To prevent IP spoofing, computer piracy against participants on this channel, and other forms of nastiness, I have gone through and replaced the computer host information on each participant with their associated e-mail address. If you find your e-mail address is incorrectly listed here, please let me know. -Sam "Criswell" Hart You have joined channel #tux4kids #tux4kids : created Thu Aug 9 17:24:53 2001 Mode change "+nt" on channel #tux4kids by ChanServ ChanServ has changed the topic on channel #tux4kids to "Free and Open Source Software in Education" molly (Cassie Hart ) has joined channel #tux4kids marshy (David Marshman ) has joined channel #tux4kids Hi Sam and molly hey... molly is my wife, she said she'd join if she felt like it ;-) (her real name is Cass ;-) Thanks - I was about to ask whether mooly was a perosn or a computer!! Hi Cass she says hi, but she's not at the computer now Sam, are you expecting anyone else? We got some decent press announcements... but thats for 18:30 GMT (approx 30 minutes) now it's just supposed to be the core developers and others on the mailing list it is still a bit early by my clock, as well... I thought it was 18:30 GMT about 18 minutes ago... erm... don't think so... I can check (whole thing is rather confusing ;-) nope its"17:51:08 Thu Aug 09 2001 in GMT" yeah, I figured some people would be.... I just tried to get a time that was "good enough" ;-) Are you on via that java client? I have others who wanted to join but are behind proxies Guess I forgot about the clock being an hour forward due to British summer time - I'm Welsh, but live in Michigan, so it's even more confusing for me.... I'm sure ;-) I wasn't able to get anything to go through our firewall at work -none of the IRC clients worked (and I tried a few)!! Hmmm... that doesn't bode well.... A few others are behind firewalls... where do you work (if I may ask)? I read your forwarded e-mail this moring about the TuxTyping BeOS user and "servers" - it confused e too... yeah... I just replied saying thanks for the compliment and said if they wanted to help they can look over our developers page No problem - I work at Ford (the car company). I'm a design engineer by day, computer geek by night (my 2nd degree's in computer science...). Oh, I had a friend who worked there about four years ago (he was a computer consultant, I think working with NT machines or something) He was a fourth or fifth cousin of mine I didn't know.... he and I met while I was working at Intel last year Ford is pretty strict with internet/e-mail abuse, which is probably why I couldn't get through the proxy... so was Intel... One of the people wanting to participate is working at 3M right now, so he will likely have troubles as well Do you have a full-time programming job now, or are you freelancing (if you don't mind me being nosey!!). I have been doing consulting since Feb. No real work. I've kind of given up and have decided to start a non-profit org for producing high-quality open-source edu games and apps (like Tux Typing) Ohh, I almost forgot to ask - will you be logging the "party"?? I'll probably miss most of it, so it would be nice... our homepage is http://www.geekcomix.com/tux4kids/ um... logging... I really should... lemme see if I can figure out how (I'm new to IRC ;-) NOTE FROM SAM: Uh... apparently I didn't know how to correctly log the IRC sessions... because the next little bit was lost ;-) Dave and I talked about a Mac OS X Tux Typing port, BeIDE project files to be included in the Tux Typing CVS, the AmigaDE, Redmond Washington (and a certain company there), Tux4Kids, and where Dave worked. Sorry about that! We join in the conversation again when Dave is talking about posting the BeIDE files on his web-site so I can add them to CVS.... No problem, I still it on my web page. should have been "stick it"... typos are esailky forgivbubble ;-) I have a 15 minute reprieve, so I'll hang around for a bit longer... okay... that should put us after th1 18:30GMT time... so /maybe/ others will show up. I still haven't received feedback from a single BeOs TuxTyping user, despite the fact there's been over 1000 downloads!! I really could do with a few BeOs testers - I'm sure there are SDL bugs on BeOs (if not in TuxTyping) that need to be found... Feedback is always a beast. We went for nearly three months without a bug submission on the main site! By the way, is TuxMath going to use OpenGL? - i remember seeing spinning "rocks" in the little demo you sent out... BeOS still doesn't, and probably never will, have hardware OpenGL... No OpenGL (too many dependancies). No, the demo was just showing how to use the engine I had built (which I actually think is too simplistic now) What's the basic premise of TuxMath - is there a page yet.... nothing... for TuxMath, think Missle Command mixed with simple math problems. Little UFOs will drop from the top with simple math equations.. and you enter the answer. If you get it