GNOME.Asia Summit 2012 - Call for Participation

Hello all!

GNOME.Asia Summit is an annual conference for GNOME users and developers in Asia. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop and devices that use GNOME, and also covers applications based on technologies underlying GNOME and GNOME development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technologies and future developments.


GNOME.Asia Summit 2012 will be the fifth Asian Summit to be held in Hong Kong and aimed at opening immense business opportunities for GNOME in Asia and create more awareness about GNOME in Asian countries.

Hong Kong Skyline

No waiting! Submit a talk now and add your name to the participants list.
If you have suggestions/ideas for BOFs/Workshops you wish to handle, send them in using the same web-form along with your details and an abstract of your idea or mail the details to organizers at asia-summit-list@gnome.org.

Know more!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2012: Event planning

Hi there,

Being a member of GNOME.Asia committee and bearing a responsibility willingly chosen, I have been spending some time lately on gearing up planning for GNOME.Asia 2012 Summit which is going to happen in Hong Kong.

The event organizers working behind making things happen this year are few and relative newbies with little experience in organizing events at such huge scale but they are giving their best effort! If you are an innate manager with noteworthy leadership skills willing to take charge of things and be the power with yourself in terms of getting things organized then this post is aimed at you! If you are good at marketing and have a PGO blog, you are most welcome! There are a number of small tasks you can help out with too. You can be an artist, a Hong-Kong based GNOME user, a content writer, a translator, website manager or simply a fan of GNOME willing to help!

Despite of limited time and even though I will not be making it to the event this year, I have been helping out in the ways I can to make the event a success! We are looking for more cheerful volunteers (both onsite and offsite) who will be devoted to the success of the event and be committed to it until it ends!

Organization is fun when you have equally high-spirited people around you. Looking forward to more eager "Hi!"s on asia-summit-list mailing list. You sure are going to love being the force behind a great event!

Cheers!

Chess in the GNOME Story...

 TEASERS:

GNOME 3.4 to be out within a week!

For preparation of the 3.4 release, git.gnome.org master branches have been frozen against last minute (and possibly erroneous) code alterations to save the precious stability from being hit. See release schedule.

Also did I bring to your notice a tiny API provided by our well-known pastebin?

Well, everyone who has an account there is provided a developer-key to use it. One non-pro account holder can paste as much as 512 KB of data at once. Apart from reconditioning the whole of Empathy's debugger for visible load-time improvements and introducing an "All" option in the service chooser, I used this API along with libsoup to provide a convenient toolbar button for pasting large and complex debug data into it in one go. Empathy will be shipped with a licence to use my Pastebin-API developer key in open.
Shots of how the work looks:

The better the debugger, the better the application! Try it live and do test it out thoroughly :)


My glchess-networking work will continue in a separate branch off gnome-games master.

Hooray!!! GNOME 3.4.0 will be wrapped and out within a week! (amazing isn't it: 3.4 is not yet out and they're already planning 3.6 :)

Twinkle

Changed the look of my blog a bit and made it more picture ready!

New things developing

[I hate procrastination. Even if I ever fall into its trap, it comes out to be beneficial at the end.]
It has been a long time since I last blogged about my work in open source.

I had mostly spend my time after coming out of my inert state (I was behind the veils partly with my beloved algorithms which I had left alone for a while) in expanding my horizons forcing myself against new things and finding myself mostly as a receptor with only inputs "ON". I had multiple projects going on simultaneously just to find myself aware when seeing anything new: seeking Bash and Make reference manuals more than ever before; teaching myself how to make full feature branches; goofing alot, literally A LOT with one bug report spanning 100 comments (which is also a perfect example evidencing changing requirements are poison), and thus learning more; adopting and experimenting with new tools; GConf/GSettings: (what on earth was that and their port: another window with a score of tabs); experimenting with Glade, a RAD tool for GTK+ interfaces; .mk files, .client, .manager, .desktop, .service and the desktop directory specification standard; installing icons and the Icon theme Specification; not to forget the DBus Specification, getting familiar with how i18n works, and many more which are not even coming to my mind right now! I apologize if you had been around and I had kept you waiting but without creating more suspense, I would like to share some cool new recent developments in my life.

• I began working on providing networking support to gnome-games.
  It just began with an idea when I was planning to make a healthy-wealthy contribution to GNOME with the aim of putting to use what I had learnt until now and learn even more in the process. I had no clue of how I would go about it. My major hurdle was that games are written in Vala which is itself in a state of progress with very little and incomplete documentation and bindings to browse to find your way out, but with Robert Ancell's patience, things have happily began to develop. I'll soon be blogging with more on it.
  
• I was given my brand new GIT developer account with my work vouched by Cassidy and now you can also contact me on vchandni@gnome.org for GNOME related issues: Thanks Cassidy and thank you Andrea Veri for setting it up for me.
  
• I was made a member of the GNOME Foundation: Thanks to Marina, Fujii, Danni and Emily.
  
• GNOME is being brought to Asia with the 5th Asian summit, this year in Hong Kong!

Danni, you made my day!

The grieving effect of Jobs' demise had just began to ruin my mood (he being one of my role models) when Danielle's honoring gesture made my day!

October 7th is Ada Lovelace Day. A day that showcases women in science and technology by profiling a woman technologist or scientist on your blog.

This calls me to write about an influential woman in technology I know of.
Though it won't be hard to figure out but if you ask me who is my Ada, she is-

Danielle Madeley

Danielle was the one who introduced me to the FOSS developer world and continues to hold immense trust in me. An unprecedented optimist full of ideas and always ready to help. Oh she knows the Linux box inside out and has the answer to any system related issues I face ever! No doubt she loves penguins (the real ones) and is playing with them (the tux here) since the age of ten [edit: not age of ten but tenth standard] when her dad gifted her a Linux CD. She loves her work a lot and I have even caught her working on a Sunday!

She is a super skilled developer who is very patient (a rare combination because codes make people go crazy at times. ;)  When asked, how are you so patient, she says, "I also do my screaming locally, when there is no one to hear it, but occasionally my housemate."

Her hobbies are playing saxophone, photography and lately, swing dancing and playing netball too. And its worth mentioning, I have never seen a more concerned environmentalist as her before who even cares about the pests infesting her chilli plants [?].