Another GSoC on the air

Ok, here is another post after a long desert - no excuses here, I’ve forgoton that I even have a blog.  But now feel like writing something after seeing the new WordPress dashboard

First thing on the agenda is GSoC 2008. As you all know Google Summer of Code 2008 is on the way this year too and in case you have been living under a rock, here is the event.

GSoC is a good breeding ground for fresh FOSS developments and had been one for me last year when I tried GSoC for the first time. Even though initially I wasn’t planning to try out for GSoC this year, after seeing some cool ideas from few organizations I felt like giving a try.

I found 2 ideas from Eclipse foundation and Apache very exciting but finally had to leave out one because I hadn’t enough energy nor time for 2 proposals. So I tried for Eclipse - creating a new plug-in for XQuery syntax editing which I found the idea is most appealing. One reason is I had been working with XML and Java stuff for a longest of my time and second one is I’ve been using Eclipse for my python works, so felt like returning the favour.  So I prepared the proposal, submitted it and got accepted this year round too All thanks should go to my mentor David and congrats to my fellow Vesess colleague Sameera, who also got accepted for GSoC this year for Coppermine photo gallery. By the way, if this helps any future GSoCer, here is my complete proposal.

But beyond my not-so-dramatic GSoC tale, I was able to give something else for GSoC.

First thing is I submitted a translated Sinhala version of GSoC flyer this year. The second is I was able to put a small guiding doc for Gnome GSoCers, doing my things right as a responsible Gnome GSoCer last year.  Other than that, I was able to encourage few of my buddies to apply for GSoC rather than trying for evil MS Imagine Cup

So the end of the line is that I’m hoping for another nice, fruitful 3 months with GSoC working for Eclispe and hope the experience will be great as was in last year.

An unexpected guest

An unexpected guest dropped by (literally) my home today.

If the image is not clear, it’s a poor porcupine -wandering near by woods and dropped into pit where a new house is being built. Seems these poor guys don’t have enough room with all the construction works going with horrible humans.

RMS in Sri Lanka

It’s one of the (may be ‘The one’) greatest free software event that has been held in Sri Lanka. RMS - The founder of the FSF (free software foundation), GNU project & the licence and Emacs is now in Sri Lanka which in itself is pretty cool, but today I got the chance to attend one of three public gatherings organized in his tour of Sri Lanka and it’s an unforgettable experience in my life.

I always liked reading about prehistoric free software details (in 1950’s when software was inherently free because computer wasn’t an industry yet) ,how commercial software came to the arena in about 1970’s, downfall of MIT and born of GNU, born of GNU/Linux and born of OSI and such, but it’s just that - “reading”; but hearing from a person who has been the main figure or a catalyst of all these events is so wonderful, it’s like meeting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after reading all Sherlock Holmes stories

But this doesn’t mean that I agree 100% with RMS. I don’t believe proprietary software are inherently evil or Open Source is bad. Some technologies such as compression technologies may be hidden from the public eye because the owning company may completely depend on that technology and releasing the source may mean basically the destruction of the firm. So my opinion is that sometimes we should be flexible enough to work with proprietary software and also Open Source should be used when adapting free software to a business model. But that’s me anyway.

However it has been a privilege to meet with this visionary man and to hear his speech. I sincerely hope that his speech today has turned many more young hearts to free software ideology.

• Event details

• Pictures of the event

(From left) Nadun, Sameera, RMS, Lakshan, me

Btw, also got a chance to play with a OLPC lap. Pretty cool stuff considering the price and very cute (eew, sounds …).

 

Updated:

More Photos

Coming of another year and last year in retrospection

First I have to say it’s absolute true in saying “time is gold”, because it seems to pass so quickly in front of our very eyes. However, last year was a fairly successful one for me, specially considering getting selected into GSoC and having a chance to do a project with Gnome. In addition to that, I also did some contributions to Drupal community in regards of modules and also can’t forget getting a new laptop :).

Also at Vesess we launched Plex - the job portal which is continuously gaining popularity and also got the chance to work in several other projects. So all and all, it can be called as one of the best years of my life so far.