right, the UFO explodes if not, the UFO crashes into a city aahh - so you have 4 * 4 as a question, and have to shoot rocks with "16" on them?? ooops - i should have waited... no... you just type "16" and the "4x4" UFO gets shot down although... that is a good idea as well... perhaps a -hidden option ;-) that sounds cool!! given my auto background, I'd like to do a car racing type educational game if we could... how about having answer questions correctly to avoid obstacles, on-coming traffic, etc...?? I have been debating about something racing based... just haven't found an idea that I like yet what skill would you suggest this one would teach? no sure - i've kind of found a chicken without ever realising there was an egg... yeah, that happens a lot. ;-) I'm just having a quick look at the tux4kids homepage - looks good. thx... it still needs work... what I really need is a PR person... I'm no good at all that junk .... RE: the car game - if we made it simple enough, how about for teaching colours and basic shapes (orange, tree, house, etc...) guess we'd need speech recognition for that though!! That's good.. I have another basic color and mouse movement one in mind as well... but the car one could easly do shapes as wel at least you seem to be a good artist - I'm lousy at that as well as PR!! I was a cartoonist for a while... I can do art... I just can't do PR ;-) BeGroovy have posted the press release, but BeNews still hasn't.... well.. the car one could do word<->shape recognition... the shape is approaching the car (a tree) and three words appear (Tree Rock House) and the child clicks the correct word Sounds promising - if you need a physics/vehicle dymanics model, you know where to ask!!! (only kidding) BeNews already had the BeBits announcement... so they may have vetoed the big announcement I have to go now (sob, sob!!). Okay, see ya... good luck crashing cars ;-) Sam, it's be fun "chatting". :) actaully that's closer to the truth than you'd think (not me personally though).... heh heh Good luck with the future - I'll also be reading my e-mail.... Bye for now. see ya Signoff: marshy () bombastic (Jacob Greig ) has joined channel #tux4kids Hey sam, has anyone else showed up? Dave was here a while ago, but I think everyone assumed the 18:00 hour one for developers was cancelled or something because no one showed up then. have you seen the project download stats lately? they are really high Dave mentionned a nifty idae for another game yeah, I saw the stats. It's pretty impressive. I'm not sure if we have broken our old record for 0.8 what game? A racing one which would use shape recognition (possibly shape<->word, but we havent hashed out the details) you "drive" a car by answering questions and making it stear away from objects it could crash into how would it be shape-word? frank (Frank Ellis ) has joined channel #tux4kids what? hi everyone you said "(possibly shape<->word, but we havent hashed out the details)", i didnt know what you meant by shape-word Oh, just that perhaps we would have objects in the way of the car, and then a few words would appear somewhewr on screen. One of the words would be trhe object while the others werent the player would click the correct word to cause the car to steer around the object is this tuxtype oh I get it ? frank: no, it's another game that Dave Marshman (BeOS pacakagr) and I were discussing earlier. isn't this like "catch the goblin"? what is it called? bombastic: yes, it is similar to what we were talking about with that. but I wanted CTG to be more basic than that anyway, so I ultimately didn't want to do this with CTG anyway. frank: nothing yet, we haven't even begun it. we were just talking about it would it be 3d? OH maybe use opengl? (please please please :) maybe 3D, that might be fun. As long as it still runs on cheap hardware I'm okay. probably not OpenGL... that would need hardware accelleration. not only is it expensive, it has spotchy support on many different platforms beos doesn't have opengl support (apparently) and linux needs very particulr hardware drat :( bombastic: you could come up with an OpenGL project yoiu know ;-) i'm more ofa helper than a leader :) what is catch the goblin couldnt lead my way out of a paper bag :) ? frank: "Catch the Goblin" (CTG) is another game we are thinking of... haven't started yet... "catch the goblin" will be where the player tryes to match up colors with voiced names of the colos multicolor ghosts/goblins run around in a mansion frank: The game will be an early childhood development title dealing with color recognition and mouse controls. Goblins will run through various rooms in a mansion (think "chase scenes" from Scooby Doo). Each Goblin has a different color. The computer voices a color (like "RED" "BLUE" etc) and displays a color in the corner of ths screen. The player then clicks on the goblin with that color. the game says specific colors and the player clicks on the ghost/goblin