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Google Summer of Code: Applications Now Open for Mentoring Organizations

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Looking for new contributors and fresh perspectives for your open source software project? Through the Google Summer of Code™ program, we fund students worldwide to work with mentors from the FLOSS community on a three month coding project. Over the past five years, we've successfully paired nearly 3,400 students "with more than 3,000 mentors from backgrounds spanning industry to academia, with some spectacular results: more than 8 million lines of source code produced and over $20M in funding in support of open source development. We're particularly excited by the social ties our students form through the course of the program. We've connected people in more than 100 countries, and hope to bring people from even more places into the Google Summer of Code community this year. We're looking forward to our sixth year and welcoming another group of 1,000 student developers to the program.

We're now accepting applications from open source projects who wish to act as mentoring organizations. We'll be taking mentoring organization applications until Friday, March 12th at 23:00 UTC. Our list of approved organizations will be published on the 2010 Google Summer of Code site on March 18th. Interested students will then have several days to discuss their ideas with the accepted organizations before student applications open on March 29th.

Check out our Frequently Asked Questions page for more details and a preview of the application. And remember, if you have any questions, you can always find us in the Google Summer of Code Discussion group or in #gsoc on Freenode. Best of luck to all of our applicants!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

The 2009 Semantic Robot Vision Challenge

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:49:00 +0000

The Semantic Robot Vision Challenge (SRVC) is a robot scavenger hunt competition that is designed to push the state of the art in image understanding and automatic acquisition of knowledge from large unstructured databases of images (such as those generally found on the web). In this competition, fully autonomous robots receive a text list of objects that they are to find. They use the web to automatically find image examples of those objects in order to learn visual models. These visual models are then used to identify the objects in the robot's cameras.

The lastest SRVC was hosted at the International Symposium for Visual Computing (ISVC) in Las Vegas Nevada from Nov 31 to Dec 2, 2009. Five individual teams competed this year and hree of the teams brought robots and participated in both the robot and software league. The other two teams participated only in the software league.

The arena was set up with four chairs, three round tables, two tables with drawers, and a small set of stairs for displaying objects. All of the furniture had at least one object for the robots to discover on it, but not all of the objects in the environment were on the list of items for the robots to find.

The crowd was very interested in watching the different robots moving around the environment during their runs. Unfortunately, the robot teams themselves were plagued with various hardware and software integration troubles and only one team was able to find any objects. However, the robot teams that did not perform well demonstrated that their software was very capable of doing the work in a stand-alone mode. The visual classification results from the software league were very impressive.

The official list of objects consisted of:

pumpkin
orange
red ping pong paddle
white soccer ball
laptop
dinosaur
bottle
toy car
frying pan
book "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter
book "Fugitive from the Cubicle Police"
book "Photoshop in a Nutshell"
CD "And Winter Came" by Enya
CD "The Essential Collection" by Karl Jenkins and Adiemus
DVD "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" widescreen
game "Call of Duty 4" box
toy Domo-kun
Lay's Classic Potato Chips
Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Baked Snack Crackers
Pepperidge Farm Milano Distinctive Cookies

Objects 5-9 were part of a list of generic objects that were given in advance to the teams. This was in a response to a suggestion from previous years to allow the teams a chance to try to build classifiers that would be capable of recognizing a generic class of objects rather than a very specific one. You can find a full analysis of the results on the SRVC site.

The US Naval Academy entered a robot based on a iRobot Create platform which used a Hokuyo URG LIDAR for navigation and a camera mounted on a mast for ddetecting the objects. This robot was by far the least expensive of the competitors but was still capable of carrying a laptop as well as the other hardware. However, under this load, the robot rapidly drained its batteries but was still able to capture a few images of objects and label them correctly.

Kansas State University entered with a robot based on a MobileRobots Inc. Pioneer 3 platform. They also had a Hokuyo URG LIDAR for navigation and a camera on a mast used for identifying the objects in the environment. This robot was able to traverse most of the environment successfully. Unfortunately, the robot was not able to aim its camera at enough objects to get a chance to correctly identify them.

The University of British Columbia (UBC) robot had by far the most complex setup of all of the robot competitors. They used a MobileRobots Inc. Powerbot that carried four laptops, multiple cameras--including a monocular PowerShot Canon camera, and a Pt. Grey Bumblebee2 stereo camera, and multiple LIDARs both for navigation and object extraction. The team demonstrated several impressive non-scored runs both before and after the event. However, during their officially scored event, the process that ran the primary object detection camera failed and so they were unable to identify any objects.

For more detailed descriptions of the robots, the software, and the computer vision techniques used by these teams, please refer to the team presentations. Each team's workshop presentation has been posted to that page. Links to their source code will also be posted.

As this contest continues to grow and evolve, the organizers are quite pleased by the progress of the computer vision research that is being demonstrated at these events. This was shown quite handily by the very high scores in the software-only league. However, the organizers would also like to remind the community that this is a robotics competition and thus want to see advances in active vision techniques, intelligent mapping and exploration, and reasoning about where objects are likely to be found (e.g. the "semantics" of the objects). In previous years, most of the robotics competitors took a random-walk approach to exploring the environment where they would hope to cover all of the space and get enough images to see the objects in question. However, the organizers this year were quite pleased to see the previous reigning champions from the University of British Columbia take the robotic exploration aspect of the competition to the next level. The organizers would like to take the time to highlight some of the significant aspects of the UBC team's approach to how to control their robot.

The UBC team approached the contest in two distinct phases: a mapping phase, and an object identification phase. The strategy of UBC this year was first to navigate the environment and map it using the SICK LIDAR and a SLAM algorithm (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). Then the robot would revisit the obstacles in the room and scan them with the Hokuyo LIDAR. Flat horizontal surfaces would be detected in the scans from detection of a few consistent surface normals and a verification stage of the hypothesis of a planar surface. The regions that point out of the plane are interpreted as objects, and 3D bounding are computed from their convex hull (see figure below). This gives a set of candidate locations for the objects. The robot then would revisit these locations to take snapshots and run its object recognition algorithms on these snapshots. Three object recognition methods were implemented, SIFT matching, Contour matching, Deformable Parts Models (DPM). A fourth one using spherical harmonics to recognize 3D data was turned off because it was not quite ready. The DPM approach was trained on the objects known in advance, but could not be used for internet images as it was slightly too slow for that even though it had been rewritten in C.

The organizers were very impressed by the fact that the robot would first identify the specific locations where objects should be found, e.g. the tops of tables and chairs, and then go back and use the 3D sensors to explicitly segment out the locations of the objects to find them. This is exactly the kind of active robotics vision research that we feel will help to push forward the state of the art in real-time computer vision on physical robots and we hope to see more of this kind of approach on future competitors.

To sum up, the research being performed by the teams interested in this competition is extremely impressive. The teams are definitely rising to the challenge put forth by the organizers. Congratulations to all that participated!

By Paul E. Rybski, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University & Daniel DeMenthon, Johns Hopkins University

Merry Music: MusicBrainz’s Latest Summit and 10th Anniversary

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:17:00 +0000

The yearly MusicBrainz summit serves an important function in building our community: we talk about issues facing MusicBrainz and we plan the road map for MusicBrainz projects. The summits are usually scheduled to allow as many people to attend as possible and this year we chose Nürnberg, Germany as our location. MusicBrainz contributor Nikolai "Pronik" Prokoschenko lives in Nürnberg and was our local contract and ended up planning most of the summit.

Pronik found us a conference room that we rented for the entire day, complete with open WiFi, which is important if you plan to have a room full of geeks. He also found us a cheap Gasthof that provided lodgings slightly better than a Hostel for a mere 20€ per person per night — a really good deal for Europe. The evening before the summit we all sat in the Gasthof and were treated to some confusing German/Greek cuisine with some of the most rude service any of us have ever encountered. But, our group is used to dealing with the crude Internet public, so we managed to laugh off the horrible service and still have a great time.

To our luck there was a grocery store right next door to our Gasthof and we commenced another successful crowd sourced breakfast. Four people were each given 20€ with the instructions to buy food/drinks that they would like to eat/drink for breakfast/lunch. No collusion was allowed between people! Once the shopping was complete we walked to the conference room, settled in and dove into the masses of food we'd collected. Many tasty bread rolls with jam, nutella, cold cuts and cheese were consumed. Of course we had fun things like a case of Bionade, juices, tea, gummy bears and chocolate. Crowd sourcing breakfast takes a potentially frustrating chore and makes it fun for everyone.

Plus, Pronik and his mate Kira brought a MusicBrainz decorated cake to celebrate 10 years of MusicBrainz!

As people were eating, we started to collect an unconference-like agenda of what people wanted to talk about. We decided to have a detailed state of the project talk including recent developments from meeting our customers in Europe. We also talked about current development processes and some of the problems associated with these processes. Oliver Charles, a 2008 Google Summer of Code™ student, gave an introduction on how to hack on the MusicBrainz server, based on his work from the last year.

Most of the time was spent discussing new features for once we release our much anticipated Next Generation Schema. At times we managed to get into deep philosophical discussions about what MusicBrainz is and what it should be. At other times we discussed light hearted topics with lots of joking. These summits do wonders for building our community and getting people on the same page. We manage to explore many topics and reach consensus on many points in one day instead of spending weeks on the same discussions online.

Finally, in the evening we cleaned up our space and retired to a local beer hall where we continued the discussion in a less formal manner. If you're interested, we posted all the session notes from the summit on our wiki. All in all, this event was fun and not much effort to put on — thanks to Pronik! On another happy note, 1/3 of the people in attendance were women, which is much better than most tech summits I've attended.

In total we spent about $1500, including all the food, drinks, lodgings and one person's travel costs. For a summit with 12 people, I think we did rather well! I call that Google's support well spent — thanks again for supporting MusicBrainz, Google!

By Robert Kaye, Executive Director, Metabrainz Foundation

London Open Source Jam 15

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:49:00 +0000

On the 3rd of December we held the latest (and greatest) Google London Open Source Jam at our offices near Victoria. The Jam is a way to get like-minded Open Source contributors and users together and give them a chance to give a 5 minute talk on something dear to their hearts, all the while availing themselves of free beer and pizza!

This time's topic was the somewhat catchall: "the Web." Like always, the topic is more of a guide than a rule, so we had some pretty diverse talks.

Our very own Jon Skeet set the evening off to a good start by telling us all about Noda Time — a new Open Source library for handling dates and times in .NET, based on the Joda Time library for Java.

Simon Phillips on Google Wave

Simon Phillips is a consultant to the film business and gave a great presentation on how he uses Google Wave to help him work closely with directors, script writers, set designers and the like. He showed some great ideas for using Wave in this way and was canvassing for help in developing Open Source Wave robots to help this process.

Simon Stewart gave a rallying cry for making the web more accessible to the blind and deaf, especially in this modern era of HTML canvas and video tags. By ensuring your sites are accessible, you open them up to more users, and as a useful side effect you also make them more testable.

HTTP has started to show its age, and maybe it's time for a leaner, meaner protocol to come along. I took a brief break from my hosting duties to present a summary of SPDY, a chromium.org project to develop a replacement protocol which will deliver data to our browsers faster.

Glyn Wintle Gets Comfortable

If you run a web site, you may have come to fear the "Slashdot effect" where you are linked from a popular website and get a spike of traffic. Glyn Wintle from the Open Rights Group (ORG) informed us that this is nothing compared to having a bunch of knitting forums link to you! His was a tale of Open Sourcing of knitting patterns and DMCA take-down notices. He also brought us up to speed on the latest from the ORG.

Sam Mbale gave us an update on his work bringing open source to Africa and told us all about BarCamp Lusaka which he'll be attending. We look forward to hearing how it went at another Jam.

Robert Rees gave us an experience report on using Velocity templates to divide responsibilities between engineers and web designers. It seems to work pretty well; contracts are enforced by unit tests, and designers know exactly what primitives they can use when laying out web pages.

Matt Savage on RESTful Acceptance Tests

Finally, Matt Savage talked about his ideas for RESTful acceptance tests, and Steven Goodwin gave us an update on his project to build a "Wallace and Gromit" house.

You can find more pictures of the event on Picasa Web Albums. To find out more about the Google London Open Source Jam, visit http://osjam.appspot.com/. If you'd like to receive regular updates about future jams, sign up for our mailing list. We hope to see you at future jams!

By Matt Godbolt, Software Engineering Team

Rocking the Grid: The Globus Alliance’s Second Google Summer of Code

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:20:00 +0000

The Globus Alliance is a community of organizations and individuals developing fundamental technologies behind the "Grid," which lets people share computing power, databases, instruments, and other on-line tools securely across corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy. We first participated in Google Summer of Code™ in 2008 and we found the experience extremely productive both for the Globus Alliance and the individual mentors, so we wanted to confirm the value of the program for the students who took part. We contacted our eight students from last year to find out what impact Google Summer of Code had on their lives and careers. While many of our students still remembered the experience fondly, and said it was valued highly by prospective employers, there were two students who had particularly remarkable stories.

AliEn Grid Site Dynamic Deployment and Working at CERN

Last year, Artem Harutyunyan, mentored by Tim Freeman, developed a set of scripts on top of Globus Nimbus to dynamically deploy an entire AliEn Grid site (AliEn is the Grid infrastructure which is used by scientists participating in the ALICE experiment at CERN). His collaboration with the CERN and Globus Nimbus folks went beyond his Google Summer of Code work, and resulted in a new framework, called CernVM Co-Pilot, for execution of 'pilot' Grid jobs on cloud resources. His work is currently used in production to run Grid jobs from CERN'S ALICE experiment, and there are plans to extend it for the execution of ATLAS and LHCb jobs. Artem also co-authored two papers on his work: "Dynamic AliEn Grid Sites on Nimbus with CernVM" was presented at the 17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2009) in Prague, and "Building a Volunteer Cloud", which includes a description of CernVM Co-Pilot, was presented during the Latin American Conference on High Performance Computing in Mérida, Venezuela.

Holder-of-Key Single Sign-On

Joana M. F. Trindade, mentored by Tom Scavo, spent last summer implementing a Holder-of-Key Single Sign-On profile handler for the Shibboleth Identity Provider in Globus GridShib. And, since then, things have just been getting better for her. Thanks to her outstanding summer work, she was offered an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at UIUC, where she worked on researching fault injection in virtual machines with Professor Ravi Iyer. After six months in that position, Joana was offered admission into the masters program at UIUC, where she is currently working with Professor Marianne Winslett. More importantly, Joana tells us that participating in Google Summer of Code gave her a renewed sense of confidence in her research abilities, having previously thought that her academic background was insufficient to gain admission into a top-tier university in the US. Joana tells us that "After Google Summer of Code, I regained that hope, and I must say I'm really happy to have found a topic in Globus to which I could contribute, and that in turn opened so many doors for me."

Congratulations Artem and Joana for all you have achieved!

Lessons Learned

Our first Google Summer of Code last year also had its fair share of challenges, including two students who didn't make it through the program, but it gave us the opportunity to learn a lot about how to mentor and manage summer students. We were fortunate to be selected again this year as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization, which allowed us to apply everything we learned. First of all, we required students to provide more information about their background and the project they were proposing. Last year our student application form was essentially a blank form saying "Tell us about your project here," so this year we presented prospective students with more specific questions. We also decided to check in with our students more often which, at least in one case, allowed us to identify a problem between a student and a mentor early on, giving us time to deal with it constructively before the midterm.