Now here comes a new year, new hopes and new challenges. Yeah, It’s common in each passing year but I feel like it’ll be more challenging for me this year than in previous years when considering my personal expectations and expected of me in new year.

Whatever stocked there for the new year, I wish everyone that their stocks contain more pleasant surprises and all hopes may become true !

Two new LOTR movies - Yey!

I loved reading Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings and all other Middle Earth related books written during WW II season. And there’s no need to talk about LOTR movies done by Peter Jakson because they made a land mark in modern Hollywood movies, specially in Special Effects arena. Then LOTR games done by EA Sports also became one of my favourites. So all and all I’m a huge fan of Lord of The Rings in every aspect.

After the success of LOTR movies it was reported that there has been some issues between New Line Cinema and Peter Jakson. But it made my day hearing that Peter Jakson and Fran Walsh are going to build another two more movies based on “The Hobbit”, which is the preclude to Lord of The Rings trilogy.

PETER JACKSON AND NEW LINE CINEMA JOIN WITH MGM TO PRODUCE “THE HOBBIT” Movie

Hopefully we will be able to see another two great LOTR movies in another few years time.

Vista to Ubuntu (100%)

I had enough with eating crap with Vista. My last line of patience warned off when I happened to wait about 5 seconds when changing from one MS Doc file to another and also happened that I was running with time to finish a project report. No, I’m not running on 256 ram, it’s 1 GB and this kind of a time wastage is totally unacceptable. You may ask why I put up with Vista in the first place. That’s thanks to HP’s decision to embrace Vista so my laptop was pre-built with Vista and no chance to downgrade because there are no drivers. So where to go now ? Easy….Gutsy.

So I’m now another guy who left windows permanently because of their own defects. I was playing dumb with Vista for this long had nothing to do with Vista being better, it’s because of substitutions not being available for some applications that I was used to in Windows environment - mainly Macromedia(now Adobe) Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Now before biting my head off, yes - there are good web developer editors in Linux such as NVu or KompoZer but they will need another few developing years to get into the same line as Dreamweaver (which had a long time to develop into the state now in) and I have to have some thing until then.

But my worries were groundless as Wine now supports Macromedia 8 series like a babe. Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash all works perfectly with Wine - installation to Execution. Another great thing with Gutsy is that my Broadcom network card support is inbuilt and with some additional applications I can search networks and connect to them like a charm. Also I’m using AWN manager to manage desktop (here is a great article on desktop styling - thanks to Lakshan) and now it looks like a hybrid between Leopard and Vista. So what else I can ask for ?

Here is my application list in Ubuntu.

Web developments = Wine + DreamWeaver 8

Web images = Wine + Fireworks 8

Photo Editing = Gimp

Java editor = NetBeans for Linux

Python = Eclipse with PyDev plugin

IM client = Pidgin

Wifi manager = gtkwifi and wifi radar

Skype = Skype for Linux

Btw, My machine is AMD 64 X2, therefore had some issues and had to do some tweaks when installing some applications but nothing I can’t handle with some effort. The catch is that I can work with all comforts like in Windows with half the memory usage as in Windows.

Favour returned to Drupal

As I mentioned in an earlier post we, people at Vesess now use Drupal heavily for our developments. We built our new job protal Plex using Drupal as the base and through heavy use of modules provided by Drupal community. Therefore we felt we need to make a return contribution to the Drupal community.

While we were building the Plex site we had to make considerable amount of module customizations and also created some new modules. The best way to pay back the favour was contributing our home made modules to Drupal community. So here is my first Drupal module release ( and hope it will be only one in many to come).

Name : RequestInvitation

Dependencies : Invite

Licence : GPL

MySQL South East Asia Roadshow 2007

Yesterday there was a summit organized by hSenid and the speaker was David Axmark, Co-founder and Vice President of MySQL. He talked about the future versions of MySQL and enhancements about to come.

According to David, MySQL 6.0 beta should be released in February next year and 7.0 should be released by the end of 2009. More attention will be given to Falcon, the new DB engine and into optimizing sub queries. In fact, improved 6.0 version should perform a sub query in 1.8 seconds which now takes 12 minutes.

