Status Report:GSoC and SoK 2012

GSoC

Puneet Goyal

Project Name: Enhancement to peer-to-peer DBus for Telepathy DBus Tubes

A _Brief_ Description Telepathy is a modular framework for real-time communications that handles voice, video, text, file transfer, and so on. It makes extensive use of the D-Bus messaging bus and a modular design. When an application connects to a peer to peer dbus tube, it must know what exactly to look for. Even When it registers for another object, the other side of the tube must know about it. So the ideas is to create a class that could ease the object to register and unregister on the DBus Tubes, and to provide you with an interface similar to the one as a DBus Server.

Status: Implementing org.freedesktop.DBus.Peer Interface and Adapter- almost complete

Screenshot:

IRC Nick: puneetgoyal

IRC Channels: #kde-telepathy

Blog: http://dcetech.com/puneet I am going to start the blog soon!

This is awesome about GSoC:

This is what I learned during GSoC:

Cyril Oblikov

Project Name: Asynchronous errors handling during file transfer

A _Brief_ Description The goal is to bring powerful, easy to use and suitable for both desktops and touch devices way to handle errors during copying or moving files. Since this project will be finished, errors will no more block copying process. The functionality for kdelibs is already done in last GSoC. You can see my blog posts about it: first, second.

Google+: munknex

Blog: http://munknex.net

Rishab Arora

Project Name: Improving Data Storage, Logs and adding DSO catalogs to KStars

A _Brief_ Description My proposal aims at improving the way the data is handled inside KStars. All user data which is currently being fed by multiple text files can be consolidated into a SQLite database which also makes the data more manageable and resolves many issues. This will also let me improve drastically on the ability to create portable logs about sky objects with a detailed interface and storage. However, in cases where reading the text files (comma/space/colon delimited) is necessary, I shall create separate provisions for processing them which is robust, tested and reliable. I shall also target the way the sky objects are stored and referenced and transfer all those objects to another SQLite database to make the data more manageable.

Status: Porting the User DB to SQLite and replacing old file usage.

Screenshot:

IRC Nick: spacetime

IRC Channels: #kde-edu #kstars #kde-in

Blog: http://blog.rishab.in/category/kde/

This is awesome about GSoC:

This is what I learned during GSoC:

Sinny Kumari

Project: Advanced features and enhancements for Plasma Media Center

A _Brief_ Description Plasma Media Center (PMC) aims to provide users all the media related facilities like Listening Music, Watching Videos, Viewing Pictures, etc. Currently, PMC have all the basic features that a Media Center need to have. My project is to add advanced features in PMC like add to playlist, cover fetching, picture slideshow, tagging, online services like fetching pictures from picasa and many more.

Link (Wiki):http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/Plasma_Media_Center

Link (Project): https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/multimedia/plasma-mediacenter/repository

IRC : #plasma-mediacenter (ksinny)

Yash Shah

Project Name: Multimodal Accessibility: Using Computer Vision to improve Speech Recognition in Simon

A _Brief_ Description A major obstacle for command and control speech recognition systems is to differentiate commands from background noise. Many systems solve this by using physical buttons or certain key phrases to activate/deactivate the speech recognition. This project explores the use of computer vision to determine when to activate / deactivate the sound recognition using visual cues. For a media centre or robot applications, it would make a lot more sense to only activate the recognition when the user is actively looking at the screen/robot and is speaking something. This is strikingly similar to the day-to-day communication between humans! Face recognition can also be employed to provide different speech models for different people. In this way the media centre could adapt to different people in one household. Checkout my blog post about it

IRC Nick: yashshah

IRC Channels: #kde-accessibility

Blog: yashshah.com/blog/category/kde/

Vinay S Rao

Project Name: Gluon: Implementing Saving/Loading Gluon Engine's Game State

A _Brief_ Description My project mainly involves providing effective ways to save the Gluon Engine's Game state. This is a feature that any game developer would like to provide. To implement this first requires serialization of the current scene of the game. My project takes this further, by creating basic scene graphs, to compare two scenes. That way, only the necessary data is saved. Also, variants of basic save/load APIs like checkpoints, level saves etc are to be built. I plan to follow up this GSoC project, with an implementation of a replay feature, that takes scene graphs further by using timestamps of events, and using deterministic prediction to minimize data and processing required.

IRC Nick: vsrao

Zhengliang Feng

Project Name: Integrate Spotify into Amarok

A _Brief_ Description This project is to integrate Spotify collection and music streaming into Amarok. So that users can login into Spotify, access their playlists and stream & play music through Amarok.

Status: Implementing basic classes of the Spotify plugin.

Screenshot:

IRC Nick: ofan

IRC Channels: #kde-soc, #amarok.dev

Blog: http://ofan.me

This is awesome about GSoC: GSoC offered an great opportunity to practice programming skills and contribute code to open source projects.

This is what I learned during GSoC: Communication is very important.

SoK

Heena

Project Name: To develop the KDE game pairs and to work as a theme editor for this game.

A _Brief_ Description In the next KDE release the game Pairs will make its first public appearance. It is designed to increase the logic and foster the IQ skills of children.

IRC Nick: stack3457

Screenshot: Coming soon

IRC Channels: #kdegames , #kde-edu

Google+: heena

Blog: Coming soon

KDE summer of code is great platform foster the programming skills.

I get to learn more about the kde applications and significance.

Sharad Dixit

Project Name: Implementation of Variable thickness lines in Calligra Karbon

A _Brief_ Description One of the most fundamental basics of drawing is varying the width of your lines to show shape, form and perspective. Almost every line tapers at either end, and often gets thicker and thinner in different places as needed. For purely technical and histrorical reasons though, every vector program (Illustrator, Inkscape, Karbon etc) make curves all one hard width. Task is to create a variable width path shape / tool, much like the path tool, would allow drawing curves, but where each node could have its width set so that the line width changed smoothly from node to node. As Karbon is part of the Calligra suite, this would be beneficial to apps such as Krita,also.

Screenshot: Here

IRC Nick: illumiknight

IRC Channels: #calligra

Google+: sharad

Blog: I am going to start the blog soon!

This is awesome about KDE Summer of code:

This is what I learned during KDE Soc:

Utku Aydın

Project Name: Port Marble to Plasma Active platform

A Brief Description: Project's aim is a nicely polished, end-user ready Marble Touch for Plasma Active. That will enable users to use their favorite Virtual Globe on their Plasma Active powered tablets.

Status: Creating a Foursquare online service, a plugin that shows venues on the map

Screenshot: http://ompldr.org/vZTVmNA (Latest status of Foursquare plugin)

IRC Nick: utku

IRC Channels: #marble

Blog: http://utkuaydin.wordpress.com (nothing related to SoK yet)

This is awesome about SoK: Like my previous Google Code-in experience, I get a chance to work with talented people in a more organized process.

This is what I learned during GSoC: QML is awesome.