my blog

Friday 26 May 2006

Everyone wants to see them rocking!

If you're interested to see who will work on the Summer of Code for GNOME, run to the Planet GNOME Summer of Code 2006! I guess this will be the best place to monitor all the cool work that will happen in the next three months. There's also #soc on irc.gnome.org, so feel free to join. Some discussion will also happen on gnome-soc-list, where all the students and the mentors should be subscribed, but this will most probably be some administrative discussions.

It looks like I'll mentor Ryan and Etienne for GNOME. Ryan will work on the applets and I believe the result will be amazing. It might look like a project that will only have an impact on developers, but in the end, it will change the way we work with the applets and, hopefully, the notification area. Etienne will provide a library to use scanners, based on SANE, but with real UI love. The library should of course be dead-easy to use it in your application.

I'll also help Sébastien mentor Peter Moberg for an Ubuntu project. Peter will work on two small applications (and maybe more, if he has time), the main idea behind them being that it should be easy to save, restore, and maybe even share your GNOME configuration. Like, for example, sharing your panel layout, or restoring the initial configuration of GNOME. I know I'll use this when smoketesting GNOME!

Some of the students will go to GUADEC. This is good news since they should all feel part of our community. I hope they'll be able to show us some of their work they've done.

I nearly forgot the teaser: expect some other good news related to the Summer of Code in the next few days ;-)

[18:44] | [GNOME] | [#384]

Thursday 25 May 2006

Planet Ubuntu comments

You have to wonder why I prefer to post comments on my blog instead of using the nice forms on people's blogs... When reading my feeds this morning, I found three great posts, all from Planet Ubuntu.

There's Jonathan, who's reporting about some Linux deployment in prisons. I'm really amazed, but it's not because it's Linux. It's because what's happening there is an effort to help people. There's a real issue (rehabilitation) and they're coming with a good solution. It really looks like what you guys at doing at the Shuttleworth Foundation is most useful. Keep rocking, guys!

Then I read about Jorge, who used pessulus and seems to like it (even if it could be improved). I guess I'm always emotive when people start talking about it ;-) I'd be quite interested to know the gconf keys you had to manually tweak, though: this is really something that you shouldn't have to do.

Last but not least, Ante reports about a fantastic translation effort. This is really impressive. I hope you submitted all your translations upstream so that, for example, the GNOME ones can be included in GNOME 2.14.2 (which is due next week)!

[12:46] | [Ubuntu] | [#383] | [2 comments] | [one trackback]

Monday 22 May 2006

My name is Frog, Le Frog

Davyd: you can't imagine how hard it is to buy a good lycra jumpsuit. I mean, did you ever try to ask for a green lycra jumpsuit in a store? Go and try it! And you'll understand that it's not an easy life.

In other news, we finished ranking the GNOME applications for the Summer of Code. It was really hard and I expect lots of people will be sad that some project didn't make it. On the other hand, I'm pretty excited by our current list of projects: while they're not all in my personal wishlist, I'm convinved the outcome will be rocking!

[21:22] | [GNOME] | [#382] | [4 comments]

Sunday 21 May 2006

Summer of Code update

Note to GNOME mentors: read your mails sent to the address with which you registered. You should have received voting informations.

Summer of Code has kept some of us quite busy since the beginning of the month. Some quick figures from GNOME:

  • 182 eligible applications were received
  • 56 mentors registered
  • we requested 40 projects
  • we will most probably be allocated ~20 projects

A good percentage of the 182 applications are really great, and it makes it hard to rank all the applications to choose only 20-30 of them. We had an IRC meeting two days ago to take some decisions, and mentors now have to vote for their preferred applications.

I'm also registered as an Ubuntu mentor and I was quite surprised to find a bit less interesting applications there (even if there are still a lot of interesting applications ;-)).

One of the big strengths of the Summer of Code is that it makes everyone really enthusiast. I'm not sure what is the magic ingredient that creates all this interest (Google? money? free software?), but if it's possible to keep everyone excited like this all year long, we can make wonders.

Many thanks to Google for organizing this and being responsive to all the requests people are sending.

[14:35] | [GNOME] | [#381] | [one comment]

Tuesday 2 May 2006

Mangez du spam avec vos trackbacks^Wrétroliens !

Comme énormément d'utilisateurs de DotClear depuis quelques jours ou semaines, j'ai eu l'immense plaisir d'avoir beaucoup de nouveaux amis. Ces amis me parlent souvent de choses très intéressantes, avec des mots compliqués ou à ne pas montrer à des âmes innoncentes. Mais malheureusement, je me suis vite lassé de ces amis. J'ai donc voulu leur fermer la porte, sans pour autant fermer la porte à tout le monde.

Fermer les rétroliens n'est donc pas une option. Certains ont proposé une solution se basant sur une vérification DNS, mais il semble que cela bloque certains rétroliens légitimes. J'ai donc opté pour une petite modification de spamplemousse se basant sur la vérification DNS.

L'idée est toute simple : dans inc/tb.php, après le test spamfilter::is_spam(), on ajoute ceci (c'est la version brutale, avec ipCheck() qui est définie comme ici) :

if ($spam === false && !ipCheck()) {
        $spam = 'DNS verification failure';
}

L'intérêt est que le rétrolien qui ne passe pas le test n'est pas perdu, mais simplement modéré par spamplemousse. On verra bien d'ici quelques jours si cela fonctionne bien...

[16:34] | [Informatique] | [#380] | [4 comments] | [one trackback]

Summer of Code: submit your applications!

I'm really excited by this year's Summer of Code: we have tons of great ideas and after only a few hours, we already received some applications for projects.

Every student should apply and submit a GNOME project (deadline is May 8th). And don't worry if you're not deeply familiar with the GNOME community, since this is an ideal way to get involved in GNOME: you'll have a project with specific goals, a mentor will be here to guide you, you'll get to know how the community works, and, hopefully, the results of the project will be used in the GNOME universe.

I'm eagerly waiting to see everyone rocking!

[13:29] | [GNOME] | [#379]

by Vincent