I understand Gervase’s concern about “SoC” not being as successful as it could have been. However, I think the program has actually been a very good thing, and will do even better next year (if they do it again, which seems likely) :

• Mozilla (10 projects started, none still alive, or so it seems) may just have had bad luck.
• SoCers were all students, most of them still are, and they’re probably busy right now with their studies.
• As far as I remember, the program was announced by Google in a bit of a hurry (lots of people heard about the program just a few days, or hours, before the deadline), and so was the list of organizations SoCers could submit a project suggestion to. Hopefully, this will be better managed next year, meaning (probably) more participants, and therefore (even) better SoCers. It was Google’s first shot at this, let’s give them some time to make it (even) better.
• Even if the percentage of SoCers still working on OSS could have been higher (Chris DiBona says about 30%, which is better than they expected), it already makes a big difference: these people have actually enjoyed the experience very much and are likely to stick around for a long time.

Corey’s statement (in which he calls me “excellent”, wow, thanks !! ) that mentors in Ubuntu may not have been as available as necessary (too busy with development) may be true in general (I don’t know), but in my case my mentor (seb128) has been extremely helpful, available pretty much all the time for me (and he still is), and always nice and friendly. Maybe that’s one of the main reasons why I stayed after all Thanks seb128 !

Another topic: my website whylinuxisbetter.net has been updated quite a lot, nice people are translating it and sending good feedback. New ideas, comments and suggestions requested : drop a mail to ideas@whylinuxisbetter.net !

PS: I guess I’m gonna provide this link to my hackergotchi until Jeff has the time to update it

Okay, I just created this small website here :

www.whylinuxisbetter.net

It is still the very beginning but, well, you get the idea

So I’d like you guys opinion about this : why do you think Linux is better than other operating systems ? If you have ideas about great features Linux has and others (especially Windows) haven’t, please comment !

PS : for Jeff, my new hackergotchi is here, if you have time to update it, it would be great Thanks !

I’ve been approved as an Ubuntu member about a month ago and I was just added to the planet, so I thought I’d write a first post to say hello

In Ubuntu, I’m mainly working with the Desktop Team, and I’m the one responsible for this :

and for this :

(among other things). So if you have rants about these two dialogs, you now know whom to shout at
Ok, that was basically my “hello world”, I’ll soon be posting (hopefully) more interesting stuff !

I haven’t had time to advertise about this until now, but I had fun, a few days ago, doing what I called “PCJacking”.

The idea is simple, and is based on the assumption that most people buy Windows because they just don’t know other stuff exists out there. I am speaking, of course, about Linux. How can I participate in letting them know about Linux ? Well, by going to places where they usually buy their PCs, and sticking Linux Live CDs (namely, Knoppix) inside the machines there !

So here’s how it looks, pictures, how to do it yourself and all.

Wow. This is great ! You can listen before buying. Discover new music for free, and don’t dive into the dark depths of P2P music download (not that I am really embarrassed when downloading music from people who already make a fine living out of it, but P2P mostyl means crappy-quality-and-hard-to-find music, as far as I am concerned). Tell it what artists you like and listen to these artists plus other stuff that it thinks you’ll like.

It doesn’t have a whole lot of Jazz artists (most of these days’ popular stuff makes me throw up), but the idea is really brilliant !

Funny news : it seems that a mere “zero intelligence” stock market trader (ie, buying and selling at random) is at least as good as a common trader. This is the result of a very serious scientific analysis. Of course, the authors quickly add that this doesn’t mean that traders are not intelligent ) But I guess that a little less volatility wouldn’t hurt…

As a “director” of a small (French) book collection called “Technique & Pratique”, I am proud to announce that 9 new books are published and available in (French) bookshops since a few days ago. English translation of some of these books is a work in progress.

This collection aims to produce cheap (less than $10) and short (128 pages) books, to learn efficiently what there is to know about a given subject (Installing Linux, LaTeX, Perl, etc.) and actually get started real fast.

More info and covers images are available here.

Here’s a picture of these books on a table :

Google’s Summer of Code program (see previous posts) has come to its end a few weeks ago. I worked on a project called “Gnome Panel Enhancements”. Information about what I did exactly can be found here, but I thought I’d upload a few screenshots.

Sorry for the poor JPEG compression, see the above web page for better images…

For example, the new GNOME “Add to panel” dialog:

with an “update as you type search bar”:

A separator for the panel, that you can add from here:

and use to separate your applets:

A startup notification that appears the first time you use GNOME:

I also gave a try a redesigning a few icons, here are three samples (for Firefox, OpenOffice Draw, and “Error” dialog icon and Verbiste:

When setting up the Summer of Code program, it probably didn’t occur to Google that it was so complicated to give away 2 million dollars…

In order not to give 30% of their grants (I guess than anybody could use 1350 bucks !) to the IRS, the participants from abroad need to go through some tricky paperwork (W-8BEN, ITIN, W-7, etc.). Well, it may not be that tricky when you know what to do, but for the moment we don’t really have a clue. Google doesn’t seem to know exactly what to do either, and they obviously want to do this right.

Anyhow, on the mailing list where accepted participants talk together, there are now litterally hundreds of emails per day, providing new information from each one’s local tax counsellor/IRS office/ambassy, asking what to do if one lives in smurfistan but has a schmarkese nationality, or trying to sum up what has been said in the 467 previous emails of the day.

I just find it really funny, interesting, and a bit surreal, that students who have been selected to write code are all talking together about how to fill in exception number h) of the fourth section of form W-674, finding out about tax treaties, different types of grants, tax withholding, etc. Another week and we can all become tax consultants !

We are just a bunch of painters, all on our way to become electricians, because the light in our workshop won’t work. So here we are, all together in the dark in the same huge workshop, discussing together and bumping into each other, trying to get the circuits A157 and C976 to connect, repairing fuses 54, 89 and 103, replacing wires, etc. Somehow, it’s just like some kind of detective story ; it’s quite unexpected, and although it might look silly, I just find it really interesting !

More news from the front now : my mentor is French (just like I am), which will probably make communication easier. He contacted me today (after I contacted the mentoring organization the day before yesterday), and we have an appointment together (on the “IRC” chat system), along with another person working on the same project (I will not be posting names or project details here, I hope to keep it this blog easy to read and understandable). That’s tomorrow morning (French time). They all seem to be really very nice, patient and helpful. More news tomorrow !

PS : although I love to use (a few) smileys in my emails, because I think they can make things easier sometimes, I will try to keep this blog smiley-free. It’s not the same kind of communication. I’m not speaking to anyone in particular ; and I hope my poor writing skills in English will be enough not to be misunderstood !

I have already written a little about Google’s project, named “Summer of Code”.

At first, 200 slots were available for students over 18. The applications had to be sent before June 14th, 2005. The success was huge, and Google was a little overwhelmed : about 8700 applications were sent, partly because of Google’s excellent reputation and partly, let’s be honest, because of the $4500 grant.

A few days after the 14th, Google announced that they raised the available slots from 200 to 400, saying they received a lot of very good applications and wanted to give a chance to more students. Provided Google also gives $500 to the mentoring organization, the math is fairly straightforward ! (410 people were finally selected.)

Anyway, the good news is that I got selected for this program : that’s why this blog is going to be a lot about Ubuntu (my mentoring organization), GNOME (the window system I will be working on) and Google, in the next few weeks. But I’ll keep on posting about more general subjects, when I have time to do so !

This kind of projects is rare enough (especially from a private company) to be really encouraged. Thanks to everybody from Google, especially to Chris DiBona and Greg Stein !

Something tells me that 4100 fingers will be actively running on keyboards until September 1st…