OpenOffice.org and designed for young children (7 to 12 years old). The contributors of the project have made considerable efforts to simplify the user interface and the code and the result is pretty amazing, see by yourself with two screenshots of Calc, the top one from OpenOffice.org, the bottom one from OOo4Kids (images are clickable):

First obvious thing is the great work that has been done on the user interface, OOo4Kids provides a GUI with larger icons in a lower number that makes the software much easier to use for kids. On the top of that, notice how placing the icons on the left side of the window helps making a much better usage of vertical space, this is particularly efficient for netbooks that offer a screen resolution of 1024×600, or sometimes even lower than that.

This said, I also want to mention that OOo4Kids is not only a great project in term of how useful it is for teaching office software to young kids, the development of OOo4Kids itself is also very education oriented. The main maintainer Eric Bachard is working hard on getting students from French and other countries universities involved into the project, providing them support and guidance on the IRC channels and mailing lists. Without these efforts, digging into OOo’s code would be extremely time-consuming and OOo4Kids would have far less contributers.

I now certainly hope to have risen some interest, you can learn more about OOo4Kids in:

The project page
The French IRC channel, #educooo on Freenode
The English IRC channel, #education.openoffice.org on Freenode
Educooo.org, the French association that is managing the project

Now there is still a lot to be done, the next steps are going to be checking the localization, providing any missing strings, integrate OOo4Kids in the operating systems used by Greenboard (the next version of the customized GLinux we are using will feature a switch to allow teachers choosing between classical OOo and OOo4Kids) and of course prepare and write some content. So you’ll read about OOo4Kids soon on this blog and on Greenboard.

Lemote sponsorship of GNOME.Asia Summit 2009

2009-11-24T03:12:44+00:00

As some of you know, both Pockey and I were at the GNOME.Asia Summit in Ho Chi Minh City this month. A lot of things happened and I will have to get back to this later. I just wanted to thank Lemote and more specifically Zhang Fuxin for his continuous support to the Beijing LUG and Open Source. On top of taking part in Software Freedom Day this year and using this opportunity to announce their new all-in-one desktop computer they have also agreed to sponsor the GNOME.Asia Summit with two Yeeloong laptop that were used for short Linux courses during the conference and that will be then donated to the computer lab in Ho Chi Minh City to be used as hacking devices. We all hope to see a lot of Vietnamese Open Source Software be ported to MIPS and more participation to our growing Loongson communities. And for those who can read Chinese you’ll be happy to know that Lemote has just launched a new Chinese version of their website!

Phnom Penh LUG and Open Institute in Cambodia

2009-11-24T01:37:06+00:00

The trip to Cambodia was amazingly excellent! Not only I went to the Open Institute Organization to know more about how they spread Open Source in Universities, joined the newly re-established Phnom Penh LUG first initial meeting, but also had a lot of great Cambodian food in Phnom Penh, as I never had any Cambodian food ever! As an animal lover, Phnom Penh is a paradise, full of wide life too!

Open Institute focus on Universities: doing localization, generating textbooks of OpenSUSE / Firefox Thunderbird / OpenOffice.org and training teachers / volunteers

Phnom Penh LUG meeting: Fred presented Reprap 3D Printer Project and of course we discussed about how to grow the Phnom Penh LUG here in Cambodia

Cambodian Traditional Breakfast: Soup Noodle

Cambodian lunch, look tropical!

Monkeys inside a temple, we fed them bananas

My favourite reptile, lizards everywhere~

It's a very relaxing city, people are very nice and friendly! Highly recommend you to go!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 ROCKS!

2009-11-23T06:57:24+00:00

Followed by Beijing, the second GNOME.Asia Summit was successfully hosted in Ho-Chi-Minh, Vietnam from 20 – 22 November 2009. I am always happy to join International Open Source events, especially outside of China, I got to talk to the local communities from all over Asia like core members from Saigon LUG, Hanoi LUG, Phnom Penh LUG, Taiwan LUG, Open Institute Organization in Vietnam! I even got to talk to the Chief Director of the Government Information Center in Vietnam and learned that all the government officers will start to use Open Source Software like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird in 2010. Implementation will begin with massive training. The main reason for the migration is that the government wants to reduce illegal use of Windows. Isn’t it cool?