In the end, applying what we learned during last year's Google Summer of Code and as well as the Mentor Summit had a noticeable effect. We were fortunate to be given ten students to mentor, and all ten students passed. Furthermore, our mentors report that practically all the code written by the students has either already been released or will be released soon. In fact, overall, we felt that this year's students rocked. Here's a summary of their summer work.

Going Beyond a Single Cluster

The Globus Nimbus cloud toolkit allows you to turn your cluster into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. However, it was mainly geared towards managing a single cluster. Not any more! Adam Bishop, mentored by Ian Gable, worked hard over the summer to add new components enabling multiple cluster support for Nimbus. He developed a series of production-quality plugins, which have already been committed to the Nimbus source repository, that publish the state of Nimbus cluster back to a Globus MDS Registry. This allows the availability of cloud resources across multiple Nimbus clusters to be gathered together into a single registry, which is the first step towards adding cross-cluster support to Nimbus.

Spilling Over Multiple Clusters

Another student, Jan-Philip Gehrcke, mentored by Kate Keahey, also spent the summer with his head in the clouds, but in a good way: he developed the Clobi project, a job scheduling system supporting virtual machines (VMs) in multiple IaaS clouds, with support for Globus Nimbus and Amazon EC2 clouds. In a nutshell, there are many scientific applications that are typically run as "jobs" on a compute cluster. Jan-Philip's project allows these jobs to be submitted to a cloud instead of to a traditional compute cluster. The most interesting use case is when a site operates a Globus Nimbus cloud and, during peaks in demand for computational capacity, extends its capacity momentarily by spilling the jobs over to a second (or third, or fourth, ...) cloud such as Amazon EC2. Although Clobi is not tied to any particular application (its design is generic and should be useful whenever it’s convenient to distribute jobs across different clouds), the motivating application for Clobi is ATLAS Computing (for the LHC's ATLAS experiment at CERN). In fact, by the end of the summer, Jan-Philip was able to run a common ATLAS Computing application (the so-called “full chain”) successfully with Clobi. If you want more details about Clobi, check out this blog post written by Jan-Philip.

Incremental GridFTP Transfers

Enough about clouds, let's move on to the exciting topic of data. Globus GridFTP is a high-performance, secure, reliable data transfer protocol that is pretty good at moving data. Fast. Of course, there's always someone who wants to go even faster, like Checksummed GridFTP Transfers

Remember Mattias Lidman? We certainly do. In last year's Google Summer of Code, he developed a compression driver for the Globus XIO input/output library (which GridFTP depends on) to compress/uncompress data as it passes through it. However, although moving data faster is all good and well, it's not worth much if it somehow gets corrupted in-flight. So this year, Mattias, mentored by Joseph Bester, continued to work on Globus XIO and developed a Checksum Driver. Mattias's driver checksums GridFTP data streams allowing both ends of a GridFTP transfer to verify the integrity of the data.

CQL Queries Builder

You know one really cool thing grids are used for? Cancer research. The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG®, is an information network enabling all constituencies in the cancer community – researchers, physicians, and patients – to share data and knowledge. caGrid is the underlying service-oriented infrastructure that supports caBIG, and it relies heavily on the Globus Toolkit. Some of the data services in this architecture use a query language called CQL that is, well... complicated. To make life easier for scientists, Monika Machunik, mentored by Wei Tan, wrote a plug-in for Taverna (an open source tool used by scientists to design and execute workflows) for constructing CQL queries, allowing scientists to focus on their work rather than on the intricacies of the CQL language.

GridWay-Google Maps Mashup

Grids require coordinating resources across multiple organizations, and the Globus GridWay meta-scheduler is a great tool to do just that. However, coordinating hundreds or even thousands of machines across dozens of sites can get a bit messy using the console-based tools included with GridWay. Carlos Martín, mentored by Alejandro Lorca, tackled this problem by creating an interactive GridWay-Google Maps mashup, allowing the administrators and users of a GridWay installation to get a quick snapshot of the status of multiple sites and the jobs running in them, as shown in this screenshot:

Carlos used the Google Web Toolkit to develop this application, which is totally decoupled from GridWay, making it easy to install it alongside existing installations of GridWay. In fact, you can download the GridWay+Google Maps application and check out its documentation, including more screenshots, at the application's page on the GridWay site.

GridWay GUI

Srinivasan Natarajan, mentored by Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti, worked on a more administration-oriented GUI for GridWay, allowing users to compose, manage and control their jobs instead of using the command line interface. This GUI includes a host of other features, such as host and user monitoring, filtering account statistics and execution history information, and support for processing DAGMan workflows, including visualizing dependencies between jobs in the workflow.

Both of the GridWay projects were presented in several sessions, including one on nuclear fusion, at the EGEE'09 conference in Barcelona, Spain back in September.

GridFTP Benchmarking

How about we get back to the subject of data management? The recent addition of UDT (UDP Data Transfer) support to GridFTP has made even faster transfer speeds possible. You guessed it: here's another student who couldn't resist the need for speed this summer. Jamie Schwettmann, mentored by Raj Kettimuthu, sought to characterize the performance of GridFTP over 10Gb/s networks, specifically to measure the speed increase given by UDT as compared to TCP transfers, as well as a number of other considerations such as CPU and memory overhead at both ends of the transfer. In doing so, they decided to develop an automated GridFTP benchmarking and throughput optimization utility called globus-transfer-test, which takes URL pairs from a list or on the command line, and allows for varying input parameters such as parallelism level, transfer type (memory-to-memory, disk-to-disk, etc), TCP Buffer Sizes, MTU sizes, and all other standard globus-url-copy options (except multicasting) and when possible, compares with other performance and throughput utilities such as iperf or scp. Designed for general use by users or administrators as well as to carry out our performance characterization, globus-transfer-test aims to provide enough information to optimize GridFTP options for maximizing throughput between grid sites. This common need has allowed collaboration with many other projects and organizations in the course of development and testing, including the US ATLAS Project, TeraGrid, and OSCER. Jamie even presented a poster on her project at the 2009 Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium.

AJAX Framework for Globus Web Services

Many of the components in Globus are web services, which are not exactly human-readable creatures. Fugang Wang, mentored by Tom Howe, developed a JavaScript API that enables accessing Globus services from a web client using AJAX. Fugang's framework, which includes a backend service that mediates service requests to the Globus toolkit and an AJAX web client to access this services, makes life easier for Globus developers and users by allowing them to interact with Globus services from the comfort of their web browsers.

Secure Cloud Communications

And we'll end with the ever-popular subject of data management. Melissa Weaver, mentored by John Bresnahan, developed a PSK driver for Globus XIO. She first developed a program that, using OpenSSL libraries to encrypt and decrypt data using a stream or block cipher of the user's choice, allowed her to experiment with different lengths of keys and initialization vectors and different file sizes to make performance measurements. Then, she developed the XIO PSK driver itself, which used the results of the first program to implement an RC2 block cipher to ensure any communication between computers, once a connection has been set up, is secure.

High energy physics experiments at CERN! Cancer research! Nuclear fusion! Cloud computing! Fast data transfers! Oh my! Oodles of congratulations to our mentors and students for all their hard work and for making this such an awesome Google Summer of Code for the Globus Alliance!

By Borja Sotomayor, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago and Google Summer of Code Organization Administrator

Introducing namebench

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:08:00 +0000

Slow DNS servers can make for a terrible web browsing experience, but knowing which one to use isn't easy. namebench is a new open source tool that helps to take the guess-work out of the DNS server selection process. namebench benchmarks available DNS services and provides a personalized comparison to show you which name servers perform the best. As a System Administrator at Google, I was curious about measuring how BGP route selection affected the performance of Google Public DNS. This curiosity resulted in writing a small benchmarking script, which was further developed during my 20% time to become a full-featured application for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

namebench is covered by the Apache 2.0 license, and was made possible by using several other great open-source tools including Python, Tkinter, PyObjC, dnspython, jinja2 and graphy. It also makes use of the Google Chart API to visualize the results:

In order to provide the most relevant results, namebench employs a number of interesting techniques. First, it personalizes the benchmark by making use of your browser history to see what hosts to benchmark with. It also determines cache-sharing relationships between different IP's and removes the slowest of these servers to avoid improperly benchmarking them solely on cached results. namebench will also report on DNS misbehavior such as DNS hijacking and censorship.

namebench 1.0 is available for download now. If you would like to discuss or have any questions namebench, please join the namebench mailing list. Happy hacking!

By Thomas Strömberg, Hardware Operations Team

TalkBack: An Open Source Screenreader For Android

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:11:00 +0000

Earlier this year, we blogged about project Eyes-Free — a collection of Android applications that enable efficient eyes-free interaction with your mobile phone. Since then, one of the questions we have received most often is about a complete access API to enable general purpose adaptive technologies such as screenreaders.

We are happy to announce the first version of such an API as part of the latest Android release (Donut). This new API is now available within the Android 1.6 SDK , and we welcome developer feedback. The Android Access framework generates android.view.accessibility.AccessibilityEvent in response to user interaction events; the event payload contains additional details about the event, e.g., the user interface control that received focus. This access framework enables the creation of general purpose screenreading applications that make all of Android's user interface, as well as native Android applications built with standard Android widgets usable without looking at the screen.

You can see this API in use within our Open Source Android screenreader TalkBack. With TalkBack installed, standard Android user interface elements such as ListView produce spoken feedback during user interaction. Applications SoundBack (for producing non-spoken auditory feedback) and KickBack (for producing haptic feedback) generate additional augmentative output and demonstrate how multiple access applications can be active simultaneously.

in response to user interaction events; the event payload contains additional details about the event, e.g., the user interface control that received focus. This access framework enables the creation of general purpose screenreading applications that make all of Android's user interface, as well as native Android applications built with standard Android widgets usable without looking at the screen.

What This Means For Developers

If you are interested in developing innovative access solutions on Android and have been eagerly waiting for our access APIs, the Donut SDK contains what you have been waiting for — including a set of free voices for English (US and UK), French, Italian, German and Spanish. You can use TalkBack, SoundBack and KickBack as a starting point for designing your own access innovations.

If you are an Android developer interested in making your applications more widely usable, you can use TalkBack and friends to quickly verify whether your applications remain usable when not looking at the screen. In this context, here are a few coding tips to ensure that your applications work out of the box with these tools:

Ensure that all visually drawn UI controls have meaningful textual labels.
Ensure that users can navigate to all controls in your application using the trackball.
Ensure that navigating controls in your application with the trackball results in a meaningful traversal order.

What This Means For End Users

End-users of Android 1.6 (Donut) can enable TalkBack, SoundBack and KickBack via the Accessibility section of the Settings menu. You need to do this only once i.e., once enabled, these access applications remain active across restarts. Note that depending on your Android device, you may need to install these applications from the Android Market; we will post videos that demonstrate step-by-step instructions for specific Android devices in the Eyes-Free channel on YouTube.

Providing Feedback

We (T. V. Raman, Charles L Chen, and Svetoslav Ganov) will be continuously improving the underlying APIs and access tools, and we look forward to your questions and feedback on the Android Developers Group.

By Charles Chen and Svetoslav Ganov, Software Engineering Team and T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

Boldly Talking Python in Boulder

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:02:00 +0000

On Saturday, October 10, the Front Range Pythoneers had a Python "unconference" at the Google facilities in Boulder, Colorado, USA. An "Unconference" is a conference organized around the principles ofopen space technologies, which tries to provide many of the benefits of traditional conferences without the associated ceremony. We still got to enjoy some delicious pizza, though.

Introducing the Pycon Boulder Attendees to Principles of Open Space

Photo Credit: Matt Boersma

It was unseasonably snowy and cold Saturday morning, but in spite of the weather, almost everybody that signed up in advance was there, along with a few last-minute registrants. We had nearly 40 attendees join us for 15+ sessions, plus the always loved "hallway track." Many thanks to the three Googlers who came out to shepherd our group and facilitate the meeting.

You can find more information about the event and sessions on our wiki, Tweets about the event and this great post-conference write up. You can also check out some more photos of the participants and our scheduling process. We discussed the following topics, among others:

Intro to Python
ctypes tips & tricks
Python extensions
matplotlib
Web development frameworks, including Django
Database access
Concurrency & pre-emptive multithreading
Event-based/actor development (e.g., Twisted & Kamaelia)
Cooperative multithreading (stackless/greenlets)
pyprocessing
Game development with Pyglet/OpenGL
Jython
RPC using Twisted/Foolscap
Desktop Application Development (PyQT/QT, wxWidgets, GTK)
IPython
Google's office decoration contest, "Pimp My Cube"

The best surprise of the event? Bruce Eckel, the author of Thinking in Java, was among the participants. Thanks again to Google for hosting the unconference; it worked really well for our purposes. The Google Boulder facility is gorgeous.

By Greg Holling, Front Range Pythoneers

Fighting Bad Memories: The Stressful Application Test

Leslie Hawthorn — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:40:00 +0000

We've just released Stressful Application Test (or stressapptest), a hardware test used here at Google to test a large number of components in a machine. The test tries to maximize random traffic to memory from processor and disks with the intent of creating a realistic high load situation. The source code is available under the Apache license.

stressapptest may be used for various purposes:

Stress test for machines.

Hardware qualification and debugging.

Memory interface test.

Disk testing.

The stressapptest team (from left to right): Matthew Blecker, John Huang, Raphael Menderico, Nick Sanders, John Hawley and James Vera

Photo credit: Taral Joglekar

stressapptest is a user space test, primarily composed of threads doing memory copies and direct I/O disk read/write. Since many hardware issues reproduce infrequently, or only under corner cases, the idea behind the test is that by maximizing bus and memory traffic, the number of transactions is increased, and therefore the probability of failing a transaction is increased. It loads the memory with specially-designed patterns that cause the signal lines to rapidly switch between 1 and 0, drawing the maximum amount of power and cause maximal noise on the nearby voltage rails. Noise on voltage rails and coupling with other nearby lines is likely to cause signaling problems on marginal lines. Also, given a probability of any signal level transition failing, these patterns have the most memory transitions per period of time, and are thus more likely to exhibit a failure.

This test was designed to test all memory available on a machine, which is not guaranteed with the execution of a CPU-intensive application (for instance, compiling the kernel on multiple threads). Moreover, it is focused on testing the memory interface and connections, not the memory internally, like memtest86. As a consequence, Stressful Application Test will detect errors not detected by regular memory tests or extended executions. A comparison with some other memory reliability tests showed that about 20% of the DIMM-related failures detected on the machines tested were only detected by Stressful Application Test, and it was capable of reporting 70% of all DIMM errors detected by all tests.

We hope this software will be useful to system administrators who need to diagnose and repair DIMM or other components. We look forward to your questions and feedback in our discussion group. Happy hacking and may your testing be less stressful!

By Raphael Menderico, Software Engineering in Test Intern, Platforms Team

Testing Race Conditions in Java

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:02:00 +0000

Can you spot the bug in the following piece of Java code?

