lots of regions have special easter traditions, so does my hometown. one week before the easter weekend, six six foot tall wheels made of oak wood get thrown into the local river so that the wood is saturated with water and cannot easily burn. at easter sunday, the wheels are brought up to a hill (the so called “easter mountain”, years ago my grandfather did this job with his two horses) and the wheels get “filled” with some special straw. when it becomes dark, a cannon announces each wheel that gets ignited and then thrown down the hill.
it’s a heathenish-germanic custom based on some sun cult, but to combine it with christianity the bells of the churches ring when the wheels are rolling down the hill.
for better imagination: exciting video footage (by anna and cedric) from last year here (youtube) and boring footage (by /me of course) from this year here (ogg video).
easter traditions.
GNOME’s GHOP Runner-Ups.
I’m quite late with this, but I like to mention a few more students that participated in Google’s Highly Open Participation Contest. I’m pleased to post our unofficial “runner-ups” here:
Patrick Hulin (patrick.hulin)
The GNOME Project has selected Patrick Hulin as our Grand Prize Winner because of the quality and quantity of his contributions to the project. He worked on a varied set of tasks including documentation enhancements, performance contributions to GTK+, test coverage improvements in glib and cairo, porting baobab from gnome-vfs to gio, and bug fixing on several GNOME modules, especially Totem.
David Turner (Cillian64)
David took on a variety of tasks. He warmed up by working on some of our “choose the bugs yourself” tasks (fixing twelve mnemonic bugs and testing five patches from GNOME’s bugzilla) just to dive into the codebases of empathy (providing support for removing groups) and gThumb (preparing to remove the libexif library). He also vastly improved the scrolling support in Evince.
In addition to this, David updated the JHBuild moduleset schemas and the (now new and shiny) manual itself.
David already had open source development experience, as the developer of tuxcast, a command-line linux podcatcher.
Natan Yellin (aantny)
Natan wrote an article on GConf for the GNOME Journal (not yet released). He provided Drag-and-drop support for the Online Desktop file widget and a mail widget for the Online Desktop sidebar, fixed a Deskbar-Applet bug and also modified gThumb’s metadata handling and enhancing gThumb’s script definitions.
Natan is full of ideas and provided own proposals for potential tasks. He is especially interested in AWN (a dock-like bar) and currently thinks about creating a universal applets framework for GNOME.
Philipp Kerling (k.philipp)
Philipp added an LCOV code coverage suite to Pango and GTK+ to measure code coverage. He also contributed code to the GNOME online desktop module by providing an embedded workspace switcher widget and popouts for the Online Desktop file widget. He removed old icons from the gnome-desktop module that are now shipped in gnome-icon-theme and fixed four bugs in gnome-build.
Philipp has also contributed to GNOME’s German translation team.
In general, we again like to thank all the students participating. Many of our students went above and beyond what had been asked for by the task descriptions and were also available in our IRC channels to help each other. It was a great pleasure and wonderful experience to work with all of you – looking forward to seeing you around!
The GNOME is out!
six months later… thanks to everybody who was involved in another nice release!
remaining 2.22 showstoppers.
translations
adding “just one additional string” to a module two weeks before a major release does not sound bad at first sight. but keep in mind that most of the modules have about 20 completely translated po files. it means that 20 translation teams have to edit their po file again. don’t request string freeze breaks that late in the cycle unless you have a real reason to (security issue etc). a “nice to have” is definitely not enough!
showstoppers
our showstopper list has become smaller. beside those 4 crasher bugs that have been around for some time now, only the missing ftp backend for gvfs (Company seems to work on it) and the missing migration of trash from the old location to the new one (i hope vuntz takes a look at it) are left.
gicmo is working on finishing webdav support and the “network:” backend has been fixed this week by a. walton. and of course alex and cosimoc also work like mad on squashing bugs and getting things finalized for 2.22.0. (now i hope i did not forget anybody in my list.) if anybody has the feeling that a big blocker for 2.22 has not been addressed yet, raise your voice now!
this development cycle is a tough one for our translators (many late string changes because of finishing gvfs/gio/nautilus and a lot of new strings due to new modules). just wanted to say thanks to our translators. you really do an awesome job!
Google Highly Open Participation Contest results.
The Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP) concluded a few days back. Google had invited 10 Open Source projects, GNOME being one of them, to set up a list of tasks for high school students.
GHOP was a great success and we had much more interested and motivated students than the approx. 100 tasks that GNOME offered (so if there’s a “next time” for this, GNOME will definitely need even more maintainers/mentors filing tasks).
Thanks to the students, GNOME has seen a lot of contributed code, improvements in automated testing, translation and documentation and many bug reports and fixes (the link is not a complete list).
Today Google published the names of the Grand Prize winners. Congratulations to GNOME’s Grand Prize winner Patrick Hulin and to the many, many other students for their great work! We hope that you gathered experience, had fun working in the GNOME community and that you will continue to contribute to GNOME and Open Source. See you around!
