Congratulations to Carrollton Community Martial Arts Students!!

Carrollton Community Martial Arts held its first Moo Do Won Tae Kwon Do belt test last night, and all six students who were testing passed! Many thanks to Charles Theiss and Thomas Johnson for judging, and to Marsha Prokopakis for judging and teaching this year. Thanks also go to all the parents, grandparents and Thomas Maffett for coming to observe and support the class. Everyone did a great job, and I hope to get more pictures and videos uploaded to the website (http://carrolltonmartialarts.wordpress.com) soon.

Kiko Kids!

One of our does had a single buck kid sometime on Tuesday, who, the next day weighed ~ 8 lbs. Unfortuantly our nice kid-weighing scale appears to be broken, so I had to bring him inside and weigh him by holding him on my (admittedly) inaccurate scale. Mind you it did lead to some fairly cute pictures:

 

1 day old

May 2, 2012, out of “Patches” and “stinky” – weighing ~ 8lbs at 1 day old

 

Google Summer of Code!

Wow, I can’t quite believe it, but I’ve been accepted to Google Summer of Code 2012. Its kinda crazy – another one of those things, I can definitely say if you’d told me would happen, oh, even 6 months ago, I’d have laughed at you. But strangely it has – and I’m psyched. Right now, I’m focused on finishing this semester, which mostly involves preparing for finals next week. Then I’ll be able to focus on GNOME Clock & GSOC completely.

I am trying to decide what to upgrade my kids’ computer to – its an old desktop, currently running Xubuntu 11.10 (I think, it may be 11.04). I spent some time last night reading about the various distro’s focused on kids, namely Debian Junior, Edubuntu, Debian Edu and Skolelinux. Debian Junior sounds the most interesting, and I may very well give it a try. Anyone have suggestions/thoughts/experience with one of these distros?

Installing Linux Mint Debian – with an end goal of Debian & GNOME 3?

Has anyone done this? I tried installing straight Debian a few months ago and ran into wi-fi driver issues along with not being able to figure out which CD/DVD’s I needed to install w/o having to download massive quantities *during* installation. I realize this isn’t a problem for most people anymore, but I average 10-20k down, 40-60k on a really, really good day. As a result, I ended up back with Ubuntu 11.10 & now 12.04 w/ GNOME 3, since it works without massive install headaches & hours and hours and hours downloading just to get it to work.

Anyhow, Ubuntu 12.04 is about to come out and I know I’m going to end up upgrading to something in the next couple months and I think its time I gave Linux Mint a shot – I’d like to see what the fuss is all about, and I’d like to get on a more straight Debian, rolling release schedule for myself at least (though I’m really not sure what I’ll do for all my family/friends that I have setup on Linux these days).

 

Any suggestions? 

GNOME Clock

So, yesterday I worked on GNOME Clocks (https://github.com/gonyere/gnome-prototypes) code for the first time, and was able to get the ‘Cancel’ button to work when you go to add a new clock. Small I know, but its my first contribution and I have to say I’m pretty psyched! Today I spent the last couple hours going through git tutorials, setting up a github account, and finally getting my first commit uploaded, which is almost more exciting than getting the code to work

Now to decide what to work on next!!

Python :)

I have to say, I am slightly surprised at how much I enjoy reviewing code, both for the purposes of looking for small typo which cause bugs, and just to try and figure out what everything is actually doing. I’ve been working on Exercise 47 for the last few days and simply could not figure out what was wrong (I kept getting NameError: global name ‘self’ is not defined). I finally went back and looked at every bit of code that I’d written and finally found two tiny misspellings that I had apparently missed the other half dozen times I looked at it. And poof! It works!! Is there anything more fulfilling than finally having code run properly an spit out what you are expecting/hoping for rather than an error message?

In related news, I know I’m not quite all the way through “How to Learn Python the Hard Way” yet (I *AM* 90% done though!! xD), but I have started re-reading the first couple lessons in the Python GTK+ 3 Tutorial, and its making a lot more sense now I know, you all told me not to do it till I was totally done, but what can I say? I’m impatient :p

More Python fun!

