• LiquidFun now runs in your browser! Using Emscripten, we’ve translated LiquidFun into JavaScript. You can see LiquidFun’s Testbed application, rewritten in JavaScript, running on our landing page.

• We’ve added iOS support for LiquidFun’s internal Testbed and EyeCandy applications. Earlier versions of LiquidFun could be made to run on iOS, but iOS is now officially supported.

• We’ve optimized LiquidFun's particle simulation. In particular, we’ve written NEON (a.k.a., Advanced SIMD) code to improve performance on ARM processors.

• We’ve stabilized the simulation, fixed bugs, and added some cool new functions, including one that automatically splits a particle group into multiple, disjoint particle groups. 

• We’ve clarified and improved the documentation, thanks to questions from the LiquidFun community.

Adoption

• Industry legend Ricardo Quesada has created an excellent tutorial on how to use LiquidFun with his popular Cocos2D-X engine. 

• Corona Labs has integrated LiquidFun into Corona Pro and Enterprise. They also have two fantastic tutorials on using LiquidFun with Corona: one an introduction, and another for particle collisions.

• YoYo Games has integrated LiquidFun 0.9 into GameMaker: Studio, and provided an excellent tutorial on the basics of particle systems.

• LiquidFun is also now a built-in component of the Lobster game programming language. 

Inside LiquidFun

• distributing information to patients via voice or SMS
• collecting data from patients or care providers
• alerting care providers of the status of their patients
• facilitating communication between patients, care providers, and/or health administrators

• Updating Java ANTLR grammar to support Java 8 syntax changes.
• Adding reliable parsing support of comments and documentation comments (special format of comments that is used by JavaDoc tool) to Checkstyle's Java grammar. This will allow Checkstyle to validate comments in code and let other developers write their custom validation rules based on ready-to-use parse tree (as it is done with java code now).
• Reviewing requirements for Java code style from Google, creating a Checkstyle configuration for it, and extending the existing checks (or create new checks) to cover Google's requirements.

• A new collaborative text editor based on KTextEditor and KDE Telepathy
• Animation support in Krita, a digital painting suite for real artists—professionals and those who create for the love and fun of it
• Communication between a user’s Android phone and their KDE desktop, with features such as desktop notification of new messages, syncing photos over WiFi, pausing music automatically during a call and more.

• Artikulate – a foreign language pronunciation trainer
• Khipu - an advanced mathematical function (2D and 3D) plotter
• A web interface for KDE project reporting that provides information along with statistics and graphical reports
• A localization team management tool that handles tasks such as application booking and the review process. Localization includes translation, documentation, and internationalization. KDE is translated into more than 100 languages.

The task was about creating a screencast of coding a Hello world module for Drupal 8. It was an ordinary task but it helped me gain recognition in the whole Drupal community. The video was also appreciated and discussed on social networks. -- Vijay Nandwani 

One of my favorite tasks was revamping the "other languages" feature on the mobile Wikipedia, for which I both added features and noticeably reduced page load times. -- Theo Patt 

My favorite task was to modify DriveSetup to make the window zoom-able. It seemed like a simple task but I was still unfamiliar with the Haiku API, so there was a bit of challenge to it. -- Freeman Lou 

I added support for new types of Flickr URLs for UploadWizard extension for MediaWiki. -- Mateusz Maćkowski

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

// Construct a cow with a required argument, its name.

Cow c1 = Cow(name("Bessie"));

// Construct a second cow with a different name, and an optional age.

// Also, specifying a type is optional, since InFact does type

// inference.

c2 = Cow(name("Lani Moo"), age(2));

// Construct a human pet owner with the two cows as pets.

