I’ve always wanted to have a blog just to post crap like this: This morning I got charged 4 euros (yes, that’s right, four) for sending my Tax Documentation to Google. Four pieces of paper. That’s one euro per page.
Jeezus Christ, seriously. Four euros. It would have been fucking cheaper to buy a plane ticket and give the damn stuff in hand to Leslie Hawthorn myself.
Anyways, here’s some actually interesting info: I’ve just noticed you may be reading this blog without even knowing what’s it all about. Yes, apart from the fact that it is a development blog about my Summer of Code for ScummVM (something which you can infer from the, once again, awesome pun in the title), you might be interested in knowing exactly what I’ll be doing during this summer, and I didn’t explain that on my first post because I was plain too lazy.
Let’s get right into it now: My task consists in the development of a new Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the program. And yes, I know that ScummVM already has a GUI. In fact, I won’t be developing a new one from scratch. I will be rewriting and refactoring a lot of code to fix all the shortcommings of the current implementation, and while I’m at it I’ll add some new features.
I know that the task may not seem that fun, because the result for the average end user will probably be the same GUI he had before (and that’s if the Gods of Timelines don’t bless us with any regressions), but the fact is that there’s gonna be a load of cool code going on the background (we are adding a lot of awesome new features and fixing a lot of the old ones) and all this code will certainly have a big impact on many ports and on the project as a whole. You could say I’m happy like some castanyoles if you knew what the fuck are castanyoles.
Oh, and I almost forgot: I won’t be doing this on my own. Apart from the extremely supportive development team, I have my very own mentor: Johannes Schickel (LordHoto) has the daunting task of replying my random rantings and inconsistent mumblings with valuable advice, and so far he’s been doing an awesome job at it: My first SVN commits are in place and we have an API which is starting to take shape. Expect a few posts on this topic soon (TM), almost certainly before the weekly progress update.
Meanwhile, as I am pretty confident that right now you can’t wait to know even more about my project, here’s enough information to fill your sickest needs -at least until I come back spamming some more.
Detailed project description (HTML)
My GSoC Application, as sent to Google (PDF)
ScummVM project site in Google Code – GSoC
My branch in ScummVM’s SVN server
Happy reading.
*Update* According to my Student dashboard, Google did receive my documentation properly. This is indeed nice because I would have to sell half of my liver in the Black Market to fax another 4 pieces of paper to them.