Google Data » Cat Allman

A Correction to Google Summer of Code 2012 Stats – Part 2

Cat Allman — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:30:00 +0000

When we published the annual list of schools with the largest number of accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2012, we received an email pointing out that we were missing one school that belongs in the Top 10. PESIT - Peoples Education Society is now shown below in the corrected chart.

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students	# in 2011
1	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	29	27
2	Polytechnic University Of Bucharest	Romania	21	23
2	National University of Singapore	Singapore	21	11
3	Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology	India	17	8
4	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	16	9
5	Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus / BITS-Pilani - K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	14	1
6	Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU)	India	13	6
7	Technical University Of Gdansk	Poland	12	9
7	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	12	10
8	Technische Universität Wien, (TU Wien)	Austria	10	13
8	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	10	14
8	University of Ljubljana	Slovenia	10	7
9	Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi	India	9	6
9	Chernihiv State Technological University	Ukraine	9	6
10	PESIT - Peoples Education Society	India	8	3
10	UNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas	Brazil	8	14

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs

Announcing Google Refine 2.0, a power tool for data wranglers

Cat Allman — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 22:05:00 +0000

Our acquisition of Metaweb back in July also brought along Freebase Gridworks, an open source software project for cleaning and enhancing entire data sets. Today we’re announcing that the project has been renamed to Google Refine and version 2.0 is now available.

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases. Version 2.0 introduces a new extensions architecture, a reconciliation framework for linking records to other databases (like Freebase), and a ton of new transformation commands and expressions.

Freebase Gridworks 1.0 has already been well received by the data journalism and open government data communities (you can read how the Chicago Tribune, ProPublica and data.gov.uk have used it) and we are very excited by what they and others will be able to do with this new release. To learn more about what you can do with Google Refine 2.0, watch the following screencasts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNccGtn3Wb0 (7 min)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45EnWK-fE9k (9 min)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5ER2qRH1OQ (6 min)

The project is open source and its code and downloads are available here. Changes from version 1.1 to 2.0 are listed here.

By David Huynh, Google Search Infrastructure

Adding Robots to Wave in a Box

Cat Allman — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 19:25:00 +0000

Starting this past July, I had the opportunity to spend some time "Down Under" working as an intern on Google Wave. Since I had worked with Google before on building the open source software that runs the Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in, I joined the Wave open source effort this time. I was primarily focused on open sourcing the Robots API, so that non-Google wave servers could support robots for their users.

One month into my internship, Google announced its plan to discontinue developing Wave as a standalone product, however Wave technology will continue to move forward as an open source project.

The Wave open source project, renamed Wave in a Box, is aiming to become a server for hosting waves inside a small company or community. With a few extra steps you will even be able to talk to other wave servers all over the world, based on a concept called “federation.” Over the past few months the Wave in a Box team has made a lot of improvements, for instance the panel for viewing waves now supports much more of the functionality from Google Wave, and it looks better and is a lot faster too!

The Robots API has now also been included in Wave in a Box and has most of the functionality available on Google Wave. One of our example robots, Echoey, for Google Wave also works on Wave in a Box. This robot -- as the name might suggest -- echoes whatever is being typed. Due to the realtime nature of Wave, the echoing happens while you type!

Wave in a Box still has a ways to go and the future of the project is being discussed at this week’s Wave Summit in San Francisco. Keep an eye on the Wave in a Box website for videos of the sessions. If you are interested in running your own wave server or want to help make Wave in a Box better, take a look at our repository and mailing list.

By Lennard de Rijk, Google Wave Team

Google Summer of Code Meetups in Sofia and Strasbourg

Cat Allman — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:07:00 +0000

Back at the end of January, when Google first announced that Google Summer of CodeTM was on for 2010, I happened to read the mail in the company of a group of Computer Science M.Sc. students. I quickly shared the news with them but rather than cheers of enthusiasm I was surprised that all I got in return were puzzled stares. It turned out that most of the students there hadn't heard of the program before and those that had, didn't really know what it was all about.

I have always thought that Computer Science students were particularly lucky to be able to participate in Open Source. Most of the time newly graduated students would have a hard time finding a decent job because of their lack of experience, which makes experience itself hard to accumulate. Open Source offers an easy way out of this: no project is going to refuse a patch simply because you don't have the necessary entries in your CV. Of course, many would say, that getting into an Open Source project is not really that easy since the learning curve in most of the popular projects is often quite steep and could prove discouraging.

This is exactly why Google Summer of Code is a unique program. A hundred and fifty of the world's greatest FOSS projects get organized by proposing ideas that students know are within their reach. They also allocate mentors to guide the work of the students, and their whole communities follow and comment on the projects ... And all this happens while students are actually paid for their work!

So getting the puzzled stares from CS students after mentioning the program was like looking at people who were preparing to spend a cold night in front of a warm house, because they didn't know there was a key under the doormat.

After sharing this thought with a few other people that had been mentoring for SIP Communicator, we decided we definitely needed to make sure everyone knew what Google Summer of Code is and, more importantly, how it works. We therefore decided to organize a couple of quick information sessions in universities that our mentors were somehow related to: the University of Strasbourg, France (which was eventually split in two), and the Sofia University in Bulgaria. We were particularly lucky to also get the help of Shteryana Shopova from FreeBSD who agreed to join in for the Sofia session and tell us about her experience as both a student and a mentor.

Both universities were particularly helpful in making room reservations and advertising the meetings to the potentially interested students. I would also like to thank Vladimir Vassilev, Alexander Todorov, and Julien Montavont for their help with the organization!

Both sessions went quite well and attracted a decent number of students. Questions were mostly related to the student selection process, whether or not one could participate with a project of their own, where does the work happen, and how does one communicate with their mentor and community. I guess this is one of the advantages of attending live sessions: one gets to ask as many Frequently Asked Questions as they want ;)

The Strasbourg Sessions

We held two meetings there in order to make it easier for students from different campuses to attend. On both of the sessions we had Vincent Lucas, Romain Kuntz, Julien Montavont and myself (Emil Ivov), all mentors from SIP Communicator's Google Summer of Code participation in 2007, 2008, and 2009. (Unfortunately, we currently only have photos from the first meeting.)

The Sofia Sessions

We already mentioned Shteryana Shopova from FreeBSD (GSoC student in 2005 and 2006, and mentor in 2007). We also had Damian Minkov from SIP Communicator (2007, 2008, and 2009), as well as Vladimir Vassilev and Alexander Todorov.

By Emil Ivov, SIP Communicator Project

Joomla! Google Summer of Code™ 2009: Lots to Shout About

Cat Allman — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:21:00 +0000

The Joomla! project was thrilled to sponsor 18 Google Summer of Code students for 2009, and we are pleased to report that 16 (89%) successfully completed their projects. Most of the projects were based on ideas generated by the Joomla! community, and our community seems to be very excited about the results.

Our two primary goals for Google Summer of Code 2009 are to (1) develop relationships with student developers that will encourage them to continue working in the project; and (2) add features and functionality to the Joomla! CMS. Our participation in Google Summer of Code 2009 was very successful on both fronts.

Relationship to the Project

Several of our students this year were already contributing to Joomla! prior to participating in the program, and the Google Summer of Code experience has only strengthened that relationship. For example, one of our students, in addition to completing his project, is now a leader in the release of the next Joomla! version. At least two students (so far) have officially joined project working groups, and several others have contributed to the project over and above their Google Summer of Code projects. Many other students have also expressed interest in continuing the development of their code beyond the program timeframe.

This year, at the end of the term, we gave each student the opportunity to present a webinar where they could demonstrate their project to the community. Even though it was a lot of extra work, more than half the students did this. The results were excellent, and the students did really good, concise, focused presentations. We recorded and linked to the webinars on our site so that anyone in the community who is interested in the Google Summer of Code work can simply watch a short webinar to see an actual demonstration of the projects.

Using the Code

There are three ways the code from Google Summer of Code projects can be used within the Joomla! CMS. In some cases, some or all of the code will be incorporated directly into the core codebase for the upcoming Joomla! version 1.6. In other cases, the code has been published as an extension that can be downloaded and used by any Joomla! user on their website. The third method is that the code will be used as a basis for further work.

Some students have combined two of the methods above, for example, producing an extension for the current version 1.5 and making the code available for the core in our version 1.6.

More Information

We invite you to visit our Joomla! Community site for more information about the different projects and what was accomplished, and to download the code.

By Mark Dexter, Joomla! Project

Etherboot Project GSoC 2009 Report

Cat Allman — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:12:00 +0000

The Etherboot Project is very pleased to have participated in Google Summer of Code™ 2009. This summer marks our fourth consecutive annual participation in this excellent mentoring program.

Google generously sponsored five students to work with us, and four of our five students (80%) successfully completed their projects. We would like to thank Google, our mentors, and our students for making this a pleasant, productive, and memorable summer.

We particularly wish thank one of our mentors, Stefan Hajnoczi, who was a GSoC student with us last year. His insights and diligence are extremely helpful and enlightening.

Although all of our GSoC projects were not successfully completed, our students' work was generally of excellent quality, and we sincerely thank them all for their diligence. Our participation in GSoC has strengthened our project by encouraging us to create additional technical and social infrastructure. These improved facilities make it easier for new people to become involved with our project and also help us better support and communicate with our existing community.

We look forward to giving future GSoC students and other interested and motivated people a positive introduction to FOSS development. What follows is a brief summary of our 2009 students' work with links to their full project pages. We conclude with a brief outline of our mentoring system that we hope may be helpful to other projects.

Student Project Summaries

Daniel Verkamp
Daniel implemented an automated regression testing framework to help us consistently deliver high-quality releases.

Joshua Oreman
Joshua extended gPXE, our network bootloader, with an 802.11 wireless stack, and added drivers for two wireless cards.

Lynus Vaz
Lynus extended gPXE scripting with a more powerful language that is capable of expressing advanced boot policies.

Pravin Shinde
Pravin created a central resource to network boot operating systems, diagnostic tools, and utilities at http://boot.kernel.org/.

Chris Kluka
Chris worked on adding a network driver DLink DGE-530T ethernet cards. Though unable to complete his project, he compiled and created useful information which will facilitate future work on this driver.

Our Mentoring System

Over our years of GSoC participation we have developed and refined a system for mentoring that works quite well for us. One of the most important attributes of our system is that we break the twelve week GSoC coding period into twelve one week evaluation periods. By doing this we ensure that we always have recent information on how each of our students is doing, which allows us to intervene in a timely fashion when needed.

Techniques
Here are some of the other ways we structure our GSoC participation:

* We mentor as a team. We have a mailing list and private IRC channel specifically for mentors.

* Our mentoring team interviews all qualified applicants in a private IRC channel. Multiple perspectives have proven very helpful in identifying excellent candidates. Mentors communicate among themselves during interviews in a second private IRC channel.

* We request code samples from all of our applicants to get a sense of their proficiency and coding style.

* We present real-time coding exercises during our IRC interviews with applicants, and ask them questions about their proposed solutions, and also about their code samples.

* We inform our students of our team mentoring approach and encourage them to send general questions to the mentors mailing list.

* We require our selected students to have IRC access and to define "work hours" where they will be online and available on our main project IRC channel (#etherboot on irc.freenode.net). We have found that this requirement encourages them to interact with our project community as well as their primary mentor.

* We use any and all available means to communicate directly with our students, including IRC, email, phone, VOIP, and IM. It is important to discover what works best to promote effective, open communication between students and mentors.

* We require our students to maintain a set of project pages, which include their:
-Project Plan
-Journal (broken into twelve weeks)
-Notes
-git repository link

* Our mentors meet weekly with each student in a private IRC channel to review their project pages and generally discuss their progress. We have found these meetings to be very beneficial to both students and mentors.

* We make the steady progress and ultimate success of each of our student projects central to our mentoring goals. We meet as mentors to discuss how we can help each student succeed, and we discuss our formal GSoC evaluations as a team.

* We base our project's success on the quality of our code and the health of our community, and we work continuously to improve as programmers and as people.