/** Maintains a list of names. */
public class NameManager {
  private List names = new ArrayList();
  /** Stores a new list of names. This method is threadsafe. */
  public void setNames(List newNames) {
    synchronized (names) {
      names = new ArrayList();
      for (String name : newNames) {
        names.add(name);
      }
    }
  }

(Hint: the method setNames() is synchronized on the names field, but that field is then modified to point to a new object.)

OK, so spotting the bug was easy. But how would you write a Unit Test to demonstrate the problem? You would need to have two or more threads calling setNames() simultaneously, but you still don't have any control over how the threads will be scheduled.

Enter Thread Weaver, a test framework that lets you control thread execution. By setting breakpoints in your code, you can stop one thread at exactly the point that you want, and then allow a second thread to run. This allows you to write repeatable multi-threaded unit tests, without relying on the thread scheduler.

Thread Weaver is released as an open source project under the Apache license, and is available on Google Code. Many examples can be found in the initial documentation. If you have comments or questions, please see our discussion group. Happy testing!

Ed. Note: Post updated with corrected formatting.

By Alasdair Mackintosh, Software Engineering Team

MoinMoin’s Google Summer of Code Wrap Up

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:14:00 +0000

We at the MoinMoin Wiki software development team had a wonderful time with our participation in Google Summer of Code™ 2009. We greatly enjoyed collaborating with our students, hacking Python and Javascript code for the wiki engine. Thanks to Google's support, we had four student projects total, and three of them were successfully completed:

Christopher Denter, whom I mentored, worked on making MoinMoin's modular storage code production-ready by adding an access control middleware. Christopher's work in this area made MoinMoin safer and more flexible. He also worked on a router middleware - think of it as a kind of a wiki
"mount/fstab" - and a SQLAlchemy backend. Our users can now enjoy MoinMoin with MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc. Christopher's work was done directly in the repo that will become the 2.0 release of MoinMoin.

Alexandre Martani, mentored by Bastian Blank, worked on a realtime collaborative wiki editor based on Google's mobwrite. Multiple people can now choose to edit the same wiki page at the same time and they all see each other's changes shortly after typing. We hope that we can merge his code into the MoinMoin 2.0 repository soon.

Dmitrijs Milajevs, mentored by Reimar Bauer, worked on groups and dictionary code with modular backends. You can now fetch group definitions from wiki pages or a wiki, and preparations have been made to make an LDAP group backend possible as part of future development. Dmitrijs also refactored the search code to get rid of the unmaintained xapwrap library and use the new xappy library. All his work has already merged into the MoinMoin 1.9 main repo.

Thanks also to Alexander Schremmer for his contributions as a mentor. Unfortunately, his student's project did not work out, but in true community fashion he provided valuable help and feedback for the other students.

In case you're curious about when all this nice code will be released:

MoinMoin 1.9 will be released later in 2009 (likely in November). Please help us beta testing, translating and generally making the release ready.

MoinMoin 2.0 will not just 1.9 + 0.1, but a major rewrite of big parts of the code base. Right now, it's like a big construction site, so it'll naturally take some time until the release will be ready, likely 2010 or 2011. We'd be happy to have your help with it; if you enjoy coding in Python, playing with new features, cleanly refactoring code and working with a fun team, then do join us to make MoinMoin an even better wiki. Check out the MoinMoin 2.0 page for more details.

Many thanks to all the students and mentors as well as everyone in the community who helped or supported the process. It was a very productive summer and we are greatly looking forward to continued work with our new contributors!

By Thomas Waldmann, Google Summer of Code Mentor and Organization Administrator

SIP Communicator’s Summer of Code Adventures: Part Two

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:41:00 +0000

Ed. Note: You may recall that last week we published the first installment of Emil Ivov's report on SIP Communicator's participation in Google Summer of Code™. This week, Emil shares more of the project's 2009 success stories and lessons learned by the project over the past three instances of the program.

Geek Communicator

Linus Wallgren from Sweden completed a task that many of us have been dreaming about for a long time now: handling SIP Communicator entirely through the command line. So what exactly does this mean? Well, now, you can exit the application, hide or show it, send or receive messages, make or answer phone calls and open or close chats, entirely through the command line. So, you remember that super script that you always wanted to do? The one that sends a message to all your online friends at 3 o'clock every morning? You can now do it thanks to Linus! His work is going to be integrated into SIP Communicator some time this year so stay tuned!

Geek Communicator: Using SIP Communicator through the Console

Setting Your Own Avatar

Shashank Tyagi from India was accepted for the "Dude, checkout my photo!" project. His work consisted of making sure that it was possible for SIP Communicator users to upload a new photo/avatar with popular protocols like XMPP, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ and AIM. He first started by exploring the mechanisms supported by the various protocol stacks that allowed this, discovering a few glitches on the way. He then worked on the glue that allows the SIP Communicator protocol modules to export this functionality to the rest of the application, and the GUI. Finally, with some help from his mentor, he also managed to wrap up a module that allowed users to take a picture of themselves using their webcam right before uploading it. Cool, isn't it?

Shashank's work is definitely going to get integrated into our trunk as soon as possible. However, until then you can either test it through his SVN branch or at least sneak a peek here:

Setting Your Own Avatar via SIP Communicator

DTMF with RTP

Romain Philibert from France worked with us on the project "DTMF with RTP" which had the goal of providing an alternative transport for DTMF tones in audio RTP streams in addition to the existing SIP INFO method. The first phase of the development consisted of research on the possible approaches to solving the problem and the viability of each of the approaches was explored with proof-of-concept implementations. The second phase was the actual implementation of the chosen solution and involved refactoring existing source code to generalize it enough to also serve the goal of the project, employing the rearchitected design for the sake of sending and receiving DTMF tones as part of audio RTP streams, writing new UI to allow switching between the alternative DTMF transports, and creating unit tests to assure the correct operation of the functionality. Romain was exposed to communicating on our development mailing list where he reported his progress throughout the program, gathered feedback from members of our community and helped another contributor in resolving a common problem related to the unit tests. The source code he produced has been reviewed and currently awaits for a major redesign of the media service of our project to be finished in order to be updated and integrated into trunk.

DTMF with RTP

Impressive list, right? We're quite happy with it :)

So, let's now get to the final part and look through the three most important lessons we've learned throughout the past three years.

Lesson 1: You've Got to Have the Time

Google Summer of Code is a two-way process. Really! You take a lot so you have to be prepared to give as much. This is not a subcontracting deal where you could simply expect work to get done by itself because it is being paid for (not that this ever happens in subcontracting, anyway). Having a dedicated mentor for a student's project is almost as important as having a dedicated student. I've seen very few exceptions to this and it actually comes down to the following:

We are dealing with students who are still learning. As eager as they are to get things done, most of them have little development experience. Therefore if left to themselves, students would tend to over-engineer, go for a dirty hack, overlook existing documentation, misunderstand the goal of the project or a bunch of other things that seem so natural to experienced project developers.

Three months is hardly enough time even for experienced developers to fully grasp the internals of a mature project that they've never seen before. It is therefore naive to expect that a student would be able to come up with a usable and integratable contribution without a fair amount of guidance.

I am far from saying that you should be spoon feeding your student or do their work for them. To make things a bit more specific, I'd say that according to our experience a mentor should be ready to spend an average of about 45-60 minutes per day working with their student. Time is rarely equally spread across the summer. Our mentors would often find themselves spending up to two or three hours a day in the beginning of the program while 15 minute chats would be enough to resolve issues toward the end of the term.

Lesson 2: Less is More

I know, I know ... what a cliché! Still, it took us some time to actually realize it so I think it's important to note this lesson. I already mentioned that in 2008 we took 15 students and that this was not our best year. Mentoring resources were of course part of the issue. We had 4 of our most active developers take up two students each. First, this proved to be quite hard for the mentors themselves. Dedicating two hours a day to mentoring may turn out to be an issue when this is not part of your day job. Second, it was also a problem for the other students and their mentors. Given that our most active mentors had their hands full with their own students, they had little time to spare giving advice to other mentor-student pairs when they needed it. This turned out to be a blocking factor on more than one occasion and there was no one happy with the situation.

In addition to mentoring resources, a higher number of students are also hard to handle by the community itself. This means that people would be less aware of the progress of every project, there would be hence less interest, less encouragement, less acknowledgment and community integration for the students.

At the end of the day, we did manage to handle things and we only had a single failed project in 2008. However, the experience was far from the pleasing memories we had from 2007. It was therefore a good lesson to learn because taking less students was one of the main reasons for a successful 2009.

Lesson 3: One Committer per Student

I believe the one-mentor-for-one-student ratio is now commonly accepted practice for Google Summer of Code and that most projects are striving for it. We definitely have done our best to avoid mentor sharing since 2008. Having more than one (non-shared) mentor per student is even better but unfortunately not always possible. Another ratio that is just as important, and probably not that popular, is the number of committers involved as mentors. Code integration represents a significant part of the effort that projects spend over Google Summer of Code. It is quite obvious that if the developer committing the work of a particular student is also their mentor, integration is going to be a lot easier than if it were someone else.

For example, we had some very valuable stuff written during 2008, like support for proxies from Atul Aggarwal. Atul did a good job, but, his only mentor, despite being very technically savvy and knowing the project quite well, did not have committer access. Proxy support is quite important for SIP Communicator, although not necessarily critical. Committing Atul's work however, would require an existing committer to study all his work, and there always seems to be something in the critical path for development that must be reviewed. Things would have been a lot easier if one of the people that were expert in this field had been following the project right from the start.

We therefore decided to add pair each student with a committer in 2009, and each committer only had to take care of one student. The results were excellent, and as I already mentioned, we already have approx 30% of the GSoC code committed barely a week after the end of the program!

Lesson 4: Specific Tasks and Clear Conditions (Learning in Progress ...)

Ok ... this case is not really that straightforward and we have more learning to do before we really get it. Here's the problem:

In 2007 and 2008, we had a couple of students who would get to 50% or 60% of their work and then get distracted with unimportant stuff or simply disappear for a while. At a point their mentors would remind them that they have more to do and this would cause the students to feel uneasy, panic, or start arguing about things, such as:

"Oh, I didn't know I had to do unit testing!" or "I was never told this feature was part of the job!"

The statements weren't completely false. It could indeed happen that a task would seem obvious to a mentor and in the same time feel utterly unnatural to a student. In one case, it was actually the mentor who didn't request a task that was considered important by other community members.

So either way, in order to try and limit the surprises we decided that we needed to start every project with a list of clearly defined sub-tasks. This way, we thought, students would know exactly what they need to do and organize better. It would also help make sure that everyone on our side was well aware of the "official" project vision. Sounds neat, right?

Well, it didn't really work out that way.. Most of the students didn't have a problem with the new system, but then again, most of the students didn't have problems without it either. One of the students we failed, however, claimed the requirements list had been misleading and had made them believe they could plan a few weeks off. When we told them that this would be risky they complained it was too late to cancel the reservations, so they didn't listen ... and eventually failed.

So it appears that a list of what we believe to be specific requirements doesn't seem to change much in terms of understanding the goals of a particular project since there's always something that could be misunderstood. Clearly, continued mentor-student communication is crucial here but it seems that we'd also need explicit there-may-be-more-to-this-than-you-think notes.

Phew, that sums it all up! Hope the lessons we've learned above would help others in similar situations. Good luck to all of you future Google Summer of Coders!

Ed. note: Post title corrected.

By Emil Ivov, Project Lead, SIP Communicator and Google Summer of Code Mentor

Perls of Wisdom: The Perl Foundation & Parrot’s Google Summer of Code

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:08:00 +0000

Google Summer of Code™ 2009 (GSoC) was filled with fresh faces and exciting new projects for The Perl Foundation (TPF). As I write this, we are currently in the final stage of the summer where students submit evidence of their work in a zip/tar.gz file by uploading it to a publicly viewable repository. I very much like that now anyone on the 'net can download a file containing the entire summer of work by the student, and there is even a download count next to each file for each student!

We started the summer with nine students, but Kevin Tew was not able to work on "A prototype LLVM JIT runcore for Parrot" in the program due to external issues. He is still a core Parrot Virtual Machine developer and I hope that he can find time to work on this awesome project some time in the near future. Since Parrot is currently redesigning its JIT framework from the ground up, a project similar to this would be great for next year.

The other Parrot VM project was Daniel Arbelo Arrocha working on "Decimal Arithmetic: BigInt, BigNum and BigRat for parrot" with Christoph Otto as a mentor. Big Decimal Arithmetic basically means storing arbitrary large/arbitrary precision numbers internally in a decimal format rather than the binary format usually used. Doing this can prevent catastrophic rounding errors. If you can store numbers internally with exactly NO error, then obviously this is A Very Good Thing. Daniel worked on making dynamic PMC's (Polymorphic Parrot Classes, or Parrot Magic cookies, take your pick) which wrap the mature and extensive IBM's libdecnumber library. What this means is that Parrot can do arithmetic on arbitrarily large integers (BigInt's) or floating point numbers with arbitrary precision (BigNum's.) Financial people are very interested in these as well, since no one wants to be short-changed on their interest due to rounding error. Daniel has also been contributing patches to many other parts of Parrot and will probably be getting a commit bit soon, which is great news to hear.

Devin Austin worked on "Refactoring Catalyst helper modules", with Kieren Diment as a mentor. This involved some "Moosification", which means refactoring home-rolled object-oriented code to use Moose (the post-modern Perl 5 object system), i.e. less code to maintain and more features at your fingertips.

I am excited to talk about our next student, who worked on a Perl 6-related project. Carl Mäsak mentored Hinrik Örn Sigurðsson on "Perl 6 End-User Documentation Tools" (github repo) . Hinrik is working on the grok command, which is the Perl 6 relative of perldoc. With it, you can get documentation for Perl 6 functions from the spec, read the Synopses and Apocalypses, and occasionally attain temporary enlightenment. If you have a properly installed CPAN client on your computer, you can install it with cpan App::Grok.

Our other exciting Perl 6 project was Paweł Murias working on "Multimethods for SMOP", mentored by Daniel Ruoso, the lead developer of SMOP. SMOP stands for Simple Meta Object Programming (or Simple Matter of Programming, if you are feeling snarky) and it is an implementation of Perl 6, a sister of Rakudo. Multimethods, short for Multiple Method Dispatch, is a feature where a language can determine which variant of a set of functions to call, based on the type of their arguments. One way that this becomes very powerful is that you can use wildcard arguments when you declare your multimethod, so you can essentially write many functions at once. Less code to maintain is a big WIN ! Paweł's code is being directly merged into the mainline SMOP codebase and from what I hear, he is and will continue to be a core contributor. That is what GSoC is all about. That and free t-shirts.

State Transitions in Mojo::Pipeline

Pascal Gaudette worked on "HTTP/1.1 Compliance Testing and User-Agent Development for the Mojo Web Framework" with mentor Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi. This is important because Mojo, one of the newest and most exciting Perl Web frameworks did not have much testing for acting correctly according to HTTP/1.1 . Part of the work of this summer has become the CPAN module MojoX::UserAgent. He has a great blog post about "State Transitions in Mojo" wherein he explains how Mojo deals with state and generated some pretty cool transition diagrams by documenting when a state transition happens in the test suite and then feeding this data into Graph::Easy.