There were a lot of presentations and workshops covering many topics other than GNOME during the whole summit! The full schedule can be viewed here. As a woman leading the Beijing Linux User Group, I gave three talks and led one panel discussion:

Women_In_IT / FOSS
Building Communities
FOSS Deployment in Schools
Panel discussion about Women Participation in GNOME

I was very impressed by the whole GNOME.Asia Summit! First, Vietnamese participants asked really a lot of questions which is not so common in China. Second, there were a lot of volunteers from different Universities, students of different domains like Computer Science, Trading, Economy and so on. They were very energetic and helpful. Third, there were a lot of girl volunteers as well which is very rare in Open Source conferences! I can see that the GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 is just a start in Vietnam, with all of these young students’ energy, community building and government support, I am sure 2010 will be a great FOSS year in Vietnam!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 in Veitnam

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Workshops

A lot of interaction with audiences

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Panel Discussion: Women Participation in GNOME

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 Speakers from all over the world

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 has over 100 volunteers full of energy (a lot of girls as well)

Details indeed

2009-11-18T05:53:08+00:00

Click to reveal Amazon's latest innovation in shipping. The screenshot was taken Wednesday, November 18th, around 12:30am.

OOo4Kids.activity.xo is available !

2009-11-14T15:54:10+00:00

On XO machines, when using Sugar, an application must respect some criterias, to appear listed as activity. We had in the scope to provide OOo4Kids as activity on Sugar.

...and the first step is done !!

Until yesterday evening (late in the night), Thomas Fontenay and me, worked hard to fix a silly issue we had with the first .xo archive of OOo4Kids. In fact, symlink are prohibited in the activity tree, and we had to modify it. + we had to include the changes in the OOo4Kids build process, similar to the OpenOffice.org one.

For the moment, we only provide en-US, but other locales are possible, like italien, spanish, french, german, and portuguese.

The lucky XO owners can download the archive there

Next steps :

* improve the set, and make its build more robust
* improve performance (simplify, simplify, remove dead code .. )
* work on the Journal implementation
* Study the sharing mechanism, like allow several children to work on the same document, though the network
* improve the python support
As you can see, there is place for a lot of students applications !!

Last but not least, I repeat my thank you to Thomas Fontenay, Abdelkader Belabbes, students at Epitch Paris for their good work.

Education Project ClassRoom : log available

2009-11-12T12:39:33+00:00

Yesterday, was IRC ClassRoom , and we were extremely pleased to receive Heiner Rechtien

As usual, the log is available on the OpenOffice.org wiki

My Debian gDium

2009-11-11T13:32:44+00:00

Hello there,

i had my gdium device (gDium) now for quite some time, it gets delivered with a customized version of Mandriva for MIPS using LXDE as an desktop, i am not the best friend of RPM based distributions, so i did a bootstrap of Debian on another gKey and it was working fine so far. But i run into a lot of problems while trying to compile a recent kernel wit the patches, so the gDium was on hold in my closet for some months …

Some time ago, there was a testing release of Debian (Lenny) for MIPS with the customized kernel and system config, i thought thats a good base to have another try, and here is what i have done.

First i deinstalled all bigger packages that i don’t plan to use (openoffice.org, GNOME, GDM) i don’t like the touch pad so much and was searching for some lightweight desktop or window manager without any heavy decencies, i tried a lot and decided the best for my needs would be awesome.

Awesome 2.x
is in the official Debian repositories and very easy to install
aptitude install awesome

I decided that i even don’t want any desktop manager, so i also deinstalled GDM, to start the system i just loggin in ans fire up startx just in old days ^^
To do so you need to modify your .xsession file a little bit, i add some tool that i need for my comfort, like an input system (SCIM), a wallpaper (nitrogen), an automounting tool (ivman) and a nice clock in the awesome panel Some of the stuff is explained here how to install: forums.debian.net

For rest i just installed some packages like locales, Chinese fonts, htop, iftop, locate and so on…

The first problem
i run into was how to set up my wifi connection, i remember hardly that it was a pain in the A*S to set up the wpa_supplicant by hand, so i searched a bit and found out that there is an super nice networkmanager as well lightweight and not depending on heavy libs: WICD and this nice little tool has even a curses mode (wicd-curses)!!! its super easy to use.

File manager
I did not know witch file manager i like to use, i thought first about PCMan the LXDE file manager but then i noticed that i can work so fast and eficent on my awesom system without mouse, why install a mouse driven GUI, i just try midnight commander and its works very well.