By Marty Connor, Etherboot Project

The Apertium Project’s First Google Summer of Code

Cat Allman — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:41:00 +0000

The Apertium Project works on open-source machine translation and language technology. We try to focus our efforts on lesser-resourced and marginalized languages, but also work with larger languages. To date, we have released translators for 21 language pairs, covering languages spoken by 1.1 billion people, ranging from English (est. 500m speakers) to Aranese (est. 4,000 speakers). A similar number of additional language pairs are in development. The Apertium software is licensed under the GPL, but in addition (a rarer situation in the machine translation field) so is the data for all these language pairs. This means that the data can be re-used by other language projects (e.g. in developing spelling or grammar checkers, thesauri, etc).

This was our first year in Google Summer of Code and we were very fortunate to receive nine student slots. We filled them with some great students and are pleased to report that out of the nine projects, eight were successful.

The completed project were:

A translator for Norwegian Bokmål (nb) and Norwegian Nynorsk (nn)

This project was accepted as part of our "adopt a language pair" idea from our ideas page. Some work had already been done on the translator but it was a long way from finished. Kevin Unhammer from the University of Bergen was mentored by Trond Trosterud from the University of Tromsø. The final result, after an epic effort, is a working translator (and the first free software translator for nb-nn) that makes a mistake in only 11 words out of every 100 translated, making using the system for post-edition feasible.

One of the key aspects of Kevin's work was the re-use and adaptation of existing open source resources. Much of the bilingual dictionary was statistically inferred from the existing translations in KDE, using ReTraTos and GIZA++ (created by Franz Och). In addition to this, Kevin used the Oslo-Bergen Constraint Grammer, contributing fixes not only to that, but to the VISL CG3 software itself. After the GSoC deadline, Kevin has continued his work, including incorporating some changes from feedback from the Nynorsk Wikipedia.

A translator for Swedish (sv) to Danish (da)

Another language pair adoption, Michael Kristensen, who had previously done some work on this translator, was mentored by Jacob Nordfalk, the author of our English to Esperanto translator. As there are very few free linguistic resources for Swedish and Danish the work was pretty much started from scratch, although we took great advantage of the Swedish Wiktionary. The translator is only unidirectional, from Swedish to Danish, and it has an error rate of around 20%.

The completion of this translator is something of a triumph for Apertium. Begun back in 2005, the project had been neglected for many years. This was the first translator for the Apertium platform that focused on non-Romance languages.

Multi-engine machine translation (MEMT)

Gabriel Synnaeve was mentored by Francis Tyers to work on a module to improve the quality of machine translation by taking translations from different systems and merging their strengths and discarding their weaknesses. The two systems focused on in the initial prototype are Apertium (rule-based MT) and Moses (statistical MT) but it can easily be extended to more. The idea behind the system is that for some languages there is often not one MT system which is better than all others, but some are better at some phrases and some are better at others. Thus, if we can combine the output of two or more systems with different strengths/weaknesses, we can make better translations.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the MEMT project is its potential for use as a research platform for future work on hybrid machine translation, by allowing the researcher to focus only on the algorithms they wish to implement. During the project, Gabriel was joined by Francis in person for a 'mini-hackathon', which, despite something of a farcical start involving requests made on IRC for phone calls across Europe on behalf of two people who were in the same city, lead to a greater degree of functionality and modularization in the code.

Highly scalable web service architecture for Apertium

Víctor Manuel Sánchez Cartagena worked with mentor Juan Antonio Perez-Ortiz on a highly-scalable web service architecture, or, Apertium for Cloud computing. Initially targeting Amazon's EC2, as well as standalone servers, the scalable web service allows the use of multiple translation services on multiple physical or virtual servers, scaling to meet the translation demands of users, from a single user-facing service, which implements the Google Language API.

The core of the system is the translation router, which controls the flow between user and translation server, based on a variety of factors, including the availability of the language pair, the current load on the server, as well as providing a framework to allow these factors to have different priorities on a per-user basis. It also takes into account the cost of each translation request. The project is a complete package; as well as the router, it includes a translation daemon, and convenience scripts to ease the rollout of server instances.

In addition to his work on his project, Víctor is also serving as an organiser for the FreeRBMT workshop.

Conversion of Anubadok

Abu Zaher was mentored by Kevin Donnelly and Francis Tyers to convert Anubadok, an open-source MT system for English to Bengali to work with the Apertium engine. This was an ambitious project and not all of the goals were realised, but we were able to make the first wide-coverage morphological analyser / generator for Bengali and a substantial amount of lexical transfer, so the project was a great success.

Zaher is also looking at improving the Ankur spell checker with information from his analyser / generator, so the work done is already being reused; there is also interest in using the data to create a Bengali stemmer, for more efficient searching/indexing of Bengali texts, and a number of tools which were created to model the various aspects of Bengali inflection will certainly prove useful in other areas of NLP for Bengali.

Apertium going SOA

Pasquale Minervini's work was motivated by the needs of Informatici senza Frontiere to have a translation engine that would fit into a Service-Oriented architecture. To this end, Pasquale, mentored by Jimmy O'Regan, designed an XML-RPC-based server that efficiently contains the Apertium pipeline, and layered it with JSON (still under development), SOAP, and CORBA services, which, as well as making Apertium more buzzword compliant, gives a greater range of options to programmers wishing to integrate Apertiums translation services into a wider range of architectures. This is undoubtedly a popular project idea: Alexa's keywords for Apertium show 'apertium going soa' and 'deadbeef apertium' (deadbeef is Pasquale's IRC nick) in 2nd and 4th place for search keywords leading to Apertium.

Because of the potential overlap between their projects, in the first weeks of their GSoC work, Pasquale and Víctor agreed on the Google Language API as a standard for their projects to communicate; Pasquale took this agreement one step further by implementing the 'language detection' feature of the API - something previously unavailable in Apertium. In addition to that, Pasquale also contributed memory leak checks against the Apertium platform, as well as other fixes, and has helped another (non-GSoC) student in the goal of porting Apertium to Windows.

Trigram part-of-speech tagging

Zaid Md. Abdul Wahab Sheikh was mentored by Felipe Sánchez Martínez to improve our part-of-speech tagging module to use trigrams instead of bigrams, as well as implementing changes to the training tools to create data for it.

Apertium was originally designed for closely related languages, but is growing to meet the challenges of translating between more distant languages. One of the unique aspects of Dr. Sanchez's work on Part-of-Speech tagging is the use of target language information which allows an accurate tagger to be trained using much less data than usual. Zaid's work builds on Dr. Sanchez's work with first-order Hidden Markov Models, extending it to second-order HMMs, similarly to TnT. This enables more accurate translation between more distant languages, using the same methods, so that the rest of the Apertium system can continue to grow.

Java port of lttoolbox

Raphaël Laurent worked with Sergio Ortiz Rojas to port lttoolbox to Java. lttoolbox is the core component of the Apertium system; as well as providing morphological analysis and generation, it also provides pattern matching and dictionary lookup to the rest of Apertium, so a Java port is the first step towards a version of Apertium for Java-based devices. Raphaël finished an earlier line-for-line port contributed by Nic Cotrell, first making it work; then making it binary compatible.

As it stands currently, lttoolbox-java can be integrated into other Java-based tools, facilitating the re-use of our software and our extensive repository of morphological analysers. Tools such as LanguageTool, the open source proofreading tool, also make extensive use of morphological analysis, but OmegaT, the open source CAT tool, could use it for dictionary look-up of inflected words; it could even be used with our own apertium-morph tool: a plugin for Lucene that allows linguistically-rich document indexing.

FreeRBMT

On the 2nd and 3rd of November, we held the first FreeRBMT workshop, which was heavily inspired by the Google Summer of Code program, both as a way for students and mentors to meet in person, and to provide the students with an opportunity to present peer-reviewed papers about the work they completed during the program. The entire proceedings are available from the University of Alicante; in particular, we would like to highlight the papers which were successfully presented by the students who took part in GSoC:

Apertium goes SOA: an efficient and scalable service based on the Apertium rule-based machine translation platform; Minervini, Pasquale

Development of a morphological analyser for Bengali; Faridee, Abu Zaher Md.; Tyers, Francis M.

An open-source highly scalable web service architecture for the Apertium machine translation engine; Sánchez-Cartagena, Víctor M.; Pérez-Ortiz, Juan Antonio

Reuse of free resources in machine translation between Nynorsk and Bokmål; Unhammer, Kevin; Trosterud, Trond

A trigram part-of-speech tagger for the Apertium free/open-source machine translation platform; Sheikh, Zaid Md Abdul Wahab; Sánchez-Martínez, Felipe

In addition, the following paper was presented by the mentors of a successful project (Michael, the student, was unfortunately too busy to participate in its writing):

Shallow-transfer rule-based machine translation for Swedish to Danish; Tyers, Francis M.; Nordfalk, Jacob

We would like to thank Google for providing us with the opportunity to participate in the Summer of Code program; in particular, Leslie, Cat, and Ellen, for making it run so smoothly. We would also like to make special mention of two students: Ankitha Rao and Daniel Beck, who, despite being unsuccessful in their applications, continued to work on their proposed projects (an English to Hindi translator, and a module for multi-word units, respectively). Finally, we would like to thank all of the students, mentors, and administrators who contributed their time and skill to Apertium.

By Francis Tyers and Jimmy O'Regan, Summer of Code Mentors for the Apertium Project

SWIG’s Second Summer of Code

Cat Allman — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:31:00 +0000

SWIG is a programmer's tool designed to make it easier to use C and C++ code from other popular programming languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Java, and C#. 2009 was SWIG's second Summer of Code, and this year we mentored five projects related to SWIG. All five students were very active over the summer period and produced some great new features. In no particular order:

Matevž Jekovec has been busy working at the coal face of SWIG to add support for C++0x, the forthcoming C++ standard. Matevž has managed to achieve close to full support for C++0x. The C++0x Wikipaedia article details the numerous planned new features and Matevž has put together a SWIG C++0x page documenting the new SWIG support for each of these. In summary the enhanced C++ language can now be parsed by SWIG, which in itself is a great step. There is much more than just this though, as most of the information parsed is used to create useful wrappers of C++0x code. The work can be tried out on the C++0x branch which should be merged fairly soon into a forthcoming release.

Miklos Vajna has been working on SWIG's PHP support to implement an advanced SWIG feature already supported for most other target languages, but not PHP. The feature is called "directors" and allows cross-language polymorphism - wrapped C++ classes can be subclassed in PHP and virtual method calls work in the natural way, whether they're made from PHP or C++ code. You can read more in the new PHP Director documentation. Miklos made such great progress that we were able to merge this support into SWIG 1.3.40, which was released even before the Summer of Code finished. Miklos also spent some time working on improving SWIG's test suite for PHP, and fixing bugs in the PHP support.

Ashish Sharma spent the summer adding support for Objective-C as a new target language. Objective-C is a major language on the Mac OS X platform. This means that now SWIG can be used to generate Objective-C wrappers over C++ code. In particular the wrappers include proxy classes, which preserve the class hierarchy from the C++ code. Ultimately this means that from the user's perspective, proxy objects look no different to objects originally written in Objective-C. Adding a new target language is quite a considerable task and Ashish is keen to add plenty more improvements over the coming months. Ashish's work is in Subversion and can be accessed in the ashishs99 branch.

Baozeng Ding has also added a new target language, in this case for the Scilab language, a free numerical computing package. He has coded up support for all the C features: variables, functions, constants, enums, structs, unions, pointers and arrays and also intends to develop it further in the near future. Documentation for SWIG and Scilab can be viewed online direct from Baozeng's Subversion branch.

Kosei Moriyama has been working on Perl bindings for the Xapian library using SWIG, to replace some existing bindings implemented by hand. He's achieved almost complete compatibility with the API of the existing bindings (the only real omission is callbacks which are waiting for completion of director support for Perl in SWIG). He has also wrapped features which weren't previously accessible from Perl. You can view Kosei's work online in his Subversion branch.

Finally, many thanks to Google for sponsoring the Summer of Code and a special thanks for all the hard work done by the students, mentors and Olly Betts, the co-administrator.

