[Dms-commit] Changes to gnomejournal/SoC/SoCInterviews.txt

[Julien Gilli]

Index: gnomejournal/SoC/SoCInterviews.txt
diff -u gnomejournal/SoC/SoCInterviews.txt:1.3 
gnomejournal/SoC/SoCInterviews.txt:1.4
--- gnomejournal/SoC/SoCInterviews.txt:1.3      Sat Aug 27 20:36:01 2005
+++ gnomejournal/SoC/SoCInterviews.txt  Sun Aug 28 13:22:50 2005
@@ -1,89 +1,19 @@
-Summer is over. For many of us it means shorter days, shedding tears saying 
goodbye to our summer love and getting ahead lot of troubles^W fun at work. 
Obviously, you need some lovin to get over it. GNOME Journal is right on time 
again. We have a present for you. Hurry up and read on to open a pack full of 
GNOME goodies, jewels and magic ! 
+Google summer of code is over. It's time for us to let you discover all the 
GNOME goodies, jewels and magic that came out of it. In this article, you'll 
learn about streaming and sharing some music with your GAIM buddys, hidding 
your personal data from others  by encrypting folders in one click from 
nautilus, using your webcam and your head as a mouse pointer and much, much 
more !
 
-Unless you've been hiding in a deep cave during the last two months, you've 
heard about the Google Summer of Code. This article is a collection of 
interviews of all the students that have been hacking on GNOME bounties during 
the Google SoC. Not only will you discover eleven great concrete and working 
projects, packed full of genius, nice tricks and eye candy. You will see how 
these students, together with their mentors, the GNOME project as a whole and 
Google got it right once again and pushed the GNOME desktop where it hasn't 
been before !
+Google sponsored four hundred students to work on OpenSource projects like 
GNOME, Apache, PERL, and KDE during this summer. Students submitted 
applications to Google by the middle of June. Mentors from the most active 
OpenSource organizations (RedHat, The Perl Foundation, etc.) selected the ones 
that had the best potential, and mentored the selected students for two months. 
Of course, GNOME fans and mentors had a lot of neat ideas for students to work 
on.
 
-First, be sure to gather as much friends as you can around your screen, and 
that no one miss the fun. Is everyone ready ? Ok, let's start the show ! 
+The GNOME Foundation has mentored eleven students. They all worked on very 
exciting new features, and by now have a working implementation of what was 
planned at the beginning of the summer. The projects domains range from music 
sharing integrated to the desktop to live edition and versionning of developer 
documentation, going through an amazing firefox extension that will help you to 
share google searches. 
 
-The first present is a cute little locked box. We all know that size doesn't 
matter (does it ?). Let's get some help from his creator to unlock the magic.
+Be sure to read on to find all the gems offered by this summer of code, and 
let's start with a step into the GNOME future : using a webcam and your head as 
an input device. 
 
-Encrypted folders and partitions have existed for quite a while now. How about 
packing this into the usual GNOME eye candy and usability excellence so that 
it's just one click away from anywhere on the desktop ? Let's discuss with our 
encrypted-folder wizard about that.
+This accessibility gem has been worked on by Adam McCullough. FIXME.
 
-FIXME : Questions/Answers to/from John Manning.
+On the music integration side, two outstanding projects made their way through 
the google application process : shared music spaces in gaim and playlists 
sharing with RythmBox. 
 
-Wait, do you ear that sound ? Yes, we all noticed the nice melody playing out 
from that box over there. Let's move on to see what's inside !
+The first one was carried on by the very enthusiastic Raphael Slinckx that 
think that "every hacker would enjoy a summer of code !". The initial plan was 
to allow people to stream music from and to their GAIM buddys in one click. As 
if it would not be enough to make it a must-have,"the project is a bit 
different from the submitted application proposal, especially concerning 
rhythmbox integration which was not planned initially.". As for now, "The 
application has reached a point where it works when the situation is perfect", 
and you can see the magic happening with these nice screenshots :
 