PetOwner p = HumanPetOwner(pets({c1, c2}));

When a Google Code-in blog post caught my eye on a cold November morning, it wasn’t because it was another one of those run of the mill race-to-the-buzzer-on-a-contrived-programming-puzzler type programming competition. No. Google Code-in is different for two important reasons. First, Google Code-in is a marathon, not a sprint. Little did I know how grueling but rewarding those six weeks would be. Second, Google Code-in isn’t about who had spent years memorizing very specific algorithms to solve meaningless and often impractical programming problems with no relation to the real world; instead, Google Code-in contestants write real code that finds its way into real repositories for real projects with real users. As it turned out, some of the work my fellow competitors and I did is now in software packages approaching 1.5 billion downloads! Very few industry professionals have the opportunity to write code with that kind of reach -- let alone a bunch of pre-college kids. 

Suffice to say, I was sold on Google Code-in! What could be more amazing than a programming competition designed for students my age (13-17) that tested and strengthened the skills required of real-world developers: endurance, the ability to work as a team towards a common goal, and the need for flexibility. When the first day of the competition finally arrived, I took a relatively simple non-coding task to do some research for an org, submitted the work, and got it accepted. One down; countless to go… I picked up a much harder coding task which I finished many frustrating hours later. Then another… Then another… My weekends disappeared... Then Thanksgiving... Then Christmas… 

What kept me going through six challenging weeks of programming day after day after day? For the first time I wasn’t just programming in a vacuum. I was collaborating with a multitude of other students from many countries and time zones. We constantly chattered on IRC and to some extent collaborated on tasks and worked together as a team to accomplish the goals of the open source projects we were helping. Two years later, I’m still friends with a few of my co-competitors even though we live thousands of miles apart and have met each other only once: on the Grand Prize trip. 

The greatest thing I gained from Google Code-in, however, wasn’t related to coding at all. Google Code-in changed my life because Google Code-in is where I found my confidence; Google Code-in showed me that I can do anything. The grand prize trip was phenomenal. One day we were being led around the Google campus by people famous in the open source community and the next we’re living it up on a private yacht sailing under the Golden Gate bridge. That week of excitement in Silicon Valley changed my outlook and inspired me towards the path I am on today. I don’t know where my journey leads, but the adventure has been amazing thus far. I challenge you to dive into the same adventure and see where your path takes you - you won’t regret it! 

By Aaron Schmitz, Google Code-in 2011 grand prize winner and 2012 Joomla Google Summer of Code student

• Dan Scott, Evergreen
• David Maxwell, NetBSD
• Olaf Alders, MetaCPAN.org (Perl Foundation)
• Abigail Cabunoc, Genome Informatics
• Sukhbir Singh, Debian
• Jacob Beard, scxml-js
• Vlad Filippov, ReviewBoard
• Richard Schwarting, GNOME

• 1,085 tasks have been completed with the 10 open source organizations thus far
• 266 students from 43 countries have completed at least one task in the contest
• Countries with the most students completing tasks so far are:

United States - 86
India - 39
Romania - 18
Singapore - 16
Germany - 10

• Over 2,300 students have registered for the contest from 89 countries
• There are 11 new countries to add to the list of registered students for Google Code-in: Anguilla, Armenia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Kyrgyz Republic, Lebanon, Mauritius, Panama, Swaziland and the US Virgin Islands.

For some time now I thought it was time for Bosnia and Herzegovina to have a Google Summer of Code meetup. In the past 9 years of GSoC, Bosnia had 4 different students doing 5 projects. A few times I thought about organizing the meetup but I was not sure if anybody would come to listen to what I have to say, and I finally decided to take this project on myself and was excited to see the results.

The meetup
After successfully completing the Google Summer of Code program as a student twice (in 2012 and 2013), I now had a lot of insight into the program and people had more reason to be interested in my talk. 

Though the logistics weren't terribly difficult to arrange, I needed a room (I reserved the conference amphitheater at the International University of Sarajevo where I am a student), a laptop and a projector. We held the meetup on November 12 with a group of 20 students in attendance, including five from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering - University of Sarajevo, and three IUS professors.  