WebKit has become often-forked and very influential open source browser engine, so it is no surprise that Perl hackers want bindings to it. Ryan Jendoubi worked on "Cross-platform Perl Bindings for wxWebKit" with mentor Michael Peters, which allows WebKit and WxWigdets, a cross platform GUI library, to talk to each other via wxWebKit. I think this was one of the more difficult projects this year, not because of the programming/algorithms involved, but because it requires getting lots of cross-platform, constantly-changing and fickle pieces of software to get along with each other. This is often like inviting zebras and lions to the same party. Messy and dangerous. But Ryan prevailed and we give him much respect and hope that he continues to maintain and improve the Wx::WebKit bindings.

I had the pleasure of mentoring Robert (Bob) Kuo this summer on his work entitled "Implement BPSW algorithm as a Perl 5 CPAN module, Math::Primality with extensive test-suite." The Math::Primality module is already on CPAN and I am glad to announce that Bob is listed as co-maintainer and published the latest release. This module is important because the Perl 5 Cryptography CPAN modules (mostly in the Crypt::* namespace) have one, very large, very fragile dependency, called Math::Pari. Math::Pari is an amazing library that gives Perl access to the extensive state-of-the-art number theory library PARI, but to attain ultimate speed, Math::Pari pokes into undocumented internal-only Perl core internals, which means that changes to Perl internals that *shouldn't* have any effect on the outside world can cause the entire Crypt::* namespace to break. Also, most of the Crypt::* namespace require only 5-10 functions from Math::Pari, which provides an interface to thousands of functions. Math::Primality implements the few prime-checking (primality) functions that Crypt::* modules want from Math::Pari in a small, easy-to-maintain, pure-Perl CPAN module. Bob implemented the BPSW algorithm, a state of the art prime-number checking algorithm which allows you to check if an arbitrarily large number is prime in O( log(n) ) i.e. logarithmic running time. It is actually a combination of very different prime number checks, which weed out different types of non-prime numbers. So far, no one has found a counter-example to the BPSW algorithm (even though those pesky mathematicians say there probably are), so it is the best out there currently. It is estimated that because no one has seen this algorithm fail yet, and it being used extensively from within other algorithms, that the first counter-example must be at least 10,000 decimal digits long! Future steps for this module will be to work on its sister module, Math::Factoring, which implements the remaining factoring-related functions that Crypto modules want and then use both modules as new dependencies for the Crypt:: namespace, instead of Math::Pari.

Justin Hunter was mentored by Ash Berlin on the project "SQL::Translator Rewrite" (github repo). SQL::Translator is a very popular CPAN module for translating various "flavors" of SQL to and from each other, such as Postgres to MySQL. This involved more "Moosification", as described above. Justin also has some advice for hopeful GSoC students:

Get over yourself.

Understand there are people smarter than you or people better at some things than you.

Just the same, you're still needed.

Just Go Ahead and Do It and find your niche.

I wish someone had told me that about 10 years ago. I would not have wasted a lot of time worrying that people would think I was stupid and starting diving into Open Source projects much more earnestly.

In total, we had a success rate of 8/9 = 88.8%, just a bit above this year's all time high of 85%. Please join me in congratulating all these students and mentors for their top-notch work ! I can honestly say that I had much fun interacting with so many corners of the Perl community. This was my first year being an organization administrator, I learned a lot by my favorite method: sink or swim. I was handed over the magic rocket-powered surf board by Eric Wilhelm after successfully mentoring Thierry Moisan last year on the Math::GSL CPAN module. Organizing and communicating with people spread across a dozen time zones is definitely an art that I am still mastering. I think using as many mediums as possible to communication with people is key. I already use chat, email and IRC, but I wish I had done voice/skype and/or video chat with some of my students and mentors, so that everyone has a face to attach to a name.

I would also like to thank Jerry Gay for being The Perl Foundation co-pilot this year and welcoming me into the Parrot community. Your guidance in certain matters went a long way.

For anyone that would like to help/be involved in Google Summer of Code with The Perl Foundation next year, we cordially invite you to our IRC channel, #soc-help on irc.perl.org, and the mailing list.

By Jonathan Leto, Google Summer of Code Mentor and Organization Administrator

Talking RSS Reader for Android

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:43:00 +0000

Keeping informed in a fast moving world can be a challenge. What if you could use those moments when your body is busy but your mind is idle to catch up on the news? That's how I decided that I would get my Android phone to read the news to me, out loud. This is doubly useful for me, because I am blind.

The Talking RSS Reader application reads articles out loud using text-to-speech. The text of the sentence currently being spoken is colored on the screen. Speech and text scrolling are synchronized. The touchscreen buttons to skip articles are right at the bottom corners of the screen, where your fingers can find them on their own. Menus and dialogs are also spoken out, so that you can "star" an item or choose a different RSS feed without ever having to look at your phone.

The application integrates with the Google Reader service, which means that articles read on your phone need not be shown to you again when you use Google Reader on another device.

It is my hope that drivers, joggers and commuters will find this a helpful tool for keeping up with the news that concerns them.

The source code for the application is available on Google code, so that anyone wanting to develop a useful talking application for Android will benefit from what I learned. If you'd like to send feedback or have questions, drop by our discussion list. Happy hearing!

By Stephane Doyon, Software Engineering Team

SIP Communicator’s Summer of Code Adventures: Part One

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:24:00 +0000

So, here we are: we have just completed our third Google Summer of Code™. Despite the nostalgia that has settled in after the end of the summer, we are all feeling very, very happy about how things went this year. While observing my fellow mentors, who are busy integrating our students' contributions into our code base, I am tempted to reminisce about our three year history with the program and the lessons we've learned.

First of all however, a quick history of our participation: Our adventures started in 2007 when we were accepted into the program for the first time. I can still remember jumping all around the room when I saw SIP Communicator's name in the list of accepted organizations. Back then we were a brand new project and this acceptance was a tremendous recognition. As it turned out later, it made a great difference in terms of popularity, credibility, and bringing new contributors both directly and, above all, indirectly.

Our first summer went exceptionally well. First of all, we had a decent number of applications, 87 to be precise, and by decent I mean not too much for the available mentors to handle and yet enough for us to have a wide choice of candidates. We received funding for eight student projects, which, as it turned out later, was also just right. At the end of the summer we had 7 successful students. During the months following Google Summer of Code 2007, we integrated virtually all the work that came out of it. We also voted and accepted two of the students as permanent committers.

Then came 2008. Once again we were all rejoicing in anticipation of a productive summer. This time we had 187 candidates and were received funding for 20 student projects. At that point, however, we started realizing how big a number 20 is and we got a bit scared. We were afraid that would be too many students for us to handle so we decided to only take 15 and let other projects mentor the additional five. It turned out later that 15 was still a bit too many - more on that later. The summer went pretty well and a lot of work got done. Once again we voted and accepted two of the students as permanent contributors and only had a single failing student at the end of the season.

This leads us to 2009, and boy was this year a good year! I can now safely say that this has probably been our best participation so far. We received a staggering number of applications: 203 to be precise. We only had around 15 mentors so it took us quite some time to go through all of them. Once we were done with the evaluations we requested 12 student projects but played it safe and decided to go with only ten, leaving the rest of the funding for other student projects. Once again, it was a really great summer. We are still in the process of integrating all the contributions and it will probably take us a few months before we are done. Even at this point, with about 30% of the work in our repository, we have already voted and accepted 2 of the students as permanent committers with probably two or three more to come in the the following months. Hip Hip ... Hoorray!!!

Here's an in-depth look at some of our 2009 projects:

Growl Notifications, and Next Generation Sparkle Updates

Egidijus Jankauska from the United Kingdom has implemented a native popup notification for the MacOS X version of SIP Communicator. It makes use of the Growl notification daemon through a new implementation of the Java bindings of the Growl API. For that purpose, Egidijus has implemented a dynamic library using Java Native Interfaces, a set of Java interfaces, and the corresponding implementations for SIP Communicator. The new born library can of course be used in other projects and this implementation has already been integrated in our source trunk.

Egidijus has also updated our package update system on MacOS X. It was based on Sparkle 1.1, and Egidijus has provided the necessary patches and documentation to switch to Sparkle 1.5b6. This work has also been integrated in our source trunk.

Egidijus has since been voted as a committer and is now part of our developer team!

Software Updates Using Sparkle and Popup Notifications Using Growl

Hush-hush Chats with Off The Record (OTR) Messaging

George Politis from Greece worked on extending SIP Communicator with Off The Record (OTR) message encryption. OTR provides encryption, authentication, deniability, and strong forward secrecy. Until now SIP Communicator did not have any text message encryption and our chats were often unprotected. George started with the implementation of our own Open Source native java OTR library, which can also be used in other projects. George also implemented all the message transformation functionalities and the GUI necessary for us to integrate OTR support in SIP Communicator. It is already implemented in many of the other popular instant messengers such as Kopete, Pidgin, Adium, mICQ, Miranda, and Trillian. SIP Communicator is now able to carry out encrypted communications with other SIP Communicator clients and the aforementioned messengers.

George's implementation has already been integrated in our source trunk and George has achieved committer status for SIP Communicator with a strong approval of our community.

An OTR Session with SIP Communicator

Storing Chat History and Contact Lists in a Database

Ajay Chhatwal from India was in charge of implementing a Database system to allow us to store all chats in a database instead of XML files. Ajay has studied many database systems, produced a comprehensive comparative evaluation on them and suggested a winner that would best suit our use case. He has then implemented a database service and a backend to provide a working database service to all the components of SIP Communicator, after which he worked on a transition mechanism that would allow transferring XML files from the old implementation into the new database system.

Once he completed his work on the history modules - yes, he still had time to hack before the end of the summer - Ajay has also coded a new version of the contact list service which now also uses the database service.

We're hoping to vote Ajay in as a committer soon.

Recognizing and displaying remote user agents

This one was worked on by Brett Geren from the United States. The project consisted of retrieving the names of the applications that our buddies are using when chatting with us, and showing the application icons to the user. In order to accomplish this task, Brett first completed extensive research determining which of the protocols we support in SIP Communicator actually deliver such information and how they transport it.

He then defined the interfaces necessary for a new user agent module and implemented the feature for MSN, IRC and XMPP. During the second half of the program, he worked on the user interface that actually displays the remote client icon and allows users to configure the behaviour of the user-agent plugin. He also completed tests with a long list of known clients in order to confirm the way they are publishing their client name and to make sure that SIP Communicator was working with them as expected.

Ed. Note: This post is the first installment from the SIP Communicator project on their participation in the Google Summer of Code program. Look forward to even more information on their 2009 student projects and some in-depth details on lessons learned on this blog next week. Stay tuned!

By Emil Ivov, Project Lead, SIP Communicator and Google Summer of Code Mentor

Notes from Oregon State University Open Source Lab

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:31:00 +0000

Many Open Source projects grow too large for free services such as Google Code Project Hosting and SourceForge.net, or simply have infrastructure needs that cannot be met by those services. Where can projects turn if they need a stable hosting environment but can't get by with the offerings available at other free hosting providers? Many projects turn to the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL). The OSUOSL hosts many of the world's most well-known Open Source projects and foundations, including Drupal, the Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and many more.

Google, through its Open Source Programs Office, has been one of the strongest supporters of the OSUOSL by providing multiple large donations which help the OSUOSL provide world-class hosting to many Open Source projects. With these contributions, the OSUOSL has been able to expand its data center and provide jobs for many student system administrators. Student employees at the Lab work closely with hosted projects to setup, maintain, and optimize hosted services. OSUOSL is able to provide system administration services and expertise so that projects don't need to worry about the trouble of running a server and can instead dedicate time to improving their open source project.

Snapshot taken from http://larch.osuosl.org/ftpmap/

Over the last year, thanks to funding from Google and other supporters, the OSUOSL has been able to expand many of its services

The three OSUOSL FTP mirrors have been upgraded, and space doubled to 6TB per server

The data center in Corvallis, OR has expanded in size to allow for future growth

Data center power and cooling have both been increased to meet future demand

All of these improvements have allowed the OSUOSL to take on new hosted partners including Cacti, Fedora, OpenMRS, Parrot, RPM, and Sugar Labs. To continue to provide such a world-class hosting infrastructure for Open Source projects, the OSUOSL needs your help. For more information on OSUOSL donation programs and to find out how you can help support the Open Source Lab, please see http://osuosl.org/donate.

By Jeff Sheltren, Operations Manager, OSUOSL

Endless Summer in Atlanta

Leslie Hawthorn — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:36:00 +0000

Celebrating Software Free Day at Atlanta Linux Fest? Should you happen to find yourself in Georgia's capital this Saturday, please stop in hear our very own Ellen Ko deliver a talk on Endless Summer: Create Your Own Program Based on Google Summer of Code™. Ellen will be covering topics from marketing to motivating a developer community, with a special emphasis on lessons she's personally learned during her first year as the program's coordinator. You can also get your questions about the program answered and meet up with fellow Google Summer of Code participants during an evening Birds of a Feather Session. We hope to see you there!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Spritify with SpriteMe

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:40:00 +0000

Using CSS sprites makes web pages faster, but they can take hours to create. Neophytes to this advanced performance optimization technique face the daunting challenge of trying to grasp the logic needed to convert their existing web page's background images into a spritified tribute to web performance. The bar shouldn't be so high.

SpriteMe is an open source project that helps web developers create sprites in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Its main features are:

finds background images

groups images into sprites

generates the sprite image

recomputes CSS background-positions

injects the sprite into the current page

SpriteMe is a JavaScript bookmarklet, so it runs in all major browsers. It converts the web page to use sprites while you watch, making it easy to verify that the visual layout is preserved. It lets you drag-and-drop to re-arrange the sprite suggestions any way you want. Or, you can adopt all of SpriteMe's suggestions with one click on the "make all" button. When it's done spriting, simply save the sprite image(s) to your server and integrate the modified CSS into your stylesheets. Try the tutorial to see SpriteMe in action.

Happy spriting!

By Steve Souders, Performance Evangelist

Report from the Gov 2.0 Summit

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:21:00 +0000

Clearly designed as a conference to start but certainly not finish the conversation, last week's Gov 2.0 Summit assembled an impressive cast of presenters and interviewers. Key White House decision makers, government innovators and industry enthusiasts took the stage and lined the hallways for three days.

Having spent the last five years focusing on helping government adopt Open Source software and its collaboration model, my radar was tuned for explicit mentions / inclusions / endorsements of Open Source software. It appeared that leveraging Open Source software to solve some of the thornier technology problems challenging government (think healthcare and public safety interoperability) had been more implied than expressed in recent months. For the wider community looking for more signs of game change, the event provided plenty of evidence that Open Source is clearly at play.

Paul Rademacher, Google and AllForGood.org, Brian Behlendorf, White House Consultant and Leonard Lin, CodeforAmerica.org

The Google-hosted reception Monday evening packed the public space at their headquarters on New York Avenue. The event was attended by private industry, publicists and social media converts, non-profit and Open Source community leadership and government attendees and offered a nice opportunity to mix it up after a day of the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase I sadly missed. Some of the sessions however are video-archived on the web.