+FIXME : screenshots
 
-FIXME : Questions/Answers to/from Raphael Slinckx
-
-Clever are the foxes, so clever must be the ideas packed in this 
firefox-looking package. Let's prepare for the best while we hear the paper 
scritch and scratch by opening this one !
-
-John Manning is the lucky guy that got working on this great Firefox 
extension. SearchParty allows you to find some help from people all over the 
world when you can't find the right keywords in order to perform a google 
search. It's as simple as typing your query in the google search field to find 
that you need some help, click a button to automatically join the right chat 
room, and automatically get the keywords used by successfull queries on the 
same topic. 
-
-GJ: Does the project still match the initial plan ? If not, how far is it from 
the initial plan and why ?
-
-JM: Yes and no.  One technical detail changed, and made quite a ripple 
throughout the rest of the project.  I initially intended to write the Search 
Party Protocol directly over TCP, and have a Java server somewhere that took 
care of matching up users with the proper chat room, etc.  My mentor, Seth 
Nickell, pointed out early on that this might make the extension unusable for 
those behind various firewalls, so he suggested XML-RPC.  This changed several 
things.  First of all, I had to learn XML-RPC (it's not hard at all).  Second, 
I had to write a very different sort of server.  It is esentially a PHP page 
that responds to XML-RPC requests and stores all its data in a MySQL database.  
Third, I had to teach the extension to speak XML-RPC, and Firefox's included 
implementation is broken, so I had to find a third party Javascript library 
(http:// solait.net/).  So I ended up spending a lot more time on the extension 
than I had initially intended.  As a result, I think the extension is pretty 
cool, but I haven't had that much time to focus on the trickiest part of the 
project: deciding what  exactly makes two search queries similar.  I have a 
decent algorithm, but it will be receiving a lot of love very soon. 
-
-
-GJ: Did you enjoy your summer ?
-
-JM: Yes, very much.  I graduated at the beginning and moved to California, and 
now after much searching have a new software development job.  It means I had 
to work pretty hard to fit in as much time for Search Party as I wanted.  But I 
am very happy with the results of my efforts so far.
-
-GJ: Do you have somme funny anecdotes to tell our readers ?
-
-JM: Nothing in particular.  My wife thinks the funniest thing is how she would 
come in to see how I was doing, and I'd explain some horrible untraceable bug 
that was driving me nuts (stupid interpreted languages!).  A few hours later 
(or the next day, after some rest), she'd hear me go 
"OOoooooooooooooohhhhhh!!!", which meant that I'd figured out the simple source 
of the problem.  By the end of the summer, she'd go "Oooooooooooooooohhh!!!" 
right along with me.  She loves to make fun of me!
-
-GJ: Can you tell us about your mentor ? 
-
-JM: Seth helped me out at some very key points in development.  First of all, 
it was his idea.  ;-)  Second, he pointed me at XML-RPC as I mentioned earlier. 
 As the extension took form, I was unhappy with the user interface (there was a 
separate toolbar that gained a button for every search you made).  Seth 
suggested a cleaner solution based on his original mockups.  Now he gives me 
general UI tips whenever we meet up in IRC.  I hope Seth continues his 
involvement with Search Party development, since he is a very insightful 
designer.  Besides, if Seth is using Search Party, all the other kids will want 
to be cool and use it, too!
-
-GJ: If you had to choose the three most important things you learned by 
working on this project, what would they be, and why ?
-
-
-JM : 1. Get your code in CVS as early as possible.  The shame of it all will 
drive development and increase productivity quite a bit.
-2. KISS (keep it simple stupid).  Don't over-engineer, but don't desgin 
yourself into a corner, either.  Reuse code (your own and others') where you 
can. 3. Keep lists.  I eventually moved mine over to 
http://live.gnome.org/SearchParty , but before I had my stuff in CVS, Tomboy 
was my constant companion!
-
-GJ:  By hacking on this project, what are the things (technical or not) you 
found truly amazing with GNOME ? What do you think need substantial work to be 
as amazing as the rest of the desktop ?
-
-JM: The most amazing thing was learning about everyone else's projects! 
Behdad's preload stuff for Fedora has so much potential.  Raphael's gshrooms 
project is of course super cool and will soon take over the world.  Adam's 
CamTrack is so nifty I can't wait to see how people make use of it.  GNOME is 
already great, and these people just ensure that it will keep blowing us all 
away.
-
-GJ: Last but not least, is the project done ? If not, will you keep hacking on 
this project in the future  ?
-
-JM: No, it is not done.  I intend to continue working on it for quite awhile.  