I think I’m finally, slowly understanding why math is a pr-requisite for computer science classes. Being halfway through my current math class is making Python make a LOT more sense than it did the last time I tried to learn it 8 or 9 months ago. Where all the if, else, range & functions didn’t make much sense, now they do (cause’ they’re basically the same as in math).

Exercise 35 was especially fun for me – I felt like I was building the most basic of MUDs, which was very fun. What made me smile and laugh though was my annoyance with the wording of descriptions, mostly since ‘you’ was in just about everyone, which I was always taught was a big ‘no no’ back when I was learning to build MUDs years ago. But, it was fun none the less and led me to wonder about MUD servers written in Python. A quick google brought up a handful of options: Evennia, GrailMUD, and a couple others which I see references to but don’t appear to actually exist anymore (ie AMC:SW-ERP), which is sad if unsurprising.  Some downloading & playing is definitely in the cards

Math, Python & GTK+ 3

Today has been, either entirely unproductive or very productive depending on your point of view. My house is still a mess & we certainly didn’t eat ‘well’ today by any stretch of the imagination, so in that respect at least, it was most unproductive. However, I feel like I have been productive today, if only in my head.

This morning I started out reviewing math in anticipation of my 2nd test tomorrow, and figuring out my fancy new TI-83Plus graphing calculator. I’ve never had a graphing calculator before, and thus spent a good couple hours googling & paging through the manual figuring out how to graph stuff, set up tables, find zeros, etc. I still haven’t figured out how to do everything by any stretch of the imagination, but I do feel like I have a decent grasp on the basics at this point which is nice. And, at least tomorrow I won’t be the only one sitting there doing long division & multiplication without a calculator!!

Most of the rest of the day, starting shortly after lunch has involved learning Python. Seif Lotfy got me started a couple days ago reading the Python GTK+ 3 Tutorial and I’ve been messing around with the examples from there without really having any clue what I was doing. Today he sent me over to ‘Learn Python the Hard Way‘ by Zed A. Shaw and I spent most of the afternoon & evening reading & working my way through the first 20 examples (and pestering Seif with questions). At this point, I’m feeling like I have at least some clue of how python actually works, and am trying to decide whether I should finish ‘learn python the hard way’ first or go back and start re-reading the tutorial on GTK+ 3, to see if it makes more sense.

Am I really starting to like *math*?!

Coming up on 2 months of school, and I’m becoming increasingly concerned about myself – I’m actually starting to enjoy math again! Its slightly strange, but its hard & challenging which makes it interesting and fun in its own way. Might just manage to pass this class afterall… I hope. :p

Leaning more and more away from spanish too, which is slighlty sad. But the classes here are just not on the same level of instruction at all as those in Spain, and I’m just not sure its worth it. Maybe I’ll take french or arabic or japanese or something in the fall – a 3rd language has always kinda been on the to-do-list. Not that my spanish is perfect, but short of living where I use it, I doubt its gonna get much better. What else will I be taking? No freaking clue. Any suggestions? Whats interesting? I love to read

FOSDEM

The last week has been pretty crazy. Kevin & I flew out of Columbus on Thursday ~1:30pm and arrived in Brussels ~8am Friday morning. We were to fly out of Brussels at 10am, but missed the check-in time by about 10 minutes due to cancelled trains, which led to us having to rebook for another flight which was supposed to leave at 12:10… but due to mechanical issues didn’t actually take off until nearly 2pm. So, we’re now supposed to arrive back in Columbus ~7pm, assuming we don’t miss our connecting flight in Washington DC. Of course, once we get back to Columbus we still have a 2.5-3hr car ride home, and then school and work all day Wednesday. Here’s hoping we make it in time, and survive the next couple days of insanity.

Anyhow, our trip to Brussels & FOSDEM 2012 has been amazing and certainly something that neither of us will soon forget. Its been a crazy whirlwind tour, and I know we’d both have liked it to last a bit longer, but its still been fun. FOSDEM 2012 was my first conference & Kevin’s first time in Europe, and I think we made the best of it. We got to met tons of great people both at FOSDEM & all around Brussels, wander around the city, see some, though certainly not all of the cool stuff in Brussels, and have just had a great time.

