On Student Projects and Hacking Sessions in Toulouse
ervin | March 8, 2008 | 17:12Once again I didn’t blog in a while… In particular I didn’t blog about this year project students even if they got covered once in the commit digest. Now we’re two weeks away from the official end of those projects, so I thought it might be a good idea to show some of their accomplishment.
Kapman
This year we experimented with a project starting from scratch, and apparently we had some demand for a copy of an old famous game… hence why now we have Kapman! It’s kicking and alive, it’s in a pretty good shape already so maybe it’ll be able to enter kdegames in 4.1. Of course it’s all SVG based so you can freely resize it (artists wanted!).
Kscd
We also poked the good old Kscd… Our team made quite a lot of improvements in there. In particular it’s now fully themable using SVG (artists wanted!), and uses MusicBrainz to identify discs. Of course it also got the expected KDE4 refactoring: it got ported to Phonon and Solid.
Ksirk
Ksirk is one of those games we have in playground for quite some time. One of our team has been working on it to improve its quality and make it releasable… It’s definitely getting there. They mainly worked on improving its usability and that shows in my opinion. At least now I feel like I could play with it for hours. 
Kopete
Last but not least, this year we got a team working on Kopete. They did an awesome job, it’s harder to demo or to make a screenshot for it, but they mainly focused on integrating support for UPnP and for the new live messenger protocol. On the UI front it looks less impressive, but I’m very proud of this team, they definitely had the hardest project to work on and learned a lot. Since I had no screenshot to offer, here is a picture of today’s “Kopete Gang of Four” who attended the hacking session:
From left to right: Maximilien Verdier, Michel Saliba, Romain Castan, Kevin Kin-Foo.
A few words on the hacking sessions…
Of course, after last year projects we kept the good habit of having KDE Hacking Sessions in Toulouse, we even have now a few people who are coming regularly… the community is definitely growing here. And during the student projects we have an unusual amount of my students showing up. 
From left to right: Sylvere Lestang, Kevin Kin-Foo, Romain Castan, Michel Saliba, Maximilien Verdier, Stanislas Krzywda, Anne-Marie Mahfouf.
Missing on the picture: Thibault Normand who arrived later, and Alexis Menard who is unfortunately sick today.
Is there a more traditional natively-widgetted theme for KsCD available by default?
nice SVG !
It would be cool if it were possible to integrate ksirk into into conquerclub.com
I’m not an artist but I have a half finished pacman clone in Python + PyGame I’ve been working on recently. My “artwork” was done in Inkscape and you can have it if you like.
An impression, the colors are darkened because of the game pause (and can be changed of course): http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/1732/pacmanimpressionkp4.png
Wow, the pakman/kapman is definitively something I’ll waste some hours with. Thanks!
I think it’s really great what you’re pulling off there. The hacking sessions you organized (right?) seem to have a great balance between introducing people to KDE/Qt/C++ programming and doing something good for KDE (shaping up some more or less neglected applications). Thumbs up!
A few questions came up while reading your blog entry:
- Is the list of applications you work on (i.e. ksirK) decided on in advance, or do you do that spontaneously as everybody arrives?
- Do you (Kevin) act as some sort of “leader” who gives a direction (maybe as far as defining when some feature should be done) or do you simply serve as some sort of advisor who shares insight when it comes to problems with Qt/KDE API?
Nicu made some nice Pacmen with Inkscape (And an Tutorial how to make them.):
http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2008/02/pac-man-baddies-with-inkscape-clipart.html
@Mike:
Nope, it’s SVG only, no traditional interface. Note that I don’t really like the theme you can see on this screenshot. But as far as I know there’s another SVG theme in the pipe which will be prettier and more “oxygen-like”.
@Caesar:
Could be interesting indeed, any URL?
@Frerich:
For the list of projects, I select them before hands. This year I had more proposals than groups. Then they get proposed to the students who form the teams and choose on which projects they’ll work on.
I’m not really leading, I give the students a training to get them started, and after that it’s more project control, I check that everything goes well. As for defining the features that’s generally up to the students and the application maintainer (who act as a “client”) to negociate that together.
@Tobias:
Thanks for the nice pointer.