How to use awesome
its took me half day to get used to work on an keyboard only (mostly) system, but after that time its very comfortable. awesome uses a special key to contol the system, this is the typical ‘windows’ or ‘mac’ or in my case the ‘g’ key with is usually not used on Linux. (following called gKey, do not get confused with the gdium usb stick^^)

If you start awesome first you have an empty screen, on top you see some workspaces and if you installed one the clock on the right.

To read a help file you do:
(gKey) + (F1)

You will get an autocomplete and filterd chise in the top panel

For launch an app:
(gKey) + (F2)

So SSH somewhere:
(gKey) + (F3)

To spam a new console you use
(gKey) + (enter)

The new consoles will be add in a certain pattern leaving you a main window and a some smaller ones, that layout can be changed of course.

To moce the consoles around and swap them you can use:
(gKey) + (SHIFT) + (K)

to the right, or

(gKey) + (SHIFT) + (J)

to the left.

To resize the main console you can use
(gKey) + (L) (bigger)
(gKey) + (H) (smaller)

I you like to change the workspace you just use the arrow keys on your keyboard

(gKey) + (Arrow left/right)

More details
You can rename the work spaces and decide by rules in witch workspace new programs will get moved to, all that work plus a lot of customization you can change in your
.awsomerc file, there is a lot of help at google.

my config: paste.ubuntuusers.de

Some Links
– Good install howto plus explanation of the config file
– Great wiki from the awesome makers
– The Debian image i used
– Nice screenshot with some links
– Very details install tutorial for ubuntu

ClassRoom today : OpenOffice.org Migration to Mercurial

2009-11-11T12:05:31+00:00

This is a reminder of the Education Project ClassRoom agenda : today, starting 17:00 CET (Paris Hamburg hour)and we are proud to receive Heiner Rechtien, Release Engineer à Sun Microsystems who will present us the OpenOffice.org migration to Mercurial

This is an IRC ClassRoom

Channel is #education.openoffice.org
Server is irc.freenode.net

Everybody interested is welcome. For the newcomers, we use to let the speaker explain everything and keep the second part for questions.

See you !!

Planet OLPH

In Boston, March 16th-23rd

World Intellectual Property Day

Seattle's Turnpike Pizza has Daiya

Hello Planet GNOME

View from the window at the end of my hall

Gandi giving away free as in beer domains

Showing HTML mail in Gnus

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Encouraging FLOSS gets you blacklisted by the USTR?

Ubuntu’s netbook-launcher-efl on the Gdium

OOo4kids provided as .deb archives

OOo4Kids 0.8

Reminder : Education Project objectives and Mission

NetHack (console) port for Nokia N900

OOo4Kids et OpenOffice.org Education invités aux JD2L 2010 de Beauvais

Basic rules for FOSS Localization

Blogging on ZDNet Asia

The Pulse Cafe

L'évolution du Centre de démarrage d'OOo4Kids

OOo4Kids 0.8 : new Star Center

GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 – Call for Host

New phone number

Come to anti-DRM event in SF on Wednesday 8:30am at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

UNSW Advanced OS about L4

Emacs installed on the N900

Scénari présente OptimOffice

2010 starting full speed

La création du design d'OOo4Kids a enfin sa propre machine.

Welcome to new students joining the OpenOffice.org Education Project

EducOOo reversing money to the OpenOffice.org Project

Renouvellement de la pétition contre les brevets sur les logiciels

Création du journal des TICE ( association APTICE )

OOo4Kids 0.6 and Happy New Year !!

Poor review with heartwarming community response

Education Project mailing list reactivation

Wende School Trial – Part 5 (Localized TuxTyping)

FreeRunner running Android in a different case

OpenOffice.org Education Project and Epitech Paris students

Ecole Centrale Nantes and OpenOffice.org Education project

the 2009.1 image

Touch Typing on the Gdium

Please help this little girl: Yi Fan

An event helping the Migrant Workers Families

A productive day at “Coding for Fun”

Python code auto complete in vim by ropevim

First Joint Event with Beijing GNOME User Group

Wende School Trial – Part 4

Software Freedom International 2010 Presidency

I proposed today…

OOo4Kids. Recent news (25th nov2009)

Open Source Education and Loongson reduce the digital divide for migrant workers kids

OOo4Kids now in Chinese on the Gdium

Lemote sponsorship of GNOME.Asia Summit 2009

Phnom Penh LUG and Open Institute in Cambodia

GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 ROCKS!

Details indeed

OOo4Kids.activity.xo is available !

Education Project ClassRoom : log available

My Debian gDium

ClassRoom today : OpenOffice.org Migration to Mercurial

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