At FOSDEM I met dozens of amazing and inspiring people including Karen Sandler, Allan Day, Dave Neary, Seif Lofty & many, many more. After arriving in Brussels on Friday we spent the next 4 hours incredibly lost before finally finding our hotel & taking a much-needed nap. The afternoon was spent seeing Brussels, getting lost again, and finally finding the Delirium Cafe where the FOSDEM Beer Party was held, which was fantastic. We ended up spending most of the night with a group from Barcelona Spain, with whom we went out to eat & then to another bar across from the Manneken Pís before finding our way back to our hotel rather late.

On Saturday, Kevin & I walked to FOSDEM, where I spent most of Saturday manning the GNOME booth in the K-Building, though I did get to attend a couple of sessions, including part of the Legal Issues room fill in and Grey Areas of Software Licensing by Dave Neary , as well as the Cross Desktop group picture & Allan Day’s GNOME 3: Every Detail Matter’s, which hopefully reminded people that the little things really do matter!

That night we went to the GNOME Beer Party at La Becassé which was a blast. Kevin & I spent most of the night chatting with Mario Sánchez Prada of Igalia about pretty much everything – computers, kids, video games, languages, and just life in general. I/we apparently stayed up a bit late though which led to me missing a couple of the talks in the morning which I was hoping to catch, most notably GNOME 3.4 accessible: Status, news, future by Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias and The Anatomy of a role playing game by Arthur Huillet.

I did manage to make it back to FOSDEM & the GNOME booth in time for the mini-marketing meeting, during which we touched on a wide range of issues. Topics included the redesign of the website, the Annual Report & the overall direction of GNOME in the coming months/years. One of our most important tasks in the coming weeks will be the publication of the annual report, which covers both 2010 and 2011. Another major topic was the re-design of news.gnome.org being done by Christy Eller & Allan Day, including the future of the news site, GNOME Journal, Quarterly reports, the GNOME Foundation site and how to better streamline all of them. One over all theme seemed to be a need for new content, on everything from news articles, how to articles on specific applications, interviews of developers, hackfest reports and pretty much anything else. If you’re interested in writing please let us know!!

After the mini-marketing meeting I spent the rest of the day attending sessions. I started with Seif Lofty & Allan Day’s How to trick a developer into becoming a designer, which was informative while also being humorous and engaging. I next attended a Lightning talk on libre.fm & GNU FM by Michael Sheldon, and caught part of the lighting talk on Netmagis by Jean Benoit, before returning to the Cross-Desktop room.

My last couple hours at FOSDEM were spent in in the Cross-Desktop room attending the last 3 sessions there – WebKitGTK+ status and roadmap to WebKit2 by Mario Sánchez Prada & Philippe Normand, Getting into GNOME by Ekaterina Gerasimova & David King and finally Web applications in GNOME by Xan López.

Getting into GNOME was the most interesting for myself, mostly since I felt that they were speaking to me & many others in my position. There are literally millions of users of free and open source software, but only a thousand actively contribute. Bridging this gap will be the key to the long-term survival and success of free free/open source software.

I know I’ve used Linux & GNOME pretty consistently for the last 10+ years but only found out how to get involved in the last few months. Not because I didn’t want to, but simply because I didn’t know that I could. Up until this past fall I was under the impression, as I suspect many are that there wasn’t a lot to be done outside of coding, which I, and undoubtedly many other users simply don’t know how to do. However as I’ve discovered over the past few months, this simply isn’t true. GNOME (and, I suspect most if not all other free/open source projects) need people to do lots of things which don’t require coding – writing news articles, documentation, making art work, manning booths at conferences (of which there are dozens! There’s probably even one close to you!!), and much more.

So, if you use/love free/open source software, please get involved! Its not hard and every contribution really is appreciated no matter how small. Even hanging out on irc.gnome.org & answering questions in #gnome or #gnome-love when your available, is appreciated. Even if you think ‘oh, I don’t know enough to answer questions…’ you probably do. I know I never thought I’d be able to help people, but I have! Its not hard, and it’s incredibly fulfilling when you do. Alternatively, pick a specific project and see what they need help with. Theres sure to be something that you can do to help!

Overall, I’ve had a great, if slightly crazy week, and I hope to make it to many more conferences in the future. If you haven’t made it to one yet, I highly recommend it!!