By William Fulton, SWIG administrator

Chromium OS Now Open Sourced

Cat Allman — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:32:00 +0000

In July we announced that we were working on a project called Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system based on the Google Chrome browser and built for today's web. For the past few months we have been working hard on developing a solid foundation and today we are excited to announce the Chromium OS open source project.

You can read more about our open source announcement at the Chromium Blog, or get involved directly at chromium.org. We look forward to working with the open source community to help shape the future of personal computing.

By Martin Bligh, Software Engineer

Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!

Cat Allman — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:15:00 +0000

Here at Google, we believe programming should be fast, productive, and most importantly, fun. That's why we're excited to open source an experimental new language called Go. Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go lets you move fast.

Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection.

Want to write a server with thousands of communicating threads? Want to spend less time reading blogs while waiting for builds? Feel like whipping up a prototype of your latest idea? Go is the way to go! Check out the video for more information or visit golang.org.

By Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, Russ Cox, Jini Kim and Adam Langley - The Go Team

London Open Source Jam 14

Cat Allman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:31:00 +0000

We held the 14th Google London Open Source Jam at our Victoria HQ on September 24th. The topic this time was "Video and Sound", and our Jammers had some real treats to share.

Steven Goodwin told us how his open source SGX 3D graphics engine deals with three key problems of other computer game engines. On a similar theme, Themis Bourdenas discussed the vine engine, a modular game engine for 2d and 3d games.

Borys Musielak presented Filmaster, an open source film recommendation engine. Neil Harris told us about an attempt by the Kendra Initiative to foster a common meta data format for content discovery on the semantic web.

In an Open Source Jam first, Jagannathan gave a performance of his Din software musical instrument. Din is designed for playing live Indian music, is based on Bezier curves and really has to be heard to be fully appreciated.

Sam Mbale gave us an update on his projects to help Africans build online communities using open source. Mike Mahemoff discussed some web tools frameworks for intranets, bookmarklets and trails in Scrumptious.

The UK government has plans to introduce a law to allow content-owners to force ISPs to disconnect the internet connection of users suspected of file sharing, without any proof. Glyn Wintle gave us an overview of how the proposed law will affect us, how the Open Rights Group is campaigning against it, and how we can help.

Douglas Squirrel talked about the difficulty blind people have in finding information on websites, and presented BlindPages.com - a new project to reformat the web in a screen-reader friendly way. He also demoed a prototype telephone interface to the service.

Much pizza was eaten and free beer drunk, and we all ended up in the pub next door to continue our discussions. A big thank you to all our speakers and attendees, and we hope to see you at the next Jam!

By Matt Godbolt, Mobile Engineering

Fall at the OSPO

Cat Allman — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:52:00 +0000

The leaves are turning here in Mountain View, but they are not the only ones blazing away. It's a busy time of year for open source for Google, with lots of talks and events going on.

Recently:
- Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian (Fitz) Fitzpatrick gave their "Myth of the Genius Programmer" talk as part of the Opening sessions at "Reflections / Projections", the 15th ACM@UIUC Student Computing Conference at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

- They were joined by Googler and Python maintainer Alex Martelli, who spoke on "Python and the Programmer".

- Chris DiBona, head of the Open Source Programs Office at Google gave a keynote at AstriCon in Glendale, Arizona.

Currently:
- Earlier this week Leslie Hawthorn, manager of the Google Summer of Code program, was part of the amazing team that completed a new "Manual on GSoC Mentoring" in 2, count them, 2 DAYS, finishing up late last night. You will hear more about this feat in a later post after the...

- Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009, being held in Mountain View this weekend, October 24th and 25th. This invitation-only gathering of mentors from each of the participating mentoring organizations in this year's GSoC gives the projects a chance to come together to compare notes on the mentoring process and cross-pollinate their projects. A good time promises to be had by all, and a full report will be forthcoming.

Coming up:
- Jonathan Blocksom will be speaking on Google App Engine and the All For Good project at the DC edition of Stack Overflow Dev Days, October 26th.

- On October 4th the LISA Conference in Baltimore, Maryland will feature a talk by Daniel Berlin and Joe Gregorio on the Google Wave Federation Protocol, the underlying open network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers. Interested attendees of LISA will be able to sign up for a developers Wave Sandbox Account. They will also have a chance to win Googley prizes at the Google Birds of a Feather session the next evening, hosted by Cat Allman and Tom Limoncelli.

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

Tasty New Google Summer of Code Stats

Cat Allman — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:35:00 +0000

It's time for more tasty statistics about Google Summer of Code 2005 - 2009. After much crunching and gathering, we have added the 2009 Accepted Students by School data to our published statistics page. Here are some highlights...

* We had a total of 591 schools represented this year, including 199 new schools, and a small but interesting number of "distance learning" schools. (These make tabulation interesting. If the student is studying remotely should the school, a.k.a the place of study, be the country where the school is - or where the student is?) This brings our total numbers of schools represented during the 5 years of the GSoC program to 1382.

* The 591 schools in 2009 are in a total of 81 countries, including seven countries that have not participated in past years. These include Kazakhstan with two participating students, and the following new countries with one participating student each: Comoros, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Moldavia, Morocco, Nigeria.

* For all you anxious alumni out there, here's the good part - which school has the most number of students participating. University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka continues to dominate the field with 22 students accepted.

Top 10 Schools in 2009 by # of Accepted Students

Sri Lanka - University of Moratuwa - 22
Brazil - University of Campinas / UNICAMP - 12
China - Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences - 11
Romania - Polytechnic University Of Bucharest - 11
Poland - Gdansk University of Technology - 10
Austria - Vienna University of Technology - 9
India - Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus - 9
Sweden - Royal Institute of Technology - 9
India - Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University - 8
Singapore - National University of Singapore - 8

And for comparison:

Top 10 Schools 2005 - 2009 by # of Accepted Students

Sri Lanka - University of Moratuwa - 79
Brazil - University of Campinas / UNICAMP - 37
Canada - University of Toronto - 34
Austria - Vienna University of Technology - 31
China - Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences - 30
United States - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 28
Poland - Wroclaw University of Technology - 27
Hungary - Budapest University of Technology and Economics - 21
Canada - Carleton University - 21
Romania - Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi - 20

We hope you find these numbers to be of interest - there's lots more to see online.

Here's where we ask for the readers help: as you review the list of schools, please keep your eyes open for any duplicates, misspelling or missing institutions. We did our best, but as you can imagine, the report represents a bunch of small bites of data, we had more than several languages to parse, and we always try to respect each student's wishes as to how their school is designated. If you find something that looks wrong to you, especially in the 2009 data, please let us know in the comments section so we can take a look and correct as needed.

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs

DebConf9 in Cáceres, Spain: Time of changes

Cat Allman — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:16:00 +0000

Every year several hundreds of Debian contributors from around the world get together at DebConf in a different city to share a week (or more!) of work, friendship and fun.

The 10th annual Debian Developers Conference just ended a few days ago in the beautiful medieval city of Cáceres in Spain with Debian Project Leader Steve McIntyre concluding: "This has been one of the most productive conferences we have ever held. Our developers and teams achieved a great deal during this short period, and this will surely have a big impact on the upcoming release of 'Squeeze'."

Among the many notable talks were the release goals and plans for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 "Squeeze" as well as the new timed freezes release policy, and the Project Leader's keynote about working further towards Debian's motto of being the "universal operating system".

In all, over 130 different sessions took place during the conference, ranging from formal talks to numerous spontaneously scheduled meetings. For most of these sessions, live video streams were made available over the internet as well as recordings: http://debconf9.debconf.org/video.

Also this year, several students from the Google Summer of Code program in the Debian project were present to receive feedback on their projects, gather new ideas, and establish relationships with fellow developers. Along with the technical discussions and idea exchange, the students were able to experience by themselves the Debian community, one of the key factors that makes Debian the amazing project that it is.

Google Summer of Code™ students and Debian Developrs, left to right: Sha Liu, Per Andersson, Diego Escalante, Michael Schultheiss, Obey Arthur Liu, Bdale Garbee, Neil McGovern, Steve McIntyre (Debian Project Leader)

Attending as Google Summer of Code students were: Per Andersson, Diego Escalante and Sha Liu. Aurelien Jarno and Wookey were present as mentors and, Obey Arthur Liu and Steve McIntyre as administrators. Sadly this year we couldn't have the full Google Summer of Code crew due to problems with visas, work, universities.. but the very high concentration of Debian Developers has helped several Google Summer of Code projects both on site and remotely.

As the week progressed students were able to get feedback from different people about their current work:

Per Andersson, flying from Stockholm, Sweden: working on adding support for installing Debian on MTD flash based devices, opening Debian to a whole new class of popular embedded devices.
"DebConf9 really met my expectations. Loads of freedom loving nerds -- People like me! During the week I had the chance to engage people whom worked with related software; amongst them Debian Installer and GNU Parted developers. I also made contact with the Debian FreeSmartphone.org team, who maintains packages targeted at OpenMoko phones."

Diego Escalante, flying from Lima, Perú: working on Amancay, a new interface to the Debian Bug Tracking System targeted at improved collaboration.
"I was able to talk with others about ideas and important points to consider to get more people involved in triaging bugs in Debian. Also users and developers shared thought-some feelings about increasing triaging and how it would affect them. Above all, the conference also gave me the chance to get an inside look of how Debian developers work and think and how they are different from other developer communities I know, allowing me to take more things into account in designing the UI of."

Sha Liu, flying from Shanghai, China: working on creating a mips3 port, bringing to an important range of netbooks popular in Asia.
"I discussed problems I encountered in the project and introduced the loongson2F CPU to many developers interested in porting their software to mips. The members of the emdebian team shared with me a lot of valuable experience including using the qemu simulator, the process of building a Debian armel port etc. However, the most important things I learned during DebConf9 was the infrastructure and philosophy of Debian-the most universal operating system."

All the attendees going to the daytrip to Valle del Jerte: hiking, swimming, sunbathing.

The whole Debian community is grateful to Google for being a great sponsor of the conference and specifically sponsoring the entire travel costs of our Google Summer of Code students.

The Google Summer of Code has been a success for each of the past four years Debian has participated, and we look forward to welcoming more students at Debian and DebConf.

See you in 2010 at DebConf10, taking place this time in the heart of Manhattan, New York City, USA!

Photos courtesy of Aigars Mahinovs

By Obey Arthur Liu, Debian Google Summer of Code 2009 Organization Administrator, 2008 Student

Scientists Camp Out* At Google

Cat Allman — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:47:00 +0000

Last month, around 250 invited scientists and science-related journalists, artists, and educators flocked to Google for the fourth annual Science Foo Camp (SciFoo). SciFoo is an unconference jointly presented by Google, O'Reilly Media, and Nature Publishing.

In true Google tradition, the conference began with dinner, followed by an orientation session led by conference hosts Tim O'Reilly, Sara Winge, Chris DiBona, and Timo Hannay. Immediately after, the schedule for the weekend was created by attendees covering large boards with giant post-it notes of topics.

Tim O'Reilly, Sara Winge, Chris DiBona and Timo Hannay open the conference
(Photo Credit: Suhky Dhaliwal and Ellen Ko)

Filling in the schedule boards

(Photo Credit: Bertalan Meskó)

Attendees came from all branches of science and technology, and included luminaries such as Marvin Minksy, Louise Leakey, Peter Diamandis, Bill Nye, and George Smoot. But the conference isn't only for the famous. There were many physicists, biologists, psychiatrists, chemists, and almost every other -ist represented. Experimental poet Christian Bok and puzzle maker Pavel Curtis provided interesting views on many topics.

The sessions were as varied as the attendees. Things discussed included artificial intelligence, the challenges of science education, cartoon physics, space travel, climate change, swine flu, data sharing, microbes, and more. That list doesn't even begin to scratch the surface, or include conversations had when a rocket scientist and a computational biologist sit down at the same table for lunch.

Jam session at the campground
(Photo Credit: Suhky Dhaliwal and Ellen Ko)

The event wasn't all discussion, Google demo'ed a street view tricycle and a holodeck -- tools for collecting and displaying geodata. The holodeck even provided an opportunity to visit all of Earth and Mars.