with that color The player also has to click on a certain number of goblins to proceed to the next level chase scenes in scooby doo? You know, when th various characters are chasing the bad guy and they keep running into and out from random doors in a comical fashion ;-) oh. that sounds like fun i looked over what you have for tureader this monring really? what you think? doesn't do anything heh heh..... actually it does a little, just nothing very exciting... whats tureader? plus the code online is about a week old... my current code actually sets up festival to preset defaults tuxreader is another new project which will help kids learning how to read http://www.geekcomix.com/dm/tuxread/ how will it do that is the URL ? it will use a speech sytnhizor to speak words that the kid doesnt know It displays text. The child tries to read the text. If the child cannot read a word, they click on the word and the computer reads it to them. wow that is neat It will also be able to read whole sentances and paragraphs 9even pages) and be able to play a simple word pronunciation game. what was the web site again? http://www.geekcomix.com/dm/tuxread/ will it be for windows too? we will try. The big problem is that it will use Festival for its speech synthesis, which I think is only available for Unixes (not even BeOS). I thought you said it compiled under Win32? thats too bad bombastic: yeah it says it does, but I couldn;'t find the win32 packages.... so I have my doubts.... have you asked oliver about it? no, I haven't asked Olivier. When we get further on the project, I will ask him The other big problem is that I don't know how to make a cross-platform file loading dialog! I was thinking of just using Qt's QFileDialog, which would work on *nix, Win32, and Mac OS.... but not on BeOS. do you need a file dialog? if the player ever wants to load a new file without exiting and restarting ;-) aren't there standard C/C++ functions to handle things like this? theres not C/C++ file dialog no no, I mean appropriate functions for making your own if there are, I don't know them. AFAIK, Linux's opendir() family of commands ain't too portable to non-POSIX systems ;-) maybe there is something in the Be API that you could use an #ifdef BEOS for?? maybe.... I can check with Dave is anyone else coming to this? Idunno... Dave Marshman was on a while ago. Then its just been us its been too long since Ive reaboooted into Beos, so i forget, but wasnt there a common file loading dialog it had? its getting kind of late dont remember. I lost my BeOS install when I obliterated my last Win32 partition this last month ;-) I wonder if people just couldn't figure the time? i think there is. i do have the be bible... I guess I could look :) frank: I dont know. even if no one else shows up, I feel the discussion(s) thus far have been informative and helpful. how long have you been working on tuxtype? frank: who, me or Jake? I have been working on it from the begining (it was my baby ;-) I think I originally started it near the end of 1999, but we didnt have our first release until around June 2000. frank: our first release was version 0.4pre2! So named because I wasn't taking versioning very seriously at that time ;-) oh I wasn't taking much of the project seriously at that time what about bombstic? I think he went to get a book. Bombastic (Jake) started helping me sometime near Nov or Dec 2000 (while I was still working at intel) did ytou know eachother? not before. I was advertising I needed help from mandrake 7.0 users on sourceforge, and jake was one of the first people to show up with mandrake linux 7.0 (I think it was 7.0 we had problems with) actually, I didn't know this, but Jake was going to the same University I had gone to, the U of Arizona in tucson. I found it oyut when I announced I was going back home to tucson in Jan ;-) i came because i saw someone playing this on their laptop and wantid it for my little gril. yeah, little grilles like tuxtyping ;-) i was sad when you didn;t have it for windows 98, but i stuck with it till you did what? you said "little gril"... I was just making a joke ;-) i did try the beos version, but i couldnt get beos to work very good on my computer oh im not really much of a computer person if you don't mind me asking, what do you do for a living? i am the head librarian for robertson unified school distrrict in marysville I cant find my book oh, so you are in education yes well, ahve you heard about Tux4Kids (the organization we're starting)? I still have some boxes to unpack from when I was at HP no http://www.geekcomix.com/tux4kids/ - we will be a non-profit organization to promote the development and use of open-source educational software (for schools, parents, and especially children) we are in the process of starting up. Tux typing is our flagship title and tux4kids has a really cool logo :) yes we do! will you want to work with schools once we get a nice library of games and