Planet SoC

There’s less than one month left until the beginning of this year’s Akademy conference in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium. Just a few moments ago I’ve finally arranged everything for the trip. The room at youth hostel Domein Roosendael is paid for and the plane ticket is registered. One more time I have to thank Linux Users Group of Slovenia (Lugos), who are paying for the flight. This will be my second time to Akademy and this time I’m staying for the whole week.

A couple of days have passed since eight students found out they will be hacking on Thousand Parsec as part of Google Summer of Code 2008. All have come to Thousand Parsec IRC channel to say Hi in and all of them posted their introductions to Thousand Parsec Development mailing list. Each and every student now also has a spot on the web where they will blog about their experiences and progress.

A couple of hours ago Google published the final list of 1125 students who will be working on free and open source projects as part of Google Summer of Code 2008 program. This year 8 students will work with us at Thousand Parsec project. This is twice the number of students we had last year. Here’s what they will be working on this summer:

A couple of hours ago Google published the final list of 1125 students who will be working on free and open source projects as part of Google Summer of Code 2008 program. This year 8 students will work with us at Thousand Parsec project. This is twice the number of students we had last year. Here’s what they will be working on this summer:

A couple of hours ago Google published the final list of 1125 students who will be working on free and open source projects as part of Google Summer of Code 2008 program. This year 8 students will work with us at Thousand Parsec project. This is twice the number of students we had last year. Here’s what they will be working on this summer:

During the past two days I’ve been at this year’s conference of TransAlpine Chapter (TAC) of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). It was hosted by HERMES SoftLab here in Ljubljana. Since I work quite a lot on translating KDE and other open source software and sometimes also help with documentation I sure thought it would be interesting to attend the conference.

A new version of one of the most user-friendly distributions of free and open source operating system Linux has just been released. Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (or 2008.1 if you wish) packs quite a lot of goodies. It brings official full support for the highly popular ASUS Eee PC laptop, has easier synchronisation with various mobile devices, a new parental control utility, Elisa multimedia centre is there, so is Codeina for easy multimedia codecs installation.

Parsek is a KDE 4 client for turn-based strategy games where your goal is to build a space empire. These games are known as 4X games (from four primary goals: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate). Specifically, Parsek is a client for games created using Thousand Parsec framework.

I’ve been to Maribor last Thursday where the 1st Day of Open Source event was organised at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This was my first time visiting Maribor and my first impression was that it is a very nice, clean and lively city.

Google has just published the list of accepted mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code 2008 and it is great to see that Thousand Parsec has made it once again. We must be doing something right

Great news for all fans of turn-based 4X strategy games set in space. We (well mainly Tim Ansell with help from Nathan Partlan) at Thousand Parsec project have released a new version of the free and open source wxPython based client for playing Thousand Parsec games. There is a lot of new features, the client looks better and it is easier to use. Translation of the client is now possible and I have already translated it into Slovenian language.

One of the items from the KDE swag I got at aKademy 2007 in Glasgow was a large KDE logo sticker. Since I don’t have my own car and I couldn’t convince my father to put it on his car the sticker was just laying somewhere around the house. Until this day… Today I gave the sticker to my cousin Matej and a few moments ago he proudly put it onto his snowboard (Elan Prodigy 152). I hope the sticker is snow-resistant enough to stay on the snowboard for as long as possible. Can’t compare with Mark Kretschmann getting an Amarok tattto, but it is still a great way of promoting KDE on sunny Vogel and at other Slovenian ski centres.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been very busy. Like many other people all around the world I’ve also been working hard to make the first release of KDE 4 series as good as possible. About three hours ago KDE 4.0.0 has finally been tagged and is now getting ready to be officially released on January 11th.

The meeting was in Paris during the past weekend. I’m glad I made it there and back safely, and without any complications. Well I did manage to make a long detour while going from Gare du Nord to La Chapelle métro station. Two streets had a very similar name and I somehow ended up on the wrong one which confused me a bit. Me and my roomies, Aleix Pol and Albert Astals Cid, were the last to arrive at the hotel.

On 1st and 2nd December this year the KDE Education project is preparing its first meeting. I’ve already been to a similar event during aKademy 2007, where one day was dedicated to free and open source software in education and schools. I enjoyed it a lot and was very happy that Anne-Marie invited me to the meeting which will be happening in a little more than a month in Paris. I’ve already booked my flight and I can see that there are currently 10 more people registered at the travel page. Can’t wait to meet them all.

I got a new laptop a few hours ago, for free again, thanks to LUGOS. It’s a HP Compaq nx6325 and it is a very similar model to my current nx6125. It has some more hard disk space (80 GiB instead of 60 GiB) and instead of single core AMD Turion 64 it has a dual core AMD Turion 64 X2, still 1800 MHz. Being similar to nx6125 laptop also means that it has the crappy Broadcom wireless network adapter which doesn’t even have any open source drivers from Broadcom. So I’ll still have to use NDISwrapper with Windows drivers or the reverse engineered bcm43xx drivers which are open source but don’t work as good. The laptop also has the integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 graphics card, which has some problems with closed source drivers and no good open source drivers when it comes to 3D support.

Alternative operating systems like Linux and Mac OS are getting more and more popular these days. That’s why cross platform technologies and programming are also increasingly popular and important. One of such technologies is a C++ GUI programming library and framework called Qt. Today I’ve just finished reading a book about it, The Book of Qt 4 – The Art of Building Qt Applications. This is my short review of it.

I just got an e-mail with some great news. It looks like I am among the lucky ones who are selected to receive a grant under the Qtopia Greenphone Innovation Grant program. This means that I will soon get a full Greenphone mobile phone SDK, with the phone itself, connector cables and development tools. Greenphone is one of those mobile phones of the new generation which are based on an open platform. Another well known example from the new generation is OpenMoko. Apple iPhone on the other hand still belongs to the old closed platform generation.

Looks like some Mozilla developers, like Gervase Markham, have noticed that Slovenia may soon become the first country in the world where Firefox will pass the 50% point when it comes to internet browser market share. When this happens Firefox will definitely be the most used web browser in our beautiful country.