Google Earth as seen in the holodeck
(Photo Credit: Suhky Dhaliwal and Ellen Ko)

You couldn't put this many scientists in one place without doing some real science. Dr. Larry Weiss brought supplies for performing MRSA screening. Googler volunteers discovered that you could get almost anyone to stick a giant q-tip up their nose in the name of science. Lapsed Googler Simon Quellen Field and Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research, created ice cream with only milk, sugar, liquid nitrogen, and power tools.

Simon Quellen Field and Theodore Gray make liquid nitrogen ice cream

Baris Baser, SciFoo volunteer, describes SciFoo as "hands down one of my favorite events at Google. I really enjoy how it brings volunteers together from different offices and departments. The spontaneity makes it unpredictable and unique."

For more information on what went on at SciFoo '09 visit Nature's aggregator or Google Blog Search.

*and no, there was no actual camping at SciFoo Camp ;)

By Robert Spier, Site Reliability Engineering, and Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

Let the Sunshine In – Transparency Camp West 2009

Cat Allman — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:56:00 +0000

Last weekend the Sunlight Foundation and Google hosted TransparencyCamp West, an unconference dedicated to making our governments (from municipal governments all the way up to the federal government) more accessible and transparent. The intent was to help bring people together and create community from the event; to get people in the same room, and get them to know and learn from one another.

It was a great gathering of more than 150 developers, NGOs, wonks, activists and government representatives from as far away as Russia and Israel, including folks from Sunlight Labs alongside open government legends like Carl Malamud and the folks from the National Institute of Money and State Politics working with new people in the field with an increasing desire to open up their governments.

You'll notice I keep pluralizing governments. That's because one of the big takeaways from the gathering was how important it was to open up local & both statewide and federal governments. Transparency is desired from the very bottom, like local and regional US school boards to the very top. People want access to information pertaining to their cities - representatives from cities across North America participated - and what's impacting them at a local level.

The other thing is the concept of wholesale vs. retail government web operations. There is a strong desire amongst journalists and developers for government to start being wholesalers of data, providing us with bulk access to machine readable data, and to get government to not to worry so much about retailing access to their data.

All-in-all, the event was a success and I think it was a good beginning for growing the conversation amongst the transparency community on the West Coast and far beyond.

By Clay Johnson, Sunlight Foundation

Happy Birthday, ICU!

Cat Allman — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:54:00 +0000

The ICU project is celebrating 10 years of being open source this month.

"ICU" in this case stands for International Components for Unicode - not to be confused with Intensive Care Unit or International Communist Union... It is the premier software internationalization library, appearing in everything from your Google Android phone or your iPod all the way up to IBM mainframes. It provides the Unicode support that all of these programs need for handling the languages of the world, from Arabic to Chinese to Vietnamese.

ICU originated back in an Apple/IBM/HP joint venture. That code was morphed into the core of Java internationalization for JDK 1.1.4 - a large portion of this code still exists in the java.text and java.util packages. At that time, it included pretty much just sorting, locale/message support, and formatting for dates, numbers and so on. (If you're interested in early history, see an older paper by Laura Werner - now at Google). The libraries were refined over time and ported back to C and C++; now there are also wrappers for other languages, such as PHP.

ICU's data comes from the Unicode Consortium's open source project for locale data - CLDR - and typically releases each new version right after CLDR does. CLDR 1.7 was just released Friday, May 8, with ICU 4.2 following on the very same day.

While ICU was around before Google, more recently Google has played a strong role in the development of ICU, and in providing major contributions to the Unicode CLDR project. ICU forms the foundation of our 40 language initiative, so we look forward to many successful future birthdays!

By Mark Davis, Internationalization team

Report from Day 1 of the Linux Storage and Filesystems Workshop, April 6-7, 2009

Cat Allman — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:13:00 +0000

My karma was apparently very good three weeks ago. In the last minute I secured an invitation to Linux Storage and Filesystems Workshop 2009 (LSF). This year the invitation-only workshop was hosted by the Linux Foundation on April 6-7 in San Francisco, CA. It was, as always, an intense 2 days of non-stop information exchange and decision making. I've attempted to summarize what I took away as the most interesting and important discussions of the first day. These are my opinions, and your mileage may vary.

The group of about 50 developers were nearly all present when Zach
Brown (Oracle)welcomed us and reminded folks about the ground rules of the event. Share the brownies. Wash your hands, ...just kidding. This event remains small so folks can participate and we were pretty "cozy" in the small conference room with 5 good sized round tables. First step was to turn off the projector. :)

Chris Mason and James Bottomley then did a great summary and "scoring" of promises made at LSF2008. IO stack was up first and had some good initial scores with high points for Power management, Request Based Multipath, BIO's TRIM/ERASE support, T10 DIF/DIX (complete) and FCoE (also complete). Chris Mason managed to nearly match that with 4/4 points for Barriers, BTRFS (upstream but not stable yet), IPV6 NFS, NFS RDMA.

The first problem/topic was how to cache device scanning in the kernel or how to properly export an API for device scanning. General problem is there are several methods the kernel exports info and it's very time consuming on large systems. This was followed by Async IO and Direct IO discussion led by Zach Brown (Oracle) and Jeffrey Moyer (Redhat). Zach has been the AIO maintainer "forever" and made it clear AIO was async in only a very few circumstances that happen to suit database developers.

Joe Eykholt gave a summary of "FC/SCSI Targets", how to get initiator *and* target mode support from one FC HBA at the same time. Interesting stuff. Nick Bellinger gave a concise summary of state of "LIO/iSCSI" code and the "tgt" driver.

I was interested in Tejun Heo's "libata status and issues" discussion. First we talked about the status of several patches: mvsas updates, "ATA Bus" transport class, SFF vs Native transport classes from my co-worker Gwendal Grignou, and a pile of power management patches from Kristen Accardi (Intel). Tejun then dove into the "Spurious Power Off" problem. The cause seems to be short loss of power from the PSU is causing massive FS corruption. He's documented 5 incidents so far. Additional symptoms are "clicking" sounds and START/STOP count increments (reported via SMART data). Tejun suspects the FS is issueing a FLUSH to all disks simultaneously. We further speculated that the drives might be in a low power (slower RPMpossibly) and suddenly all come to life. Currently no fix is available.

Some possible workarounds we considered:
- disable Write Cache Enable (and take a write perf hit on loads that are single threaded)
- disable power management.

He moved on to discuss ambiguities around libata/block layer data structures (e.g. hard_ vs w/o hard_ ) fields that have similar (but not the same) names.

One of the last issues was something I raised: Can we reduce the CPU utilization of the block layer? I was asking since several new flash technologies are under development and they are all capable of 200+ *thousand* IOPS. The answer was Jens Axboe was working on this already since about December 2008 had committed his initial results to his own git tree already. I just need to find the git tree and proper branch now. :)

That wraps up day one. I hope you find the information useful. If you want to read about day two, please leave a comment and if demand warrants it, I'll cover that in a future post.

By Grant Grundler, Platforms Kernel Team

Google Summer of Code™ by the Numbers

Cat Allman — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:02:00 +0000

As the fifth instance of Google Summer of Code gets underway, we thought it would be interesting to look back at the first four years. Our team is frequently asked things like, "How many countries are represented by the participants?", or "Did anyone from X school ever participate?" so we decided to compile some statistics and make them available for everyone.

There are several reports available to you:

Number of Mentors per Country by Year
Number of Accepted Students per Country by Year
Number of Accepted Students per School by Year
Degree Sought by Accepted Students by Year
Participating Projects by Year
Summaries of #s by Year

Google Docs will let you sort by column to organize the data as you want, so slice and dice to find what interests you. Please let us know what you think - we welcome your comments.

By Cat Allman, Open Source team

Joomla! Joomla! Las Vegas!!!

Cat Allman — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:41:00 +0000

Leslie Hawthorn of the Open Source Programs team is heading to the bright lights of Las Vegas to speak at Joomla! Day Las Vegas coming up April 3rd through April 5th, 2009. If you are interested in Joomla!, haven't had a chance to hear LH speak before, or just want to hang out with some past Google Summer of Code participants, don't miss it.

Hope to see you there.

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

PHP Quebec 2009

Cat Allman — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:06:00 +0000

By Marcus Boerger, Software Engineering Team and PHP Core Developer

I recently attended PHP Quebec 2009. This was the seventh year of this gathering of PHP developers and though we had a new venue the conference was great as always. As one of my fellow speakers was ill, I jumped in to give the Writing PHP Extensions (PDF) talk along with Johannes Schluter. Even better, the talk on PHP - Worst Practices (PDF) was well received by the audience, with reactions to the material far more positive than I would have anticipated given that we've all engaged in these worst practices from time to time. You can also check out the slides from my third talk Objects for the Masses (PDF). On a more personal note, I was happy to hear and see that other presenters used the Google Chart API in their talks for examples.

The rest of the conference talks were luckily not completely focused on PHP 5.3. It turns out there's continued interest in the current stable platform, PHP 5.2. Folks are happy to give us core developers more time to add some new features, most notably closures , namespaces and Phar done right. Those who want to learn more about PHP 5.3 should check out Johannes' slides (PDF).

Googlers Out and About – FOSDEM and Beyond…

Cat Allman — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:50:00 +0000

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs

It's going to be chilly next week in Brussels but FOSDEM is always a place to explore hot topics in the FOSS world. Our Leslie Hawthorn will be finishing off the conference with the closing keynote on large scale community organizing. We will also be hosting the pre-conference beer reception on Friday, February 6th - hope to see you there!

If you are affiliated with the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, you will have a chance this week to hear Chris DiBona, the head of the Open Source Programs Office, present at InnovationΧΔ Lunchbox. The Office of Patent Counsel and Technology Transfer at JPL/JHU hosts informational lunchtime sessions to inform Laboratory inventors, project staff and other interested Laboratory professionals about issues relating to APL tech transfer, in this case, Open Source.

Later in February Leslie and I will be speaking together at SCALE 2009, the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, CA, Saturday February 21st on "Getting Started in Open Source". We will also be at the Women in Open Source Workshop the day before, and in the Google booth on the show floor, along with a bunch of our colleagues. The SCALE organizers always attract a lively crowd to a very affordable conference, plus you'll be able to learn about a variety of Google technologies at the booth.

Heading into March, Leslie and I will be heading to Chattanooga TN, USA to present at SICCSE (Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education) 2009, a venerable (40th anniversary!) ACM conference on teaching computer science. The conference committee has asked Google and others to share our thoughts on integrating FOSS methodologies into "traditional" CS curriculum. Leslie is on a panel on this topic on Wednesday March 4th, and I will be talking about Google Summer of Code on Friday March 6th.

From Chattanooga Leslie goes directly to our nation's capital, Washington DC, to speak at DrupalCon on Friday March 6th. The conference, "*the* event for Drupal developers", runs March 4th - 7th. The latest word is that it's sold out, so if you haven't registered yet, you'll need to check the website for news on ticket exchange and the waiting list.

Last but not least, Chris DiBona will be speaking at OSBC, Open Source Business Conference, coming to San Francisco, CA, March 24th and 25th.

Google Blog Converters 1.0 Released

Cat Allman — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:12:00 +0000

By J.J. Lueck, Data Liberation Front

Blog authors around the world, Google would like to remind you that it's your blog, your data. Now that Blogger allows users the ability to export all contents of their blog, the Data Liberation team would like to announce the Google Blog Converters project. This new Open Source project provides the ability to easily move blog posts and comments from service to service. This initial release provides Python libraries and runnable scripts that convert between the export formats of Blogger, LiveJournal, MovableType, and WordPress.

In addition, the source code includes templates for hosting these conversions on Google App Engine. Future additions to the project will include support for BlogML and synchronization tools between various services that do not provide a import/export feature but do provide APIs for accessing and modifying blog contents.

We're excited to provide this level of control for your personal blog data. Contributions to the project are always welcomed and encouraged, so check out our source code (download, 2.7 MB zipped) and let us know what you think. We look forward to your feedback in our discussion group.

