Last Call for GNOME Summer of Code 2010 Ideas! Student proposal period starts Monday!

On Saturday a small group of SoC mentors will sort through the list of ideas on the wiki, clean them up, remove those we don't want to recommend to students, and highlight those we find especially alluring.

If you have ideas for your project, you have today and tomorrow to add them to the wiki before our meeting. Please place new ideas in the "Other Ideas" section.

The student proposal period starts Monday. If you want to help review student proposals, please sign up as a mentor. If you don't use your full name and include details when applying to be a mentor, we may not know who you are, so if you choose to do that please email me, Ruben, or Daniel with your link_id so we don't reject you. :-) We have to be careful because there are some sneaky or confused students out there who try to sign up as mentors.

The ideas page will be under tight control after our meeting on Saturday, but it will still be possible to add ideas if you check with folks in #soc-admin or on the GNOME soc-mentors-list first.

One-click install for Banshee Telepathy Sharing Extension 0.1.1

Over the course of the summer, you may have read Neil Loknath's various blog posts about his Summer of Code project that lets you share your Banshee music library with your Telepathy contacts.



Well, it's pretty cool stuff, and now that he's started making releases, it's a great opportunity for people to try it out and give him feedback.

If you're using openSUSE 11.2, you can get version 0.1.1 of his extension through this handy one-click install link.

Note that my little repository includes upgrades to telepathy-gabble, telepathy-mission-control, and gnutls. You'll need to log out/in or kill all telepathy/empathy/mission-control processes before the changes take affect.

If you're like me and prefer to build Banshee from source and Neil's extension from source but don't want to reinstall your entire Telepathy stack from source, just install telepathy-gabble and telepathy-mission-control from my repository (this will cause a few gnutls packages to upgrade as well), and you'll be good to go.



Let me know if you have any issues, but let's consider these packages officially unsupported, could break your Empathy, impregnate your cat, etc.

Tweeters, UIA Status

Climbing, Addiction

I took last week pretty easy, since I was still kind of wiped out from being sick. This allowed me to be refreshed and ready for my weekly Thursday rock climbing. This week our usual group was supplemented by new friends and some friendly geeks (it was almost a BarCamp reunion). I had a pretty good climbing night, and then we went out for dinner at Shakespeare's Pub which is always fun.

Dinner with a big group is interesting and fun because there are usually two or three main conversations going on, and the center of those conversations may shift around the table. What was weird at this dinner was that any time there was a lull in the conversation, the geeks produced their smart phones and (presumably) caught up on email, feeds, and general internet happenings. At the other extreme, if somebody made a particularly witty comment, these same geeks raced each other to Twitter it.

It was kind of surreal...I generally consider myself too plugged-in, so I avoid highly-addictive services like Twitter. During the recent San Diego fires, I did find Twitter the best source for fire news, but in general I've made a conscious effort to *not* join that community. I really wonder what these services do to a person's attention span. When spending time with tweeters, I get the feeling that if I am not a constant source of interest or entertainment, they will be quickly drawn back to the web via the nearest terminal.

Previously I've thought about how convenient it might be to have a cool smart phone that I could develop software for, but now I fear that my addictive personality would quickly fall victim to these pitfalls.

I kind of get the feeling that hyper-plugged-in people are not so much the creators of Web 2.0 as they are the "product" for some weird Web 2.0 economy. Although, they could just be geniuses with much more time and energy than I have... ;-)

UIA Status

In other news, I made some good progress last week. I have a hacky little patch to winforms that initializes the providers via reflection, and exposes a FormAdded event to get notified when forms are created. I really want to stress that this is just a proof-of-concept to get the pieces connected for UIA, and is not ready (for various reasons) to be proposed for inclusion in Mono. Anyway, this initializes our new UIAutomationWinforms assembly so that it can create providers as Forms are created. I also made a little more progress on the WindowProvider and ButtonProvider, but they haven't been my focus so they are still incomplete. I wanted to work more on our "core" that will connect the UIAutomationProvider assembly with the winforms provider and the UIA<->ATK bridge, but ended up getting stuck reading a lot of documentation about the Microsoft implementation.

Andres has done some awesome work to get the bridge working, so I'll be working with him to get the end-to-end model working. It will be very nice to have a thin vertical slice of our entire infrastructure working, so that we can at least see winforms windows in Accerciser. I'll be working on the core and improving providers this week.

Summer of Code Deadline Extension

Also, the deadline for submitting proposals to GNOME for Summer of Code 2008 has been extended by one week. I spent a lot of time this weekend reviewing the proposals we have received so far, and plan on spending next weekend in much the same way. There are some really great proposals in there, but it will be good to see what another week brings us. I don't expect to do any mentoring (I didn't propose any Tomboy ideas this year), but it's fun to help out with the whole process. My main role this year will be getting on people's backs about deadlines and overall status. ;-)

Summer Plans

Lessons from Summer of Code

So, GNOME didn't accept any Tomboy-related projects for Summer of Code 2007 (Mono did accept a neat one, though). On the whole, this was not due to any shortcoming in the proposals themselves. We received 14, and several of them were very good. In fact, most of the students who submitted good proposals for Tomboy have been accepted by other organizations this year, so the end goal of getting these students involved in open source is achieved.

