May 2012
1 post
One less mutagen in my life
In order to be able to visualise DNA, one genotyping technique employs Phosphorus-32. This technique is called the Southern Blot. Phosphorus-32 is radioactive. Working with P-32 is a bit awkward, as one not only has to work in a fume hood designed for working with biohazardous material, but also behind a shield. Additionally, laboratories using P-32 must take care in disposing of all P-32...
March 2012
1 post
Documentation Hackfest - Brno, Czech Republic
After a 17 hour commute (plane:plane:bus:bus) I finally arrived in Brno to join the GNOME Documentation Team on Saturday February 18. I have taken part in a couple of other docs hackfests last year, mainly working on gnome-user-docs as well as application help. This year I have become interested in helping to create tutorials for new developers. Some instructional tutorials had already been...
January 2012
2 posts
GCI Update
This was my first year mentoring the Google Code In. Seeing as the GNOME Games are undergoing modernisation, I thought I would try my hand at mentoring the writing of Mallard topics for Gnome Games. The following tasks were accomplished:
Gnome Sudoku:
- The intro, basics, keyboard shortcuts, toolbar, notes and rules topics completed by Chris Beiser (USA).
(Bug #618342)
Gnome Sudoku...
RIP Bug #79348
I just wanted to say thank-you to the many GNOME developers and documenters who contributed their time and skills to helping us close an almost 10 year-old bug today. As I stated in the comment on the bug, I think work on developer.gnome.org should remain a work in progress. In this spirit, I hope more ideas and thoughts can be put towards this effort as we approach the Doc Sprint at the Developer...
October 2011
2 posts
Montréal Summit - GNOME Strategy
I am at the GNOME summit in Montréal. This morning Robert Ancell ran a discussion about GNOME strategy. The three main areas covered were:
1. What are we building?
2. Who is it for?
3. How do we get there?
The answers, of course, are multi-fold. We are building a desktop shell, applications, an active community, an ethos, a brand, a developer story, and an OS. There are side-effects to all...
Toronto GNOME 3.2 Release Party
Last night in downtown Toronto, GNOME hackers, documentation writers and translators got together to celebrate the release of 3.2. It was a small gathering. Some of us had met in Berlin, while others had never met before. It was a perfect occasion to bring together contributors from different areas of the project. A big thank-you to Mike Hill for organising the event, and to Richard Schwarting...
August 2011
1 post
Desktop Summit 2011
It has been a week since we returned from Berlin. First, I want to thank the GNOME foundation for giving me the opportunity to attend this years desktop-summit. Without their sponsorship my attendance would not have been possible!
Second, I want to reflect on the gains I made through this experience. A big thank-you to my room mate Marina Zhurakhinskaya! I first met Marina at the Boston...
June 2011
3 posts
Open Help Conference and Hackfest
Last Thursday I returned home from the Open Help Conference and Hackfest in Clifton, Cincinatti.
The conference gave us the chance to meet with members of the Mozilla documentation team as well as participate in insightful talks and discussions by Anne Gentle, Dave Robbins, Dru Lavigne, Janet Swisher, Jennifer Zickerman, Lana Brindley and Shaun McCance. Many of us kept the world up to date on...
Contact Wizard in the Document Viewer
I did a quick mock-up of two possible ways I see the contact wizard fitting into Evince. First, there’s the obvious choice of accessing it through the Files menu. I showed the original design to the docs team over coffee at the Open Help Hackfest, and got some input. Initially, I had named the menu item Share…. Shaun and Phil suggested Meeting… and Phil suggested Start...
Getting and Building Evince from Source on...
Recently I built Evince from git source. I ran into a couple of issues while doing so, and googling around revealed that I wasn’t the only one who was wishing for some step-by-step instructions. This is what worked for me, although there may be slight variations.
In a terminal, type:
git clone git://git.gnome.org/evince
cd evince
yum install gnome-common glib2-devel intltool
yum...
May 2011
1 post
I'm back: GSOC 2011
Last term I participated in GWOP. It was a very rewarding experience, which allowed me to integrate into the GNOME community, learn tonnes about the new GNOME3 by documenting it using Mallard, learn how to use tools such as irc, git, and work as part of the documentation team. You guys rock!
Since the end of my internship, I have written new mallard docs for eog, become a foundation member...
April 2011
1 post
The Eye of Gnome is getting Mallard Documentation!
I have been wanting to write Mallard docs for EOG for awhile, so
when I came across bug #633522, I decided now is as good time as any.
I committed an outline and some topic stubs yesterday.
You can:
$ git clone git://git.gnome.org/eog
$ cd eog/help/C; yelp $PWD/
to have a look at this outline. If you feel there are topics
that need to be covered that you do not see in the outline,...
March 2011
1 post
Yelp it!
It is great to be participating in the documentation hackfest at the very end of my internship with the Gnome Documentation Team. Mallard is fun. Try it! You just might like it. Yelp 3 really show off its powers.
Natalia and I have been working with the docs team over the past few months, contributing to the contents of the the Gnome Help for Gnome 3.0. Over that last 4 days, we have been...
January 2011
1 post
WatchThis is my attempt at trying to make a very quick video tour of the Gnome Shell Desktop. It is a one minute taste of Gnome 3. I started out with a list of things I wanted to show, but then there was just too much happening in too short a time, and the video was too long. The idea is to include a video introduction with the user docs. This screen capture video was made using the Gnome...
December 2010
1 post
On the State of Gnome-Help
The writing of gnome-help in Mallard is a very large task. A couple of weeks ago, gnome-help appeared to be a collection of pages (.page files) whose topics were the result of great brainstorming. However, what was missing was structure. As Natalia mentioned last week, she picked out the themes that were present in the existing pages, and sorted the files into these themes.
The task still...
November 2010
2 posts
A Better Python Console
I have been using IDLE as my Python IDE. Sometimes I would write programs in gedit instead, running them in the terminal. Today I was reading that I can use gedit as my Python IDE. Imagine my excitement!
I already had gedit-plugins installed, so I simply enabled the Python Console plugin. However, it wasn’t what I expected. It was a bit better than the terminal, giving both the source...
Hello GNOME World!
Pleased to meet you. I am very excited about being chosen and getting the opportunity to contribute to GNOME through the Women Outreach Program this year. I will be working with the Documentation Project with Paul Cutler as my mentor. As if this isn’t awesome enough, I was also given the opportunity to attend the Boston Summit 2010 (thank-you Marina and the Travel Committee!) This was my first...
March 2010
2 posts
On the need to use error-correcting memory →
February 2010
1 post
The Public Domain Manifesto →
June 2009
1 post
hello.
*wave*