I’ve been doing GHOP tasks for the Gnome Online Desktop. My most recent task was to code an email stock for Bigboard. There’s a snapshot at the bottom of the post.
I’m about to begin working on a new app soon to edit and “remix” fdo iconsets. It’ll be the Linux equivalent of CandyBar. If you’re interested in helping out, leave a comment or just ping me on irc.
In order to work on my latest task for GHOP, I need to do some coding in Python. I’m attempting to learn the language in under two days while I’m on vacation at the Dead Sea with limited internet access. So far, its gone (going?) surprisingly well.
I’m reading over Dive Into Python (a free book for programmers who are experienced with other languages) and I just got up to the following section on Python’s garbage collecting:
As a former philosophy major, it disturbs me to think that things disappear when no one is looking at them, but that’s exactly what happens in Python. In general, you can simply forget about memory management and let Python clean up after you.
The number of Linux users reading this blog has gone up lately (yippee!), so I’m pretty sure that I won’t be the only one to get a kick out of that. 
I know the name sounds a bit awkward and geeky, but GHOP is a masterpiece move by Google in the endless game against Microsoft. I may just be a pawn, but that doesn’t bother me one bit.
For those of you that missed it, Google announced GHOP (Google Highly Open Participation) about two weeks ago. The contest works something like the following:
1) High school students sign up and work on tasks for open source projects. (A google account is obviously a requirement.)
2) Google pays the students up to $500 and gives all participants (as the google website says) “the all important t-shirt.”
3) GHOP ends in January and the top ten contributers win a trip to Google hq.
4) Students continue to work on open source projects and are a pain to Micro$oft.
I’m working with GNOME for the contest. So far I’ve just written an article for Gnome Journal on GConf, but hopefully I’ll get to do some coding soon.
Anyway, its time for me to get some sleep… If you’re a high school student, go head over to the website and check it out!
I haven’t posted for the past few days, and (for once) it wasn’t for a lack of topics. Bad Behavior (a plugin for wordpress that is supposed to block spam bots from accessing your website) started blocking me from logging in. Several of you may have had your comments blocked.
I’m currently on vacation at Ein Gedi (by the Dead Sea), and my iMac is back at home. I tried a few different ways of deleting the plugin, but finally I just resorted to deleting it over ftp on my Dad’s laptop.
It seems to be that Bad Behavior starts misbehaving whenever a new version of the plugin is released and you don’t upgrade. I find that a bit scary, so I’ve permanently disabled it.
Anyway, quite a bit has been happening lately, but I’ll write about all of that later…
Happy holidays!
I have a new awn applet that I’m going to pull out of my sleeve sometime during the week (see the Awn-Terminal thread on the forums), and I may even manage to magically draw a Compiz Fusion plugin out of the hat sometime soon.
Anyway, enjoy the holidays, be it Chanukah, Christmas, or something else that I’m forgetting to mention.
For those of you that haven’t been following on the Awn forums, I wrote Awn Terminal, my first applet for Awn, last week.
I’ve put in some more work (and spent some time wondering whether its even possible to come up with a more unintuitive system than gconf), and version 0.4 is now done.
Instead of listing all of the new features, I’ll just throw in a few screenshots… The download link is at the bottom.
| Download: | awn-terminal |
|---|---|
| Version: | 0.4 |
| Updated: | December 3, 2007 |
| Size: | 719.73 KB |
“kwwii: I have never done artwork before and probably won’t ever really help in any way but I wanted to suggest that ubuntu go pink and green”
Not surprisingly, the idea wasn’t very well received. :)
The google ads on this website are getting pushed to the bottom of the page again. I suppose I should go off and fix it when I get a chance…
I’ve fixed the link to download my Chuck Norris widget. Thanks to all of you that pointed out the broken link.