C++ Mocking Made Easy

Cat Allman — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 01:29:00 +0000

Post by Zhanyong Wan, Software Engineer - Engineering Productivity Team

Since we open-sourced the Google C++ Testing Framework in July 2008, many people have asked us when we will release a mocking framework to go with it. You asked, we listened; today we released the Google C++ Mocking Framework under the New BSD License. It is inspired by popular Java mocking frameworks like jMock and EasyMock, and works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. More details are on the Google Testing Blog. As usual, we are eager to hear from you, so please share your thoughts with us on the Google Mock Discussion Group!

Serious Geeking Going on in Oxford Over Online Publishing

Cat Allman — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:36:00 +0000

By J-P Stacey, OxfordGeeks

On Wednesday 22 October, over a hundred geeks attended the ninth Oxford Geek Night, upstairs at the Jericho Tavern. After the musical theme of the previous OGN, this one had a distinct flavour of online publishing.

Jeremy Ruston of BT Osmosoft demonstrated TiddlyWiki (an open-source wiki application that works offline) and revealed its offshoot Project Cecily, a prototype ZUI (Zooming User Interface). Adrian Hon of Six to Start then explained the ideas and tech behind We Tell Stories, a complex Django-based site of interactive fiction, built for publishers Penguin UK.

Continuing the Django-ish theme, Rami Chowdhury discussed WSGI—the server/application web standard—in one of the more technical microslot talks (five minutes each, from local volunteers). In another, David Sheldon took us through the steps required to hack a CurrentCost electricity meter, to get at the regular XML packets it emits from a serial port.

In the microslot sessions we also covered moving your business mail to Google Mail, protection—or otherwise—against socially engineered virus vectors, and how to use an interlocking stack of Python, Ruby on Rails and Java to crawl the web for comparisons of mobile-phone tariffs. We also had a short talk from the Oxfordshire branch of the British Computing Society about their forthcoming IT-industry events.

As usual, the evening was rounded off by a book raffle, this time courtesy of Pearson Education. Many of the night’s talks—especially the keynotes and the microslot on antivirus protection—had generated heated debate among the geeks in the room, and this carried on for some time after proceedings had officially finished.

The Oxford Geek Nights are free events, thanks to Torchbox and the Google open-source team. But even the generosity of our sponsors couldn’t prevent the upstairs bar staff from tapping their watches, as we all headed downstairs into the main room of the pub to continue arguing.

Mixxx’s Google Summer of Code 2008 Roundup Report

Cat Allman — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:00:00 +0000

By Albert Santoni, Mixxx Project

Google Summer of Code 2008 has been a great opportunity to bring fresh new talent into the Mixxx development team. For those not familiar with Mixxx, it's software that allows DJs to create live beatmixes. This year, Mixxx was supported by four students, each with a new project to help improve some aspect of Mixxx. As this was our second Summer of Code, we helped plan our students' projects better this year, which led to our students producing more maintainable code with clear paths for integration into our trunk.

Zach Elko worked on session saving and crash recovery. Session saving allows a DJ to save various aspects of Mixxx's state (such as the knob positions) for easy recall later. Early on in his project, Zach realized that a good starting point for a crash recovery system would be to allow Mixxx sessions to be saved and restored. His project's focus was shifted towards creating a rock solid session saving system, and Zach has made significant inroads toward this goal.

Russell Ryan rewrote Mixxx's waveform viewer widget. The waveform viewer widget renders a song's waveform in realtime and scrolls through it as playback proceeds. It also allows a user to seek through a song by dragging the widget. Russell's new waveform widget provides improved performance, better modularity, and is much more extensible than our previous widget. The new waveform viewer was merged into trunk in late July and was featured in our recent 1.6.0 final release.

Tom Care worked on improving Mixxx's support for hardware MIDI controllers, which are popular with DJs. MIDI controllers are hardware control devices that mimic the look and feel of real DJ mixers, and can make mixing much easier. Tom's work has yielded an easy MIDI binding interface so DJs can use any MIDI device with Mixxx, as well as overall improvements to the structure and modularity of our MIDI code.

And finally, Wesley Stessens continued his project to add Shoutcasting capabilities, which he began earlier in the year. Shoutcast support allows DJs to broadcast their mixes live through internet radio stations. Unfortunately, due to personal circumstances Wesley had to leave GSoC at the midterm. We're hopeful that he will rejoin our development team in the future.

By the end of August, the three remaining projects were in good shape. The two projects which haven't yet been merged into trunk have time-lines for being merged, and we're pleased with the outcome of these projects. We'd like to thank Google for their gracious support through Summer of Code this year. It's been a fantastic experience for us, and we're happy that we were able to introduce some students to open source development.

plop: Probabilistic Learning of Programs

Cat Allman — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:00:00 +0000

By Moshe Looks, Google Research

Cross-posted with the Google Research blog

Traditional machine learning systems work with relatively flat, uniform data representations, such as feature vectors, time-series, and probabilistic context-free grammars. However, reality often presents us with data which are best understood in terms of relations, types, hierarchies, and complex functional forms. The best representational scheme we computer scientists have for coping with this sort of complexity is computer programs. Yet there are comparatively few machine learning methods that operate on programmatic representations, due to the extreme combinatorial explosions involved and the semantic complexities of programs.

The plop project, launched early Monday, November 10th, is unusual in addressing these issues directly - its long-goals are quite ambitious! Plop is being implemented in Common Lisp, an equally unusual programming language that is uniquely suited to constructing and transforming complex programmatic representations.

C++ Standards Meeting Finalizes Feature-Complete Draft Standard

Cat Allman — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:39:00 +0000

By Matt Austern and Lawrence Crowl, Google

In late September, Google hosted the 44th meeting of the ISO C++ Standards Committee in San Francisco, California. Approximately 50 members from seven countries met six days non-stop to nail down details of the new standard.

The new standard, "C++0x", will be a major upgrade to the language—the first major upgrade since C++ first became an International Standard in 1998. It will include support for concurrent programming, better abstraction power and efficiency, simpler programming, enhanced functional programming, upgraded generic programming, optional garbage collection, significant new library components (including TR1), and many other additions and cleanups. C++0x will still be recognizably the same language as today's C++, and it will be almost 100% compatible, but working programmers will find the new standard a much improved tool for serious application development.

All of the features in C++0x have been on the table for years, but this meeting was the one when the committee finally voted to commit to them. Among the long-awaited features added at this meeting were user-defined literals, symbol attributes, simplified iteration with Python-like for loops, library thread safety, and improved generic programming with "concepts".

This was an unusually busy meeting, and it achieved a major milestone: this is the meeting where the committee voted to advance the draft standard to Committee Draft. Or, in less bureaucratic language, we've shipped our beta. The language is now feature complete. The committee will still fix some bugs before the final version is officially released in 2010, and some features might get tweaked or even dropped, but you shouldn't expect major changes. Interested programmers can try the partial g++ implementation.

SWIG’s First Google Summer of Code

Cat Allman — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:44:00 +0000

By William Fulton, SWIG administrator

SWIG is a programmers tool for semi-automating the calls to C or C++ code from almost any other programming language. The idea is to feed C/C++ header files into SWIG and SWIG then generates the 'glue' code so that your C/C++ library can be used from another language such as Python, Java, C#, Ruby, Perl etc. In fact there are implementations for supporting over 20 different of these target languages. The participating students have had a productive summer and have extended the number of languages and features supported in SWIG's first Google Summer of Code™.

Haoyu Bai has added support for the upcoming Python 3 release. Python is the most popular target language amongst SWIG users and no doubt this addition will be much appreciated by those who are thinking of upgrading to Python 3. Also Haoyu has provided new Python 3 features which make coding faster and simpler when using Python extension code. The main features added are function annotations, buffer interfaces and abstract base classes and are outlined in more detail here: Python 3 Support.

Jan Jezabek has added a new 'language' module providing Windows Component Object Model (COM) support. This new module makes it possible for any COM enabled language to easily call into C or C++ libraries. The COM module in SWIG is more powerful than most as it ultimately provides support for more than one language as there are numerous languages that can call into COM libraries. Compiled languages such as Visual Basic and scripting languages, such as JScript, VBA and VBScript that can run on the Windows Scripting Host are probably the most popular to benefit. A great use will be the ease of making C/C++ libraries available in applications supporting the various Basic dialects, such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. SWIG makes it easy to utilise more advanced C++ code, such as templates, and the COM module is no different here as Jan has added in very comprehensive coverage of the C and C++ languages, full details here: SWIG COM Module.

Maciej Drwal has added a module for calling C++ code from C code. It is now possible to automatically create a flattened API of C++ classes so that the C++ functionality is available in the form of easy to use C structs and global functions. For example, features such as C++ template classes / functions are easily callable from C. One cool part of this project is the graceful handling of C++ exceptions in the calling C code. Some introductory documentation is available here: SWIG C Module.

Cheryl Foil has added an interesting feature to improve code documentation in the target language. This works when C/C++ code is documented using the industry standard Doxygen tool for annotating methods, classes, variables etc. The new feature extracts the Doxygen comments from the code for use by one of the many target languages. Cheryl has added initial support for Java so that the Doxygen comments are turned into JavaDoc comments embedded into the generated Java wrappers, see Doxygen support in SWIG for details.

Lastly, a great big thanks to the other mentors involved in making this happen, Ian Appru, Olly Betts, and Richard Boulton and finally to Google for funding a great programme.

OpenCog and GSoC

Cat Allman — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:19:00 +0000

By Ben Goertzel, PhD, Director of Research, SIAI

This summer OpenCog was chosen by Google to participate in the Google Summer of Code™ project: Google funded 11 students from around the world to work under the supervision of experienced mentors associated with the OpenCog project, and the associated OpenBiomind project.

OpenCog is a large AI software project with hugely ambitious goals (you can't get much more ambitious than "creating powerful AI at the human level and beyond") and a lot of "moving parts" -- and the most successful OpenCog GSoC projects seemed to be the ones that successfully split off "summer sized chunks" from the whole project, which were meaningful and important in themselves, and yet also formed part of the larger OpenCog endeavor ... moving toward greater and greater general intelligence.

Many of the GSoC projects were outstanding but perhaps the most dramatically successful (in my own personal view) was Filip Maric's project (mentored by Predrag Janicic) which involved pioneering an entirely new approach to natural language parsing technology. The core parsing algorithm of the link parser, a popular open-source English parser (that is used within OpenCog's RelEx language processing subsystem), was replaced with a novel parsing algorithm based on a Boolean satisfaction solver: and the good news is, it actually works ... getting the best parses of a sentence faster than the old, standard parsing algorithm; and, most importantly, providing excellent avenues for future integration of NL parsing with semantic analysis and other aspects of language-utilizing AI systems. This work was very successful but needs a couple more months effort to be fully wrapped up and Filip, after a brief break, has resumed working on it recently and will continue throughout November and December.

Cesar Maracondes, working with Joel Pitt, made a lot of progress on porting the code of the Probabilistic Logic Networks (PLN) probabilistic reasoning system from a proprietary codebase to the open-source OpenCog codebase, resolving numerous software design issues along the way. This work was very important as PLN is a key aspect of OpenCog's long-term AI plans. Along the way Cesar helped with porting OpenCog to MacOS.

There were also two extremely successful projects involving OpenBiomind, a sister project to OpenCog:

* Bhavesh Sanghvi (working with Murilo Queiroz) designed and implemented a Java user interface to the OpenBiomind bioinformatics toolkit, an important step which should greatly increase the appeal of the toolkit within the biological community (not all biologists are willing to use command-line tools, no matter how powerful)
* Paul Cao (working with Lucio Coelho) implemented a new machine learning technique within OpenBiomind, in which recursive feature selection is combined with OpenBiomind's novel "model ensemble based important features analysis." The empirical results on real bio datasets seem good. This is novel scientific research embodied in working open-source code, and should be a real asset to scientists doing biological data analysis.

And the list goes on and on: in this short post I can't come close to doing justice to all that was done, but please see our site for more details!

All in all, we are very grateful to Google for creating the GSoC program and including us in it. Thanks to Google, and most of all to the students and mentors involved.

