blog.fossasia.org

FOSSASIA and Openclipart Launch Internet of Things T-shirt Design Contest

Post author:Hong Phuc
Post published:February 11, 2016
Post category:FOSSASIA Open Event

Special prizes await international designers, students and artists who join the competition and create T-shirt designs for Asia’s premier Open Technology event taking place from March 18-20 at the Science Centre Singapore.

FOSSASIA and Openclipart are launching a contest for International students, artists and designers to design a T-shirt graphic representing “The Internet of Things for Me.” 1st place winner of the contest will win a FiftyThree Pencil and final design placement on the official FOSSASIA 2016 T-shirt. Second and third place winners’ graphics will be used as design elements at the conference main party on the second day of the event.

“FOSSASIA 2016’s theme is about the Internet of Things for Me,” said chair of FOSSASIA, Hong Phuc Dang. “What better way to represent this idea visually than to unleash local Singaporean and international designers, artists, professionals and students to make artwork representing their ‘things’ and expression about this topic.”

FOSSASIA 2016 challenges all participants to join the contest at Openclipart, the world’s largest collection of original and free to use clipart. The contest begins February 11, 2016 and runs for two weeks until February 24, 2016 where three judges will select the top three compositions. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners will be selected, awarded, and announced publicly.

“Since 2004, Openclipart has been a dynamic creative community of artists and designers producing more than 89,000 clipart by more than 4,900 artists,” stated Openclipart founder, Jon Phillips. “This competition is to bring creativity to the conference, and use the powerness of Open to create image composition of what the Internet of Things is all about. Even better, all the artwork made in the competition will be released into the public domain using Creative Commons Zero 1.0 license so that anyone may use the images for any reason, even commercially.”

Judges for the competition will be Singapore-based artist and designer Gloria Chiang, chair of FOSSASIA Hong Phuc Dang and technologist and co-organizer Mario Behling. After the two-week competition ends on February 24, 2016, results will be announced March 2, 2016.

“Singapore is a hub of software and cultural innovation,” said Singapore-based artist, Gloria Chiang. “FOSSASIA 2016 is a brilliant place to showcase international innovation trends and work with local artists, designers and students to illustrate these concepts.”

“FOSSASIA 2016 T-shirt design competition participants artwork will be showcased not only on T-shirts and publicly on the web, it will also be used to create an atmosphere for the 2nd night of the FOSSASIA 2016 conference,” said organizer Hong Phuc Dang. “All participants of the FOSSASIA 2016 conference are invited to attend this special event and share the works found at our party with the hashtag #FOSSASIA. With lots of surprises, you will not want to miss FOSSASIA 2016.”

Join the competition at: http://openclipart.org/fossasia2016

Participate in FOSSASIA Summit 2016 in Science Center Singapore, March 18th-20th

Post author:Hong Phuc
Post published:January 12, 2016
Post category:Event FOSSASIA

Please join us at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore, the premier Open Technology event in Asia.

The event will take place from March 18-20 at the Singapore Science Center and already on 17th March the pgDay Asia conference is part of the pre-event activities.

The FOSSASIA weekend from Friday to Sunday is dedicated to the “Internet of Things and Me” covering open technologies and software that make todays connected devices run. In workshops kids can start learning with the Pocket Science Lab. In the Science Hack track attendees will learn how to participate in the Citizen Science community. Please:

get your FOSSASIA Summit Ticket
become a Volunteer
or submit your talk until February 2 at Speaker Registration.

More than 120 speakers from Asia and around the world will join the event from communities and companies such as Google, RedHat, and Github. There will be talks and hands on workshops on topics including:

Open Hardware, Makers, Internet of Things
Open Source Software, Data and Free Knowledge
DevOps, Docker, Programming languages, Python, Go, and more
Science Hacks and Open Design
Tech and Science for Kids

Info on the FOSSASIA Summit 2016 at the Event Website

Read the Call for Speakers here.

Join the FOSSASIA Meetup Group in Singapore and reserve your spot in workshops as soon as they are announced.

Check out the photos from last year on Flickr.