We kicked things off with GSoC slides and an overview of the program, including info about projects from previous years, open source/free software in general and a few tips and tricks. I wrapped up with some of my personal experiences in the program. Probably the most important thing that happened at the meetup was to alleviate some of the fear around applying for Google Summer of Code. It took me two years to get it together and gather the nerve to send my first email to a mentoring organization, so I tried to explain to the people at the meetup that they should not be afraid, "If I could do it, why can't you?" 

Based on the number of questions and the quality of the discussion after the presentation, it was clear that the main goal of the meetup was achieved: drive interest in the program. A number of students that came to the meetup plan on applying for GSoC, and though this is still a relatively small number, it's the beginning of what will hopefully be strong participation from Bosnia and Herzegovina students. I look forward to organizing at least one more meetup in the future.

Admir Huric, thank you for your help with this story. 

By Benjamin Talic, Google Summer of Code 2012 and 2013 student 

Panic. Confusion. Bewilderment.

Scrolling down the infinite list of tasks, my face shifted from a merely quizzical expression to one of befuddlement as I saw task after task involving C, Perl, or some other knowledge that I did not understand. 

And then I saw SymPy. Hey, that's written in Python, right? 

For me, Google Code-in was an easy way to get involved in real programming - in writing code that other people would use - as a high school student. The competitive nature of the program naturally held my interest, and the mentors were perfect for novices like me, as I began knowing barely git commit and git status. And even though I still couldn't handle many of the tasks - "Implement ODE solvers", with my two months of calculus was rather intimidating to see listed - I found a niche that I could contribute to.  

My first tasks were not that exciting: formatting docstrings and cleaning up warnings and then I moved on to Sympy's website. I felt much more confident with HTML than with Python and found that I enjoyed these tasks the most. Other students and I fixed bugs, implemented a mobile website, and most noticeably, redesigned the theme of the site. I was proud of our contributions. 

After the competition concluded I felt that we had unfinished work left. SymPy Live had bugs and the mobile interface we wrote was rather unpolished. Naturally, I couldn't let those bugs stand, especially after having put in so much effort implementing some of those features in the first place...and so I submitted another pull request. And then another. SymPy's developers didn't have the time to focus on their websites, so I began to maintain them, fixing bugs and adding features. 

While digging through SymPy's repositories, I found an abandoned website - SymPy Gamma. The site had had no updates in years. But its premise interested me - an open source Wolfram|Alpha competitor - and I began to dream up and implement new features: basic plotting, a new design, steps for differentiation. By now open source had become my hobby, more so than just programming for its own sake had been; I could contribute to and work with a community, and that was rewarding beyond the task of simply writing code. 

I am glad Google offered this opportunity to get involved in open source. I learned more about software development than any school could have taught, and I was introduced to a welcoming community, one that appreciated any contribution made. I hope that the users of the myriad projects of Google Code-in enjoyed the improvements that we, the students, made, and I hope other students take the opportunity to involve themselves with open source communities. 

By David Li, former Google Code-in 2011 student and current Sympy contributor

"The reason you are here is because you deserve to be. The whole point of GSoC is to introduce new developers to FOSS, create more FOSS code, and support projects we think are great. We look at reviews, and the aftermath and say 'did it work?'
You are here because it did. 
Thank you for being there for Open Source Software. Thank you for being there for Free Software, and for being there for Google. Open source matters to us. The future of Open Source matters to us. This room--and the people you bring in--without you, it wouldn't be as wonderful in 5-10 years as it is today."

A New GSoC Tradition

Big Take-aways

Operating Systems Summit
When else do you see core developers from Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, and others, all politicking in one place? 

Gamification in FOSS Session
Tales of developer incentivization were shared by projects such as Joomla, Battle For Wesnoth, and the Fedora Community. 

HFOSS Session
HFOSS.org founders and members, met with representatives from other projects such as OpenMRS, Sigmah, PostgreSQL, The Sahana Software Foundation, The Tsunami Information Project, Mifos, NetBSD, SugarLabs, BRL-CAD, and a handful of others, to discuss our role as hackers to improve the conditions of our planet, and our species.