Nmap’s Fourth GSoC: Success Stories and Lessons Learned

Cat Allman — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:30:00 +0000

By Gordon "Fyodor" Lyon, author of the Nmap Project and GSoC Mentor

The Nmap Security Scanner Project was honored to participate in our fourth Google Summer of Code(tm)! The pencils-down date was two months ago, but so much code was produced that we're just now finishing the integration process. I finally have time to reflect on these last four years, what GSoC has brought us, and the lessons it has taught us.

In 2005 (detailed writeup), 70% (7 out of 10) students succeeded, and they tackled some wonderful projects! This year we begin work on our new Zenmap GUI (then named Umit), Ncat network communication utility, and 2nd generation OS detection system. Doug Hoyte first made major contributions that summer, and continues helping to this day. I was the mentor for all 10 students, and I had them all send me patches rather than providing SVN access. Nmap didn't even have a public SVN tree back then.

In 2006 (full writeup), I had a better idea of what works and what doesn't and was able to improve the success rate to 80% (8 out of 10). Perhaps the most exciting project was the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE), which has become one of Nmap's most compelling features. It allows users to write (and share) simple scripts to automate a wide variety of networking tasks. We also finished and integrated the 2nd generation OS detection system, and Zenmap (Umit) continued to improve. I again mentored the students myself without providing SVN access.

In 2007 (full writeup), our success rate grew again to 83% (5 of 6)! I attribute part of the success to me being less of a control freak. For example, I took only 4 students compared to 10 the previous year. The remaining two 2006 students were mentored by Diman Todorov, who created NSE as a 2006 SoC student. I also made the Nmap SVN server public and provided commit access to the students. This year we formally integrated Zenmap into the Nmap build system and packages, making massive improvements along the way. This Summer also introduced David Fifield to the Nmap project and was the first SoC for Kris Katterjohn. Both of them have been prolific developers ever since then.

Enough with the history—let's take a look at our 2008 results! I'm happy to report that we had an 86% (6 out of 7) success rate. In other words, our success rate has increased every single year! I like to credit improved processes and interaction based on what we've learned before, but it also helps that we invite the best students back in later years. We've never had a 2nd year (or more) student fail. This year we expanded to three mentors, all of whom (except for me) were former SoC students. Now let's look in detail at our 2008 SoC accomplishments:

Vladimir Mitrovic spent the summer improving the Zenmap GUI, under David Fifield's expert mentorship. They made huge usability and stability improvements, but the pinnacle of their summer achievement was clearly the scan aggregation and topology features! Scan aggregation allows you to conduct multiple scans at different times and add them seamlessly to your existing results. Topology draws a beautiful interactive diagram like this of the discovered network:

Jurand Nogiec also worked with David on Zenmap, and was responsible for many key UI improvements which now seem obvious in hindsight. For example, he added a cancel button for aborting a scan in progress without clearing the Nmap output, and he added context-sensitive help to the many dozens of options in the Profile Editor. He also made numerous improvements to the command entry field for people who like to type Nmap command directly, while still benefiting from Zenmap's visual and searchable presentation of results.

Patrick Donnelly made substantial NSE infrastructure improvements. He added mutex support and an NSE Standard Library, fixed some serious bugs, and rewrote and optimized a substantial amount of code (particularly the nse_init system). But his crowning accomplishment was the NSEDoc system, which uses special comments and variables in script and library code to generate a comprehensive documentation portal.

Kris Katterjohn, who already had hundreds of useful Nmap patches to his name, returned for 2008 to write hundreds more! There is no way I can list everything he did here, particularly as his contributions ranged all over the map from writing NSE libraries (such as the username/password module and the standardized communication library) to improving Windows support (adding IPv6 and OpenSSL). His biggest project has been finishing up Ncat, our advanced Netcat replacement (which began as a 2005 SoC project by Chris Gibson). Ncat is now integrated with Nmap in our latest SVN revision.

Michael Pattrick was David's third student, and he accomplished a wide variety of tasks. For example, he created a new OSAssist application for testing and integrating the thousands of Nmap OS detection submissions sent in by Nmap users all over the world. With OSAssist, integration is more accurate and much less tedious. Michael also built two prototypes (one in Perl and then another in C++) for an Ndiff application which compares two or more scan output files and prints out any changes. The prototypes proved so popular that David wrote a final version in Python which is now integrated with Nmap in our latest SVN revision.

Philip Pickering spent the summer working on NSE scripts and libraries. We've already incorporated his libraries for binary data manipulation, DNS queries, Base64 encoding, SNMP, POP3, and cryptographic hashes. We've also incorporated several scripts he wrote utilizing these new libraries.

In addition to these core Nmap projects, 5 students were sponsored to work on the UMIT Nmap GUI (now a separate project led by Adriano Marques). Four of their five students passed, as described here.

Please join me in congratulating all these students for their excellent work! I'm particularly pleased that many of the SoC students have continued contributing even though the summer has ended. I'm looking forward to GSoC 2009 (assuming it is held again and they invite us), but 2008 will be a tough year to top!

GitTogether ’08

Cat Allman — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:06:00 +0000

By Shawn Pearce, Google Open Source Programs Office and Git contributor

Last week Google played host to the first Git developer conference at its Mountain View headquarters. The 3-day conference was well attended, with almost 25 major contributors and users coming out to discuss the past and future of the Git distributed version control system.

Several major topics were presented, leading to some highly interesting new topics starting on the Git mailing list. A true Git library is now being planned, to provide native bindings into scripting languages such as Perl and Python. Major user interface improvements to git send-email and the overall user experience were also introduced and are well under way. A Google Tech Talk, Contributing With Git, was also given by Johannes Schindelin, and is now available to the public on YouTube.

More details about the sessions, including slides and notes, are available on the git wiki.

A big thanks to Google for supporting open source projects by offering meeting space for the conference attendees.

SciFoo: 200 of the World’s Top Scientists Meet at Google’s Annual Meeting of Really, Really Smart People

Cat Allman — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:30:00 +0000

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

Organized in collaboration with Nature Publishing Group and O’Reilly Media (“FOO” stands for “Friends of O’Reilly”), and hosted at the Googleplex, the third annual Science Foo Camp (SciFoo) unconference boasts no predefined agenda. Rather, participants are invited to propose their session topics on a giant white board, in various time slots with eight sessions running concurrently.

Most academic conferences are highly specialized and attended time and again by the same people. Here, to promote fruitful cross-pollination, participants hail from dozens of science and technology disciplines, from biology and astrophysics to CS and nano-technology. Attendance is invitation only; in the interest of mixing things up, many of the 200+ participants are not invited twice. “SciFoo allows people at different institutions and from different disciplines to interact with each other,” says Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona, who spearheads SciFoo. “It gives them a rare chance to talk freely with each other in a private setting.”

This year, the conference was attended by Eric, Sergey, Larry Page, and Larry Brilliant of Google.org, along with a bevy of Google organizers and volunteers. The list of "campers" boasted four Nobel Prize winners (Sydney Brenner, Walter Gilbert, Andy Fire, and Frank Wilczek) and a laundry list of champions in the scientific community. Here are just a few: George Dyson (scientific historian), Brian Cox (physics popularizer, spokesman at CERN), Aubrey de Grey (biomedical gerontologist who studies "living young longer"), Eugenie Scott (director, National Center for Science Education), Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ (astromer at the Vatican), Neal Stephenson (science fiction writer), Nick Bostrom (transhumanist philosopher), Dan Tani (NASA astronaut, who has spent 131 days in space), Steward Brand (creator of The Whole Earth Catalog), Jill Bolte Taylor (neuroanatomist, author of the recent bestseller My Stroke of Insight [see TED talk]), notable theoretical physicists Lord Martin Rees (England's Astronomer Royal), Max Tegmark, Paul Davies, Lee Smolin, and renown oceanographer Sylvia Earle. To give the conference some umph, rocket scientist Carl Dietrich brought along a model of his Terrafugia "roadable aircraft," also known as a flying car, and Ian Wright parked his X1 all electric performance car, capable of 0-60 MPH in 3.07 seconds, by the dining tent.

Certain themes recurred. One was the need to do a better job of open sourcing data within the science community, including negative results; such sharing would enable collaboration and prevent scientists from "reinventing the wheel." A number of seminars also addressed the more quotidian concerns of studying science, from navigating office politics in academia to finding ways of making the discipline more exciting to young people. Many talks were also informed by specific social and humanitarian concerns, such as how Google can help detect emerging global pandemics, how genomic testing can help people prevent diseases, and, in a nutshell, what we can all do to ensure the long-term survival of the human race.

“A scientifically literate world is one that’s good for everyone,” DiBona says, summarizing the intent behind the conference. “People who are better educated will better understand what's possible on the Internet. As Googlers, I think it's incumbent on us to try to support basic science research and education around the world."

You can learn more about SciFoo by checking out the blog buzz and news coverage aggregated at Nature.com.

Heading to the 8th Jornadas de Software Libre?

Cat Allman — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:03:00 +0000

By Mario Bonilla, Site Reliability Engineering Team

The 8th edition of the "Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre", a.k.a. JRSL, will happen on this August 20, 21 and 22, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The JRSL is a Free/Open Source conference that has been held alternately in Argentina and Uruguay since the year 2000, and both the quality of its agenda and the number of its participants define the JRSL as one of the most important events of the region. This year the conference is organized by CaFeLUG (the Capital Federal GNU/Linux User Group), usuaria (the Argentinian Association of Telecommunication and Computer Users) and the University of Belgrano, which is hosting the conference.

Google's Open Source Team will be sponsoring, and I will participate giving a talk about Google and Open Source. The event will also have other important guests, for a total of 80 speakers and 120 sessions.

The conference is conveniently scheduled after the end of the Debconf 8 , which will happen in Mar del Plata, Argentina, and is not too far from Buenos Aires. If you plan to go to the Debconf, or if you just happen to be around Buenos Aires between August 20 and August 22, just remember to register and participate in the JRSL too. I hope to see you there!

London Open Source Jam 9

Cat Allman — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:25:00 +0000

Post by Neil Dunn, Software Engineering Team

For the past 2 years, every two or three months, at the Google London Engineering offices, on a Thursday, around 6:30pm, something happens.

That something is the London Open Source Jam!

OS Jam is a free for all, open to anyone, geek night where open source hackers get together to discuss a topic close to their hearts. Last week we hosted the 10^th event. The topic was Performance and Scalability. The pizza was hot, the beer was cold and the 5 minute lightning talks came thick and fast.

Here's a summary of the talks:

David Beaumont - What's in an API? - David talked about Java's CharSequence and Appendable APIs and use cases that can kill application performance. His takeaway message - Sometimes the standard APIs just don't fit. It's ok to roll your own.
Tim Cox - Scalability in an ad serving system - Tim discussed the iterations his team went through when building a fault tolerant ad serving system. He concluded that sometimes scalability comes at the cost of precision.
Zoe Slattery - Profiling PHP and Java with open source tools - Zoe discussed the tools she used to compare a PHP and Java implementation of Apache Lucene: XDebug for PHP and Eclipse TPTP for Java.
Douglas Squirrel - 5 minutes of monitoring - The second in a fantastic series of mega lists. Everything Douglas' company monitors and why they do it.
Manik Surtani - Publishing internal benchmarks? - Manik discussed the performance benchmarking framework he has built for JBoss Cache and put a question to the audience: Would it be useful if he published the benchmark results?
John Ripley - Building software for small devices - John asks, can it be done on a small device? Decoding MP3s? Watching MPEG videos? Playing Doom? Will it blend? Yes it can. As long as you know the platform.
Ade Oshineye - Beyond REST - 3 million HTTP requests for 6 thousand photos? Ade weighed in on the issues of RESTful architectures and suggested a few alternatives such as XMPP, the hanging GET, the never ending resource and HTTP callbacks.
Simon Stewart - Perfomant Selenium tests - Don't write them! - Simon says you could you use Selenium RC or Selenium Grid, or maybe HTTP unit, or maybe you could write smaller, faster unit tests instead.
Jonathan Chetwyn - Visual metaphors for missing images and static vs. dynamic content - Jonathan brought some questions to the table from his work on openicon.org
Darren Hobbs - Caches! - Rip out all the caches and fix your architecture instead!