other apps, then we would like to consult (very inexpensively of course) with schools to help them impliment cost-effective alternatives to proprietary software we would like to have outreachs of some sort to help schools learn about open-source software, and how it can help elliminate the financial and legal threats that proprietary software can cause oh its largely motivated by an article I read on Salon.com a while back where Microsoft has been bullying school districts and suing them over alleged and real copyright violations oh http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/10/microsoft_school/index.html is the article frank: perhaps you could alert your administration to the dangers in this article and tell them of our cause? ;-) would they have tuxtype in the classrooms? YES! That's the point. That's why we are doing these projects ;-) in tucson they already have a school that uses linux on their compyuters and uses tux typing not just in Tucson... there are actually several schools across the country which are doing the same that would be really neat, how much would they have to pay you for the license? the license is the Gnu GPL, which (in a nutshell) allows anyone to get and use the games for free there is no cost, its free (but contributions to Tux4Kids would be welcome :) Well, it is "free" as in no cost... but the "free" used here actually refers to "freedom" as well. Bascally, a school (or individual) is "free" to use Tux Typing for whatever purpose, provided they do not change the license. so it would be freeware to the schools as well no, it's not "freeware". It's "Free-Software", which is significantly different. not freeware, its open-source. yes, it is "Open-Source", but that isn't very precise. That's like saying that I am a mammal. (I am, but it's more precise to say I am a "homosapien" ;-) frank: take a look at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html this explains what "Free-Software" is, andd why it's different from freeware ok what these licenses really mean to schools is that the schools are free to use the software as much or as little as they want, and they do not have to worry about having litigation brought up against them (which gives them peice of mind, and can save them tons of money) really, Frank, don't let the lingo of the licenses and the software frighten you. All that you really need to understand is that our choice of licenses help schools, parents, and children have the most possble access to our software. They can use and distribute our software for no-cost, can install it on as many computers as they want, and can use it wherever they want. that really does sound neat. I heard about this one school in philidelphia (one state over) where they were sued. afyter that, we all got this three page memo about software piracy I'm sure, it was a big deal the best thing is that you cant "pirate" Tux Typing. anyone can use it, and anyone can have it exactly... because the source code is available to whoever wants it, there really is no such a thing as piracy with respect to "free-software" that school in phili is in the article I sent you i know, i was reading it. thats why i said it oh ;-) sam: can I send you the patch for the $HOME dir config file? sure. I may not impliment it. This weekend I will be going to phoenix for a NMI orientation and wont be back until wed. While I am there, I plan on focusing 100% of my efforts on fixing the build process. this fix may screw up your pacth ;-) so its not a vacation? no ;-) Well.... it's supposed to be. My father-in-law will be in town for the Red Cross and he will have this big suite. He wont be using it much during the day, so he invited Cass and I to go and stay there. But I feel I need to get a lot done.... I have soooo many people complaining about this build problem it's not even funny. no rest for the wicked? nope. I cant believe microsoft would ask for $19.8 million dollars! that's what I thought when I read the article! I was so upset and these schools are very poor already well, they are financially strapped, but they /wont/ go bankrupt- The govt will always front them the money if they are found guilty in a lawsuit i need to go home, its 4pm here now. but i will email this article to my supervisor great, let them know of Tux4Kids and Tux Typing as well ;-) later bye Signoff: frank () I should go soon as well. I just got back from the book store buying books and I havent eaten lunch well, send me that patch, and i'll see what I can do. are you keeping a log of this? i'd like to read it yes I am, Dave wanted to read it as well. I hope some other people show up (like Jesse and Cal) we've only had three people on other than me ;-) what about molly? oh, that's my wife. she was going to join, but is in the other room now doing something (got bored waiting) I should close her client for her oh thats from your domain. yes, its cass I might call you before you leave, when are you