• For this year’s GSOC, I will be mentoring Julen Ruiz Aizpuru, who will be working on Effective user experience for Pootle.
• I badly needed a break this week, and so three of us from college went for a trip to Mandarmani, a sea side resort around 200 km from Kolkata. It is still somewhat isolated compared to the other sea side resorts nearby, and the last 7 km of our trip consisted of driving over the beach, and getting stuck in the sand, which was fun. However, due to Mandarmani’s isolation, and since we went there in the middle of the week (no weekend tourists), we had almost the entire beach to ourselves for the next two days, and it was an awesome experience. Some pictures
  
  
  
  Driving on the beach

  
  Desolate beach, dotted with red crabs

  
  The beach

  
  Sunset

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.