If you're near the London area and want to hear about future Open Source Jam Events, join our Google Group or monitor the feed on the OSJam page.

Rock on OS Jam!

Ed. Note: Updated post to correct spacing.

A Gaggle of Googlers Are Going to OSCON Next Week

Cat Allman — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:00:00 +0000

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

The Annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON ) is returning to Portland, Oregon, USA next week from July 21-25, and like swallows to Capistrano, Googlers will be there in force.

Between speakers, tutorial instructors, demo-ers of cool stuff in our booth, #116, and attendees, we expect to have upwards of 25 Googlers in attendance. Sessions with our speakers and instructors include:

On MONDAY, July 21st
PHP Extension Writing, Marcus Boerger, and Practical Test-driven Development, Josh McAdams.

On TUESDAY, July 22nd
An Open Source Startup in Three Hours, Gavin Doughtie, Porting to Python 3.0, Anthony Baxter, and People for Geeks, a panel including Brian Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman, plus Tuesday evening is the annual Google O’Reilly Open Source Awards.

On WEDNESDAY, July 23rd
Subversion Worst Practices, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, Code Reviews for Fun and Profit, Alex Martelli, An Open Source Project Called 'Failure', a panel with Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, Google XML Pages (GXP), Laurence Gonsalves and Harry Heymann, and The Google Open Source Update, Chris DiBona and Leslie Hawthorn.

On THURSDAY, July 24th
PLUTO: PL/SQL Unit Testing for Oracle, Josh McAdams, General Lightning Talks, lead by Anthony Baxter, Do You Believe in the Users?, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, CSS for High Performance JavaScript UI, Gavin Doughtie, Even Faster Web Sites, Steve Souders, and (The Lack of) Design Patterns in Python, Joe Gregorio.

On FRIDAY, July 25th
Open Source and Standards, Joe Gregorio

If you have questions about Google and Open Source, come on down. Hope to see you there.

2008 New Zealand Open Source Awards

Cat Allman — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:43:00 +0000

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

The deadline for nominations for the 2008 New Zealand Open Source Awards is coming up fast. You have until July 18th GMT (remember the International Dateline!) to submit a nomination, either for an individual Kiwi for their contribution to a project or Open Source in general, or for a New Zealand organization for "exemplary use of open source". The award categories are:

- Open Source Contributor
- Open Source Software Project
- Open Source Use in Government
- Open Source Use in Business
- Open Source Use in Education
- Open Source Use in Infrastructure
- Open Source Use for Community Organizations

Google's Open Source Team is a proud sponsor of the 2008 New Zealand Open Source Awards, and we're excited to ask all of you join in the quest to find the best Kiwi Open Sourcerers. The nominees must all be New Zealanders or New Zealand organizations, but you don't have to be a Kiwi to put in a nomination. The organizers of the awards specifically encourage you to interpret "open source" in its widest sense (i.e. it need not refer to specific licenses), but will generally be taken to mean a technological system where open collaboration and innovation prevails, so be as creative as you like.

EclipseDay at the Googleplex

Cat Allman — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:25:00 +0000

By Robert Konigsberg, Software Engineering Team and Eclipse Enthusiast

What did you do to celebrate the release of Eclipse Ganymede? We celebrated by opening the Googleplex to the public and hosting EclipseDay, a free half-day conference!

(Ganymede is the code name for this year's release of software from the Eclipse Foundation, based around the 3.4 platform.)

I appreciated that the speakers were experts in their respective domains. Their presentations were polished and solid. The sessions covered a wide variety of Eclipse projects; including CDT, Mylyn, Equinox, OSGI, ATF and ECF; one about becoming a wicked plug-in developer; and two Google products that rely heavily on the Eclipse platform: Android and the Google Web Toolkit. The keynote, given by Michael Galpin, taught us how eBay has made Eclipse an integral and critical part of their development process.

I must specifically acknowledge one presenter, Mustafa Isik (he's my former Google intern!) He, along with Scott Lewis, gave one of the best presentations of the day: "Wiring Hacker Synapses: Collaborative Coding and Team Tooling in Eclipse." If you missed the presentation, you can check out Mustafa's popular code sharing screencast. My intern's all grown up! (*sniff*)

Any good trip to Google includes lots of yummy snacks and beverages. This visit was no exception!

Thanks to our speakers and guests, particularly Ian Skerrett and the Eclipse Foundation. Congratulations on releasing Ganymede!

Another Busy "While" for Open Source Googlers

Cat Allman — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:45:00 +0000

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

With a tip of the hat to Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, it's a busy "while" for the Open Source Team here at Google.

Leslie Hawthorn is in Durban, South Africa, speaking at the Third OpenMRS Implementers Meeting, 17-20 June 2008. The meeting is being held in conjunction with HISA 2008, the annual conference of the South African Health Informatics Association. OpenMRS is a community developed, Open Source, enterprise electronic medical record system framework, specifically intended to help those actively building and managing health systems in the developing world, where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria afflict the lives of millions. If you are interested in Open Source health informatics and/or health care in developing parts of the world, take a look at the project.

Yesterday our office in Mountain View CA hosted the Creative Commons Technology Summit. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that builds tools that help realize the full potential of the commons in the age of digital networks. Their first technology summit brought together many parties interested in making sure "Copyright 2.0" facilitates rather than hinders innovation and the open web. The summit included an update and overview of Creative Commons technologies, panels featuring other leaders in open digital rights technologies, and a look at the future, including the role of digital copyright registries (and similar animals). Check out the online coverage, and stay tuned for the video of the event, which we will post soon.

Also this week, the GCC Developers Summit, sponsored in part by Google, returned to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada for a 3 day "meeting of the minds" by the core development team behind the GNU Compiler Collection. Several Googlers presented; Vinodha Ramasamy spoke on Feedback Directed Optimization using Synthetic Edge Profiles from Hardware Event Sampling, Ian Lance Taylor gave a talk about A New ELF Linker, and Diego Novillo gave a tutorial on Tuples - A new data structure and API for GIMPLE.

Next week we are hosting another conclave in Mountain View, California, USA; Eclipse Day will be held on June 24. This half day event for developers is a chance to learn about different Eclipse projects and related technologies. Googlers speaking include Sergey Prigogin on What's New in CDT Ganymede , Bruce Johnson on Tools Make the Difference: GWT in Eclipse, and Xavier Ducrohet on Android's Eclipse Toolset . Unfortunately / fortunately, the event is completely full, and registration including the waiting list is closed, so if you are not already registered you can't join us, but watch for reports on the event later next week.

Also next week, USENIX Annual Technical Conference will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Googler David Presotto is chairing the Short Paper Session at this venerable but always tasty technical conference.

It's shaping up to be a busy summer... :)

Ed. Note: Post updated to fix formatting.

AOP 2008: Free and Open Source in Finland

Cat Allman — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:01:00 +0000

By Tero Kuusela, Turuxi-vastaava, Linux-Aktivaattori ry

Turuxi is the local Free and Open Source user group in the general area of Turku, Finland. We function as a working group of a nationwide non-profit organization Linux-Aktivaattori ry (in Finnish).

As one of the most active FOSS groups in Finland, Turuxi's mailing list now has 56 subscribers. Our monthly meetings are regularly attended by 6-15 people depending on the topic. The topics cover a wide range of FOSS-related -- and unrelated -- stuff.

Perhaps the most visible part of Turuxi's activity has been event-organizing. After our first event -- a local gathering to celebrate Debian's 10th birthday -- soon after the group was founded, we've been organizing several small events. And since 2003, we have also held yearly a larger event called "Avoimien ohjelmien päivä" (AOP for short). The name can be roughly translated as "Open Source Software Day", but in Finnish it's also a play on words about free and open attendance.

The theme of this year's AOP (in Finnish) was "FOSS in professional use". The schedule was built around four presentations (some of the links in Finnish only):

Arto Teräs introduced the many faces of Linux from mobile devices to supercomputers (slides available in english)

Asmo Koskinen gave a presentation about the Edubuntu project

Teemu Välimäki explained the economical and ethical benefits of FOSS to businesses

Tommi Virtanen discussed developing for embedded Linux

In addition, there were lightning talks about various topics. And of course the 11 booths, where people from various Finnish community and business groups had many interesting discussions with our visitors and each other.

We had secured a very nice place for the event -- the common ICT-building of 3 universities of Turku. We were thus hoping for a good student attendance, but unfortunately we got a murky day with some sleet which crushed those dreams. Most of our about 60 visitors ended up being FOSS users from other cities around Finland and not many fresh faces from Turku had decided to battle the weather.

Google supported AOP 2008 as our first ever international sponsor. Our visitors were clearly glad of the fact, since the nice handouts sent by Google ended up being the most coveted in the event. They even sent something special for female visitors, since this year's event coincided with the International Women's Day :)

We were pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm Google's Open Source team showed to support our small group's modest event. Encouraged by this experience, we're looking forward to making AOP 2009 even better -- with hopefully even stronger involvement from our new friends at Google.

Open Source Googlers at Large

Cat Allman — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:34:00 +0000

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

There is lots going on in May, starting this week with Connectathon in San Jose, California, USA from Thursday, May 8th through Thursday, May 15th. Samba guy Jeremy Allison will be taking part Monday - Thursday in this network proving ground which allows vendors to test their interoperability solutions, with special emphasis on NFS and Internet protocols.

On Wednesday, May 14th BSDCan, an annual gathering of 4.4BSD based operating systems developers, kicks off in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada with two days of tutorials, followed by 2 days of talks, including one by our own Leslie Hawthorn on Google Summer of Code™, currently under way for it's fourth year.

The Summer of Code goodness doesn't stop there: other past GSoCers also speaking include past mentors Poul-Henning Kamp speaking on "Measured (almost) does Air Traffic Control", and Pawel Jakub Dawidek on the ZFS file system. Past student participant Constantine A. Murenin will be speaking on the past and present history of OpenBSD's hardware sensors framework, and Ivan Voras will be present on "finstall" - the new FreeBSD installer he's began working on as a Summer of Code project in 2007.

It shouldn't be too hard to find members of the Open Source Team if you're in San Jose or Ottawa over the next few days. Stop by, introduce yourself and let us know what's on your mind.

Ed. note: updated post with corrected typo.

Happy Hacking, Real-Time

Cat Allman — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:39:00 +0000

Posted By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Team for Matthias Stuermer, Hackontest Coordinator

You might have read the recent Hackontest announcement on Slashdot. We've received a great response, and already 25 open source projects and 50 feature requests are registered.

Nevertheless, we'd like to present briefly the idea behind this new kind of Open Source competition sponsored by Google: starting from now, Open Source communities may register their project on the Hackontest platform. Then developers, as well as users of the software may file feature requests, like adding new functionality, all of which could be implemented during the Hackontest event. These features may be already planned within the roadmap for future releases or they may be completely new ideas for the project. In order to select the most wanted enhancements, features may be rated by registered visitors, or they can add comments to the proposals, e.g. for pointing out the feature is already completed within the development branch.

Subsequently, developers are sought who are willing to implement the features at the Hackontest event. Therefore it's very important that a project submission is not only done by an individual but that it's supported by the community at large. To get invited to the Hackontest event, the level of community support counts. The Hackontest jury will review the number of feature requests, their ranking level and of course the number of signed-up implementers in order to decide which projects and which developers are going to participate in the Hackontest competition.

The jury selects the teams on August 1st, 2008, giving time for everyone to plan vacation and book flights to Zurich, where the hacking goes uninterrupted September 24-25, 2008. However, the Hackontest platform will still be open during this time; new feature ideas as well as rankings and comments can still be submitted shortly before the event starts. The jury will decide which feature(s) the project teams have to implement, which is a great way to keep eager developers from being tempted to do some work beforehand.

