GSoC week 3

Ok, week _three_. The final exams were during week2 so it didn't see much work. But the exams are all over now :D

I started hacking/gaming/surfing/chatting from Thursday, here's the weekly report.

1. The biggest thing is that contact-selector is working now :-) Although the final code is not at all complex, it does take some efforts from me. Many thanks to the telepathy-book. I copied much code from telepathy-book and other places :-)

It now fetches all contacts from telepathy (so the list is the same as in Empathy). Sure it's very primary and needs lots of work, e.g. filtering out offline contacts, responding to contact or connection status change, showing the status-pixbuf (the green circle or red triangle) or maybe the avatar.

2. I also commited a little refactoring to sudoku.

== Next week ==

* Continue with the contact-selector. Implement the above things. Should add the contact-selector into my branch of sudoku and be able to send tube requests after this week.

* Read more about telepathy and understand the code I wrote (yeah, many things are still not clear to me).

* Continue the refactoring. I think I would have to change the way new game is opened.

==
During these several weeks, I feel more and more that programmers do differ in their abiliting of coding. One needs really coding to be able to write nice code.

For example I sometimes hold a statement and wonder which class or method should I put it in. I think the final maintabily will be affected and it needs experience to know the answer. Hopefully I can get some of it after GSoC :-)

GSoC week 1

Officially, the first coding week just went by. Here is what I have done.

1. I got the debt card and the first 505 dollars. Many thanks to Google! For example this domain 'zhangsen.org' is bought using the stipend :P

2. I created a branch on git.gnome.org. My work during the summer will all go there. Below is the first week,

Zhang Sen (19):
      Add new_with_contact to GUI
      Remove duplicate code of closing current game
      no need to do_stop before selecting game
      Extract method of (de-)activate actions
      Delete useless call to function-decorator
      Make function-decorator into a method
      Extract method of running background-generator
      Merge branch 'master' into work
      Define self.tube_handler to be testable
      Remove the ugly dialog-swallower
      Cleaner way of finding current focused box
      Delete useless functions
      Properly do post-open setup
      No need to inactivate buttons/menuitems now
      Mark 'TODO'
      Delete useless comment
      Make attribute 'vb' a local variable
      Make attribute 'main_area' a local variable
      Unified way to open game

 * Most of these are refactoring work.

3. Before the remote player's puzzle can be lively shown, (at least) these two things are needed,

 * For receiver: a TubeHandler which listens for incoming tubes.
 * For initiator: suitable way to initiate network game (including a button, contact-list, tube offering, etc)

I have begun to add these parts but of course they are far from working. The following several weeks will probably still be refactoring work and trying to implement the above components.

My final exams are beginning this week, so I can't do much until mid-June.