Being a mentor ! #GoogleCodeIn

Post author:Jigyasa Grover
Post published:January 11, 2016
Post category:FOSSASIA

Google Code-In 2015/2016 just concluded and it was an enriching experience to be a prime segment of this cool initiative.

It feels great to have worked as a Mentor for Google Code-In 2015/2016 under FOSSASIA organization 🙂 gci-vertical-1142x994dp

I strongly believe that helping people steer their careers in the right direction is a key element in developing. The esteemed task of mentoring is an essential leadership skill. In addition to managing and motivating people, it’s also important that one can help others learn, grow and become more effective in their lives.

My experience with mentoring Google Code-In tells me that mentoring is a rewarding experience, both personally and professionally. It not only aids in improving communication skills but also brings about a a great sense of personal satisfaction. One gains a new perspective of thinking and gets to advance technical skills by learning together with the mentee.

The mentor-ship experience was a surreal one. I never knew my answers and feedback to simple questions could be the cause of someone’s high spirits. It made me realize the impact one’s guidance could have on a budding developer. My feeling of immense contentment was augmented by the innocent tweets and blog posts of the mentees expressing their gratitude and happiness. (refer a few screenshots attached 😀 )

CZaBPEnUAAA5zOP (1)

Screenshot from 2016-01-08 22:12:40

Screenshot from 2016-02-12 00:18:58
The journey in this field will urge to shed all inhibitions, keep pride aside and dive into this worthy mission of building a powerful community. The small interesting conversations and tasks will sometimes leave a deep impact on the mentor as a person, after-all not everyday one comes across a student submitting “Peace Pledge: No ! To war and distrust” to his/her mentor where both belong to two countries supposedly at ‘cold war’ 😉

I am also of the view that by being a mentor to a newbie, we pay our regards to the entire computing sphere and its fraternity.

Helping the mentee have a smooth transition into the tech world helps make long lasting associations and ensure a better future.

A season of mentoring gone by, excited for another already !

FOSSASIA Hack Trip to 32C3 Chaos Communication Congress

Post author:Mario Behling
Post published:December 30, 2015
Post category:FOSSASIA loklak

From December 27-30 the 32C3 Chaos Communication Congress took place in Hamburg, Germany. Members of the FOSSASIA community met at the event to learn about the latest OpenTech hacks. We used the opportunity to work with mentors on our coding program for kids. See photos from our gathering here.

Get together at 32C3 Hamburg

Mitch Altman at Chaos Communication Congress 32C3 with Hong Phuc Dang from FOSSASIA Hong Phuc Dang meeting Mitch Altman (Twitter)

FOSSASIA Mentors Michael Christen (Yacy), Jan Suhr (Nitrokey), Hong Phuc Dang Meetup with FOSSASIA mentors and supporters from Europe Michael Christen (Yacy.net/loklak), Jan Suhr (Nitrokey), Hong Phuc Dang (FOSSASIA), Anna (Mozilla)

Kids Coding with FOSSASIA and Google Code-In

Post author:Mario Behling
Post published:November 29, 2015
Post category:FOSSASIA

After the successful Google Summer of Code we are very happy and honored to participate for the second year in Google Code-In. The contest introduces pre-university students (ages 13-17) to open source software development and runs from December 7 2015 until January 25, 2016. Learn more here.

Because Google Code-in is often the first experience many students have with open source, the contest is designed to make it easy for students to jump right in. Open source organizations chosen by Google provide a list of tasks for students to work on during the seven week contest period. A unique part of the contest is that each task has mentors from the organization assigned should students have questions or need help along the way.

Updates on FOSSASIA Activities – GSoC, Science Hack and Meshcon

Post author:Shaojing
Post published:September 26, 2015
Post category:FOSSASIA loklak Open Event
Post comments:0 Comments

FOSSASIA Participation in Google Summer of Code

An exciting summer is behind us, where we had lots of students coding on summer of code projects. Check out some of the outcome on our project repositories. For example the Open Event project, our twitter harvester and search engine loklak.net [repo] or the activities at our FashionTec knitapps project with lots of interesting blog articles.