Inside a famous etoy.TANK located at OpenExpo 2008 Zurich, the selected Hackontest teams will gather for a 24 hours coding marathon. Of course the teams will be served well with food and drinks and also have the possibility to relax and sleep inside the container - thus contrary to rumors there won't be any dead hackers inside a sarcophagus ;)

During the Hackontest event, visitors of OpenExpo receive the unique chance to see in real-time how open source software is developed and how enthusiastically developers collaborate with each other and their virtual communities. Best yet, it's not only the three participating hackers within the container who make the projects happen; through their internet connections each can draw on the development power of their entire community in order to win the cash prizes. In the end, the jury will evaluate the produced source code and grant awards to the winners. All the participating developers then have the chance to stay some more days in Zurich, relax and do some sightseeing in Switzerland if desired.

Check out the Hackontest site and register your Open Source project as would-be participant or to suggest enhancements to your favorite projects!

Report on International Free Software Forum (fisl 2008)

Cat Allman — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:07:00 +0000

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

Our own Fernanda Weiden, Systems Administrator, Load Balancer Jedi, Network Sniffer, and all around Free and Open Source Software Champion, was kind enough to send us her thoughts on fisl 2008, the premier Brazilian Free and Open Source Software conference. fisl 2008 was held last week in Porto Alegre.

Last Saturday was the last day of a three day conference in Brazil called International Free Software Forum (or fisl, as it is called by its closer friends). Google participated as a sponsor, and I participated by helping to organize Google's participation and, personally, helping the Program Committee, which I am member of.

I believe numbers say a lot about such an event, so let's check them: more than 7400 people, more than 400 speakers, 21 countries, 258 sessions. The conference center was always full, the sessions as well. During my Google Summer of Code&trade talk (the only session I managed to attend), more than a half of the audience were new to the conference, which is great news. The community is receiving new blood, which is something really important to us, and something we have been working for a while to get. The time when a Free Software/Open Source conference was full of old friends is gone. We are upstream, everywhere, with everybody!

The conference had no delays for the sessions, there were problems to follow the conference over the internet in the first day, but the problem got solved, and we had more than 20 thousand unique IPs connecting to the "Free Software TV" (TV Software Livre) to follow fisl. It was great to meet so many Summer of Coders and I shared the microphone with them during my talk. The room was full and I got lots of questions. People gave me good feedback about it later on (even though we had so many problems to get the projector to....project!).

Besides the 257 sessions of the main schedule, there was a Programming Arena, a competition that challenges the participants to solve bugs in existing Free/Open Source Software projects, and also develop new software that will be useful for the community. The final challenge was to build an ODF reader for Maemo, software used in mobile platforms. The code will be published soon, and the hackers got geek gadgets (mobile phones and Internet Tablets) from the Nokia Institute of Technology as prize.

"May the source be with you....and you...and you...". This was the message you could see everywhere, which means people loved our swag! Google distributed many t-shirts to the people participating at the conference, as well as very nice mugs, and an impossible-to-count number of stickers.

For the next year, there is already plan for a Kernel Development and Smalltalk miniconfs. The idea is now to get all this energy and motivation focused on development.

One of the things that makes me like this conference so much is the fact that it is fully organized by volunteers, me being one of them. A team that decreases in number every year, but a team who really keeps up with the work of making the largest and best Free Software conference I've ever been to. The conference is already over, but all I can think about is "what are we going to do next year?". I still can feel the energy. fisl 10, for 10 thousand. That's how it will be :)

Many thanks to Fernanda for sharing her experiences with us!

A Recent Conference Roundup

Cat Allman — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 01:10:00 +0000

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

It's been a busy couple of weeks for the Open Source team as the first phase of "Conference Season" starts heating up. We have reports on three events from Googler participants.

Our very own Brian "Fitz" Fitzpatrick writes:

Flourish 2008: Open Source Helping Students to Flourish

If you've ever flown cross-country or around the planet to attend a conference, I'm sure you'll agree that nothing beats going to a conference in your own backyard. So I'm sure you can understand how delighted I was when my colleague, Ben Collins-Sussman and I were invited to give a keynote at the Flourish 2008 conference last week in our fair city, Chicago. It was a great conference, and the most amazing part is that it is an entirely student-run conference. Thanks for having us, Flourish.

I also attended ApacheCon Amsterdam where I gave a talk as part of the business and community track, in addition to co-moderating the ApacheCon Lightning Talks, which I started several years ago.

Other Googlers at ApacheCon EU included Chris DiBona, Greg Stein, and John Hjelmstad, Cassie Doll and Dan Peterson who together lead a BoF on Apache Shindig.

Last but not least, LugRadio LIVE USA was held for the first time in San Francisco last weekend, showcasing all things Free and Open Source. An enthusiastic crowd of approximately 350 enjoyed 2 days of talks, exhibits and cheerful verbal mayhem from the 4 blokes who bring you the LugRadio podcasts, aided and abetted by Google in the form of Leslie Hawthorn, Kynan Dent and yours truly, plus a bunch of stalwart volunteers. It was an old school FOSS community event with lots of surprises. Can you tell a good time was had by all? :)

Concurrency Summit

Cat Allman — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:39:00 +0000

By Allison Randal, O'Reilly Media

Early in March, Google's Open Source Team hosted a one-day concurrency summit organized by O'Reilly Media. The participants represented a broad spectrum of interests and perspectives, from fast-paced startups, to academic researchers, to hardware companies with unique offerings in concurrent hardware or hardware acceleration for concurrent software, to large software companies looking to concurrency for the next generation of radical technology advances. The discussion ran fast and furious, over a variety of topics: the implications of increasingly concurrent hardware and software for power consumption, whether locks should be considered harmful, solutions for testing concurrent code, the obstacle of legacy code in moving toward concurrent implementations, REST as a model of distributed concurrency, the benefits and limits of mathematic formalism in concurrency, and how to train the next generation of programmers for concurrent development so they can solve the next generation of concurrent problems. Much positive attention went to concurrency models based on components/boundaries and message passing. Energy demands and economics, rather than improved performance, were generally agreed to be the driving factors behind the current trend toward massively multicore machines. All-in-all it was an incredibly valuable day. My main take-away is that we're still in the very early days for concurrency research and development. There was a time when people talked about artificial intelligence, but now we talk about genetic algorithms, neural networks, symbolic learning, fuzzy systems, certainty factors, and a host of other topics related to or inspired by early research in artificial intelligence. Concurrency has a similar path ahead, where we stop thinking and talking about it as a monolithic solution, and start treating it as a general field full of rich and diverse solutions to practical problems.

Introducing libkml: a library for reading, writing, and manipulating KML

Cat Allman — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:41:00 +0000

By Michael Weiss-Malik, KML Product Manager

KML has seen tremendous uptake as a GIS data presentation language, in large part due to its simplicity. The ability to quickly and easily read or write small bits of KML by hand helps newcomers to rapidly experiment with the language and learn it. That said, the most interesting and sophisticated KML documents generally aren't created by hand... instead, authors tend to write computer programs to generate data-driven KML en masse. Programmers are often forced to roll custom KML-generating code for each such project. Likewise, mapping application developers have traditionally been tasked with writing one-off KML parsers if they want to read in and visualize KML data.

Both KML authors and consumers should therefore be pleased hear about today's version 0.1 "preview" release of libkml: Google's open-source reference library for reading, writing, and manipulating KML. Our hope is that libkml will reduce the need for everyone to re-invent the wheel with a custom parser or serializer, by providing a single re-usable library that implements KML's semantics. This first release is focused primarily on the low-level details of the KML DOM itself, but it's our intent to enhance the library in the future by implementing more sophisticated operations like style resolution and balloon text templating. If you don't know what these are, I encourage you to check out Google Code's KML documentation.

Our initial release covers parsing and serializing of all elements in KML 2.2, which is currently pending acceptance by the Open Geospatial Consortium as an OGC standard. It's a C++ library that compiles and runs on multiple platforms, so C++ is the most direct way to call into it. If C++ isn't your thing, the library's build system can also generate (through SWIG) wrappers/bindings for Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby. Since the whole thing is released under a BSD license, you have complete flexibility in how you use our code and/or integrate it into other projects. Do note that we're labeling this a "preview" release on purpose: you should expect changes.

I encourage you to download and play with the library -- it includes several example programs that are worth the price of admission in and of themselves. And keep an eye out in the coming months, because this first release is just the beginning!

Wellington Girl Geek Dinners

Cat Allman — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:40:00 +0000

By Brenda Wallace, Catalyst IT and Geek Girl at Large

Wellington, New Zealand's first Girl Geek Dinner was held last week on the 12th of March 2008 and was a giant ball of fun and tech. Held at the Long Xiang restaurant on Dixon street, more than 50 Girl Geeks gathered to hear guest speaker "lightning talks" about a variety of geeky passions from customer usability and comic book design to Agile methodology and busting sales myths.

Originally started in London, these dinners are quickly becoming popular all over the world. Girl geek dinners are an opportunity for like-minded 'girls' to talk about technology over good food and to learn from some of their best fellow girl-geeks in Wellington. Attendees are usually geeks by profession such as software engineers, computer scientists, database experts, engineers and the like but anyone is welcome to attend as it's primary objective is socialise and network.

The organisers were surprised at the response the first dinner has received. All of the tickets were sold out in only 3 days, showing the demand in Wellington for such an event. Guys can also attend girl geek dinners provided they are invited by one of the women attending.

The lightning speakers were:
Sale Coe - Usability Believer
Sandy Mamoli - DBA and Project Manager.
Jo Hubris - Web-famous Wellingtonista blogger.
Sarah Lewis - Tech sales ninja.
Brenda Leeuwenberg - Digital Media-ite.
Amber Craig - Solutions Magician and Gaming Geek.
Heather Buchanan - Comic book geek, artist, and creator.

Much food and drink was consumed, new friends made and many hundreds of business cards changed hands. Everyone who attended last week's event left with swag bags containing a variety of goodies from tech companies and local businesses, including gifts from Google's Open Source Team, one of the sponsors of the dinners.

Girl Geek dinners are to be held quarterly in Wellington, with the next event to be held in August. Visit our website to learn more about attending or speaking at an upcoming dinner. becoming a sponsor or guest speaker for this event. You can also take a look at photos from the latest dinner.

Open Source Team Heads East

Cat Allman — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:52:00 +0000

Post by Cat Allman, Open Source Team

If you've ever wanted to hear what we on the Open Source team have to say "live and in person", you will get a chance next week at DrupalCon Boston '08. This twice annual conclave of Drupal developers is being held at the Boston Convention and Expo Center, March 3rd - 6th. Our fearless leader, Chris DiBona, is giving the keynote; "Open Source is Magic". Geek herder extraordinaire, Leslie Hawthorn will be speaking about Google Summer Of Code 2008, and the results of GHOP, the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. Come on down!

There will also be Googlers 2 weeks later in Chicago at PyCon. Guido van Rossum is giving the opening Plenary Keynote on March 14th, "Python 3000 And You", and our Brian 'Fitz' Fitzpatrick will be also be giving a keynote later in the conference. There will be a number of us in attendance - please say hi.

We hope to see you there!

Google’s Open Source Team Hosts Collective Intelligence Foo Camp

Cat Allman — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:40:00 +0000

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Team

When I asked Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist and UC Berkeley professor for his elevator definition of "collective intelligence", he replied, "People and computers collaborating." In conjunction with our colleagues at O'Reilly Media, this provocatively broad expanse of ideas brought together nearly 100 industry and research professionals for 2 days of wild and woolly conversation last week at the Googleplex in Mountain View. This was the kind of event where the visual aids used in sessions ranged from white-boards full of equations that describe adaptive market analysis technology to video clips showing the collective behavior of ant colonies.

At several points the participants were too busy talking to each other to go to - or end - sessions, which is the mark of a hugely successful conference in my book. Some of my personal favorite sessions were "Leveraging the Picky - getting users to clean data" lead by Coda Hale and Brian Donovan, "Legality of Prediction Markets" lead by Tom Bell, "Design Space for CI - (yin-yang, point-counterpoint)" lead by Hal Varian, and "Summing Collective Ignorance: Finding experts and avoiding the madness of crowds " lead by Greg Linds.

In short, lots of dynamic connections forged, interesting thoughts shared, and some laughs besides. You can learn more about the conference content at O'Reilly Radar.