Lifting off in a small flurry of debate over the right hash tag for the Gov2.0 Summit, the two day Gov2.0 Summit opened with the and energy and grin of Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer. Chopra earned a reputation for creative collaboration with industry in his prior role as the Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia and brings the same to the federal scene. Virginia's extensive use of Open Source and open collaboration, as well as that of former D.C. CTO — now Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, is well known.

The conference brought attendees through a whirlwind tour of recent innovation in government IT: data transparency projects like Apps for Democracy and resulting mash-ups and visualization as inexpensive and "dirty" Open Source solutions to real problems. Open Source and its exceptional benefits of open standards and interoperability were highlighted in many presentations.

Conference highlights:

Beth Noveck provided the most comprehensive picture of what progress had been made by the new administration and its policy road map.

Best of Show for Crowd-Rallying: Carl Malamud discussed the need to make judiciary information — data and hearings — truly public in a day where “public” means “on the Internet.” In his speech designed in part for an audience not in the room, his closing comment asserted government operating systems should be Open Sourced brought the crowd to resounding applause.

Favorite Projects: Anything visualized — and most frequently enabled by Open Source.

Killer App: All things Geo-spatial.

Significant Announcement: The General Services Administration (GSA) will begin experimenting with the use of OpenID to manage identity on government web sites.

David Recordon, OpenID Foundation Board of Directors

For the seasoned government attendees, there was in reality not a great deal of new information to be had. That was, in fact, good news; as one government manager shared with me, social media tools like Twitter and GovLoop have made it much easier to stay in touch with what other agencies are up to, plus the 2009 Federal IT Strategy has been broadly distributed and much discussed internally.

The White House will release its new Open Government Directive in a few weeks and will set federal agency wheels in motion. Implementation will be challenging and require the philosophy of change to shift into gear. Industry and government seem to agree that the next non-trivial challenge to technology innovation will be procurement reform.

Ed. Note: Post updated to correct caption.

By Deb Bryant, Public Sector Communities Manager, Oregon State University Open Source Lab and Producer, Government Open Source Conference

Endless Summer of Code … Google Style

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:02:00 +0000

While many students might be spending their summers backpacking around Europe, working at an investment bank, or catching up on their studies, our Google Summer of Code™ 2009 students Udai Gupta and Johan Hilding were helping to transform technology in the fight against global poverty through their work with the Grameen Foundation, a global organization working to end poverty through microfinance and other initiatives to strengthen local business and social institutions. Udai and Johan recently concluded their projects with the Mifos Initiative, an Open Source information technology platform built by the Grameen Foundation to help microfinance institutions more effectively deliver financial services to the poor. Sponsored and provided a stipend by Google, they spent their entire summer making stellar contributions to advance testing and quality assurance in the Mifos platform, improving the quality of our software for our customers and making it easier for developers around the world to contribute code to our platform.

Udai, a recent Bachelor’s of Technology recipient from the LNM Institute of Information Technology India and Johan, a second year-student attending the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, both applied to the Mifos Initiative to learn about testing, agile development, and pair programming all while helping to deliver a flexible technology solution to the microfinance industry. Lead by their mentors, Jeff Brewster from the Grameen Technology Center in Seattle, Washington, USA and Adam Monsen, working remotely out of Minnesota, they collaborated across the globe with our entire community of microfinance practitioners and technology professionals.

With their work stretching across so many time zones and physical and cultural borders, at times it was challenging for Johan and Udai to work while being so far away. Technology like Google Groups, IRC, Skype, and TokBox were instrumental in bridging the communication divide; yet, it was the steadfast commitment and passion to work late into the night that made successful collaboration possible.

Through Google’s commitment to the Open Source community, the Grameen Foundation has been able to utilize Udai and Johan's skills to make enormous contributions to the Mifos Initiative. Udai’s major accomplishments throughout the summer included standardizing the naming conventions of our unit and integration tests, making these tests run independently of one another and optimizing the MySQL database to improve overall performance of these tests. His efforts helped lay the foundation for greater modularity in Mifos which will allow our community to build new functionality more effectively, enabling microfinance institutions to release new products and pioneer new technologies like mobile banking to serve the poor.

Udai Gupta

At the same time, Johan helped to triple the number of acceptance tests in Mifos, allowing us to do more frequent releases with the assurance that no code is breaking. His improvements to the acceptance test infrastructure from making drop-down boxes language independent, to making tests run in different locales are a huge value-add to our international customer base. His work will be utilized significantly as the Mifos team delivers an Arabic version of Mifos in their upcoming release.

Johan Hilding

With Google Summer of Code 2009 now complete, Johan, like the majority of the more than 1000 students who contributed to one of 150 different projects, will be returning to his studies at KTH in Sweden. However, for Udai this marks the beginning of a new path for him as he will be moving to Bangalore, India for the next 12 months to continue contributing to Mifos and supporting one of its leading customers, Grameen Koota. The Grameen Foundation hopes to participate in future instances of Google Summer of Code and we invited all folks interested to join our community at www.mifos.org/developers. You too can help to change poverty one line of code at a time!

By Adam Monsen, Mifos Summer of Code 2009 Mentor and Software Engineer, Grameen Foundation

Ogg Theora Book Sprint

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:20:00 +0000

What's the best way to spend a summer week in Berlin? Writing a manual about Ogg Theora of course...at least that was the opinion of 6 dedicated souls brought together by FLOSS Manuals with the help of Google's Open Source Team.

The event is another in the growing body of FLOSS Manuals Book Sprints, kicked off by our first meeting to write a manual for Inkscape. The aim of these sprints is to write a book in 5 days. Actually, we have done it it in shorter time – in February of this year we wrote a 260 page manual introducing newbies to the Command Line in 2 days. Though created quickly, these books are extremely well written texts: comprehensive, readable, and complete.

For a long time we have been wanting to add to the available material on how to use Ogg Theora – the premier free video codec. Waiting until now to do it turned out to be very fortuitous as Firefox 3.5 was released just weeks before and hence Theora has been given a very recent boost with native support via the HTML5 video tag. As it happens a lot of the technologies supporting Theora have come to recent maturity. Only a few months ago it was hard to find a simple GUI editor for Theora video but now PiTiVi can manage simple editing very easily and smoothly and the development track looks very good. Theora also has great subtitling support, either through embedded subtitles or using an extension to JQuery javascript libraries. Streaming is looking good also with the fantastic Theora Streaming Studio and you can get grubby on the command line with a whole host of mature tools for manipulating and analyzing Theora files. There is more of course, much more, but the point being that we were very happy to have the opportunity to gather some Theora junkies in one spot for a week and write a book on all the cool stuff you can do with Theora video.

A 220 page manual in 5 days - not bad. And it's all free, libre and gratis. Some of the material is also now being translated by the FLOSS Manuals Finnish community, and we hope more translations will follow.

Present at the sprint was myself (Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals), Jan Gerber (ffmpeg2theora developer), Jörn Seger (Ogg Tools developer), Holmes Wilson (FSF Campaigns manager) and Theora geeks Susanne Lang and David Kühling. A few popped in remotely to help out, for which we are always grateful – notably Silvia Pfeiffer and Ogg K.

In the end we have free documentation that you can read online, download as a PDF, or log in and improve. It's also available in dead tree format for those who'd like it on their shelf.

Many thanks to Google for supporting this, and also to the Berlin Sommercamp for inviting us to include this sprint as part of their event.

By Adam Hyde, FLOSS Manuals

Wrapping Our Fifth Google Summer of Code

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:00:00 +0000

The sun has set on our fifth year of introducing college and university students to Free and Open Source software development, and what a year it's been! Just under 2000 mentors and 1000 students began working together to improve the code bases of 150 projects, and we're pleased to let folks know that 85 percent of our student participants have received passing final evaluations, up a full two percent over 2008 and our best success rate to date.

These successful Open Sourcerers are busy preparing code samples for the world's perusal, and we'll post an update here when actual source code produced during this year's Google Summer of Code has been made available on project hosting on Google Code. Of course, there's no real need to wait for code samples - many of these students have already had their work integrated into their project's code base, so check out their work by visiting the websites and mailing lists of your favorite participating projects now. We'll also be publishing more extensive statistics from our program evaluations, along with wrap up reports from some of our participating mentoring organizations, so stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

Google Summer of Code Mentors Dimitri Gaskin and Karoly Negyesi
Photo courtesy of Scott Hadfield

Congratulations to all of our students for their achievements this Summer. We certainly hope you will continue helping your project communities with source code, documentation and general enthusiasm long after this Summer has ended. Many thanks also to our community of mentors, without whose time, skill and dedication this program would not be possible.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Food and Fun: Linux 18th Anniversary Picnic

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:51:00 +0000

The annual Linux 18th Anniversary Picnic happened last weekend at Sunnyvale Baylands Park in Sunnyvale, CA. It happens around the weekend following the Linux World Expo (now Open Source World) and generally in the same time frame as the anniversary of the announcement of Linux. Sbay.org, a local non-profit, organizes this social event to get the Free and Open Source community together for a day of fun, and some form of the picnic has happened every year since 2001.

This year was great fun. I was responsible for buying the food for the picnic. In true Google fashion, there was a ton of food. After a few trips to supermarkets, we had more hamburgers, hot dogs, veggieburgers, sodas, and condiments than I had ever assembled for one event. Of course, we also had wifi for those working on their personal projects, provided by a portable point-to-point wireless link that was set up by some of the attendees.

Throughout the day, more than 250 people showed up to the picnic. Some brought their geeky gadgets to work on, some hacked on their Open Source projects. Others spent time getting some much needed socializing. When I wasn't making runs for more food or other supplies, I got to talk to some of the people about how they used Linux. A number of the people used it on their daily jobs as system administrators or software engineers. Some were there with friends to learn about Linux for the first time. I even demoed my laptop setup for some folks that were curious about the difference between what they were using and Linux.

All in all, the day went really well and helped draw out members of the Free and Open Source software community out under that weird ball of fire in the sky, and everyone had fun. We'd like to thank Google's Open Source Team and our other sponsors for making sure we all had plenty to nosh on whilst enjoying each others company.

If you would like to get involved in the future, please see http://www.linuxpicnic.org/ and http://www.sbay.org/. We can always use additional help and would love to see you next year!

Photos courtesy of Jennifer Davis.

By Warren Turkal, Site Reliability Engineering Team and Treasurer, Sbay.org

Zurich Open Source Jam 8

Leslie Hawthorn — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:58:00 +0000

On August 13th, 2009, starting at 6 PM a little more than 50 people trickled into our Zurich, Switzerland office to share thoughts and snacks about all things free as in freedom for the 8th edition of the Zurich Open Source Jam. By 7 PM, a great variety of talks were lined up on the whiteboard and we started with our traditional lightning talks.

Markus Michael Geipel introduced us to his research on Dynamics of Open Source Code, providing quantitative insights into laws of growths, change dynamics and special structures applicable to open source development. He also presented us with a research tool developed for this project and contributed to Open Source, a workbench for relations visualization.

Lukas Lang, a Google Summer of Code™ 2008 student, talked about a program at the Institute for Software Technology of Vienna University of Technology to involve students in Open Source during a semester as a subject. Students participate into Open Source organizations such as Apache Software Foundation and develop independent proposals to achieve during the semester, not unlike the Google Summer of Code.

Matthaus Ringwald presented BTstack, a lightweight and portable Bluetooth stack for embedded machines. BTstack targets devices such as the iPhone, where the existing Bluetooth stack is severely limited, or embedded operating systems lacking any Bluetooth support. He presented us with a live demonstration of a WiiMote controlling over Bluetooth a 3D object in an OpenGL ES application running on an iPhone.

Michel Pauli recounted to us his travels in Africa and in particular his work in a school in Limbe, Cameroon. He has been using Open Source software to run a computer lab using partly scavenged hardware with great success. With tools such as LTSP,Xen, Edubuntu or Moodle, he used computers to transmit a broad range of knowledge on only a few watts of electricity.

David Anderson presented NxOS, an operating system base for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robotics kit. The system aims to simplify the basic job of other NXT operating systems such as Lejos, as well as open the doors for new experiments with the kit. The topic of killer robot armies made of lego, foremost in everyone's minds, was of course discussed.

Tara Andrews told us how Open Source would help the Humanities. She explained how the current state of specialty humanities software impedes collaboration and research, and envisaged what computing in the Humanities could achieve if open source software development methodologies were being efficiently used. We traveled all over Europe through her fascinating stories of copist monks, manuscripts collecting, Unicode mangling and massive textual corpus diffing.

The rest of the evening saw Googlers and guests happily chatting about all kinds of subjects and 10 PM was too soon and the (Swiss) beer still unfinished when we had to mark the end of this edition of the Zurich Open Source Jam.

To stay informed about future Open Source Jams in Zurich, please join the Open Source Jam Zurich Google Group. Open Source Jams are sponsored by the Google Open Source Team.

By Obey Arthur Liu, Software Engineer in Test Intern

GNU Generation: Bringing Pre-University Students into Free Software

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:11:00 +0000

While GNU Generation isn't the next Google Highly Open Participation Contest™ (GHOP), the two efforts have a lot in common. My name is Max Shinn and I am going into my junior year of high school. This summer, though, I'm interning with the Free Software Foundation (FSF). When I was participating in GHOP, I never imagined that I would be using that experience to start a similar project. I have been working on GNU Generation extensively as part of my internship with the FSF.

GNU Generation is a growing community for young people (approx. ages 13-18) interested in contributing to free software. Once you sign up on the wiki, you can pick out one of the projects listed and start contributing immediately. Alternatively, if you would like to contribute to a project not listed, you can fill out a form and just start working; as long as you are working on something related to free software, no approval is needed. It doesn't need to be a coding project either. Art, advocacy, documentation, and other projects are equally welcome. We maintain a very informal and relaxed environment; if you have any sort of special request, it's likely that you'll get it. At the end of each month, a "contributor of the month" will be chosen to win a free t-shirt. At the end of each year, the participant who has contributed to free software the most will win a GNU/Linux powered netbook!

There are rewards to be gained other than just prizes, though. You will be able to see your contributions being used and enjoyed by all kinds of people. There is a wonderful community of young free software advocates already participating in GNU Generation. There are few other ways to meet and connect with such a diverse population of like-minded peers from all around the world. It will also give you a golden line to add to your resumé, especially if you win contributor of the month or year. You'll have a chance to learn about how the world of free software works and, perhaps most importantly, you will know that you helped spread digital freedom.

A page has been put together with detailed instructions as to exactly how to join. You are also encouraged to sign up for the mailing list and join the IRC channel (#gnu_generation on irc.freenode.net).

We are still looking for projects to participate as well. Any free software project is welcome to create jobs, or "projects" as we call them, through the "create a project" form. All you need is a description of your project, some information on how to get started, and your contact information. Any students interested in your project will be able to sign up and begin contributing immediately.

GNU Generation is a huge opportunity for both young free software users, and for free software projects. Our main goal is to assist students who would like to contribute, but don't know what to do or how to get started. What's more, you can still participate in GNU Generation if you are already contributing to a free software project! Just register, and create your own project describing what you are already doing.

Whether or not you can or choose to join the GNU Generation, I wish you the best of luck in the free software world!