GNOME 2.22.0 will probably not be GNOME 2.22
well. KDE 4.0 is not KDE4.
GNOME 2.22 will also have some regressions because of porting from gnome-vfs to GIO. two of them are listed in the latest GNOME showstopper review: the missing “network:” backend implementation and the missing ftp support. there are more regressions. if you have some spare time and are ready to dig into the world of GIO and/or nautilus, help is most welcome! see the GioToDo wiki page, take a look at the list of gio bugs and nautilus 2.21 bugs and/or visit #nautilus on irc. thanks for your help.
die musiklage der letzten tage.
- Fad Gadget’s Collapsing New People. Zwei Fad Gadget-CDs besaß ich ja bereits, aber mir kam erst letztens die Idee, nach Videos zu schauen. YouTube ist toll, wenn man sich dort die Auftritte bei der ARD-Hitparadensendung “Formel Eins” nochmal anschauen kann (ich wollte schon immer den Begriff “Hitparade” verwenden). Ich kann mir jedes Buch der Welt in einer öffentlichen Bibliothek ausleihen, aber die Fernsehsendungen, für die man teilweise GEZ-Gebühren (korrekte Bezeichnung hier: “Rundfunkgebühren”, bevor die GEZ mich abmahnt) gezahlt hat, sind verschlossen in Archiven, oder (wenn ich mich an das Weihnachtskaffeetrinken mit der Familie richtig erinnere) man zahlt 800 EUR für einen 15-Sekunden-Schnipsel einer ZDF-Musiksendung aus den 80er Jahren, wenn man den rechtlich korrekten Weg gehen will. Urheberrechte waren geschichtlich nie mit physikalischen Eigentumsrechten gleichgesetzt; nun gehen wir dank dem Lobbyismus der Plattenfirmen und Filmstudios also diesen Weg, machen damit 95% der Kultur einer ganzen Generation unzugänglich und kriminalisieren die bevorzugten künstlerischen Ausdrucksweisen der Jugend, indem die Verwendung eines halbsekündigen Bildes in einem selbstfabrizierten YouTube-Click mit einer vierstelligen Abmahnungssumme belohnt wird. Verweise hierfür zu Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture”. Arme neue Welt.
- Von Collapsing New People zu Collapsing New Buildings. “Alles wieder offen” von den Neubauten ist noch ruhiger als Vorgänger, aber ebenso lyrisch und wunderschön industriell instrumentiert. Geld absolut wert. Link zum Video.
- Alicia Keys: Songs in A minor. Lag hier schon länger herum. Recht schöne Musik zum abends mit Wärmflasche für Klausuren lernen. :)
- The Streets: Original Pirate Material. Hatte ich schon mal vor Jahren als dann verlorengegangene MP3s. Allein für den Satz “Geezers need excitement. If their lives don’t provide them this they incite violence. Common sense, simple common sense.”, der die gesamte Debatte über gescheiterte Integration und Jugendkriminalität kurz und präzise zusammenfasst, lohnt sich der Kauf. Eigentlich warte ich jetzt nur auf eine schnoddrige Zusammenarbeit zwischen The Streets und Lady Sovereign. :-)
- Miss Kittin: Batbox. Schöner, direkter, halliger Elektro. Link zum Video.
- MGMT: Time To Pretend. Läuft hier gerade ziemlich oft. Grandioser Text, unglaublich beschissenes Video. Gut dass ich das erst nach dem Hören gesehen habe.
- Es macht mir große Sorgen, wenn Drittklässler in diese “Freunde”-Bücher (in denen jeder den vorgefertigten Fragebogen ausfüllen soll) unter Lieblingsmusik “Massiv” eintragen. Vorallem machen mir die Eltern Sorgen, die nicht mitbekommen, welche Musik ihr Kind hört.
some (software) plans for 2008.
evolution
at the beginning of the 2.23 cycle, i want to take a look at evolution’s user-visible messages. a lot of non-crasher bug reports (and especially support questions in forums) deal with error strings that are hard to understand for average users. i filed an evolution tracking bug to collect bug reports based on cryptic messages. in a kind of way “evolve your user interface to educate your users“, though you of course cannot compare the information that can be displayed on a 1024x680px webpage to a small error popup.
this should also include error messages that are useless to the user, e.g. the famous (and now fixed) bug 213072:
it does not totally fit here because it is about security and phishing, but i love the Phishing Tips and Techniques somebody linked on planet gnome a while ago. it tells a lot about application dialog design and its effect on users’ behaviour.
so my task currently sounds like going through evolution’s error messages xml files and see what can be improved. any additional comments to bug 502515 appreciated.
translations
at the beginning of 2.23 gnome should migrate from using context for strings to msgctxt which is less error-prone and supported by most translation tools. see http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/MsgctxtMigration. i also hope to push other gnome goals and the migration from deprecated modules like gnome-vfs and libgnomeprint*. let’s get a platform that is attractive to vendors and contributors.
marketing
for the second half of this year, i would like to concentrate a bit on FLOSS marketing. which projects have good marketing, and what can be improved? i hope that this will lead to become my diploma thesis. firefox and gnome are of potential interest here, though they have quite different target groups.