Outreach Program For Women
Led by Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the Gnome Foundation, who introduced the OPW, and discussed ways to bring more diversity to your FOSS project.

YOU too can join the excitement!

The week was fast-paced and exciting! On Monday, we got to know each others’ projects, nailed down our target audience and desired outcomes, and brainstormed ways in which we might share this new resource after the week was over. By Tuesday mid-morning, we had a table of contents. We chose the sections we were each most excited about to write first. By the end of Tuesday we had our core chapters mostly written and spent Wednesday writing our introductory and supporting material. Thursday we spent the day editing and gearing up for our 6pm deadline to complete the book for it to go to print. The week was a lot of work and a lot of fun, we were all inspired and well fed.

And that is how our book titled “Contributing to OpenMRS: Getting Started as a Developer”came to be. Usually the hardest part of making meaningful contributions to any open source project is getting started. On behalf of the authors and broader OpenMRS community, we hope this book helps significantly lower the hurdles new OpenMRS developers encounter, whether they are new to open source projects, Health IT, OpenMRS, or all three. The book introduces OpenMRS development processes and architecture, walks the reader through setting up a development environment and building a basic module, overviews OpenMRS collaboration tools and where to go for support, and suggests a potential progression of becoming a seasoned developer community member.  

By Jordan Kellerstrass, OpenMRS team

Last week, a small troop of five GNOMies from the docs team (Sindhu Sundar, David King, Kat Gerasimova, Michael Hill and Aruna Sankaranarayanan) arrived at Google ready to write a book for our community. We were joined by two enthusiastic documenters, Amanda French and Heidi Waterhouse, who volunteered to help us with our book from the perspective of complete newbies to our project, which was perfect as they are the intended audience for the book. 

Our first day was spent getting to know the other teams, sharing our project with them and pinning down the table of contents. In the evening, Amanda and Heidi started setting up a working environment for using GNOME’s Yelp help viewer. It has been very useful to see how our tools are presented by the Internet at large to potential users. For the most part, the available information is accurate, although some details needed to be clarified. 

On Wednesday, halfway through our second full day of writing, we almost had our first version of the book completed. For Thursday, we refined the existing content and expanded the book where necessary, completing our book by the 6pm deadline to go to print. On Friday we got to see (at least on screen), the fruit of our labour: the Introduction to Mallard book. The printed copies were ready by 8pm Friday night.  

The week of book sprinting was a remarkable collaborative writing experience, and I can’t wait to recommend it to other projects I know. Thanks again to Allen Gunn for inspiring us and to Adam Hyde for getting a book out of us and to the Google Open Source Programs team for Doc Camp. 

By Michael Hill, Aruna Sankaranarayanan, and Kat Gerasimova, GNOME Mallard team

BRL-CAD, a computer-aided design open source software project, is ecstatic for having participated in the 2013 Google Doc Camp. BRL-CAD's team of seven individuals came together from four different countries, three continents and one oceanic island to produce a contributor's guide totaling more than 100 pages in length in less than one week. The inspiration, ideas, and productivity experienced throughout the week-long event has invigorated an effort to expand documentation and improve outreach for our project. Google Doc Camp introduced an exciting technique for documenting and sharing information which we are using to help grow our community. 

By Christopher Sean Morrison, BRL-CAD team

“All the knowledge and skillset that I have learned will certainly help me in my career ahead. Working with a nonprofit organization like Benetech, you have that awesome feeling of being part of something big that is helping people across the globe. I sincerely hope to continue the same in the future.”  -- Yashasvi Gridhar

• RProtoBuf is an R package for Google’s Protocol Buffer library that allows one to define simple data structures with intuitive getter and setter methods. These data structures can be serialized into an extremely compact format for sending to other distributed systems. Recent releases include improved support for 64-bit integers, protocol buffer extensions, and more.

