Textual Pornography

Summer of Code is a very interesting, very neat program run by Google. Basically, it’s like a virtual internship with an open-source “company”; you essentially become a developer for an open-source project for the summer, implementing a project for which you submitted an application. Of course, it wouldn’t be an internship without pay: $4500 for lasting through the whole summer and meeting expectations, to be exact. The developers have incentive to become “mentors” for SoC as well; the project is given $500 for each mentor who participates.

I was very strongly considering becoming a student for Adium. In fact, I even had a project picked out: improving the minimal AppleScript support. However, for reasons I’ll get to shortly, I’ve decided to instead drop out and work for free on my project of one, the Summer of PMS, a tripartite initiative to Get Shit Done.

Programming

Being able to read already-written code and make changes is a very important skill, and it’s one I’d be getting some serious experience in if I had followed through and applied for Summer of Code. However, while playing around with a demo application to try to get AppleScript working, I realized that I need much more experience in actually making my own OS X applications. My skills in the area are extremely lacking since I have yet to complete, well, anything.

Goals:

• finish my screensaver
• make a game

Music

Over the last school year (and the last semester especially), I downloaded a lot of music. Much, much more than I was listening to and burning off to DVDs. As a result, I had a few hard drive space crises.

This needs to stop.

So, now that my downloading ability is crippled thanks to my return to dial-up, I should be able to maintain a listened to/downloaded ratio above one. However, I want to step up my listening rate, hopefully for good, so that I don’t run into mad DVD scrambled in the future. An album a day would be nice.

Goal:

• have at least 10 GB of hard drive space free

Site

I’ve had quiteajolt.com for far too long without putting anything up. I already have the general plan mapped out: a unified site plan with some MySQL and mod_rewrite action going on in the backend. I even have a layout designed, which looks almost identical to the one I had at chz.fourx.org save for a larger font size and redesigned links bar. I just need to, you know, do it.

Goal:

• do it

Pessimistic Recap

Knowing me, I’ll probably give up after a few weeks and waste my summer. :(