going? saturday morning at the crack of dawn. my orientation is at 8am what is the orientation for? that non-profit management institute I plan on taking classes from oh yes, I remember well... I'm going to go get a big mac :) okay I might check in later on alright take care sam see yez ;-) Signoff: bombastic () amc (achomjak@mmm.com) has joined channel #tux4kids I can't wait to show the game to my little girl Yeah, we're really proud have you tried any of the themes? not yet I will probably wait until I get home to fiddle with those the ASL one (I made it) is /really/ hard! (I mean, even if you know ASL ;-) I don't even know what ASL is "American Sign Language" OOOOH, duh I made an ASL theme that replaces the letters with their equivalent ASL finger signs I should do that one soon my sister in law is really big into the ASL community in Colorado Well.. we've found it's really good for leanring to read finger spelling (the hardest part of talking to a deaf person ! ;-) She is part of a group popularizing it as a foriegn language option in the schools there It really should be an option. I personally think it (and spanish) should be languages that every child in the states should learn (in addition to Englihs) Babies of deaf parents typically can communicate with their parents via sign long before speaking babies do I would agree ... that is one of the largest shortcomings in the US I limited abilty to speak multiple languages children of deaf parents (who both know ASL and spoken english) on average score much higher than their non-ASL counterparts there are many studies that show ASL forces you to use areas of the brain not normally associated with language skills (and rarely used ;-) When Dave was on before, he mentionned he'd like to see a racing game that would help teach children shape recognition that would be fun we haven't hashed out the details... but generally it sounds like a nice idea how about an animal or shape pop up game ? the idea would be to "steer" the car to avoid hitting things. Trees, rocks, and inanimate objects would work good... uhm... animals may be gruesome... ;-) not in the driving game, though ... ;-) that could sell well in the south and in some parts of Idaho hey, did you want to discuss any of the financial stuff? If we do, we should not mention dollar ammounts (instead, percentages) and we should not mention any names in particular of contractors... but we could discuss it generally yes, that would be good to do now okay, I had a percentage list I have thought out, lemme grab it mostly I want to know the scope of the tux4kids organizaiton well, we have basically two goals.... the second builds on the first one... the first is to make more games like Tux Typing. We want to make as many Open-Source/Free-Software edu games and apps as possible... creating a suite of titles go on These will be geared towards Linux, but will be made in a platform independant way... so ports can be made very easily to other OSes. (to maximize the number of children who can access them) the second goal will be to package these together with a Linux distro geared towards schools, thus giving schools an alternative to the proprietary software they are using now is this organiztion going to be a clearinghouse of sorts or is it going to take over projects like tuxtyping we don't want to "take over" projects. how does tuxtyping come into this? we will start our own (which we manage) and then donate money to others that we feel need it and are working towards our goals Tux Typing is our flagship title. it is also our proof-of-concept. will it be controlled by digital monkey or tux4kids it shows 1) we can make high-quality educational apps 2) we can get community development support and 3) our games are "production ready" for schools (tux typing is currently in use at several schools nationwide) Controlled is a term that is hard to define in Open-Source arena. I know they are the same person but from a finincial perspective there needs to be a seperation of the two It will be controlled by whomever the project manager is for the project, at the moment, me. Tux4Kids will primarily deal with funding projects like Tux Typing. could that change at any moment? It could, if enough of the developer's get upset with the way I am running things, fork the project, and move the majority of the development elsewhere (This happened with Tux Racer, though they forked it because Tux Racer became closed source) so it is more of a clearing house than an actual development operation Idunno.... I mean, we would give money to developers, and they would develope for our project. But as far as the "ownership" of the code, once it's Free-Software (GPL) everyone has equal rights to it I understand the goal of the organization but the actual operation is still unclear would these developers be employees or would the organization be donating to a project? Well... I don't know. I was thinking contractors. But it