Oh yeah, summer’s approaching and so is GSOC ‘09.
Here is the SOC ‘09 FAQ
http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2009/faqs.html
You’d probably notice that there is a cap limit of 1000 students this year and the timeline has changed too!
Nevertheless, I may not be able to participate in SOC this year for various reasons.
Google Summer of Code Artwork - using Gimp
Do you like my design for GSOC?
Rejoice all students, finally an end to the long wait for GSoC results.
This time google is funding 1125 students; they received over 7,000 applications for this year.
Post announcing results open by Leslie Hawthorn.
All students should be thankful to LH and whole team as well as the participating organizations for this program. It is a real effort demanding task to carry out such an enormous scale program.
As for KDE, this year’s accepted projects are listed here.
I should thank the whole KDE team for their effort on this. 
My application ‘KDragons’ didn’t make it to the selected list; may be it was too stupid. 
So, that’s the end of my GSoC road for this year. Now to finish my leftover builds on KDE4 and I should be ready enough to write some patches. I should try to get my SVN account on KDE in another month or so.
KDragons needs hosting somewhere now, may be on kde-playground or if not, my choice would be launchpad.net
Hmm, its 04:35, I am not yet feeling sleepy. Guess results scared the sandman away! 
While the mentors might be pondering over my simply simple application for GSoC, I am making efforts to build the development environment.
KDE’s Techbase has a very well written documentation; thanks to everyone who contributed, it made my life a little easy.
The build was smooth until I compiled qt-copy. It failed due to insufficient disk space on my /home. This was obvious, since I had /home of 3GB only.
I use a very peculiar partitioning scheme. On an 80GB IDE Harddisk, I make 11 partitions, having /boot, /, swap, /usr, /var, /opt, /home, /code, /data, /musik, /vm-os.
While, reinstalling my distro with a huge /home would have been the sane thing, I decided to drop my /musik and /vm-os and created a /home of 15GB. I knew I have to build this again, but then continuing at this point would give me more experience.
So, by saturday night I was done with the kdebase build and was using KDE4 applications on KDE3.5.8 Desktop. At this point, my free space on /home was 6.1GB; I had option to delete my *.o files to free up space, which I didn’t exercise.
At #kdegames (irc.freenode.net), jpwhiting and milliams pointed me to kollision, it was fun and I was scoring points until I started understanding how to play.
I fell asleep on my keyboard that night (happens many times); next day’s fun on next post.
Phew, I am back home after a long and tiring stay at Chennai again. I say tiring because, there was not much to do in the extra 3days of my stay due to missing the train.
Luckily I didn’t miss the KDEGames meeting. It was decided that there will be a student’s meet for all GSoC participants of this year. That’s really sweet of the kdegames team.
My GSoC application (KDragons) to KDE has moved from status ‘Available for review’ to ‘Ranking in progress’.
I am back to building KDE4 on my desktop.
At mukt.in, the website theme has been updated with something that looks and feels like open source software atleast. The theme is still under development, so please do not get mad with the colors yet.
The blog and ToDo links have been removed.
Blogs will be updated under volunteers section and ToDo goes in the discussion forum. We’ve decided to leave the wiki as a playground/sandbox for everyone. Selected Ideas from wiki will make it to the website.
Our chat still runs mibbit ajax based web irc client; one of the drupal modules. I wonder if it supports connecting to any other irc server. We may have to configure this to auto-join irc.devnode.org; thanks to devnode for enabling us on their webchat server.
mukt.in welcomes suggestions/comments anytime.
I’ve submitted my application for KDragons on my dashboard at Google SoC.
Its time now to prepare my box for KDragons.
What do I need?
I start by removing multiple Operating Systems on my box. It has been running ubuntu and windows for some testing. So, missed KDE for some time now. Now gearing up for a re-union.
Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon finds its new home on my box now.
It is running KDE 3.5.8 and I just finished installing firefox3 beta4. Flash plugin has been found broken during add-on install. Need to report it. I am online at IRC using Konversation.
Next task is to get KDE 4 (after breakfast)
My email to kde-games-devel about `KDragons` game has earned some good responses. Thanks to them, my nervousness level has come down.
I ended up adding the idea to techbase ideas page, which was probably not the right thing to do and so removed it.
Just finished this simple sketch of a probable screen for KDragons.
Sorry for the bad quality image; used a VGA Cellphone cam.
Here is the Enlarged image
I should try mailing this to KDE Games mailing list for some suggestions.
Aaron’s email said “there’s no problem with hosting PyKDE/Qt apps in kde’s svn. it’s actually a
stated goal for the KDE4 timeframe to host non-C++ apps.” has given me some relief.
Thanks Aaron.
Will keep updating my blog on my GSoC progress. Expecting to apply for KDragons using Google’s Webapp by tomorrow.
Till then I am found having fun at #gsoc, #kde-devel, #kdegames, #kde-soc, #python, #pygame and #mukt.in at irc.freenode.net
Ciao for now
So here it is, March 24, the students’ applications open today. Other important dates listed here.
Students wanting to participate in GSoC can see Official List of Mentoring organisations or Categorized list of mentoring organisations and Mentoring organisations by Language.
I was wondering if I should try my luck at GSoC this year. Bad that this occurred to me just 4 days ago, so lot of studying time is lost already.
Another hick-up is I’ve moved to a new place and BSNL has not provided my internet connection yet. I called them up so many times; no avail. 
Yesterday, I had to work from an internet cafe, I couldn’t convince the admin that it is safe to connect my linux laptop to his network, so at last I had to convince him for xchat (30 minutes to convince him that xchat isn’t a virus and he can safely install that on his windows box.)
I mailed a small game idea of mine to kde-games-devel mailing list; impatiently waiting for reply.
Another interesting idea is Elements under OLPC where I am also interested in writing small python/pygame based games.
Chris Hager (probable mentor) is about to propose a detailed project list in about another 8hrs; will be interesting to watch tickets page of Elements.
Applications should be open around 19:00 UTC, thats around 00:30 March 25th in India. So waiting with fingers crossed.
