Leslie Hawthorn has just announced Google Highly Open Participation Contest at the OSDC open source conference in Australia. What is GHOP ? It’s a new contest that aims to introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development, just like Google Summer of Code does for university students. Thanks to Google now even pre-university students can be involved in all aspects of open source development, from fixing bugs to writing documentation and doing user experience research. It’s a great opportunity for students in highschools to dive in open source software development and get new valuable experience.

For the contest, Google selected 10 Open Source projects which you might work for: The Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS. Each of selected projects (mentoring organizations) will provide a list of tasks the relevant project needs help with. Students choose on which particular task they want to work on and submit their work according to the instructions for each task. Students are eligible to win cash prizes and nice GHOP t-shirts, grand prize winners will get a nice free trip to Googleplex in Mountain View :-)

The contest started today and finishes January 22.

Full details are available at the Google Highly Open Participation Contest page

Post at Google Summer of Code blog can be found here.

You can also check out the contest FAQs for some more information and visit GHOP discussion group to get help or share your thoughts.

If anyone is interested in FPGA programming here are some links that shows how you can display stuff on VGA output in VHDL or Verilog. Well this subject isn’t my favorite, but that’s what I have to do right now at my university ;-)

PongGame example (Verilog)

Squares example (VHDL)

VGA Interface (VHDL)

Well couple days ago I was doing my homework for German lesson. I needed a really fast way to translate a lot of words that I wanted to use (but I didn't know the polish-german translation). I have always used a DeP polish-german, german-polish online dictionary, but I could never find Mozilla Search Plugin for this one. So I created my own ;-) You can find it on MozillaPL.org.

Here is the list of my tests and exams in 6th semester at Wroclaw University of Technology (faculty of Electronics, Computer Science).

If you pass in Date(0) you're exempt from exam. ;-)