2007.
- czech republic: found out a few things about myself (i should continue that in 2008), for example that i am able to share my room with somebody (i had expected me to look for a flat on my own after three weeks, but my roommate was just too friendly) and in general that i can get along in another country quite well. also spending time with people from all other the world is serious fun, with regard to both partying and discussing about cultural differences or even politics. and i’m quite sure there’s no better club than crossclub.
- holidays: we had one of the best holiday trips ever by just taking a car and driving west.
- soccer: i’m still a proud member of the teheran isotopes, a wonderful soccer team. thanks guys for lots of fun!
- new year’s presents:
(french:) je remercie #gnomefr pour me faire cadeau d’un t-shirt très chic (crevette, je t’aime!) est une disque compacte avec de la musique allemande (vuntz, je t’aime aussi et à partir de maintenant, nous pouvons l’accompagner ensemble et à haute voix).
(english translation:) i’ve spent the last days on observing behdad to find out when he leaves for work. i broke into his apartment and stole his favourite yellow t-shirt and his mouse. behdad, i have really seen apartments in a much better state than yours (see the attached picture i took there). thanks so much to crevette for sending it to behdad so i could steal it there! ;-)
vuntz also seems to be busy sending presents. i surprisingly received some german music that he loves to sing while eating icecream, thank you too! seems i like #gnomefr more and more! and thanks nokia for a cute internet tablet to play with (it unfortunately does not work with the university wifi because of missing ttls-pap support). - gnome: again annual #1 bug closer, perhaps time to look out for new challenges. had a 2007 guadec talk (also something i should do more often). the nice thing about social communities is when you meet physically when travelling – thanks to pvanhoof, mcrha and matĕj for spending some time together when i was around!
- music: (parental advisory: don’t click links if you may dislike contents.) mp3s: beside my old time favourite crystal, i think this was my heavy rotation for 2007: rihanna: umbrella, lupe fiasco: kick push, justin timberlake: my love, jan delay: klar, k.i.z.: pogen, vypsaná fixa: lunapark. live shows: ignite (probably concerts #20-#22), rise against, k.i.z. (laughed till my tears ran down my cheeks), f.r., freundeskreis. remember, music will be always there, even if everything else gets broken.
that short-term-thinking disease.
- GHOP tasks: so far we have at least 59 fixed bugs by GHOP students (in fact it’s much more, but i’m too lazy to tag them in bugzilla). congratulations to all participating students and their mentors!
a few maintainers have been very active adding tasks (i’d especially like to thank the people behind gthumb, deskbar-applet, totem, online-desktop, anjuta and a few more projects for adding tasks), but most folks i talked to said “naah, no time”. can understand that – mentoring a student takes time, but some of our GHOP students are definitely interested in long-term contributing. and some of those students that cannot find a task because no unclaimed tasks exist are probably also interested in long-term contributing, but we lose these opportunities. - GNOME Goals: same here, there’s no momentum to get that stuff worked out… the PoLinguas goal is only waiting for the non-answering gparted maintainer to review (the rest of the modules is harder to work out), and the PoptGOption goal is only waiting for patches for Evolution, bonoboui and gnome-python and the unresponsive gnopernicus folks. i’m sometimes impressed by the ignorance even of maintainers of small modules that it takes years and several pings to get such simple patches in. maintainers may say “naah, no time, more important stuff to work on”. can understand – small goals also take time. i just wonder how attractive the GNOME platform can be towards contributors or potential investors if you don’t clean up your codebase. i’m curious how long it will take until we can finally stop to ship deprecated gnome-vfs and libgnomeprint*. probably ages.
- release notes: we had bad press for 2.18, and we had bad release notes. we had good press for 2.20, and we had good release notes. surprise? the earlier you start working on cute release notes, the better the text and the (number of) screenshots can be. you need input from the maintainers for that, and nagging every single maintainer takes time. GNOME has a roadmap for that, and the maintainers shall update it with the module features and also plans for 2.24, now that we have reached 2.22 feature freeze. some maintainers will say “naah, no time”. can understand – refelecting on the important stuff you’ve added in the past months takes time. but the release notes are the most crucial thing GNOME has to manage in six months. if the notes suck, then the GNOME release will suck (at least according to the press). journalists will not just wait to see for themselves and spend their time on running 2.22 to write an article about it two weeks after everybody else has written about it. and don’t even mention sneak previews that we don’t have the volunteers for.