By Max Shinn, Intern, Free Software Foundation

Congratulations to the Winners of the Google O’Reilly Open Source Awards

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:13:00 +0000

Yesterday evening, I was privileged to share a stage with OSCON Co-Chair, Allison Randal to present the 5th Annual Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards. We once again opened nominations to the Open Source world at large and we were pleased at the fantastic response we received from the community. From the hundreds of nominations we received, after much deliberation these five individuals were selected:

Brian Aker, Best Open Source Database Hacker for his work on Drizzle and MySQL
Bruce Momjian, Database Jedi Master for his work on PostgreSQL
Clay Johnson, Best Community Builder for his work with Sunlight Labs
Evan Prodromou, Best Social Networking Hacker for his work on identi.ca and Laconica
Penny Leach, Best Education Hacker for her work on Mahara and Moodle

Our Award Winners & Presenters (listed from left to right):

Brian Aker, Leslie Hawthorn, Evan Prodromou, Bruce Momjian, Allison Randal, Nat Torkington
Photo Credit: Pinar Ozyger

Congratulations to Brian, Bruce, Clay, Evan and Penny! Each of them will receive a beautiful (and shiny!) glass statue, along with a 5000 USD cash prize in support of their Open Source development efforts.

The awards are just one part of Google's participation in OSCON 2009. If you're around, come find us, introduce yourself and share your thoughts on all things Open Source.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Where to Find Us at OSCON 2009

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:41:00 +0000

OSCON has returned to the San Francisco Bay Area for 2009, and Googlers will once again be out in force to spread the joy of all things Google and Open Source. Please make sure to join us on Tuesday, July 21st for the conference opening ceremonies, where we'll announce the winners of the 5th Annual Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards. If you've already arrived for the conference, you may want to stop by our Birds of a Feather session for the Google Summer of Code™ community this evening at 8:00 PM. We're also proud to feed all of you in the great Google tradition at Wednesday's lunch.

And, of course, there will be several talks and tutorials delivered by Googlers, including:

Introduction to Google App Engine by Joe Gregorio, 8:30 AM on July 20th (tutorial)
Zen and the Art of Abstraction Maintenance by Alex Martelli, 10:45 AM on July 22nd
Even Faster Websites by Steve Souders, 11:35 AM on July 22nd
Getting Started in Free and Open Source, by Cat Allman and Leslie Hawthorn, 11:35 AM on July 22nd
Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth, by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, 1:45 PM on July 22nd
Green Computing for the Little Guys with Bill Weihl, 1:45 PM on July 22nd (panel)
Your Work in Open Source, the Numbers, by Chris DiBona, 9:15 AM on July 23rd
JRuby on Google App Engine by John Woodell and Max Ross, joined by Ted Han, 10:45 AM on July 23rd
The Google Open Source Update, by Chris DiBona and Leslie Hawthorn, 11:35 AM on July 23rd

If you're around Silicon Valley and can't make the entire conference, keep in mind that the Birds of a Feather sessions, OSCamp and a host of other events at OSCON are free of charge to attend with your expo hall registration. We hope to see you there!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Crossing the Desktops in Gran Canaria

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:15:00 +0000

The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit ended just a few days ago, and now everyone is back to work sun-tanned and/or sun-burnt, but loaded with new ideas. The idea behind this summit was to organize GUADEC and aKademy, the yearly GNOME and KDE conferences, on the same spot so that developers from the two communities could get together and more freely exchange ideas.

The series of keynotes that opened the event was particularly interesting with, among others, Robert Lefkowitz sailing between computers and philosophy and, of course, Richard Stallman dressed up as St. IGNUcius.

We were given the chance to darken our hacker-pale skin a tiny bit thanks to the green towel that was offered to each participant. GNOME and KDE hackers alike delivered many keynotes and talks, especially cross-desktop talks to help explore and overcome problems encountered in both projects). Hacking and chatting on the beach was another popular conference activity.

All in all, one always comes back from such an event with starry eyes and a dreamy mind about the exciting (very near) future of the two desktops, and their tightened collaboration. Stay tuned for a lot of hot things happening soon in a desktop near you, and let's hope that next year's event will bring us the same amount of excitement and sunshine!

By Manu Cornet, Software Engineering Team

Releasing Debug Panel for GWT

Leslie Hawthorn — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:14:00 +0000

A few years ago, we released GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, which allows code to be written in Java using your favorite editors and then compiled into JavaScript that runs smoothly on host browsers. Today, we're releasing some additional debug tools to make troubleshooting easier. See the post on the GWT blog for more details!

By Jeff Bailey, Software Engineering Team

Making Beautiful Music Together

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:08:00 +0000

Google's Open Source Programs Office has been supporting the MetaBrainz Foundation for the last three years and has just let us know that they'll be continuing their support in 2009. The MetaBrainz Foundation operates the MusicBrainz project, which can be likened to Wikipedia for music. MusicBrainz knows which artists have released which CDs as well as where and when they were released. MusicBrainz also knows all of the tracks as well as who performed which instrument or vocals on a given track. This and many other data pieces are made available to the public and form the underpinnings of services such as audio CD identification and digital music collection cleanup tools.

Last year, Google's generous donation paid for a much needed server and it allowed us to hire our Google Summer of Code™ student (Oliver Charles) part time after the program wrapped up. The donation also helped pay for mundane things like keeping the lights on, backup disks and paying for insurance. But the most fun part that we spent money on last year was our phenomenal MusicBrainz Summit in London. Our summit allowed the community to come together and to bond face to face at the Last.fm offices. MusicBrainz paid for its Summer of Code students to come to London from Sweden, Germany and Lancaster. MusicBrainz arranged for the summit space, subsidized accommodations and provided food. But, most important was our gathering at a pub near the last.fm offices — we had fun and bonded for many hours that evening.

Holding yearly summits has been a long tradition for MusicBrainz. We're planning on having another one this year and this year's donation will certainly help make this one memorable as well!

Thanks for your continued support Google!

By Robert Kaye, Executive Director, Metabrainz Foundation

Brazil Open Source Jam 2

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:29:00 +0000

On July 2nd, 2009 about 50 people gathered in our Belo Horizonte, Brazil office for the second edition of the Open Source Jam Brazil. Guests were welcomed with an aperitif of snacks and drinks. At about 19:00 we started a round of short talks on various topics.

Scott Kirkwood presented his Convertsy Wave Robot and gave a short introduction on how to write robots for Google Wave. Ricardo Bittencourt spoke about implementing an MC-1000 emulator on FPGAs. Rafael Sachetto Oliveira talked about his Ubuntu Simple Package Crawler project and demonstrated Web USPC. Fabrício Ceolin reported on integrating government software, CACIC, with Intel vPro technology. Licio Fonseca introduced the audience to GNOME Love, a project to help new contributors to the GNOME project, and Germano Teixeira de Miranda talked about speeding up cloning computers with Recuperao de Imagem de SO.

After the talks we had almost two hours to talk to one another and get some more snacks, including ice cream. The Brazilians are known for being quite sociable, and this quality was made very clear in the strength of its Open Source community; developers, enthusiasts and Google engineers shared their projects and ideas, and some even found new projects to work on together. The evening came to an end at about 22:00 when most people left.

Google Open Source Jam events are getting increasingly popular. It took less than 12 hours for the 50 attendees to sign up for this second Open Source Jam in Brazil, so join the Open Source Jam Brazil Google Group to stay updated on future events as soon as they are scheduled. Open Source Jams are hosted by the Google Open Source Team.

By Rodrigo Damazio, Software Engineering Team and Michael Hanselmann, Systems Administration Team

Ed. Note: Post updated with new photos.

Releasing Neatx, an Open Source NX Server

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:38:00 +0000

We at Google have been looking at remote desktop technologies for quite a while. The good old X Window system can be used over the network, but it has issues with network latency and bandwidth. Neatx remedies some of these issues.

In 2003, NoMachine released a large portion of the source code of their NX product under the GPL licence. NX is a protocol compressing X requests and reducing round-trips. Although mostly Open Source, NoMachine's NX product contains one closed component, the NX server. It's the part connecting clients with the Open Source libraries doing the work.

A free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine's libraries named FreeNX was published in 2004 by Fabian Franz. FreeNX's primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of BASH, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain.

Last week, we released the source code of our own proof-of-concept implementation of an NX server, Neatx. Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries. It is written in Python, with the exception of very few wrapper scripts in BASH and one program written in C for performance reasons. Neatx was also able to reuse some code from another Google Open Source project, Ganeti. The code still has some issues, but we're confident interested developers will be able to fix them.

Also, Neatx implements features not found in FreeNX, such as the drop-down menu for session control in rootless sessions. At the same time, not all of FreeNX's features are implemented in Neatx.

Michael Hanselmann gave a presentation at FISL 10 in Porto Alegre, Brazil describing our implementation and use of virtual workstations (slides: PDF, 200 KB).

More information and the code can be found at the Neatx code.google.com project. You can also send us questions and feedback on the Neatx discussion list. Happy hacking!

By Euan Guttridge, Stephen Shirley and Michael Hanselmann, Systems Administration Team

Australia Goes Open

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:30:00 +0000

Here in Google's shiny new Sydney office, we recently hosted the first hackfest for OpenAustralia.org. OpenAustralia takes the data from Australia's record of Federal Parliament speeches, the Australian Hansard, and makes it easy for people to follow topics they're interested in.

Back in 2004, Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska found themselves at the launch of the UK site TheyWorkForYou.com, a website designed to allow the average person to quickly and easily search the United Kingdom's Hansard - the record of all happenings in Parliament. Their work blossomed and they were inspired to make a similar site happen in Australia, OpenAustralia.org.

Both websites give ordinary people, who often have no idea who their local representative is, let alone what their representative has been doing on their behalf, the ability to track topics they're interested in and find out exactly what their representatives are doing.

When Matthew emailed out asking for a location for a place to host a hackfest, we were very happy to lend a helping hand. The hackfest ran on Saturday the 13th of June at the newly opened Google offices in Sydney, Australia and was successful beyond anyone's expectations.

When originally announced, the event's original 25 attendee slots filled so fast that we ended up increasing the number to 50 (which also filled remarkably fast). More surprisingly, almost everyone turned up and we even had a number of attendees fly in from other Australian states. No one expected this level of enthusiasm from the community, and we were pleased to share in everyone's excitement.

Some cool outcomes include a tool for crowd sourcing transcription of the "register of member's interests", an API and datasource for mapping street addresses to representatives, a "FixMyStreet" iPhone App and numerous bugs on the site fixed. More information on these and the ongoing efforts of this community can be found on the Open Australia Development list.

Matthew was also gracious enough to give a tech talk for Googlers about some of the many challenges faced by creating such a site, e.g. dealing with Crown Copyright, problems with getting a clean source of data, and problems getting the data fixed when it's clearly in error. Enjoy!

By Tim Ansell, Technical Solutions Engineering Team

Sojourning at SouthEast LinuxFest

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:59:00 +0000

Fresh on the heels from speaking at Google Developer Day in Beijing and Tokyo, Chris DiBona will be heading to the SouthEast LinuxFest. This new conference promises to provide a welcoming environment for novice users of Open Source software, with a little something for everyone with talks on data warehousing, education and philanthropy. Should you find yourself in or around Clemson, South Carolina this Saturday, June 13th, please stop by to hear Chris discuss "Open Source: Then, Now and Tomorrow." As much as the Open Source Team enjoys connecting with Open Source developers and users worldwide, Chris is particularly looking forward attending this grassroots, community driven event and sharing his thoughts in this intimate setting.

We hope to see you there and, if you're attending, please do come by to say hello!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Introducing Android Scripting Environment

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:52:00 +0000

The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device. These scripts have access to many of the APIs available to full-fledged Android applications, but with a greatly simplified interface that makes it easy to:

Handle intents
Start activities
Make phone calls
Send text messages
Scan bar codes
Poll location and sensor data
Use text-to-speech (TTS)
And more

Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale. Python, Lua and BeanShell are currently supported, and we're planning to add Ruby and JavaScript support, as well.

Scripts can be edited directly on the phone.

The script manager displays available scripts.

Scripts can be launched interactively or as background services.

Interactive terminals can be started for interpreters that support it.

Scripts can use the Android UI to get user input.

You may ask, why write scripts instead of real Android applications? Admittedly, Android's development environment makes life pretty easy, but you're tied to a computer to do your work. ASE lets you develop on the device itself using high-level scripting languages to try out your idea now, in the situation where you need it, quickly. Have a look at the following example Lua script to see for yourself:


--Placing the phone face down will disable the ringer. Turning it face up again will enable
--the ringer.
require "android"
android.startSensing()
android.sleep(1)  --Give the sensors a moment to come online.
silent = false
while true do
  s = android.readSensors()
  facedown = s.result and s.result.zforce and s.result.zforce > 9
  if facedown and not silent then
    android.vibrate()  --A short vibration to indicate we're in silent mode.
    android.setRingerSilent(true)
    silent = true
  elseif not facedown and silent then
    android.setRingerSilent(false)
    silent = false
  end
  android.sleep(1)
end

Here's another useful script, this time in Python.


"""Say chat messages aloud as they are received."""

import android, xmpp

_SERVER = 'talk.google.com', 5223

class SayChat(object):
  def __init__(self):
    self.droid = android.Android()
    username = self.droid.getInput('Username')['result']
    password = self.droid.getInput('Password')['result']
    jid = xmpp.protocol.JID(username)
    self.client = xmpp.Client(jid.getDomain(), debug=[])
    self.client.connect(server=_SERVER)
    self.client.RegisterHandler('message', self.message_cb)
    if not self.client:
      print 'Connection failed!'
      return
    auth = self.client.auth(jid.getNode(), password, 'botty')
    if not auth:
      print 'Authentication failed!'
      return
    self.client.sendInitPresence()

  def message_cb(self, session, message):
    jid = xmpp.protocol.JID(message.getFrom())
    username = jid.getNode()
    text = message.getBody()
    self.droid.speak('%s says %s' % (username, text))

  def run(self):
    try:
      while True:
        self.client.Process(1)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
      pass

saychat = SayChat()
saychat.run()

These scripts demonstrates several of the available APIs available for both Lua and Python. It is intended to be run as a service and silences the ringer when the phone is placed face down. For some scripting languages, like BeanShell, it's possible to access Android's Java API directly. To simplify things, ASE provides the AndroidFacade class. For other languages, like Python and Lua, the API is made available via JSON RPC calls to a proxy. Naturally this means that only the part of the API which has been wrapped by the AndroidFacade and AndroidProxy are available to cross-compiled interpreters like Python and Lua. Thankfully, both AndroidFacade and AndroidProxy are simple to extend.

If you'd like to give ASE a try, it's not yet published to the Market, but will be soon. You can download the latest APK from our project page. Some sample scripts and documentation are also included there to help you get started. We always love to hear what you think, so please send us feedback or ask your questions in the ASE discussion group.