FOSSASIA Science Hack

What else happened? FOSSASIA’s Hong Phuc is working on organizing Science Hack events across Asia in cooperation with Science Hack Day. She is now an official Ambassador. Congratulations! You can meet her in the US at the San Francisco Science Hack Day on October 24-25, 2015 at GitHub HQ.

FOSSASIA Participants Present at Meshcon @Maker Faire Berlin + Free Tickets

FOSSASIA participants are present at Meshcon@Maker Faire Berlin on Saturday, October 3rd. Meshcon brings together Mozilla’s Firefox Open Web makers, IoT experts, industry representatives, fashion designers, local producers, knitters, textile manipulators, software developers and DIY hardware makers. We will have a stand in the club area. So if you are there, please come over and talk to us.

And, if you are in Berlin and still need a ticket, we might be able to help you out. FOSSASIA is an official partner and we got free tickets. Please go to http://meshcon.net, choose your ticket and enter the code FLDUXH on the next page.

The event starts at 10am (until 6pm) on Sat. 3rd Oct. 2015 at Postbahnhof Club at Berlin Ostbahnhof. On top of topics around Fashion and technology, we are coding, doing usability tests and hack for refugees. The schedule of talks is available here: http://meshcon.net/schedule.pdf

130 projects will showcase their work at the Maker Faire. Workshops include FOSSASIA’s machine knitting project, 3D printing, and Arduino tinkering:

* http://www.meetup.com/FashionTec-Meetup-Berlin/

* http://www.meetup.com/OpenXLab/

* http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-berlin/events/225532149/

Additional Info: http://meshcon.net | http://makerfaire.berlin

Location: Postbahnhof, Strasse der Pariser Kommune 8, 10243 Berlin

searchQuick Apprise: EIGHT #GoogleSummerOfCode #FOSSASIA

Post author:Jigyasa Grover
Post published:August 29, 2015
Post category:FOSSASIA

The intended “searchQuick” (sQuick) is an application to enable a user to search a set of books or texts, like an encyclopedia, or some other topical book collection offline built in the open source platform Pharo 4.0.

Bringing up to the rear of the summers, the project was brought to a penultimate stage by achieving the following tasks:

Handling empty string searches by raising error pop ups.

searchButtonClicked
searchBar accept .
(myString isEmptyOrNil  ) 
ifTrue: [self errorPopUp ] 
ifFalse: [ 
     myString := searchBar getText asString .
          self printSearchResults
               ] .

Adding Help, About and Feedback sections to give an authentic application look and required details to an interested developer.

Inserting ScrollPane for BrowseFile list menu

browseScroll := ScrollPane new.
browseScroll scroller addMorph: browse.

Truncating BrowseFile list menu file titles to have their extent within the #MenuMorph: boundary
```
title := anObject truncateWithElipsisTo: 25. 
```

Removal of OK/CANCEL buttons from the Search results accordion widget
```
dialog buttons: {}.
```

Implementation of a Search Bar for searching via Search results accordion widget.

Categorizing methods as: accessing, initialization, submorphs–add/remove etc.

Removal of unwanted/redundant/commented code lines i.e. scrubbing dead-code.

UPCOMING: Wrap Up.

Functionality of KnitWeb Application

Post author:sameera1234
Post published:August 25, 2015
Post category:FOSSASIA

Hi Everyone,

In this blog post I will show what are the functionalities implemented in KnitWeb application. First of all let us look into why there is a web application to get a knitting job done. It’s simple. Going for a web application is the best way to acheive platform independence among all the knit app firmware. So the if the hardware level functionality can be abstracted out to a separate library then the web application can use that and provide a common interface to all different knitting application platforms. This is what we have been doing in this GSoC, to provide a common platform and interface for all open source knit app solutions.

So let’s look at the KnitWeb Functionality. KnitWeb consists of two major components, KnitWeb front end and KnitWeb back end logic. KnitWeb front end consists of a pattern editor for edit loaded patterns to workspace, Simulator for show knitting progress and a drawing tool for draw a pattern from scratch. Therefore Pattern editor component is used for easily edit the pattern before send for knitting.

