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1    Summer is over. For many of us it means shorter days, shedding tears saying goodbye to our summer love and getting ahead lot of troubles^W fun at work. Obviously, you need some lovin to get over it. GNOME Journal is right on time again. We have a present for you. Hurry up and read on to open a pack full of GNOME goodies, jewels and magic !
2    
3    Unless you've been hiding in a deep cave during the last two months, you've heard about the Google Summer of Code. This article is a collection of interviews of all the students that have been hacking on GNOME bounties during the Google SoC. Not only will you discover eleven great concrete and working projects, packed full of genius, nice tricks and eye candy. You will see how these students, together with their mentors, the GNOME project as a whole and Google got it right once again and pushed the GNOME desktop where it hasn't been before !
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5    First, be sure to gather as much friends as you can around your screen, and that no one miss the fun. Is everyone ready ? Ok, let's start the show !
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7    The first present is a cute little locked box. We all know that size doesn't matter (does it ?). Let's get some help from his creator to unlock the magic.
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9    Encrypted folders and partitions have existed for quite a while now. How about packing this into the usual GNOME eye candy and usability excellence so that it's just one click away from anywhere on the desktop ? Let's discuss with our encrypted-folder wizard about that.
10    
11    FIXME : Questions/Answers to/from John Manning.
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13    Wait, do you ear that sound ? Yes, we all noticed the nice melody playing out from that box over there. Let's move on to see what's inside !
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15    
16    FIXME : Questions/Answers to/from Raphael Slinckx
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18    Clever are the foxes, so clever must be the ideas packed in this firefox-looking package. Let's prepare for the best while we hear the paper scritch and scratch by opening this one !
19    
20    John Manning is the lucky guy that got working on this great Firefox extension. SearchParty allows you to find some help from people all over the world when you can't find the right keywords in order to perform a google search. It's as simple as typing your query in the google search field to find that you need some help, click a button to automatically join the right chat room, and automatically get the keywords used by successfull queries on the same topic.
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22    GJ: Does the project still match the initial plan ? If not, how far is it from the initial plan and why ?
23    
24    JM: Yes and no.  One technical detail changed, and made quite a ripple throughout the rest of the project.  I initially intended to write the Search Party Protocol directly over TCP, and have a Java server somewhere that took care of matching up users with the proper chat room, etc.  My mentor, Seth Nickell, pointed out early on that this might make the extension unusable for those behind various firewalls, so he suggested XML-RPC.  This changed several things.  First of all, I had to learn XML-RPC (it's not hard at all).  Second, I had to write a very different sort of server.  It is esentially a PHP page that responds to XML-RPC requests and stores all its data in a MySQL database.  Third, I had to teach the extension to speak XML-RPC, and Firefox's included implementation is broken, so I had to find a third party Javascript library (http:// solait.net/).  So I ended up spending a lot more time on the extension than I had initially intended.  As a result, I think the extension is pretty cool, but I haven't had that much time to focus on the trickiest part of the project: deciding what  exactly makes two search queries similar.  I have a decent algorithm, but it will be receiving a lot of love very soon.
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26    
27    GJ: Did you enjoy your summer ?
28    
29    JM: Yes, very much.  I graduated at the beginning and moved to California, and now after much searching have a new software development job.  It means I had to work pretty hard to fit in as much time for Search Party as I wanted.  But I am very happy with the results of my efforts so far.
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31    GJ: Do you have somme funny anecdotes to tell our readers ?
32    
33    JM: Nothing in particular.  My wife thinks the funniest thing is how she would come in to see how I was doing, and I'd explain some horrible untraceable bug that was driving me nuts (stupid interpreted languages!).  A few hours later (or the next day, after some rest), she'd hear me go "OOoooooooooooooohhhhhh!!!", which meant that I'd figured out the simple source of the problem.  By the end of the summer, she'd go "Oooooooooooooooohhh!!!" right along with me.  She loves to make fun of me!
34    
35    GJ: Can you tell us about your mentor ?
36    
37    JM: Seth helped me out at some very key points in development.  First of all, it was his idea.  ;-)  Second, he pointed me at XML-RPC as I mentioned earlier.  As the extension took form, I was unhappy with the user interface (there was a separate toolbar that gained a button for every search you made).  Seth suggested a cleaner solution based on his original mockups.  Now he gives me general UI tips whenever we meet up in IRC.  I hope Seth continues his involvement with Search Party development, since he is a very insightful designer.  Besides, if Seth is using Search Party, all the other kids will want to be cool and use it, too!
38    
39    GJ: If you had to choose the three most important things you learned by working on this project, what would they be, and why ?
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41    
42    JM : 1. Get your code in CVS as early as possible.  The shame of it all will drive development and increase productivity quite a bit.
43    2. KISS (keep it simple stupid).  Don't over-engineer, but don't desgin yourself into a corner, either.  Reuse code (your own and others') where you can. 3. Keep lists.  I eventually moved mine over to http://live.gnome.org/SearchParty , but before I had my stuff in CVS, Tomboy was my constant companion!
44    
45    GJ:  By hacking on this project, what are the things (technical or not) you found truly amazing with GNOME ? What do you think need substantial work to be as amazing as the rest of the desktop ?
46    
47    JM: The most amazing thing was learning about everyone else's projects! Behdad's preload stuff for Fedora has so much potential.  Raphael's gshrooms project is of course super cool and will soon take over the world.  Adam's CamTrack is so nifty I can't wait to see how people make use of it.  GNOME is already great, and these people just ensure that it will keep blowing us all away.
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49    GJ: Last but not least, is the project done ? If not, will you keep hacking on this project in the future  ?
50    
51    JM: No, it is not done.  I intend to continue working on it for quite awhile.  If this project is successful, I suspect the server will go through a lot of performance tuning and other refactoring.  Not to mention all the work I would like to do on the query matching algorithms.  However, the extension is really becoming quite useable, and I would love for people to download it from the wiki, try it out, and tell me what they think!  I hope to make a release to the general Gnome/Mozilla communities in the near future.
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