Junior (and not-so-Junior) jobs for KStars

Want to contribute to open source and don’t know where to start? Like KStars, and don’t know how to start contributing? Here are some junior (and not-so-junior) jobs for KStars, to help you get started.

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Edu/KStars/JuniorJobs

So get hacking and get rocking!

(This could also be “proving grounds” for SoC / season of KDE candidates.)

Users and other developers are welcome to add ideas / tasks to that list!

KStars gets moons for Saturn!

Now, you can see all bright moons of Saturn in KStars – thanks to a patch sent in by Vipul Kumar Singh!

Here’s a screenshot:

Vipul read a bit of code from an open-source implementation of Meeus’ Astronomical Algorithms to figure out the calculations required.

Now, we need someone to clean up this code and merge JupiterMoons and SaturnMoons classes into a single “SolarSystemMoons” class that reads the coeffecients from data files and draws the moons around any parent planet!

Link to the commit

The Nerd Test I took today!

Gee, I’m happy:

Add comment March 22, 2009

Quite a few bugs fixed, half-finished features polished, and patches commited

Today, I took time off to work on KStars after a long time. I had a lot of pending maintainance tasks that I needed to finish off, and I reserved Saturday for that.

KStars now displays the Large Magellanic Cloud in the find dialog, and has the required backends to calculate comets’ tail lengths. Now, all we need is someone to give those comets a nice, realistic look . Many thanks to Alexey Khudyakov, and Jain Basil Aliyas for their contributions. I had yet another interesting patch waiting to be commited, but unfortunately, Vipul Kumar Singh who sent in the patch forgot to add a few files to version control. Will blog about that when it arrives!

I also got the KDE build environment running on my desktop, so that I can do more in lesser time – without having to boot my laptop. With academics taking the front seat, it is unlikely that I will have a lot of time on my hands for KStars for the next one year and so every minute matters! I have also updated the KStars GSoC ideas page – removed some lesser important ideas and added more details to some of those project ideas. We seem to have some really motivated SoC students waiting to work on those.

Given that I will be coding infrequently for a while, it would be really nice if we had more contributors. I hope I will be able to chunk out some time to list out some junior jobs / pending tasks in KStars which would be really useful is completed. This might also be good proving grounds for GSoC aspirants.

It’s rather satisfying to strike off a lot of pending tasks from your TODO list (in my case, that’s mails in my inbox!). Along with a good number of KStars tasks completed today, this week has been rather fruitful for me with a lot of academic backlog completed. I’m now roughly up-to-date with my General Relativity and Dynamical Systems courses. Within a week’s time, I should probably be done with all my backlog and start working on something exciting.

Well, it’s time to get off the computer and get to the bed now! (I must thank Pradeepto for explaining that I shouldn’t be lazy to blog about progress in KStars.)

Blogging with weblogger – with images and math!

Back to weblogger.el

I just realised the power of these amazing programmable editors, like emacs. Today evening, I decided to work a bit on productivity. I decided that there are a lot of things I should be blogging about, without wasting a lot of time on trying to sign into the javascript-heavy wordpress interface.

Lot of the things I would like to blog about have images and math content. I thought it might be worth spending some time rigging up ELISP functions to automate some tasks – for instance posting formulae. Here’s some (dirty) code I wrote:

Weblogger Helper Functions

With these functions, I can quickly upload files to my “file” server (to which I have access via ssh) and link them into my blog. This way, I can quickly insert images, links to files on blog posts without bothering about having to upload them.

Inserting links:


M-x weblogger-insert-file
[Type the filename in the minibuffer]
[Wait till it gets uploaded...]

The file is then uploaded and a link to it is inserted into the post.

Inserting images:


M-x weblogger-insert-image
[Type the filename in the minibuffer]
[Wait...]

The file is uploaded and an <img…&rt; tag is inserted which pulls in the image.

Inserting math

With texdrive.el from here, and a few “wrapper” functions in my elisp file, it’s really easy to insert LaTeX formulae into my blogposts. All I need to do is M-x weblogger-insert-formula and enter my TeX formula and a title for it, and the function inserts an <img…&rt; tag into my post. As an example:

M-x weblogger-insert-formula

and then, in the minibuffer:

Formula (TeX): T^{\mu \nu} = (p + \rho) u^{\mu} u^{\nu} - \eta^{\mu \nu}
Title: Stress-Energy Tensor

and the result is:

<img src="http://members.bas.org.in/kstar/blog_files/stress-energy-tensor.png" title="Stress-Energy Tensor" class="texdrive-formula" alt="T^{\mu \nu} = (p + \rho) u^{\mu} u^{\nu} - p \eta^{\mu \nu}" border="0">


Next, I do a M-x weblogger-upload-tex-images and the TeX formulae are automatically picked up from the buffer (by texdrive.el) and put through LaTeX and ImageMagick to produce a png, which my code then uploads to the server. So here’s the result:

I’d be glad if somebody would like to improve the code. It’s licensed under the GPL.

[Thanks to SG for pointing out that I had missed a 'p' factor in front of the Minkowski metric]

HTH