Laknath's column

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.

About 3 weeks after the acceptance into my SoC project I thought of putting a note saying what’s going on with the project.

Actually there’s a fair amount of work going on with SoC already. Even though we are not to start coding until May 28, there are things that have to be done before coding starts.

We have been given extra 2 months ahead of coding in order to better preparing for the project and get to know the community. It’s really good to have some time to understand ethics, ways and workings of new environment. that we are working with in next 3 months and may be for quite some time after that. So most of the organizations seem to using this extra time wisely and getting to know about their SoC students and making them comfortable with the community.

Talking about Gnome, it’s really great to work with them. Gnome got 29 projects selected for this year SoC and they are giving a great support to their students. After getting selected first thing I did was chat with my mentor and other guy who will be doing the other part of the project. ( Since the scope of this project seemed too long for SoC time line, Gnome divided the work load into two, thereby giving me most of GUI and may be some widget works and giving Phenatic most of inner works such as subversion integration, adding functions to send patches, more widgets.etc). So we had a sort of group discussion with 4 of us(Me, my mentor, Phenatic and his mentor) in IRC. Then I subscribed to Gnome SoC and Developer mailing lists. Gnome-soc mailing list is the place where all the Gnome SoC students can express their problems, progress in their projects and also can be used as a meeting place. After that I sent my blog and Hackergotchi to Gnome and hope it’ll be integrated into Planet Gnome soon. Yeah, above is my Hackergotchi ( I know it seems funny). And if any one interested in the FoieGras project you can reach us through IRC, gimp.net #doc or #gnome chanels.

I also requested for a new SVN account in Gnome because it’ll make my works easier to have a separate account when doing the coding. There are some strict policies into getting a new account in Gnome and they seem to take security of the accounts very seriously and I agree with that. And also we have to give a sort of a report of what we have done in every week to Gnome starting from this Monday. Yeah, Gnome is taking a head start into the SoC projects and I think it’s a good thing, to keep in touch and correct mistakes ASAP before being too late.

And finally, in personal matters I’ve been doing some python and working with pyGTK which will be used to do the GUI parts of the project. And also I bought a wireless router so I can completely move into Ubuntu. (By the way, if you haven’t tested Fiesty, it has some good features, give it a try.). Hmm, Eventful days these are with nearing the start of SoC projects.