if made more sense to be donating.... I mean, naturally, any money Tux4Kids gave to projects like Debian Jr., or OSEF would be donating.... but for the core projects we'd be responsable for, I would think it would be employess Tux4Kids would always manage the "orginal" Tux Typing.... but like I said, if the managment did something to piss off the developers, they could fork it that makes sense now to me See, of the money we'd spend specifically on projects, I'd like to have about 50% for internal projects and 50% for external I would suggest clearly seperating digital monkey - ghostwerks - tux4kids This is all key to my reason for this being non-profit. I don;t want us to be in competition with anyone... I'd much rather we collaboratred We can do that actually, we should get rid of Digital Monkey altogether... there are already three Digital Monkey companies out there.... ok this is what I see ... Digital Monkey is just a leftover from when i first started this long ago... any other questions? ;-) Tux4Kids is a not-for-profit that seeks funds for the goals already stated yes it aquires tuxtyping from digital monkey and becomes the administrator of it okay... if we have to do that, that;s not a problem remember, tuxtyping /really/ isn't anyone's property.... It's made up of so many community things, its not even funny it then solicits funds to further its goals including supporting existing organizations that help tuxtyping further its goals not just tuxtyping.... we want to have other projects we manage in the same vein as tuxtyping such as TuxReader (I have a URL, if you want) and Tux of Math Command like I said, we want to make a suit of games and applications. perfect :) we will combine our suite with other applications and games from other organizations I will draw up the articles of incorporation and the IRS documents so tuxtyping is the flagship and our proof-of-concept (since it is the most mature and "finished") wait on that... I have some of those classes i need to take shall we do this in Utah or arizona wel... I mean you can start them, but don't get too final ;-) Arizona has better non-profit legislation (I thought we had discussed that) so you are going to take those classes at the university yes... this weekend is the orientation excellent how is the legislation different in az than in ut we have better congressmen and senators ;-) actually, one of the classes I will be taking discusses this very thing, so I'd like to hold off until after I take the class I am not going to argue that for sure well except for Kolbe, who wants to get rid of the penny... ;-) http://www.geekcomix.com/dm/tuxread/ it is such a waste of metal ;-) that's the URL for TuxReader yeah, the penny is pretty useless... it just makes for very funny material on the Daily Show ;-) but, yeah, if you want to start on the articles of inc and IRS docs, that would be good. like I said, just wait on finishing them for a bit I noticed that some places (like OpenProjects.net) have managed to solicity initial funding from the community to pay for these docs and the filing of them as well as other startup costs I am currently looking into PayPal (what they used) for us I will write a draft for you to edit maybe take to the class for the instructor to edit and critique pay pal for what? for initial funding (not tax-deductable) for startup fees et al. see http://www.openprojects.net/fund_contributions.shtml that's what they did who? its basically just for contributions OpenProjects.net, they host the irc we're using ;-) They are a non-profit org formed to do stuff (not like our stuff) Open Projects Net exists to provide an interactive environment for free software and open source projects and support groups. thats from the page I just mentioned them as an example of how we can get some startup funds an excellent example I was just reading there page now, we have an advantage in that our project is education oriented. so we will be able to gain govt. grants (and not need to rely as much on donations) arizona would be a much better state than utah though I could look into doing it in california or washington which are even better why ca or wa? from a edu perspective why? much larger amount of non-profit and educational spending in those states and I can get things done in those states really... okay Ihave lots of contacts in washington from my graduate school days yeah, AZ has had pretty poor edu funding of schools (well... not really, but it does vary WIDELY from district to district) (TUSD, which is about three times the size of Flowing Wells, gets maybe half the funding ;-) so does every state except utah they suck across the board Now, with me not being a resident of any of those places, can that cause troubles ? no you are seperated form the corporation. the articles of incorporation need to be initiated by someone in that state but that will not be a trouble. we are only looking for non-profit status from the IRS