A couple of days have passed since eight students found out they will be hacking on Thousand Parsec as part of Google Summer of Code 2008. All have come to Thousand Parsec IRC channel to say Hi in and all of them posted their introductions to Thousand Parsec Development mailing list. Each and every student now also has a spot on the web where they will blog about their experiences and progress.

I’ve created a Thousand Parsec Blog on Blogger which links to all the blogs of our students. The page will also serve as the blog for everyone who would like to write about Thousand Parsec but doesn’t feel like setting up his or her own blog just for that. So, if you are interested to see what we at Thousand Parsec are up to this summer, this is the place to start. Of course we will also make sure that feeds from our blogs are aggregated on Planet SoC. You will then be able to see all GSoC posts from our blogs in one place and add the feed to your favourite feed reader.

Tags: games, game, gaming, gamedev, 4x, strategy, turn-based, strategies, tbs, programming, google, summer of code, soc, gsoc, open source, free software

A couple of hours ago Google published the final list of 1125 students who will be working on free and open source projects as part of Google Summer of Code 2008 program. This year 8 students will work with us at Thousand Parsec project. This is twice the number of students we had last year. Here’s what they will be working on this summer:

• 3D Client for Thousand Parsec - Blog - Eugene Tan Jie Ming
• Tigris and Euprhates Ruleset Adaptation - Blog - Dustin E. White
• Genetic Conquest: An AI Client for Thousand Parsec (RFTS ruleset) - Blog - Victor Ivri
• DroneSec: A simple, one hour game for tpserver-py - Blog - Juan Lafont
• A Modified Risk ruleset for the Thousand Parsec C++ server - Blog - Ryan Neufeld
• Remote Server Configuration Protocol and Single-Player Mode - Blog - Aaron Mavrinac
• AI for RFTS - Blog - Vincent Verhoeven
• Schemepy - Blog - Chiyuan Zhang

You can be sure that all of us, students and mentors, will do our very best to complete these projects successfully. Exciting months for open source 4X games are ahead of us. I hope you look forward to the results as much as we at Thousand Parsec do.

Tags: games, game, gaming, gamedev, 4x, strategy, turn-based, strategies, tbs, programming, google, summer of code, soc, gsoc, open source, free software

During the past two days I’ve been at this year’s conference of TransAlpine Chapter (TAC) of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). It was hosted by HERMES SoftLab here in Ljubljana. Since I work quite a lot on translating KDE and other open source software and sometimes also help with documentation I sure thought it would be interesting to attend the conference. One other reason for me to be there is that, as of late, I’m more and more thinking about how it would be to have a career in technical communication (translating, writing documentation and all things related). At first it looked like I wouldn’t be able to be at the conference because the attendance fee (195€) was quite high for a student. Luckily Linux Users Group of Slovenia (Lugos) stepped in and sponsored me.

The conference itself was well above my expectations. I anticipated to meet more or less older and more reserved people, but it turned out they are relaxed, fun, overall cool and in average younger than expected. The talks were also very interesting and they covered a broad range of subjects. Just goes to show how wide the spectre of technical communicators’ knowledge can be. To me the three most interesting presentations were:

Pictures and profits: how visual information design and simple usability studies can save your company millions by Patrick Hofmann

Very interesting how creative you often must be to convey some mesage or concept in a graphical way. A lot also depends on culture an end user comes from. In the end all makes users of documentation happier, because it is easier to understand. This, together with reduction of messages to translate, can save companies a lot of money.

Brave new world: How one writing team moved to DITA-based authoring by Helen O’Shea

DITA is not only a new XML format for technical documentation. It also brings a new way of thinking in topics as basic and complete chunks of information. Topics can later be assembled into different deliverables like books and online help. During this presentation I was constantly thinking how DITA could be used for documentation in KDE. Is there need (and will) for another conversion?

Improving the quality and usability of error messages by Katarzyna Kostorz

Yet another presentation where I was thinking about how all that was said could apply to KDE. First we were shown some examples of bad and good error messages and what are the properties that make them bad or good. Next we could see how error messages are handled by IBM. Not only is the short version shown in GUI, the longer explanation and possible further actions to be taken (by different type of users) are all part of the documentation.