Knitting Simulator is used for render knitting progress to the user with a enhanced user experience. It also consists of main controls for knitting job which user can start/pause/stop a job while knitting.

KnitWeb Drawing tool is used to generate a pattern from a scratch. It provides basic drawing tools including pencil, line, basic shapes and color palette. It also used for replicate a pattern from a existing pattern or a image. Then user can export it to the workspace to continue knitting job.

Pattern Editor Usage

Pattern editor gives following functionality to the users

Loads the pattern according to number of rows and columns(stitches) to the editor. Pattern is pixelated as the defined number of rows and columns.

Select pattern area using square/free hand tools. Then edit colour values of selected area.

Show colour regions of selected area/whole pattern and easily edit their colour values.

Configure machine type and Available ports before creating a knit job. In this step knit web client is communicating with the knit lib server to get those information. After that user can click proceed knitting button to create a knit job.

Knitting Simulator Usage

Knitting simulator provides knitting progress to the user with enhanced user experience. Current knitting progress is shown to the user as above and also with a progress bar.
Knitting simulator window consists of other meta data input needed for configure knitting pattern(knitpat) file such as Start Line, Start Needle, Stop Needle, Number of colours used etc.

Drawing Tool

Drawing tool is used to generate a pattern from scratch or design patterns by replicating image or a texture.
After editing finished pattern can be exported to the workspace.

Apart from the above mentioned components edited patterns at the pattern editor can be downloaded as a image file. Also multi-language translation is added by @shiluka to the knit web interface. following is the translation for german language

This sums up the most critical functionalities of knitweb application. I would like to continuously contribute to FashionTec as this inspired me to research and do things that I have not done before. :).

Also here is a little demo on the functionality of knit web. demo link

Thank You 🙂

KnitWeb Localization

Post author:shiluka
Post published:August 25, 2015
Post category:FOSSASIA

Why Localization important

Localization is the process of adapting, translating and customizing a product for a specific locale or cultural conventions. Localization distinguishes a good web front end from a truly successful one. Today English is a priority language to be learning to use computers. Having Localization we can gain benefits such as, no need to local users to learn English first, Reduce amount of training and localization brings additional value. To improve localization community of volunteers needs to get together and first establish a guiding set of terms to guarantee accurate and consistent translation. Community is the strongest part for an Open Source project. Translation process can be improved by making sure that efforts in translations are consistent and structured. So the lots of local users can enjoy KnitWeb and hopefully become a part of the community.

How Localization work on KnitWeb

KnitWeb construct elements of the interface using JavaScript dynamically. Retrieve the correct localized string in JavaScript is the most important part for localize an app like KnitWeb. For the Localization I used 3 types of files i.e. languge.properties, locles.ini and l10.js.

.properties files (en.properties, ge.properties): These files contain the translations of strings used in the KnitWeb. Each line is the translation of a single string in “name=value” format; name is an identifier for this string, It is used to map the string; value is the translation of the string in particular language.

Inside ge.properties

#Inputs
input_port=Port
input_machine=Maschine:

Inside si.properties

#Inputs
input_port=කවුළුව
input_machine=යන්ත්‍රය:

locales.ini : locales.ini includes which is the default language in case app does not support current language, what type of other locales KnitWeb supports and the location of the each translated file.

l10n.js: JavaScript library. Automatic localization of strings appearing in your app’s HTML. Provides a JavaScript API your app can use to retrieve localized strings( get, getLanguage, setLanguage, getDirection)

global_translate_german — Localization – German

global_tranlate_sinhala — Localization – Sinhala

[Tutorial] Continuous Integration Automated Build for your Pharo Application

Post author:Jigyasa Grover
Post published:August 22, 2015
Post category:FOSSASIA Tutorial

reposted from jigyasagrover.wordpress.com/ci-automated-build-for-your-pharo-application

Hello Fellas !

