OLPC is looking for a UI developer for Sugar, the interface for the XO-1 laptop for children. Requirements include experience with C, Python, and GTK+. Knowledge of Gecko, X Window System, D-Bus, GStreamer, Cairo and Fedora Linux is preferred. For more details, and on information on how to apply, visit the OLPC careers web page.
[Update]: It seems that the email address originally posted (job-sugar@laptop.org), does not work. The correct email address would be (jobs-sugar@laptop.org). Apologies for the inconvenience.

I’m willing to mentor the following projects for Google Summer of Code 2008 for this year:

• General Improvements (feature additions) to Pootle
  
  While working with Pootle at OLPC, we have come across a number of feature requests, most (if not all) can be implemented within the GSoC timeframe. I have listed some of the high priority features here. The main requirements for this project is familiarity with Python and some basic ideas about localization. The mentoring organization for this is Translate Toolkit and Pootle.
• A Translate this Activity activity for Sugar
  
  Similar to the functionality offered by the “View Source” key in the OLPC XO-1 laptop, an activity should ideally allow the user to translate it. A Translate this Activity activity would allow the user to translate any given activity, and optionally let the user share the translation, so that it can be reused by other users in the mesh.
  The main requirements for this project is familiarity with Python, PyGTK and general idea about a typical gettext based software translation workflow. The mentoring organization for this is One Laptop Per Child.

• OLPC Nepal is having a translation night out - read all about it here, and feel free to join the fun.
• Warm Holi/Doljatra greetings to everyone.

Whenever we work on a PO file, we usually translate from English to the translate language. However, recently at OLPC, we had some Aymara translators who did not know English, but were quite comfortable with Spanish. We had been receiving such requests for supporting the display of an intermediate language in our translation system for quite some time now, and it was also a prominent feature request for Pootle, the web based translation software that we use. I was feeling a bit bored with my usual work, and decided to see if I could do something.


The straight forward way of implementing the feature would be to add yet another user preference which would store the list of languages in which the user would want to see the translations, but that seemed to involve significant amount of coding, and I was too lazy to do that. After thinking for sometime, I decided to take a short cut which should help us quite nicely now. Pootle can optionally show it’s interface in a non-English language, and I thought I would take advantage of that. Within around an hour (which included figuring out some of the Pootle code and understanding jToolkit), I had a patch which produced this:

So, if you select your UI language as Spanish, along with the original msgid, you will also get the corresponding Spanish translation when you are translating a message. I think this should do for now - though the “proper way” is probably the right thing to implement at some point.

Just came across the excellent news from Jani Monoses that Sugar is finally in the Hardy universe. Though at the moment, apparently one needs to run Sugar in an Xephyr window (using sugar-emulator). Support for running Sugar as a standalone desktop environment (ie - you get the option of logging into sugar from GDM) would be really awesome.