Git Merging Galore

So I fixed the title bug in wikiotics today. I decided to change the code to simply search for a line that starts with "= " and then strip any '='s off the line. This is the simplest solution in my opinion. I also had a fun time learning how to apply patches from one git to another. That only took oh... two hours haha.

TransBot is up and developing

So for the RIT HFOSS class my partner Mark and I are working on TransBot. TransBot is an IRC bot translation bot written in Python that uses the Google Translate API to translate between IRC channels. We grabbed the original code from John McLean's FedoraHosted repo. John noted in his wiki that he intended for the project to be picked up and improved. The base code looks very basic and we are looking forward to improving it quite a bit. Some of our preliminary goals:

• Modularize the code: We want to create a translation module that will take in a stream and output a translated stream. This could have other useful applications in the future.
• Port to Sugar: TransBot would be an invaluable tool to children in developing countries. It would allow them to communicate to the outside world without language barriers. We want this to work on the XO 1.0 as well as XO 1.5 and Sugar on a Stick.
• Involve the community: The existing version of TransBot is very basic and requires coding knowledge to configure properly. We'd like to add a more user-friendly interface to TransBot. Add a GUI instead of manually writing a config file.

We'll be maintaining a wiki on SugarLabs as well as FedoraHosted It's pretty bare-bones at the moment but you can find our project at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TransBot. We'll be adding content here as we flesh out where the project is going.

Our source code is available a http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/transbot.git

Stay tuned for more updates!

Django

So over the weekend and today I've familiarized myself with Django, the web framework Ductus is built on. It seems fairly intuitive so far. I've also been debating this ticket. My quick fix for the ticket was a little too general. Ductus currently uses the first line of Creole code for a wiki page as it's title. This becomes a problem when Creole syntax characters are in the line ('=, *, [['). I've been thinking about the best way to handle this problem. If there are images or external URL's in the first line this is even worse. You can't just strip off some Creole characters and put a URL in the title of a page. I think I'm going to look at posting the page's URL in the title. It doesn't make sense to pull information from the page unless we mandate a page title at the beginning of every page. ie "= English Lessons =". Otherwise we could pull the first line which is a link to something else. An example would be having a page listing spanish lessons with the first link being "spanish introduction". The current code would pull "spanish introduction" when it really should be something like "All Spanish Lessons".

TransBot

So looks like I'm picking up Transbot for the HFOSS class I'm taking. I've started looking at the code and it looks like we can really take this somewhere. My partner, Mark, and I are going to improve the existing code and port it to a Sugar activity. Can't wait to start!

Wikiotics "Day 1"

So It's Day 1 of my Wikiotics job. Today I'm trying to see about translating their intro lesson to ASL. Hopefully I can find some videos on youtube and embed them in the Ductus wiki. If I figure this out fast I'm going to look at finding a ticket I can close.

Hello Ductus

I just started my first "unofficial" day working on Wikiotics, a free open source language learning tool similar to Rosetta Stone. I just spent a couple hours today sifting through the code. I'm pumped to start in next week!