Internship - Week 1

Hi all,
Last week I created a new popup feature that would allow the users to quickly enable/disable accounts from the accounts tree-view in accounts dialog.

Right clicking a disabled account.

Right clicking an enabled account

Note that the icon on the enable menu-item is the most-available presence depending on the chosen presence and not always necessarily the "available" icon.

I also made a small change in the way private and multi-user chats appears to a user. Influenced by approach used by Google talk, the user's name in current chat will be reduced to the string "Me: " thereby making chat look clearer and avoiding unnecessary clutter. This recent change is awaiting commit after which a private chat will look somewhat like the following with only the current chat affected.

Using "Me" for the user's name in private chats

...and similarly in Multi-user chats too.

Now, i'll be concentrating on improving Multi-user chats (MUCs) and removing its major and normal bugs.

Internship begins...

So it's Dec 15th and my internship begins today. Excited? Yeah!! Immensely and a little nervous too!!! :D 

Well in this while I had been somewhat preparing for my internship to start in a good pace. I went through the basic GTK tutorials and underlying API references and fixed some of the bugs in Empathy.


A few ambiguities resolved. A small fix was made in Empathy's account's dialog which required changing the tab focus chain sequence. Another notable change was that when no accounts are set up in empathy (or all are disabled) then instead of having the full 'Room' menu made insensitive, only sub menus Join, Join Favorites and any favorite rooms are made insensitive. Which means, if a user had no account set up then he can now click on the "Room" menu and his default empathy view would be somewhat like this (ignore the theme):

There will be a 'Save all' button functionality added to the debug window hopefully soon. The work on it was stalled due to some GTK bug yet unresolved. I created a standalone application to demonstrate it but that didn't seem to have caused much effect.

I hope I keep up to mark and create things that the open world would remarkably recognize and appreciate! I have a long way to go and this is only the first step. I have learnt a lot of things on my way to this first rung of my career and it was a wonderful experience.
Wondering how enthralling it's gonna be beyond this. :)

My Hi to GNOME Planet dwellers!

Being here makes me feel that I really belong to an assorted group of really skilled and motivated group of individuals, all trying to contribute in their own special ways to make the world a little better, a little happier place for the rest!

I am Chandni, a recent grad from Dr. M.C, Saxena College of Engineering and Technology, Lucknow, India. I have a passion for finding an elegant solution for any kind of problem, be it in a physical form, puzzle-like or algorithmic thus developing in me hobbies like puzzle-solving and competing in algorithmic coding contests with other brains in the world.

I will be working on Empathy IM client under the expert guidance of Danielle Madeley. I owe a lot to Danielle, firstly for being such a kind heart and patient person as she is, for guiding me through my first commit and being there whenever needed (which was really difficult as this was my first contribution to open source I had never used a version controlling system before), and last but not the least, for informing me about the program and giving me the confidence to go for it!

Getting selected on such a prestigious platform was something unimaginable. Being here provides me a chance to touch the lives of so many dependents and admirers of the open-source desktop with my ideas and skills. I am proud of being a woman and being chosen here also gives me a chance to prove to the world that a female mind has abilities no less than anyone else in the world.

Lastly i'd like to thank all the Empathy folks for their help in both big and small ways and for their time they have invested on me. I'd like to get in touch with more of you while contributing on IRC.

My SSH key

I created a SSH key for authenticating me and establishing a secure connection between my pc and the project hosting server. Otherwise also, if your SSH servers are visible over the Internet, you should use public key authentication instead of passwords if at all possible!

I created a key pair using RSA public key cryptography algorithm using 3 simple commands on the terminal:

Note: The ssh-keygen command automatically creates ~/.ssh and assigns appropriate permissions to it, thus reducing the 3 commands to just 1. Thanks Marius for correcting.

ssh-keygen -t rsa

also, I for better security, I considered using

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 

Then I was asked for a filename and location and a pass-phrase after which it was done! :)

My public repository!

I learnt some GIT basics in this while. There are many books and tutorials available online for getting hands on with GIT. The GIT community book is what I found to be particularly powerful and easy-to-follow reference I would commend for all newbies.

I created my first SSH key and a public project to host branches of projects I'll work on.

Updated:

My Gnome work will be hosted on the glassrose-GNOME project on Gitorious.org and I'll push my Empathy WIP branches in the Empathy repository in this project. :)

I'm a proud GNOME Intern now! hooray!

Hello everyone!

Yesterday night the results for GNOME internships 2010 were finally officially announced and I am in!! :)
The best Deepawali present ever. :) What occasion would have been more auspicious than this for the results to get declared!

Everyone was happy. My dad and my grandparents were more than elated as they wouldn't believe me before anything was up on notices! I received my family's blessings and applauses with heart full of gratitude as their belief in me was always intact and they gave me the freedom to pursue my dreams!

I planned a gift trip for mom and dad to Jim Corbett Wildlife Sanctuary on my expenses. I had heard them planning the visit along with their old friends sometime ago. ;)

I extend my thanks to all the empathy folks, particularly Danielle Madeley who supported and guided me all the way through! She's really talented! This wouldn't have been real had she not been there. Thanks again!

added a new feature to empathy!

Today I coded a 'Save all' debug logs functionality for empathy ( Bug 592994 )

Yea, 'twas a handsome amount of code for anyone's second fix :) , but choosing this was a conscious decision! While looking for a resolution, I was exposed to some of the important and frequently used data structures in GTK, like GtkTreeModel interface and its GtkListStore and GtkTreeStore implementations. I used widgets like GtkComboBox, GTkToolBar, GtkToolButton and Gtk core reference - stock items while creating a custom button as this.

This bug was a must for me!

My first empathy commit

Hey guys, yesterday was somewhat special for me as I made my first commit to empathy! :)
Check out the bug i fixed here and my commit here.

Will be committing some more in quick succession. Keep watching!