If this project is successful, I suspect the server will go through a lot of 
performance tuning and other refactoring.  Not to mention all the work I would 
like to do on the query matching algorithms.  However, the extension is really 
becoming quite useable, and I would love for people to download it from the 
wiki, try it out, and tell me what they think!  I hope to make a release to the 
general Gnome/Mozilla communities in the near future.
-
-You probably all know about RhythmBox, the iTunes looking GNOME music player. 
So let's get some rhythm out of the box, and bring the power of sharing to it ! 
Let's hear what Charles have to say about his great work on iTunes to RB and RB 
to RB  music sharing.
-
-GJ: Does the project still match the initial plan ? If not, how far is it from 
the initial plan and why ?
-
-CS: Depends how specific you get with "initial plan."  My goal is reached, 
iTunes Music Sharing (Digital Audio Access Protocol or DAAP) for Rhythmbox.  So 
in that regard, the project still matches up with my plan/proposal to Google.
-
-In my proposal I had suggested doing this using a DAAP module for GnomeVFS.  
So that you could hand GnomeVFS a uri like daap://Lyndsey's Music and it would 
return a directory full of music.  I had done some initial work towards this 
last October, and planned to merely continue this and get it working with 
Rhythmbox.
-
-Very quickly though, I realized & was convinced by others that this really 
wasn't the way to do it.  That the DAAP code should live inside Rhythmbox, not 
in a GnomeVFS module.  So I rewrote my module work from last year and went from 
there.  Rewriting it like that was initially a pain in the ass, but has 
definitely paid off.  I'm quite glad I didn't go the GnomeVFS route now.
-
-GJ: Did you enjoy your summer ?
-
-CS: In general my summer has been busy.  I just returned from studying abroad 
in Australia for 5 months.  I had to live with my parents for 6 weeks.  I had 
to move back into my apartment.  I'm looking for full time employment.  And in 
September I'm taking my last college class.  So, in general, good, but way too 
busy.   With regards to SoC, its been enjoyable.  Hectic trying to schedule my 
time around all the other things I have to do, and needing to finish up my 
project by the end of August.
-
-GJ: Do you have somme funny anecdotes to tell our readers ?
-
-CS: Not really.
-
-GJ: Can you tell us about your mentor ?
-
-CS: My mentor is Colin Walters (walters on irc).  The relationship has been 
great.  Early on, there wasn't a lot of interaction, simply because most of my 
work was related directly to DAAP and not to Rhythmbox+DAAP.  In the past few 
weeks he's been an invaluable resource for questions like "walters: how should 
I make it so that the _get_playlist () function doesn't return DAAP playlists?" 
and the like - that is, RB specific questions.  Most of our interaction has 
been over irc or comments on my patches via email.  I definitely see myself 
continuing to work with the Rhythmbox community (fixing/improving DAAP for one, 
and I'm thinking I'll tackle equalizer support next) - so I'm sure the 
relationship will continue in something like is present form of 
question/response :)
-
-GJ: If you had to choose the three most important things you learned by 
working on this project, what would they be, and why ? 
-
-CS: 1. When working with network code, never ever ever assume /anything/ about 
the response you get from servers/clients.  Always always always check them in 
every way you can.
-2. Time management is a skill I am still lacking. 
-3. Don't underestimate how much people actually want a feature.  Just because 
you don't get any initial enthusiasm or response, keep plugging away.  If its 
something /you/ want for the software, its something someone else wants too - 
probably something a lot of other people want.
-
-GJ: By hacking on this project, what are the things (technical or not) you  
found truly amazing with GNOME ? What do youthink need substantial  work to be 
as amazing as the rest of the desktop ?
-
-CS: Dunno.
-
-GJ: Last but not least, is the project done ? If not, will you keep hacking on 
this project in the future  ?
-
-CS: The project is done.  There are several additional features that I didn't 
specify in my proposal to Google that I'd like to investigate & implement, so 
I'll continue hacking on those.  And, like I said, I'mgoing to stick around in 
the RB community - I'd love to add equalizer support next.
-
+The project is not finished, and Raphael "plans to move to a better streaming 
protocol when gstreamer will be ready, and improving aspects such as 
firewall/nat byassing.". Indeed, the feature will only work "if you have a PC 
directly connected to
+internet or a upnp capable router, and no firewall.". He has been "astonished 
by the GNOME community", but found that "lacking, or even missing 
documentation, was one of the biggest problems he has faced.". Connect, push up 
the volume and share the music, it's as simple as it gets !