GNOME and GSoC

GNOME was once again accepted as a mentoring organization by Google for their Summer of Code!

The fun will begin later in the summer, but there are already a few things you can do to help:

• add ideas for cool things that could be done during the summer
• apply as mentor
• or just hang around on #soc to guide students looking for help

So you know what you have to do now to help GNOME have a rocking summer!

For the late birds....

For those of you that procrastinated for too long and missed the GUADEC paper submission deadline, I've got insider information... Something tells me the application interface on the GUADEC website will accept paper submissions until 23:59 UTC today (Sunday).
So this is really your last chance to propose a talk for GUADEC 2010 if you were really really late :)

On your mark, get set, go!

Only one day left!

Time is ticking away, the deadline for talk submissions for GUADEC 2010 is tomorrow evening (Saturday 20th 23:59 UTC). If you are planning go give a talk there and haven't applied yet, there's no more time for waiting, better to apply now before it's too late! :)

GUADEC Call for Papers deadline

It's nearly over us, it's coming fast!

If you want to submit a talk proposal for GUADEC 2010 (July 24, 2010 – July 30, 2010 in The Hague, The Netherlands), make sure to make your submission real soon since the deadline is Saturday, March 20th (aka "End of this week").

That's all folks!

One way to help free software projects

Free software projects are always looking for new volunteers to help, new coders, new translators, new documentation writers, ... However, sometimes you want to contribute but can't become any of those, either because you lack time, because you are already involved in other projects, or because you feel you don't have time. For some projects, another way to help is through donations, here are 2 examples for projects I'm involved with.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox has had a plugin for Magnatune for quite a while now. In addition to not being evil (their website says so, it must be true! Joke aside, they give 50% of what they sell to the artist), they give 10% back to the Rhythmbox project for every purchase through its plugin.

And since they are not evil, today they sent a $600 check to the GNOME Foundation (which we chose as the recipient for the money). So you can buy lots of cool music on Magnatune while giving money to the GNOME Foundation at the same time!

Thanks a lot to John Buckman from Magnatune who was a really nice guy to interact with and to Adam Zimmerman for all his hard work on Rhythmbox Magnatune plugin.

libgpod

libgpod is the iPod handling library used by gtkpod, rhythmbox, amarok, songbird, ... It recently gained support for most of the latest devices released by Apple (iPod Nano 5th generation, iPhone, iPod Touch) which were unsupported under Linux until now (thanks a lot to Marcan, Nikias and all the people who helped with that by the way :)

However, this development was made harder by the lack of devices to test the code on, forcing us to look for testers with the right devices and going back and forth with bug reports and bug fixes until things work as expected. So donations to the project (even small amounts) are really helpful so that we can buy these missing devices and move things forward.
This already let us fund an iPod Nano which was a tremendous help to polish support for it in libgpod, thanks to everyone that made that possible. Next on the list are an iPod Touch to make sure the iPhoneOS support is up to par, and a buttonless iPod Shuffle which is so far unsupported by libgpod.

I've already mentioned it here, but if you have old iPods you no longer use , please get in touch, they can also be helpful for testing (thanks Götz!)