Google SoC

I'd like to join the crowd and welcome my mentee, Pinar Yanardağ, to the GNOME community and Google's SoC. I'm sure her blog will be syndicated in a prominent place soon enough(hint, hint p.g.o admins) so you all will be able to learn about her progress all summer and into the future (hopefully). She's so on the ball she's already created her own hackergotchi:



She'll be working on integrating Seahorse key selection dialogs(libcryptui) into Evolution as well using Seahorse's DBus interface for encryption and such. I'm also hoping to see some rocking integration with the e-d-s address book.

Please join me in welcoming Pinar and all of the other Summer of Coders to our fine community.

Slackware is Hard?!?

Andrew,

I realize your chart is pointed at the newbie, but quite possibly the only part of a new Slackware install that isn't entirely straight forward is partitioning your disk. I admit that the installer isn't graphical in nature, but neither is the Windows installer. For anyone not wanting to manually pick packages to install, the install all option is front and center. Upgrading Slackware is now as easy as Debian with the slapt-get tool. Granted that you can't install and update GNOME with slapt-get, as Patrick no longer builds GNOME and no one provides the appropriate repositories, but the folks over at Dropline GNOME do a fantastic job of keeping GNOME up to date with their installer and update applet.

I admit Slackware's not for everyone, but it's not the great evil it's made out to be.

OCRopus

Philip:

Tablet PC implementation? Allow beagle/tracker/whichever to search handwritten notes? Print out handwritten notes as text? Let the madness ensue.

Google MyMaps

I've really been digging the new MyMaps feature of Google Maps. I even started working on a MyMap version of my university. However, I have a few suggestions/requests that would make this product even more useful for such a large and complicated area.

• Allow showing and hiding "overlays" based on the same color. Also, allow a key for what each colored area means. (Residence Halls, Academic Buildings, Parking Lots, etc.)
  
• Allow showing all areas and points of interest at once and not just those in the order they were created. Possibly allow sorting of the items allowing non-linear creation. (For instance, all buildings should be shown with their labels all of the time when the buildings overlay is shown)
  
• In their blog post, Google indicates making your map public includes it in the search results, but that doesn't appear to be happening at present. (For instance search for "googleplex building 43" which is clearly marked on their example map of the googleplex. Also searching for "Clemson Crew Boathouse" doesn't return my campus map or this one.

I think this product has a lot of potential and makes it easy to get directions for places that don't necessarily have physical addresses, like the boathouse, but I'd like to see a little more functionality for "power cartographers".