School this semester was hard. I have a hard time with exam environments. Even my programming course took a lot of my time due to our (pretty cool) service learning project.
We made a J2ME app for a local community centre in our school which involved allowing a user to see his or her timetable and set reminders to the calendar. J2ME was a pain to work with, so some of the group members and I vowed (sort of) to complete it. We may end up making it blackberry specific. Code signing for J2ME is pretty expensive and we aren’t getting paid.
So lately I had some free time in between exams and played around with the new widget api for the blackberry. It was fun and easy, but the resulting app, maybe due to me never having used javascript before, was painfully slow. I used jquery and learned quite a lot about javascript dev, and managed to improve it quite a bit, but its clear a native app would be faster and not that much harder to make. I conclude that if you’re fine with Java, there is no harm in sticking with it. it was a fun experience, though, and I’m glad I gave it a try.
Well GSoC is officially finished but there is still work to do. The connection for the whiteboard still needs to be closed, and there are many GUI-related problems. Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to commit for a while because I just bought a new computer (asus G51VX-A1) and I need to install the dev environment on it. Also, I am going back to school in two days and it will be hectic until classes start.
I’m currently trying to get an internship for third year, or third year summer. This seems interesting 
The basic whiteboard is done thanks to lots of help from Asterix, Liori, and Nikos. I’m currently adding features like deletion and editing. I don’t have much time left, and recently my right wrist got carpal tunnel so I’m typing this with my left hand. I’m getting good at that so I hope I can finish at least one more big commit.
I’m learning alot doing the whiteboard project for Gajim! I learned about Polish economy from Liori (who’s helping me by updating his jingle implementation so I can use it for the whiteboard), and lots of… everything from my two mentors, Asterix and Nikos.
Finally getting an actual project to use my knowledge on is quite satisfying. It’s only now that I realize how little I know. I have to do alot of documentation reading to make sure I’m doing everything right, even though it’s always tempting to just hack at it and make it work.
The whiteboard currently cannot connect to the session because I haven’t gotten to using the jingle yet. It has two tools so far, a brush and an oval drawing tool, and it can export. I’m currently trying to get the UI look pretty, and there are some little GTK glitches. I might just let them go for now and start trying to get session working.
One thing I’m concerned about in the future is how I am going to get erasing working. How would I make a cut in the middle of a path or an oval? Should I just cover over it with the background color? I will have to look to see how other clients do it
My Islamic Studies research project is going interestingly, if slowly. We were supposed to make a website. Right now we still haven’t bought a webserver. We have, however, determined what colors are suitable for color blind people and what sort of menus we maybe should use.
Draw SVG Images In Python « ActiveState Code.
Right now I’m working on making my widget draw to an svg image for the later SXE implementation. It’s not the funnest part of this project but it isn’t too bad.
It’s interesting, elegant, and I really see why people have a hard time adopting Jabber as their main IM tech. As a programmer, I find Jabber awesome. However, from a user’s perspective, Jabber really doesn’t have any new features over, say, MSN.
In fact, if you were to count ‘fun’ features, you would have to give the win to MSN. It might make Jabber more attractive to business, though while can be quite secure, advertising ‘open standards’ gives the uninformed the wrong impression about the technology as a whole.
Ways to make Jabber more adopted:
1) Focus on ease of use and random cool features (for teens)
2) Have one really really cool feature that makes it easy for a persuasive teenager to verbally sell to his/her friends
3) Continue being awesome to code for
4) Advertise how secure it is. Continuously. Secure is never a bad thing; even if your target audience are 14 year olds, adding ’secure’ in front of client descriptions will not make it seem any less cool.
One pet peeve is that most jabber clients advertise with a picture of their client, which makes sense. Why don’t they ever have a full contacts list? I understand that you may want to use test accounts to keep your family and friends from being exposed to 4chan, but I see those limited contact lists and feel sad. It’s probably better to have a blurred out full contact list, than a clear short one.
Also, pictures of chat windows should have interesting text! Honesty, a normal user doesn’t care about the UI (not conciously) as long as it is acceptable. They will download the app based on how useful/exciting it is, and to make it seem useful you should have examples of it being in use.
It’s very unfortunate I have not yet been able to start with my gsoc duties yet, but the end to my suffering is near! In 7 hours I will take my final exam and I shall be done my first year of school.
I was originally planning to try and fix some bugs for gajim during a small break I had, but ironically my room had a bug infestation and I had to move to my friend’s room. I only managed to checkout and take a brief look before I started seeing bugs crawl on my notes. After tomorrow though I will finish packing, and if I can I may even start before I return to vancouver.
One difficulty I forsee for this summer is the timezone difference between the majority of the gajim committee and the canadian west coast. I will have to wake up early, but I suppose it isn’t that big of a deal.
And I bought a pair of ultimate ears super.fi 5 earphones for 130 usd with free shipping. Those will be my ‘coding phones’
After finishing my sociology exam, I finally had some time to install a blog for my Google Summer of Code project (it’s required!). Since I was doing a python project, it made sense for me to install a python blog. Fine, then.
Alright. So I went and installed pyblosxom, and it was going great and I was learning how to use it. I even planned to write a plugin for it (in the future? probably not during the summer) so I could update blog with unconventional means. By unconventional I mean unpractical (IM/IRC bots are awesome blogging tools! I don’t know what you mean >.>) but that’s not the point when it comes to programming.
So I was installing the commenting plugin for pyblosxom when the akismet spam protection plugin required me to go to wordpress.com, make an account, and get the wordpress api key. I went, logged into my neglected wordpress account, took a look at their new pretty api and Gears (!) support, sshed into my server and installed Wordpress in 3 minutes. It actually took 3 minutes. I’ll get back to pyblosxom one day, but only when I switch hosts.
I will be working on my gsoc project this week. I hope to be familiarizing myself with the code and hopefully I will have time to fix some bugs in between studying for CSC165 (Mathematical Expression and Reasoning for Computer Science) and MUS211 (History of Popular Music).
Once I have time I will also make this blog pretty. It’ll be a while though, as I was never one for site prettifying.
Also, I want to buy headphones. 200 dollar range?