User talk:CharlesMerriam

April 2nd

I enjoyed reading April_Fool_2008_Build_Process, but for better or worse it is now April 2nd. Just a reminder, were you going to revert yourself here?

I'm not sure it really got the audience it deserved (~25-30 views), maybe you should consider turning April_Fool_2008_Build_Process into a vision statement, :-) (smiling, but not necessarily kidding).

Cjl 10:40, 2 April 2008 (EDT)

A vision is a ground breaking strategy. This is more like a work order ticket. I made the joke explicit.

It looks like your portrayal of the "Shakespearean fool" was quite successful, congratulations. Here's hoping your ticket gets closed with all deliberate dispatch. Regards Cjl 13:13, 4 April 2008 (EDT)

Thank you. I wrote up the debate from yesterday's talk 2008_Debate_of_Build_and_Release. CharlesMerriam 13:12, 5 April 2008 (EDT)

More foolishness

You have quite the "fool" thread going these days, the full Emerson quote is "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." It might have been kinder to yourself to refer to page naming consistency as your bugbear.  :-)

Thank you. I remember the quote, I guess I'm just "A bugbear of very little brain." and overly fond of honey.  :)

I think there is a certain INconsistency in the several OLPC xxx constructions. In many circumstances, it is OLPC country, perhaps best read as "OLPC volunteers in country", whereas your construction of OLPC language/script for keyboard page naming is read as "OLPC (Cambridge) keyboard design for language/script".

I agree that the whole tag of OLPC as a prefix/suffix on an OLPC based wiki is a bit strange. I was moving some information gleaned from the devel list into the wiki and noticed that half the layouts had no naming scheme. Now all the keyboard layouts are consistently wrong. Progress!

My own personal bugbear/bogey/hobgoblin is consistency in meta-data, particularly categorization. To that end, I've done some wiki-work on the "OLPC country" tags to improve their utility in finding relevant pages (and quiet the clamoring voices in my head) which has included (in only one or two instances) adding the "OLPC country" category to the cognate OLPC language/script keyboard pages, but I haven't done this extensively as I've noticed some oddities and I've been hesitant to be TOO bold in offering my own solutions.

Hmmm... Countries vs. languages vs. deployments: most of the keyboard layouts are of random academic interest for people who like to design keyboards and some are on real laptops. There seems to be no table of hoped/planned/committed/actual deployments with number of units and versions. I can make the wiki page and would need the numbers from OLPC Foundation. OLPC Foundation may have legitimate reasons for balking. Or maybe there already exists a page I haven't found.

I would think keyboard mappings might be of interest to developers (or at least Pootle translators) that may not have access to the real hardware. (e.g. how would you transcode "Press Y/N" for yes/no, etc.)

Do you think these particular page names deserve some attention?

Spanish (Latin America) is at OLPC_Argentina_Keyboard.

Arabic is at OLPC_Libya_Keyboard

French is at OLPC_Rwanda_Keyboard

Kreyòl is at OLPC_French_Canadian_Keyboard

I think a combination of adopting your "OLPC language/script keyboard" naming convention and more widely applying "OLPC country" categories might be the best of all possible worlds. Any thoughts?

I may have uncovered a problem, and my solution was an unconsidered hack towards conforming to the majority emergent standard. Either a round of organizational head-work about organizing deployments is in order or the problem could be deferred with some reference and redirect pages. For example, a main deployment page mapping the rough equivalents in a table, e.g., spoken language "Spanish" goes with written language "Spanish" used in country "Argentina" for deployment "Planned Ciebel 5,000 laptop trial" and "Deployed RandomVillage 200 laptop Pilot". Also, redirects for "OLPC_Argentina_Keyboard" to "OLPC_Spanish_Keyboard" so that both are valid.

I'm not convinced that deployment is a critical concept in this context as one-to-many and many-to-one country:language mappings are fine. "OLPC Afghanistan" tags on Dari, Pashto, etc. keyboards; or "OLPC Peru" and "OLPC Argentina", etc. tags on "OLPC Spanish keyboard" page. Not that deployment numbers wouldn't be interesting, but they're going to go stale quickly, whereas Uzbek keyboards will probably never be deployed in Ecuador.

If you want, I can make the blank pages for others to fill in. Note that tables in Wiki's are a pain to edit without WYSIWYMG (JavaScript) editors. If you can find out if OLPC Foundation is against centralizing and releasing the deployment data, it would save me hassle.

As for tables, you can get away with HTML tags instead of proper wiki-text, see here for example, not that HTML tables are any great fun to build freehand either, but MSWord > Save as HTML will get you there. Or you can go really old-school ASCII-hack and use MSExcel as a text-formatter (alternating columns to add wiki-text "||" between cells) and then a final =concatenate(A1,B1,C1,...) column to produce a single text line per row of table. I've hacked up bulk SQL batch updates that way many times.

Cjl 15:20, 5 April 2008 (EDT)

CharlesMerriam 00:24, 6 April 2008 (EDT)

Yet more foolishness

I thought about it a bit more, and decided templates would be a better idea. This summary could be kept up to date by country, and replaces the obsolete color map.

There would still need to be a separate deployment box for each deployment project. That box would include sponsoring organization, local websites, OLPC Foundation contact point, etc.

Here's the rough cut. I taught myself templates and the odd programming language constructs last night. Template:Country_box

CharlesMerriam 02:14, 7 April 2008 (EDT)

Brazil

---

Country Information
ISO Country Code	Set Code Param
Wikipedia Article	Wikipedia Link
Government Support	Sponsored Trials
Deployment	Demonstration (under 50 machines)
Languages
Keyboard Layout	OLPC_Argentina_Keyboard
Written	Spanish
Spoken	Spanish
Secondary Written	None
Secondary Spoken	English