By Damon Kohler, Software Engineering Team

Improving Freenet’s Performance

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:46:00 +0000

The Free Network project is the community that creates and maintains Freenet, free software that allows you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship by means of a decentralized, anonymous network. Since version 0.7 , the software has had built-in support for downloading and uploading large files. These are long-term downloads, which persist between restarts of the node. This support has improved performance and usability, but it has also meant that when lots of downloads are going on at the same time, Freenet uses a lot of memory, takes a long time to complete the startup process, and crashes if you queue too many downloads. By storing the current progress of uploads and downloads in db4o.com's open source object database (= a file on disk) rather than in memory, Freenet's memory usage can be greatly reduced, the end-user doesn't need to worry about running out of memory, we can have an unlimited number of uploads and tens of gigs of downloads, and so on.

To begin at the beginning, Freenet divides all files into 32KB blocks (called CHKs), which are each fetched and decrypted separately. Then we have a layer of redundancy, and various complexities surrounding putting files together and putting in-Freenet websites together, which makes up the client layer. Before the db4o branch, uploads were persistent, but downloads were restarted from scratch after every restart, pulling huge numbers of blocks from the datastore (on-disk cache). Worse, memory usage was rather large if you had any significant number of downloads on the queue.

The db4o project puts the client layer (persistent downloads and uploads) into a database (db4o). I had initially hoped that this would be a relatively quick project, which shows how much I knew about databases then! We decided to use db4o in a fairly low-level way, specifically to minimize memory usage. We had heard from testimonials that some embedded applications had done this, but unfortunately this is not really the way that db4o is usually used, which caused some complications. Overall, the project took one developer most of a year, the final diff was over 46K lines of code covering 320 files, and went well beyond its original remit, solving many long-standing problems in the process. New architecture was required for optimal performance, including using Bloom filters to identify blocks we are interested in, a queue of database jobs, major refactoring in many areas of the client layer, a new system for handling temporary files, etc.

The effort was well worth it. Our client layer overall has vastly improved and Freenet now

starts up quickly

resumes work on downloads and uploads almost instantly on startup

can have an almost unlimited number of downloads and uploads

doesn't need the user to worry about or configure the maximum memory usage

doesn't go into limbo with constant 100% CPU usage desperately trying to scrounge a few more bytes

can insert DVD-sized files and huge websites (or git/hg repositories) on relatively low end systems

uses fewer file handles

This project would not have happened without support from Google's Open Source Programs Office. It will be one of the most important changes in version 0.8 of Freenet when it is released later this year, and current work includes Bloom filter sharing, a new feature that should greatly improve performance both for popular and rare content. Google is also funding that project, watch this space!

By Matthew Toseland, Freenet Core Developer

Web Storage Portability Layer: A Common API for Web Storage

Leslie Hawthorn — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:33:00 +0000

As discussed in our Google Code Blog post on HTML5 for Gmail Mobile, Google's new version of Gmail for iPhone and Android-powered devices uses the Web Storage Portability Layer (WSPL) to let the same database code run on browsers that provide either Gears or HTML5 structured storage facilities. The WSPL consists of a collection of classes that provide asynchronous transactional access to both Gears and HTML5 databases and can be found on Project Hosting on Google Code.

There are five basic classes:

google.wspl.Statement - A parametrizable SQL statement class

google.wspl.Transaction - Used to execute one or more Statements with ACID properties

google.wspl.ResultSet - Arrays of JavaScript hash objects, where the hash key is the table column name

google.wspl.Database - A connection to the backing database, also provides transaction support

google.wspl.DatabaseFactory - Creates the appropriate HTML5 or Gears database implementation

Also included in the distribution is a simple note-taking application with a persistent database cache built using the WSPL library. This application (along with Gmail mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices) is an example of the cache pattern for building offline web applications. In the cache pattern, we insert a browser-local cache into the web application to break the synchronous link between user actions in the browser and server-generated responses. Instead, as shown below, we have two data flows. First, entirely local to the device, contents flow from the cache to the UI while changes made by the user update the cache. In the second flow, the cache asynchronously forwards user changes to the web server and receives updates in response.

By using this architectural pattern, a web application can made tolerant of a flaky (or even absent) network connection!

We'll be available at the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O to discuss the cache pattern, HTML5 development and the WSPL library. Check it out! If you have questions or comments, please visit our discussion list.

By Robert Kroeger, Software Engineer - Mobile Team

Support for Mercurial Now Available for All Projects Hosted on Google Code

Leslie Hawthorn — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:27:00 +0000

You may recall that we recently asked for help from some early testers of Mercurial on Project Hosting on Google Code. As of today, all of our Project Hosting users can make use of this added functionality. For full details, check out the Google Code Blog. Better still, if you happen to be joining us at Google I/O, stop by the Mercurial on Big Table Tech Talk to learn more.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Distributed Version Control for Project Hosting Users

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:09:00 +0000

Love our Open Source project hosting service but wish it supported distributed version control? Pine no longer! You can find full details about Mercurial support for hosted projects on the Google Code Blog.

For those of you who are Git fans, you may want to check out these articles: Develop with Git on a Google Code Project and Exporting a Git Project to Google Code.

Happy hacking!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Ed. Note: Post update to correct link.

Now Accepting Nominations for the 5th Annual Google-O’Reilly Open Source Awards

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:01:00 +0000

The Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards are back again for 2009! These awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2008 include Angela Byron, Andrew Tridgell, Harald Welte, Julian Seward, Karl Fogel, Martin Dougiamas, Pamela Jones and Paul Vixie.

The nomination process is open to all, so please send your nominations to osawards@oreilly.com. Nominations should include the name of the recipient, any associated projects or organizations, suggested title for the award ("Best Hacker", "Best Community Builder", etc.), and a description of why you are nominating the individual. Google and O'Reilly employees are not eligible for the awards, though we thank you if you thought of us.

Nominations close on May 22, 2009. The awards will be presented during the kickoff ceremonies for OSCON 2009. We look forward to hearing from you and having your help to honor those community members who make Open Source that much better for all of us!

Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Announcing Accepted Students for Google Summer of Code™ 2009

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:12:00 +0000

Students in 70 countries are now celebrating their acceptance in to the Google Summer of Code 2009 program! For our fifth year running the program, we've paired 1,000 students with mentors in more than 65 countries with more than 150 Free and Open Source software projects. Check out the program website for more details on each accepted student project. We're looking forward to bringing you more news about our accepted applicants in the coming weeks, but for now here's a peek at the top 5 countries for accepted student applicants: United States (212), India (101), Germany (55), Canada (44) and Brazil (43). In addition, the following countries are represented for the first time, each with 1 student: the Dominican Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg and Nigeria.

For those of you who aren't participating in the program, now is a great time to continue working on your project ideas and learning about Free and Open Source software. Each participating project is well placed to provide you with assistance in getting up to speed as a new contributor; take advantage of this opportunity to fix some bugs, hone your skills and, if you'd like, prepare for future instances of the program.

Congratulations to all students whose proposals were accepted, and many thanks to all of our applicants. The community bonding period starts today, and we'd love to hear from all of you how you plan to spend this time getting ready to start coding in six weeks. Feel free to post a comment and share your thoughts.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

London Open Source Jam 12: On a Budget

Leslie Hawthorn — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:49:00 +0000

After a somewhat longer than usual hiatus, the Google London Open Source Jam was back to its usual Thursday night. With the G-20 in town, and the finances of the world a hot topic, what better to talk about than "Open Source - On a Budget"? We had a good mix of on (and off!) topic discussions, project updates, invites, and calls for help set the tone for some excellent discussions.

The five minute talks came fast and thick. The following folks shared more with all of us about their latest and greatest adventures into Open Source:

Matt Godbolt: Matt talked about his experiences working with FFMpeg on YouTube Mobile , and asked is "Free software really free?" (Conclusion: It's not free but probably saves a lot of work.)

Matt Godbolt's Inaugural OSJam

John Ripley: John helped us to build our own consumer electronics. John talked about turning your old toaster into an mp3 player. Why would one do this, you may ask? Well, if you've asked then this likely isn't the best project for you.

Matthew Bickerton: Matthew discussed TikiWiki, a multilingual Content Management System/wiki, how he got involved and why it's a good project for people who are just getting started in Open Source.

Carl Harroch: Carl gave us an update on the London Android meetup and invited everyone to come along for the next go 'round.

Tav: Does Tav have the lead on Web 4.0? He proposed "Peer Computing not Cloud Computing" while giving us an overview of the Plexnet platform.

Sam Mbale: Sam shared his thoughts on how he's getting people excited about Open Social in Africa.

Stephen Colebourne: Stephen gave us the inside track on Java Specification Request (JSR) 310 - Date and Time. What's the cost of developing a JSR? Is it really nearly 47,000 GBP?

Alp Toker - Alp, a WebKit developer, talked about the cost and compatibility problems that surround conflicting coding standards.

Simon Stewart: Simon presented some answers the age old questions "Isn't maintenance dull?" and "It's a real shame that writing code is so easy, but maintaining it so hard and expensive. How do we make it cheaper?" He talked about writing good end to end tests (possibly with WebDriver), and the benefits of the Model View Presenter coding pattern.

Simon Stewart, WebDriver Master

Chris - Chris shared a case study on saving a local business money by switching to some Open Source software. Chris' advice? Don't force the change, let the software stand on its merit, and Open Source does work.

Shaun McDonald - Shaun is works with Open Street Map to plan cycle routes without buying expensive data and routing software. Now we know how to do cycle routing on the cheap.

We hope our guests found the evening as fun and informative as we did. If you are in or around London, you are welcome to join us for the next Open Source Jam. Keep your eye on our London Open Source Jam site for an announcement of the next meeting.

By Zak Cohen, Software Engineering Team

Secrets for Android

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:46:00 +0000

Secrets for Android is an application to securely store and manage passwords and secrets on your Android powered phone. It uses techniques like strong encryption and auto-logout to help ensure that your secrets remain safe, assuming you've chosen a good password! Context-sensitive tips guide you along through its operation, making it easy to use.

Secrets for Android also serves as a great example for developers learning to program on Android, as its well documented source code illustrates how applications can perform file I/O, use the crypto APIs, and do some simple 3-D view animation.

Check out the code or participate in the discussion group with feedback, suggestions, or bug reports. Hope to see you there!

By Roger Tawa, Software Engineering Team

Student Applications for Google Summer of Code™ 2009

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:51:00 +0000

Our mentors for Google Summer of Code 2009 have a busy two weeks ahead of them. As of last Friday's student application deadline, we received nearly 5,900 proposals from just under 3,500 student applicants. Folks who have followed the program over the years will note that the number of student applicants and proposals submitted is a bit down for 2009.

We expected some decrease this year, as we heard from many of our mentoring organizations that past experience had helped them refine their application process and that they'd instituted new requirements for applicants, such as submitting a patch. A quick survey of our mentoring organizations, with 96 out of 150 organizations responding, revealed that 60% of organizations who had participated in past instances of Google Summer of Code received higher quality applications this year, with only 3% responding that application quality had decreased. We'd also heard that the number of completely untargeted applications this year decreased dramatically.

We're pleased to see that we're reaching students in even more locations this year, as we received applications from 93 countries, up from 90 last year. In terms of overall numbers of applicants, our top five countries for this year are the United States (744), India (610), China (202), Canada (138) and Brazil (135). We're looking forward to bringing you more details about our student applicants in the coming weeks. Keep your eye on the Google Summer of Code 2009 site for updates, as we'll be announcing the list of accepted student proposals there on Monday, April 20, 2009.

So what should students be doing over the next two weeks? Keep in contact with your mentors about your proposal and respond to comments on what you've submitted. You can subscribe to updates to your proposal to receive notifications when a mentor asks for more information. You'll also find that the next couple of weeks are a great time to read documentation, fix bugs, and generally show yourself to be the enthusiastic future contributor you plan to be during this Google Summer of Code.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

POP and IMAP Troubleshooter

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:01:00 +0000

The POP and IMAP Troubleshooter is a wizard-like application that people can use to diagnose and repair problems when connecting to email service providers. It reads the configuration files of several email clients, checks them for appropriate settings, and then attempts to create a connection to the provider's servers. You can compile a generic version that allows you to connect to arbitrary servers, or a provider-specific version that can check additional constraints, such as the correct IMAP server name. Google's own binary is available from our Gmail support pages. The troubleshooter is written in C++ using Qt, and can be built for Linux, Windows, and the Mac.

We welcome your feedback. Check out the code and join our discussion group. Happy hacking!

By Gunnar Ritter, Site Reliability Engineering Team

Reminder: Applications for Google Summer of Code™ 2009 Due Friday

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:36:00 +0000

We're entering the home stretch for the student application period for Google Summer of Code 2009! With 150 Free and Open Source software projects acting as mentoring organizations this year, we have a little bit of something for everyone. Students have until Friday at 19:00 UTC to submit proposals to work on a three month coding project with a mentor from academia or industry.

If you're searching for inspiration or a bit more information while you talk about your ideas with your would-be mentors, you may be interested in the latest installment of the Code Conversations series from the Google Code Blog. We share some past success stories, tips for student applicants and a bit more about Melange, the software that powers the Google Summer of Code 2009 site.

Ready to apply now? Take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions page and get ready to submit your proposal. As always, helpful and knowledgeable folks are hanging around in #gsoc on Freenode to answer your questions, or you can subscribe to the program discussion list for news and updates.

Remember, all applications are due by 19:00 UTC this Friday, April 3rd. Best of luck to all our applicants!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Nixysa: Scriptable Plugins for Browsers

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:14:00 +0000

Nixysa is a new tool for developers who want to create scriptable plug-ins for NPAPI-supporting browsers such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Currently, exposing significant APIs via JavaScript is a tedious and repetitive process, but Nixysa lets you declare your API with a simple Interface Description Language. It also generates all the glue code that is needed to script your classes directly from the browser. If you want to add fancy features to web browsers, you can focus on the code that enables cool functionality instead of the boilerplate glue. As a bonus, Nixysa also works with Native Client which makes it easier to create NPAPI modules, providing a secure way of running native code in the browser.

We welcome your feedback. Check out the source code and take our sample code for a test drive. We look forward to hearing from you on our project discussion list.

By Antoine Labour, Client Software Engineering Team

Open Sourcerers at Google I/O

Leslie Hawthorn — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:58:00 +0000

In or around San Francisco on May 27-28th? If you are, why not check out Google I/O 2009, the 2nd occurrence of Google's largest developer conference. Among the many other great sessions, you can hear our very own Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick discuss Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth and hear their thoughts on creating happy users in their talk Do You Believe in the Users? We hope to see you there!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Spreading the Summer Love in South America

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:17:00 +0000

You may recall the recent post by Borja Sotomayor about the five Google Summer of Code™ information sessions he organized in the Chicago, USA area. Several other students and mentors are following in Borja's footsteps, and we'll be bringing you news about many of these meetups. Most recently, several former students have been busy spreading the word about the program to students at their local universities in South America.

Five former students teamed up to promote the program at the University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Bruno Cardoso, Bruno Dilly, Luis Felipe Strano Moraes, João Batista Correa Gomes Moreira and João Paulo Rechi Vita spoke to a packed lecture hall, showcasing the strong past participation of University of Campinas students. They also dispensed some advice about how to apply, including best practices for community interaction, and shared a bit about their past experience as students in the program. You can find more details, including pictures from the session, on João Paulo Rechi Vita's blog.