At the end of the conference I was asked if all that I’ve learnt has scared me away from thinking about being a technical writer. I answered that I don’t get scared so easily. Quite the opposite, I can now say that I’m interested in a technical communication career even more. STC membership application is already filled out and ready to be sent across the Atlantic Ocean.

Congrats to the organisers for such a great conference. Hopefully I will be able to meet all the people once again next year.

Tags: transalpine chapter, tac, society for technical communication, stc, technical communication, technical writing, documentation, translation, dita, kde

A new version of one of the most user-friendly distributions of free and open source operating system Linux has just been released. Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (or 2008.1 if you wish) packs quite a lot of goodies. It brings official full support for the highly popular ASUS Eee PC laptop, has easier synchronisation with various mobile devices, a new parental control utility, Elisa multimedia centre is there, so is Codeina for easy multimedia codecs installation. They have also switched to PulseAudio sound server, updated software to latest versions (yes even KDE 4.0.3 is available) and given the distribution a fresh new look. Go download it from here (or via BitTorrent) and while downloading be sure to check out a visual guide to what’s new in Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring.

As with previous releases I also did my fair share of beta testing and bug reporting this time. In addition this is also the first release where I have been the coordinator of Slovenian translation team. We did a great job and almost everything is translated. The only thing left are initscript messages (which are hidden most of the time).

Even during beta testing this release proved to be of very high quality. Looks like after some hiccups a year or two ago Mandriva have put their act together and the quality of releases is increasing every year now. They are also doing a great job with improving their relationship and interaction with community. If they continue in this direction they can soon be back at the top, although it will be hard since unfortunately there is not so much hype surrounding Mandriva as there is around some other very popular Linux distribution.

Tags: mandriva, linux, distributions, eee pc, eeepc, free software, open source, operating systems

Parsek is a KDE 4 client for turn-based strategy games where your goal is to build a space empire. These games are known as 4X games (from four primary goals: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate). Specifically, Parsek is a client for games created using Thousand Parsec framework.

I’ve started working on Parsek a little more then a year ago. It was one of my ways of learning Qt and KDE programming. Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to work on Parsek since then. Well yesterday I’ve imported Parsek into KDE’s Subversion repository, into playground/games/parsek.

Parsek can’t be used to actually play games yet. It can connect to the server, download properties of objects in a Universe and display objects in a simple tree and it can download the messages and display them in a simple table. Two of the main things to be done before Parsek is usable is to make it possible to view and add orders to objects and to display a nice map of the Universe. Anyways, here is how Parsek currently looks like:

If you find this interesting and would like to help in any way, you are more than welcome. The basic instructions on how to compile Parsek are on its Wiki page.

Yesterday I have also been browsing through the history of posts on Planet KDE and I found a post about lack of user research by Celeste Paul. She also put together a user research template which I will try to fill out as soon as possible and will then put it into Wiki and in plain text form also into the Parsek’s source code folder.

Tags: games, gaming, strategy games, 4x games, kde, kde4, free software, open source

I’ve been to Maribor last Thursday where the 1st Day of Open Source event was organised at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This was my first time visiting Maribor and my first impression was that it is a very nice, clean and lively city.

At the event itself you could attend various interesting talks about Linux and Open Source Software in general. I even had the honor to be the very first speaker. I presented FLOSS, it’s history, licensing and after that talked a bit about Lugos, the Linux User Group of Slovenia. Too bad I missed the talks at the end of the day but I had to catch the last train back to Ljubljana.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the number of attendance. A quick count showed that there were constantly at least 150 people in the room. By comparison, the day before this event Microsoft organised a similar event, where there were only 30-50 people. Despite Microsoft having better promotion and they even tried to bribe students by some expensive prizes.

Anyways, hats off to Oto Brglez jr. and the Students Group. They did an excellent job organizing the event and I sure look forward to the 2nd Day of Open Source.

Tags: open source, free software, floss, linux, lugos, maribor, slovenia