IRC: I had already set up an IRC nickname for last semester's project Exaile, though I never really used it. I use Pidgin for all my instant-messaging needs and it allows easy setup of IRC stuff. I joined both the channels listed on the Math4Team wiki: #sugar and #fedora-olpc, but there's not much going on tonight. It doesn't look like the #sugar channel regularly logs its chats, so no history there, and the #fedora-olpc looks like it only logs meetings. The Math4Team indicates to use the mailing list for most conversations anyway.
Mailing List: Apparently the forwarding of our group gmail account worked (I hope) because I received multiple messages from the mailing list, mostly about new contributers joining, and what we have to offer to the project. I'm not sure how I feel about Brittany's response that we're all "pretty good programmers", but I know we'll each be able to find something valuable to contribute.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Eric Steven Raymond compares Linux to nuclear explosions (page 11) in this piece of work. I've never considered that analogy before, but I like it and I think it fits. He describes Linus Torvalds' development process and how it was so different from the earlier ones he had used that he didn't think it would work, but obviously it did (and pretty well). Raymond also stresses the importance of source being open, especially in the development and debugging processes because letting more people see the code (who actually WANT to see the code) greatly benefits the software and its users. Most of his ideas make a lot of sense, and you'd think a lot more people would follow them, but that could just be my biased opinion because I like his pro-Linux viewpoint.
Other news: I tried to install the Sugar desktop while running Ubuntu 10.04. Although successful and I could log in and even connect to the network, there was nothing usable in it, which is actually noted on the wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sugar. Next steps are to either install the "appliances" from a USB stick as indicated or set up a virtual machine to run the environment. Or to just do the much simpler install on my other machine running Ubuntu 10.10. Either way, it will be nice to play around with the software first and get a better idea of where we're going with our involvement in this project.
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