Rodrigo Lazo presents at the San Pablo Catholic University

Rodrigo Lazo arranged an information session at the San Pablo Catholic University in Arequipa, Peru. About 50 people came to the session, meaning standing room only for a few of the attendees. In addition to telling folks more about the program and how to write a successful proposal, Rodrigo also educated them about Open Source software: what it is, why people write and release Open Source code and why getting involved in the Open Source world is exciting and rewarding.

Standing room only at the information session in Arequipa, Peru

Have you hosted a Google Summer of Code information session at your local school or computer club? Are you planning to host one? Let us know! Share your plans, results and thoughts in the comments section or on the program discussion list.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Students, Apply Now for Google Summer of Code 2009!

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:10:00 +0000

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Students, want to gain real world software engineering experience and get paid? We are now accepting applications for Google Summer of Code^TM 2009, our global program to introduce university students to the wonderful world of Open Source development. For our fifth Summer of Code, students can choose from 150 Free and Open Source software projects, in technical areas as diverse as gaming to humanitarian efforts to operating system design. All accepted students will be paired with a mentor from academia or industry and will receive coaching in all aspects of software development over the course of their three month coding project. Successful students will receive a stipend of 4500 USD for their participation in the program.

Check out the program Frequently Asked Questions and the extensive set of resources for student applicants on the program wiki, then talk to your prospective mentors about your ideas. Each mentoring organization has provided an ideas list to help get your creative juices flowing and learn more about what the project needs. Our mentors are also very excited to hear from students who have their own plans for improving their code bases, so let their ideas inspire rather than constrain you.

You can find knowledgeable folks on hand to answer questions in #gsoc on Freenode and on the program discussion list, or you can keep up with our announcements on various social networking sites.

We'll be accepting student applications through April 3, 2009 at 19:00 UTC. Best of luck to all of our student applicants, and get those applications going!

Our Fifth Google Summer of Code: Meet Your Mentors

Leslie Hawthorn — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:34:00 +0000

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

We've just announced the list of accepted mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code^TM 2009. After reviewing nearly 400 applications, we finally narrowed our selection to 150 Free and Open Source projects. The accepted projects are now busy adding details about their participation in GSoC to the program website, but you can already take a look at the list of accepted projects and their Ideas lists.

As we do every year, we're trying new things to improve the program. This year, we're accepting fewer mentoring organizations with the goal of creating larger student peer groups within each project. We've heard feedback from several organizations that having more students helped their mentees develop a greater sense of engagement with the community through their engagement with one another. Community engagement has long been cited as a critical success factor for Google Summer of Code, and we're confident that creating these larger peer groups will help facilitate that.

We had to make some very tough decisions this year, as we simply aren't able to accept every great project that applied. We are also bidding fond farewell to some past participants in favor of bringing new projects into the program. We greatly appreciate everything they have contributed to the program in past years and hope they will remain actively involved in our community. We want to thank everyone for their applications and would encourage those who were not accepted to apply for future instances of the program.

What Happens Now?

No doubt many would-be Google Summer of Code students are wondering what their next steps should be. You'll have a few days to learn about each participating organization before student applications open on March 23, 2009. Use this time to meet your potential mentors and to discuss how you'd like to contribute to their organization and your ideas are for improving their code base. Keep on eye on the program mailing lists, as we'll post notes about additional resources for learning about our mentoring organizations.

Most organizations have provided individual points of contact for each project suggestion, and you can always propose ideas and look for guidance on project mailing lists or forums, as well as on IRC. You can also look for your potential mentors in the program IRC channel, #gsoc on Freenode.

Remember, some of our most successful student projects come from ideas suggested by the students themselves, so take advantage of this time to explore what areas of development most excite you. You can then find people to help you brainstorm about your initial thoughts and further refine them. Don't be nervous about how your ideas will be received; take some time to think through what you'd like to accomplish, propose a plan of action, then work with your potential mentors to iterate, iterate, iterate.

Congratulations to all of our future mentors! We look forward to working with all of you this year, and to working with many of you once again.

Nav, An IDE-like Navigation Pane for Emacs

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:55:00 +0000

By Issac Trotts, Software Engineer - YouTube

Nav is a lightweight solution for Emacs users who want something like TextMate's file browser, or the Eclipse project view. Unlike these two, Nav only shows the contents of a single directory at a time, but it allows recursive searching for filenames using the 'f' key-binding, and recursive grepping of file contents with the 'g' key-binding. Nav can be run painlessly in terminals, where Speedbar either fails on its attempt to make a new frame or is hidden. Nav's terminal-friendliness comes from running in the frame where it was started, keeping window management simple. The Nav key bindings are simple, as well — each key command is a single keystroke long.

We welcome your feedback. Check out the code and join our discussion group. Happy hacking!

Developers Wanted: JaikuEngine

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:30:00 +0000

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

The Jaiku code base is now Open Source and running on Google App Engine. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to check out the code and help shape the future of Jaiku. You can find full details on the Jaikido Blog.

Spreading the Summer Love is Easy!

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:41:00 +0000

By Borja Sotomayor, Ph.D. Student, University of Chicago and Summer of Code 2008 Mentor

Google Summer of Code^TM is on, and it's time to spread the Summer love. As Leslie noted in a previous post, former students and mentors are hosting more than 20 informational sessions worldwide, from Peru to Switzerland. In the last two weeks, I have lead information sessions at universities around Chicago: The University of Chicago, Northwestern University, DePaul University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. I'd like to share some of my experiences organizing some of these sessions, to show you how easy it is to promote Google Summer of Code at your local colleges and universities.

So, let's say you've participated in Google Summer of Code as a student or mentor, and you want to spread the word about how great it is to flip bits, not burgers, during the summer. All you need is the following:

First of all, you're going to need an audience. More specifically, you want to get as many student coders from your local college or university in the same room. But what if you don't have any contacts at the university? Don't let this hinder you: try contacting the university's ACM or IEEE student chapter, Linux User Group, Computing Club, etc. Most universities have at least one, and they are usually listed in the website of the more computer-centered department on campus (typically Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering). Sometimes just typing http://acm.cs.foobar.edu/ is a surprisingly effective way of finding the ACM student chapter for Foobar University. If they're not listed anywhere, try the general contact e-mail for the department, and ask if there is some sort of student computing association on campus.

Once you've pinpointed the right group, contact them and introduce yourself as a former Google Summer of Code mentor/student. Ask them if they would be interested in hosting a GSoC informational session. These groups are generally accustomed to hosting external speakers, so they will probably be more than happy to host a talk and handle all the logistics for you (reserving a room, advertising the talk, plastering campus with flyers, etc.). All you'll have to do is show up and present. Even if the group you contact can't host a talk, you can ask them to alternatively just post flyers around campus, and forward the flyer to mailing lists that are populated by geeks.

Next, you need a presentation to deliver. Not to worry: There is an existing slideset you can use. Even if you don't plan on using slides, the slideset can help you structure your presentation. And if you need further inspiration, you can watch videos of other GSoC informational sessions. Using the Google-provided slideset, my presentations typically involved a 20 or 30 minute talk followed by a Q&A. If you'd like to invite other local GSoCers to speak along with you, the folks from Google's Open Source Programs Office can help put you in touch with other folks in your area. Make sure to let them know when your presentation is scheduled so it can be added to the program calendar.

Finally, you need time to deliver the presentation. Unless you're like me and work in academia, you probably can't sneak out of work for an hour or two in the middle of the day. In my experience, however, student associations tend to prefer scheduling these events in the evening, since there are no classes at that time and it makes it easier for students with jobs to attend. Just let them know what your time restrictions are, and they'll probably be able to accommodate them.

Do you have any other tidbits of advice on how to organize a GSoC information session? Let us know in the comments! In any case, I hope you'll join us in spreading a bit of Summer love.

Spreading the Summer Love

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:49:00 +0000

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Each year, we ask for help from the community to help us spread the word about Google Summer of Code^TM. We're thrilled that the outpouring of support has been so great for 2009. Even before the program started yesterday, volunteers translated our program flyer into more than 50 languages. We've also had former students and mentors host more than 20 informational sessions worldwide, from Peru to Switzerland, with more to follow. For those who want to learn more about the program, Hackystat mentor for 2008, Philip Johnson, contributed this excellent video:

If you want to get involved but are looking for more information, check out our Frequently Asked Questions or join us in #gsoc on Freenode. You can find screencasts of work done by past student participants and more informational videos in our program YouTube channel.Interested students may find our recent post on the Google for Students Blog useful. And, of course, don't forget about our discussion list.

We can always use more help spreading the Summer love, so if you'd like to contribute, post our flyer wherever geeks near you congregate. You can also follow our updates and spread the word to your friends on your favorite social networking sites. We can also use help to translate the program flyers and presentations. Short on time but full of zest for Open Source? We'd love it if you'd attend a local information session to share your experiences with newbies.

Many thanks to all the community members who contributed their time to promote the program!

Now Accepting Applications for Google Summer of Code 2009

Leslie Hawthorn — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:31:00 +0000

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Google Summer of Code^TM, our flagship program to introduce college students to open source development, opens today. Over the past four years, we've seen nearly 2,500 successful students "graduate" from the program, and we're looking forward to welcoming another group of students for our fifth year. We're now accepting applications from open source projects who wish to act as mentoring organizations and will begin accepting applications from students on March 23rd. For more details, check out the Google Open Source Blog.

New Functionality for Moodle

Leslie Hawthorn — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:32:00 +0000

By Cristin Frodella, Google Apps for Education Team

We're always excited to jump into the world of education and when it helps Open Source, we're all the happier. Moodlerooms, a partner of Moodle, the Open Source learning management system, recently approached to fund a project which would allow Moodle users to easily integrate Google Apps Education Edition, our communication and collaboration suite. Our Open Source Programs Office sponsored the work and the result is an Open Source single sign-on integration between Moodle and Google. The best part is the extensibility features allow any educational software vendor to take a similar approach to provide user directory synchronization, single sign-on, and user data integration. Check out the full story on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Zurich Open Source Jam 6

Leslie Hawthorn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:14:00 +0000

By René Nussbaumer, Systems Administration Team

We started the evening slowly, and by around 18:30 almost everyone had arrived to enjoy the food and beer. Thirty-three guests from all over Switzerland and surrounding countries were there, and we even had one visitor from Canada.

After everybody enjoyed the first round of food, Gürkan Sengün started with the first lightning talk about hugin, a software package used to create panorama photos. Hugin creates panorama photos by wrapping around other scripts, such as finding common points in two images and putting the images together. Gürkan did a live demo of the software by going through all the steps to create a panorama photo of the audience.

The next speaker, Lukas Renggli, gave us an introduction into seaside. Seaside is a web application framework designed to make web applications easy to write and maintain. Applications are written using the component design pattern and can again be composed to build larger applications. Should any problems arise, you have the possibility of live debugging and live fixing of the code without loosing state. As a demo, Lukas showed us a simple application which calculated the reciprocal of an integer, all of which you could change through interactive links.

The next round of talks was started by Michael Schwarz, who is working on leanXcam. leanXcam is a small Open Source camera running uClinux that not only takes photos but is also able to process them on the device. After a quick introduction Michael gave us a demo how the camera works.

The last talk was about JExample by Adrian Kuhn. JExample is an extension for JUnit, a testing framework for Java, and fully compatible with it. JExample provides unit test dependencies to make debugging unit tests easier, providing graphs where you can see which components failed without running the actual tests. Adrian illustrated this functionality by testing a defective stack implementation.

It was a really interesting evening and everyone attending enjoyed it immensely. Thanks to everyone and hopefully we'll see you soon again. To stay informed about future Open Source Jams in Zurich, please join the Open Source Jam Zurich Google Group.

Software Construction Toolkit Released

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:10:00 +0000

By Randall Spangler, Software Engineer - Client Tools Team

If you've ever worked on a cross-platform software project, you know how often changes made on one platform break the build on other platforms. If you're using native project files (Xcode on Mac, makefiles on Linux, etc.), every developer needs access to every platform just to add a single source file. You can use a single makefile shared between all the platforms, but writing a makefile which "Does The Right Thing" on each platform is tricky. On all platforms, you need simple ways to express dependencies, run unit tests, and rebuild individual project components. You need to be able to extend the build tool to cover the 5% of your project that doesn't fit the usual build patterns. Oh, and the tool should be documented, tested, and free of charge.

To meet those challenges, we've written a cross-platform Software Construction Toolkit, built on the Open Source SCons build tool. It's written in Python, and builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

In addition to contributing fixes and enhancements back to SCons itself, we've released full source and documentation for the toolkit.

We always look forward to your feedback, so check out the code or an example project and send us your comments in our discussion group.

Oxford Geeks Run the Gamut from Hardware Hacking to Navigating Social Media

Leslie Hawthorn — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:20:00 +0000

By J-P Stacey, Oxford Geek

The most recent Oxford Geek Night had a record number of attendees — well over 150 — and filled the Jericho Tavern in Oxford to bursting point. Given they're a regular event and we've been holding them for two years now, it was really good to see them more popular than ever. In contrast to previous events, OGN10 hosted design and marketing keynotes, which meant we could cater to the more varied nature of the geek scene in Oxford. Elliot Jay Stocks, designer and writer for .net, launched into a history of type on the web, moving from the misleading nature of website tools listing every font on your local machine, through the sameyness of web-safe fonts, into replacement technologies such as sIFR and ultimately the future of embedded fonts in the browser and the @font-face CSS directive. Next, Sylwia Presley of 1000heads explained how an individual or organization could adapt to the existing ethics and mores of online social communities, specifically Twitter, and to what extent they could plough their own furrow while still being accepted by the community as a whole.

The two keynotes were supported by more technical microslot sessions. David Sheldon, fresh from investigations into scaling at online music distributors We7, explained the various problems inherent in multi-machine scaling, including such oddities as individual machines' garbage collection leading to a deadlock of the network, and the importance of adapting to your application's individual behaviour as Facebook have done. Drew Mclellan ran through RGBA colour support in modern browsers, using the experiences of the 24ways team last advent to show how new designs involving transparency can be made to degrade well for older browsers.

Tom Dyson demonstrated how the combination of live data from the National Grid might, via his home-made single-serving site caniturniton.com, provide signals for hardware hackers to turn on household items like fridges whenever the UK power grid has spare capacity. We also had some great talks from Peet Morris and Tim Davies respectively, about the history of Microsoft culture circa Windows 3.0, and about the future of online culture for adolescents, how site design and application flow need to adapt to privacy and child-protection legislation and goals. Finally, Bruce Lawson spoke about BS 8878, the new British Standard for accessible websites. He explained how these non-binding standards dovetailed with UK accessibility law, and how they might be used internally to support good accessibility within top-down development management.

Our end-of-night book raffle was courtesy of Pearson Education, with a number of T-shirts thrown in by We7, and a couple of Sitepoint books donated by their author. As always we overran, and as always the Oxford geek community continued to chat, discuss, network and argue well into the night. Videos and slides from the evening will be up on the OGN site shortly. Thanks to Google's Open Source Team and our other sponsors, Oxford Geek Nights continue to be a free event, and the number of attendees at the first OGN of 2009 suggest that they'll also continue to be popular among the local geek crowd for some time to come.