This post aims to put forward the basics of Build Automation and also brief the steps required to put up a Pharo application on Continuous Integration, Inria which is a platform for Scheduled Automated Build.

For simplicity, Build automation is the act of scripting or automating a wide variety of tasks that software developers do in their day-to-day activities including things like:

compiling computer source code into binary code
packaging binary code
running automated tests
deploying to production systems
creating documentation and/or release notes

Various types of automation are as:

On-Demand automation such as a user running a script at the command line
Scheduled automation such as a continuous integration server running a nightly build
Triggered automation such as a continuous integration server running a build on every commit to a version control system.

In recent years, build management tools have provided relief when it comes to automating the build process.

The dominant benefits of continuous integration include:

Improvement of product quality
Acceleration of compile and link processing
Elimination of redundant tasks
Minimization of ‘bad builds’
Have history of builds and releases in order to investigate issues
Save time and money – because of above listed reasons.

A build system should fulfill certain requirements.

Basic requirements:

Frequent or overnight builds to catch problems early.
Support for Source Code Dependency Management
Incremental build processing
Reporting that traces source to binary matching
Build acceleration
Extraction and reporting on build compile and link usage

Optional requirements:

Generate release notes and other documentation such as help pages
Build status reporting
Test pass or fail reporting
Summary of the features added/modified/deleted with each new build

Considering the above mentioned advantages of automated build, the below enlisted steps will help to put up your own Pharo application hosted on github on the CI server for continuous integration/scheduled build.

1. Log on to Continuous Integration, Inria website (https://ci.inria.fr/).

2. Click on ‘Sign Up‘ at the top-right corner, enter the required details and register for CI.

3. From the ‘Dashboard‘ option located at the top most of the screen click on ‘Join an existing project‘ blue button as shown .

4. Search ‘pharo-contribution‘ in the enlisted public projects and click on ‘Join‘

5. On clicking the ‘Join‘ button, a message stating: “Request to join the project ‘pharo-contribution’ sent.” appears.

6. It might take a day or two for the request approval mail to deliver at your registered Email ID.

The E-Mail content is as follows:
Your request to join pharo-contribution has been accepted
Hi _ _ _,
Your request to join the project pharo-contribution has been accepted !
Regards,
Support team.

7. Click on ‘My Account‘ option and under ‘My Projects‘ check the status of pharo-contribution project. It should state ‘member‘.

8. Now, visit the LINK: https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/JobTemplate/ to create a ‘New Job‘

9. Read all the steps mentioned carefully. After going through all the points, click on the ‘New Job‘ mentioned in point 2 on the Project Job Template web page.

10. Enter the ‘Project Name‘ in the ‘Item Name: ‘ box and choose ‘Copy from existing item‘ option and fill ‘JobTemplate‘

11. After clicking OK, You will be directed to your project configuration.

12. Fill in the description of the project in the desired box.

13. Fill int the configuration details of your project like:

* Maximum number of builds
* Link to GitHub Project
* Source Code Manager
* Build Triggers
* Schedule of build (@hourly, @daily, @weekly, @fortnightly, @monthly, @yearly etc.)
* Configuration Matrix (User Defined Axis: Name && Version Values- stable, development etc.)
* Build environment options
* Post-build actions
* Report regressed tests

14. The main task is to carefully write the commands in the ‘Execute Shell‘
The default commands are as:

15. After saving and applying the changes, the application is all set for automated build.

16. Each build’s ‘Console Output‘ can be used to analyse the steps and highlight the weak areas of the project.
For instance: The below output is of a project whose stable version build was successful.

TIP: Keep a regular tab on the build results and analyze each line of the Console Output with utmost care.

Hope this post was able to help you start with the automation build process of Pharo Application.

Do like if it was worth a read !
Post queries/suggestions as comments 🙂 Looking forward to them.

UPCOMING: Next, I plan to share experience of putting up my Pharo application searchQuick on CI Inria for automated build. I intend to detail about the various configuration settings applied along with the Execute Shell commands utilized for a GitHub project 🙂

Introduction Accredits: Wikipedia
Resources: Build Automation and Continuous Integration .