But as a web developer most intriguing fact is the online backup function that will be available in next version. Now when there’s a need to give the ability to create a online backup option I use an export script from phpMyAdmin. But it’s a messy job. So next version of MySQL should make developer’s life bit easy.

Drupal-The best open source CMS of the year

First let me say a big sorry for being absent for more than two months of time. I was having sort of a writers block and didn’t have a mind to write anything. But that doesn’t mean I was idle for the whole lot of time.

In fact, it has been good in regards to my work at Vesess. After last year exams were over, I put all my effort into finishing some works that have been elongating. And I also got the chance to help build our new job portal Plex.lk which opened to public recently and seems promising.

The specialty of Plex is that it is totally based on Drupal, which is the best Open Source CMS in Open Source CMS awards, 2007. The experience is totally exhilarating, when compared to some other CMS such as Expression Engine (I will write about that experience later)

The work I did mostly involved around module customization. Actually I had to create a new module for the site and I’m on my way publishing it to Drupal community. One of the best things about Drupal is that its huge array of modules, which covers almost everything. But when we were going to launch the site we were presented with a requirement to moderate invitations (since the site is still in beta) and we were unable to find a suitable module for that. So I created a new module which use one existing module - Invite and I named the new module ‘Invite Request’. (The new module is in use, you can see it in right hand side bar of Plex.lk)

I guess I will be seeing more of Drupal in future as Plex.lk is still on its way and there’s lot more work to be done. And it’s a good news because I’m enjoying my work with Drupal.

End of a great three months

First, I’m sorry about not being able to post any thing in a while. I’ve been caught up with my Summer of Code final works and university works, I’ve hardly had any time left. Summer of Code finals evolution began on 20th August and I’ve tried to finish all goals before the deadline.

By midterm evolution, I had built the basic work for the text engine. It had a solid structure and ability to render inline tags by then. But after the midterm evolution I pushed myself bit hard than in the first half of SoC and could finish all the goals I’ve setup with my mentor.

Now Foiegras has the ability to render both inline tags and block tags. Rendering block tags had been something to think over and it was very satisfying to see it’s accomplished at last. Then it came to rendering images, and it wasn’t hard as implementing block tags and could finish quickly. Also meanwhile I understood that the text editor should have a mechanisms to validate and render tag attributes. So I’ve implemented the structure for attribute validating and rendering, in which you can define what are the attributes that’s valid under a given tag and what are the valid values for that attribute. (Similar to a DTD) . As the final goal I’ve planned to finish Foiegras table support, which is a bit complex task since Foiegras table structure has considerable amount of attribute variations. Because of this, I’ve focused only on implementing the basic table support within the SoC time period and could finish that. This is the current status of FoieGras text engine.

Even though the GSoC time period is over, it’s really is the beginning of FoieGras project. Since this project is starting from the scratch, I only focused on basic needs of the text editor that will be required for a first release. For this release two parts of the project will be merged and come as a complete text editor. I’m itching for that first release to see how the response is going to be since that’s what we will be reaping from the effort we have put into the product.

This three months of time period has really made an effect on me. It has helped me to get more in touch with Open Source developments and directly contribute to it through Gnome, which is the most favourite Linux desktop environment according to a survey of DesktopLinux.com. It was a great pleasure to work with such a community which consists of a large bunch of very entusiastic people.

Throughout the Summer of Code time period and even before that, my mentor Don (Don Scorgie) has been a great help to me, and for that I’m in debt to him. He is also the one who directed me to this project at the beginning when I was looking out for projects. Also my partner in Foiegras throughout Summer of Code period -Phenatic and his mentor Shaunm have been very supportive throughout the project. Phenatic has implemented a cool application shell for Foiegras and as I’ve mentioned before we have to combine the application shell and text engine for the first release. As a final remark, I’d like to thank everybody who has given a hand to this project and made me possible to product something useful(hopefully) for FOSS community.

Screen shots of the current FoieGras text rendering status is given below.