So what happened? Basically, I posted ideas that I hadn't really thought through, and though they might have made interesting projects, they didn't have any obvious value to GNOME as a whole. When students saw the ideas post on the wiki page, they might have thought that as long as they had the best proposal for a given idea, they would be accepted. This was not the case.

1. Revision Control: This was the first Tomboy idea listed at the GNOME SoC Ideas page. We got 8 proposals for this idea. I would have been happy to mentor at least 3 of those proposals. But here's the thing: why would anyone use this feature? If you want revision control on your notes, you probably want it on all you data, in which case you want a system-wide revision control system, not a custom GUI in each application. The only use case I can think of where this feature makes sense is for simple or formal note synchronization (that is what I would use it for). But I failed to list this when writing the idea and its benefits, and most students did not focus on it at all. In the end, these proposals received low scores from most mentors, and the highest-rated students ended up being accepted by other organizations.
2. Encrypted Notes: This feature represented an edge case for Tomboy. It would only be useful to users who are paranoid enough to want to encrypt a few notes, but not paranoid enough to want to encrypt their whole file system. And this set of users would also have to be really into Tomboy, since there are already applications specifically designed to store secrets. We received a good proposal for this project, but most mentors were not convinced that this would really be used by anyone.
3. Todo/Task Lists: This was my favorite idea, and I think it had the most relevance to GNOME as a whole, but it was one of the last ideas on the wiki page, and we only received two related proposals. One proposal was so well thought out that we will probably use it in our own implementation of this feature. The student who wrote this proposal was accepted by GNOME for a higher-priority idea instead.
   

So what are the lessons here?

• I (or whoever) need to only list ideas that have a clear benefit to GNOME as a whole, and that have a high probability of being supported by other mentors involved in the ranking process.
• Any piece of the idea designed to be reusable by the rest of GNOME needs to be implemented in C, or there will be a backlash. This is unfortunate but understandable. Any ideas that violate this rule should probably be listed with the Mono project instead.
  
• Most proposals will be for listed ideas. It is better to list no ideas then to mislead 8 students into writing good proposals for an idea that has no chance of being accepted.
• Corollary to above: make sure students know that just because a maintainer is interested in seeing proposals for a particular idea, that doesn't necessarily mean the rest of GNOME will be convinced by it (and in fact, it doesn't even mean the mentor who listed the idea will be convinced by it, which, to be fair, I did state on the wiki page)

So I'm bummed I won't be mentoring anyone this summer, but really the fault is my own for getting too excited and listing inappropriate ideas. I sincerely apologize to any students who may feel burned by this.


Plans for the Rest of the Summer

So I'm finally starting to have free time for coding again (SoC and other obligations being over for me). Here are my goals for the summer:

• Get win32 support into Tomboy for 0.8.0. I've really dropped the ball on this, and it's going to take serious work to get it ready now.
• Make a "Note This With Tomboy" extension for Firefox or Epiphany. I have basically done this for Epiphany, but unfortunately there are some limitations when writing Python extensions for Epiphany that may lead me to switch to Firefox (which is my browser of choice, anyway). This is inspired by the cool bookmarklet you can use with Stikkit to make a stikkit of the page you're viewing.
• Poke around with Todo/Task list support in Tomboy. It would be cool to sneak this into 0.8.0.
• Help out with note sync for Tomboy, and make sure there is some sort of win32 support.
  
• Clean up and release svnservant before it suffers from bit rot.
  

Summer of Code == Week of No Code

176 valid proposals received by GNOME.

14 proposals for Tomboy work.

8 for Revision Control for Tomboy Notes.

3 for some sort of Evolution integration (tasks, appointments, etc).

2 for Encrypted Tomboy Notes.

1 for Networked Tomboy.


0 lines of code written by me in the last week or so. ;-)

The Bullets of My Life

(not a whiny post about my job)

• Google Summer of Code 2007 has opened for applications! Of course, GNOME is participating this year. If we get any good proposals for Tomboy, I'll be mentoring, which is pretty cool.
• I wrote the draft for the "History" page for the new GNOME website. Of course, it won't go up for a month or so. For some reason it took me like 2 weeks to crank out a couple of straight-forward paragraphs. I really need to practice writing more...
• Although I haven't done any huge Tomboy work, I've done a bunch of little things that have been eating into the time I should be spending doing the refactoring I announced a month ago. Unfortunately I can only really spend about 8 solid hours per week on Tomboy. :-( But, I documented my work, and hopefully I'll get some feedback so I can start moving things into the main code base. Followed soon after by WORLD DOMINATION (well, no, just better Windows support, but still!).
• Guys and gals, I added this "Shared Items" thingy to my blog, and you should check it out! When I'm in Google Reader, if I see something I think should be shared with the world (often it's not even geeky programmer stuff), I click the little "Share" button and it shows up in this widget on my blog. So you should check it out from time to time!
• Yes! Exclamation points are definitely "in"! (so is putting punctuation where it should logically go: outside the quotation marks, unless you're quoting the punctuation!).
• Ack! Almost forgot! GNOME 2.18 was released yesterday, so now I'm jonesin' to upgrade my Ubuntu installation to the beta of Feisty (whenever it comes out...).
• I'm a little peeved that "refactor" and its various permutations are not recognized by most spell-checkers as words. I mean, shouldn't spell-checkers in geeky programs like Firefox and blogger include words like that? Incidentally, "blogger" is in blogger's dictionary, but not Firefox's.