It's the Summer of Love, Just Kidding, It's Google's Summer of Code

I swore I wouldn't learn code--not Java, not C+, not Perl, not Ruby on the Rails (but I like that name), and I still am sticking to my guns.  I also said you would not find me,
MsMonolinguinal Ignorant American (studied three years of high school Spanish and three years of college French and a crash course in German, all for naught)  translating Wiki docs.  But when I see logs showing 12 and 13-year-old kids translating from both Finnish and Russian on one project, I am ashamed. 

I swear I don't know how they do it at Wiki, but they make translating into and out of a language you don't know any better than your high school sweetheart's middle name at this point (and that was supposed to be such undying pure true love), seem like rolling out dough for biscuits.  Lay it down, roll it out, crease where necessary and you're ready to read Nabokov  in the original Russian.  It's some kind of alchemy.  Of course you've got helpers, and watchers, to make sure that some poor Croatian teenager doesn't get arrested for attempting to take Russian money out of Russia--A big no-no.  I  might have translated that you were expected to give money to every person who handles your luggage.

Today they (the Wiki nymphs  or elves or whatever they are who leave missives aplenty, but aren't seen or heard from to my knowledge.  They led me down some document about the big conference or foundation of the LXDE or some such, and I did some simple editing that was put in front of me that was probably just a test.

I am working on something to do with setting up the quicker, sharper desktop known as the LXDE, but I am dim on what's involved and exactly what the end product is.  I am bummed because I didn't know about this big Woodstock of codewriting until two weeks past the deadline for scholarship applications.  Not that I planned to learn to write code so I could go hang out with thousands or hundreds of  geeks. But the international meeting takes place in Paris this year.  I'd learn enough code to sign up to make a hamster or turtle gadget for a $5,000 internship, and an all-expenses paid trip to Paris.  I forgot to say that everybody gets a mentor to guide and direct them with their project.

GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2011

Here's the poop on the women's project for the summer.
I also found out that for part of this Summer of Code, they have decided to attract more women to make gadgets and work on documentation.  There is a $5,000 internship to be awarded to any female code writer or even plain writer/editor who wants to sign up for some of their complex and mysterious unfinished projects.   It's a two-page single-spaced list and I went over it carefully with the attitude that there must be something a spaced out clutz without a techno  cell in her brain pan can do, because I sure do need that money this summer.

Some fairy or maybe a gnome brought  me to sign in for Wikipedia late last night after I'd been up for a couple of days.  Right away they start in with the usual same old song that what I thought was my "global" login is worthless, never heard of my user names or e-mail addresses, on and on.  So I say to myself the hell with it, I'll just bite the bullet and register at a Wiki website for the 100th time.  But every username I come up is either already used, as is the e-mail address, of course, because they're mine but just not good enough for this Wiki Wacko.  Then the person starts finding fault with every e-mail address and username I come up with.  I finally snapped and did what I should have done much earlier and just left.

Well imagine how I felt today when I was nosing through the Subversion, Google Project Hosting and Wiki Wacko pages and found a script for what happened to me with the login last night.  It seems they use a special cookie so that even if you check on the login "remember me"  it really won't.  There's also a faulty code of some kind that ensures your login will never be successful.   I am not lying.  I may post some of these scripts next blog.  They have actual scripts with pretend persons written out showing how it should discourage a bad seed from darkening Wiki's weird door with offers of help and voluntary slave labor.  There are dates and actual quotes of what the facilitator said to the poor schmuck minding his or her own business and just trying to login/register.  There's even the sort of snide remarks about usernames that I was getting.  I am publishing it next time.  It has to be seen to be believed.  These people are out of their geeky minds.