Year: 2010

Ada, meet Katie’s posse!

Role models are key to getting more women and especially young girls interested in science and technology and specifically open source. And here are some of KDE’s finest 🙂  Will you be one of them next year?

Ada Lovelace Day, video by fabulous Alexandra

Unfortunately not in the video but still very awesome: Alex, Ana Cecília, Ana, Chani, Claudia, Sabine, Valerie, Valorie, Vera and many more.

KDE accepted for GSoC 2010

KDE has once again been accepted as an org for GSoC. Yay! This means we’ll once again be welcoming a bunch of great students into our team to make KDE software rock this summer.

So what to do now?
If you’re a student who wants to take part in GSoC this year: Go and check out the ideas page and pick one you like or come up with your own idea. Then get in touch with the team working on the program you want to contribute to over the summer. Work with them to write a kick-ass proposal and then hopefully make it reality this summer. To keep up with all things GSoC you can also subscribe to the kde-soc@kde.org mailing list.

If you’re a potential mentor: Go and check out the flow chart below. It has everything you should need to know about how we’re doing GSoC this year. Then go and subscribe to the kde-soc-mentor@kde.org list. Further announcements for mentors will be made there.

If you have any questions please join us in our IRC channel #kde-soc on freenode or send an email to the kde-soc mailing list.

KDE GSoC process 2010

GSoC info session in Karlsruhe

Since Google Summer of Code is coming up again very soon Sven, Phil and I will be doing a short info session at the University of Karlsruhe on Thursday at 4pm in room HS -101 in building 50.34 (Infobau). We’ll be giving a short intro to GSoC and tell a bit about how GSoC works in KDE and Debian and of course answer lots of questions. If you’re planning to apply this year you should definitely show up 🙂 Please drop me a short email if you want to attend at lydia at kde org.

If you’re not in Karlsruhe or anywhere near there are info sessions in other cities around the world listed in the GSoC calendar.

looking for awesome GSoC ideas

It’s that time of the year again when we need to start thinking about awesome ideas for GSoC. I just prepared a page on the community wiki to collect them. The list needs to be finished by March 8th. Got a great idea for a nice project a student could be working on for the summer? Add it! If you are unsure or have any questions ping me or the team of the app you have an idea for.

Let’s make some noise in Karlsruhe!

Right now there are 22 release parties all around the world on the wiki and of course there will be one in southern Germany as well. Previously we always did them in Stuttgart but it’s time all those Stuttgart people get to see Karlsruhe 😀
So if you are in or around Karlsruhe on the 13th around 20:00 then feel free to join us for our release party at Vogelbräu. Please put your name on the wiki page or let me know by email by Monday latest if you are coming so we know how many people are coming.
If you are not anywhere near Karlsruhe check out the other release parties or organize one on your own 🙂

(special thanks to Lemma for taking care of the venue)

The mailman will love you!

A lot of FLOSS mailinglists (including KDE’s) are run by a software called Mailman. Now Mailman is great and all but it isn’t exactly a dream to work with if you have to admin a mailinglist with it. And it gets worse if you have to admin more than one list with it.

Thankfully there is a great little program called listadmin that helps here. It is a command line tool that remembers the lists you moderate and their passwords and then just checks them for new emails or subscription requests you need to deal with.

This is what it looks like if there is a mail in moderation:

Of course I want to approve sebas’ email (how could I not? ;-)) so I say “a” for approve and then “y” to submit all the changes for this list:

And done:

Not really hard, right? 😉  The only thing that’s not so easy is figuring out the correct format for the .listadmin.ini file with the preferences for your lists. For @kde.org lists it needs to look like below. All settings (username, password,… apply to everything following it until overwritten). Adapt for your needs 🙂

Hope it helps making admining Mailman lists a little easier for you. And now I’ll go investigate the Mailman patches the great folks at Systers have written to see if they are maybe suitable for KDE.

log “~/.listadmin.log”

username lydia@kde.org

adminurl https://mail.{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}

password ******

amarok@kde.org

password ******

amarok-devel@kde.org

amarok-promo@kde.org

password ******

community-wg@kde.org

password ******

kde-press-announce@kde.org

password ******

kde-soc-mentor@kde.org

kde-soc@kde.org

password ******

kde-core-devel@kde.org

password ******

kde-kiosk@kde.org

help needed with kde.org relaunch

We need a lot of help collecting data for the new www.kde.org that is being worked on and you can help! It is pretty easy but a lot to do. The more people help the better.

What needs to be done? Just find some simple data about KDE’s programs following a template and putting them on a wiki. We also need screenshots. The community wiki has more details. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know all the data for a certain program. Fill in as much as you know. Everything helps. If you have questions come to #kde-www on freenode or drop me an email at lydia at kde org.

Everyone who completes at least two programs gets hugs from me 😀

It should all be done next weekend so get cracking! 🙂

This is the entry for Parley as an example:

Screenshot sent: no
Name: Parley
Description: [can be HTML or wiki markup]
<p><b>Parley</b> is a program to help you memorize things.<br> Parley supports many language specific features but can be used for other learning tasks just as well. It uses the <a href=\”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition\”>spaced repetition</a> learning method, also known as flash cards.</p><p>  Creating new vocabulary collections with Parley is easy,  but of course it is even better if you can use some of our premade files. Have a look at the <a href=\”http://kde-files.org/index.php?xcontentmode=687\”>KDE-Files.org</a> page or use the \”Download New Collections\” feature directly.</p>
Features (optional):
Different test types
Mixed Letters (order the letters, anagram like) to get to know new words
Multiple choice
Written tests – type the words (including clever correction mechanisms)
Example sentences can be used to create ‘fill in the gap’ tests
Article training
Comparison forms (adjectives and/or adverbs)
Conjugations
Synonym/Antonym/Paraphrase
Fast test setup with all options in one dialog
More than two languages (for example English, Chinese Traditional and Chinese Simplified)
Find words (also by word type) quickly
Easy lesson management
Premade vocabulary files ready to use
Share and download vocabulary using Get Hot New Stuff
Open XML file format (shared with KWordQuiz, Kanagram and KHangMan) that can be edited by hand and is easily usable with scripts

Homepage: http://edu.kde.org/parley
ID on kde-apps.org: 66741
Page on Userbase: [empty]
ID of subforum on forum.kde.org: 21
Link to handbook: http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdeedu/parley/index.html
IRC channel(s): #kde-edu
Mailing lists: kde-edu@kde.org, parley-devel@kde.org
Project name on cia.vc: kde/parley
Bugzilla component: parley