• HistogramTools is a new R package I have released that uses RProtoBuf to read in a compact protocol buffer representation of binned data and includes a number of helpful functions for manipulating, plotting, and measuring the statistical information loss due to the binning. In addition to protocol buffers, it also supports importing aggregate performance data directly from DTrace output.

Google Summer of Code 

Back in 2005, Google made a commitment to support open source software contributors. In addition to our other programs to build and support the contributor base, we thought a great way to increase awareness was to introduce the wide world of open source to college students. Google Summer of Code was born: match student developers from around the world with open source software organizations to work on a project while on break from their universities. 

With over 8,300 mentors in 100 countries around the world, the 8,500 student developers have produced a stunning 50 million lines of code. The program will now be reaching its 10th instance in 2014. 

We told you on the Official Google Blog just a few highlights of what we’ll be up to this year, and now we want to tell you all the details:  

1. 10 visits to countries with high participation throughout the year.
2. 10 developer events in promotion of the program. 
3. 10 mentors who have participated in Google Summer of Code will be featured on our open source blog.
4. 10% additional student stipend (a total of $5500 for students who successfully complete the whole program).
5. 10% more students than we’ve ever had participate in the program before.
6. 10 more mentoring organizations than we’ve ever had in the program will be participating in Google Summer of Code 2014
7. 10 year student reunion event will be held on Google’s Mountain View campus next year for all the students who have participated in the program. 
8. 10 year reunion mentor summit will be held on Google’s Mountain View campus for all our Google Summer of Code organization alumni.
9. 10 students/organizations will be chosen to highlight their work at the Google booths at open source events throughout the year.
10. 10 student projects from the past nine years will be highlighted on the open source blog and YouTube.

We’re pleased to be running a program that touches a lot of lives around the world, and we hope this will be a celebration of all the accomplishments we’ve seen from so many of our participants. Watch this blog for announcements about our travel and our efforts over the next year. Here’s to 10 Things! 

Google Code-in - Program starts for students November 18th

For the fourth consecutive year we are thrilled to announce Google Code-in, an international contest designed to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source development. Open source projects are about more than just coding, and this contest highlights a variety of ways to contribute to open source projects. Every year, open source software is becoming more important around the globe; from government, healthcare, relief efforts, gaming, to large tech companies and everything in between. 

When you read the term open source do you think:

• What is open source?
• What types of work do open source projects do?
• I’ve only taken one computer science class, can I contribute to an open source project?
• I’m not really into coding, what else can I do to contribute to open source?
• I’ve never participated in open source or an online contest before, can someone help guide me?
• Open source sounds cool, how can I get started?

If you’ve wondered about any of these questions and are a pre-university student (age 13-17) then we hope you will join in the fun and excitement of the Google Code-in contest starting Monday, November 18th. 

The different categories of tasks that students will be able to work on include:

1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
3. Outreach/research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
5. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Over the past 3 years we have had over 1200 students from 71 countries complete tasks in the contest. In April, we flew the 20 Google Code-in 2012 Grand Prize winners and a parent to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters for a 5 day/4 night trip where they enjoyed talking with Google engineers, an awards ceremony, a Google campus tour, and a full day of fun in San Francisco. 

Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Google Code-in 2013 site for more details on how to sign up and participate. And please help us spread the word to your friends around the globe! If you are a teacher that would like to encourage your students to participate, please send an email to our team at ospoteam@gmail.com. We would be happy to answer any questions you may have. 

Stay tuned to the contest site and subscribe to our mailing list for more updates on the contest. We will announce the 10 open source organizations that will be participating in the contest on November 1. The Google Code-in contest starts for students on November 18, 2013. We look forward to welcoming hundreds of students from around the world into the open source family again this year.

Apache Isis  -- Students: Bhargav Golla and Dimuthu Upeksha

Apache Isis is a Java framework for rapidly developing domain-driven apps. This summer we had two students working on new “viewers” that interact with a REST API that Isis automatically generates, reflecting the structure and behavior of the domain objects. In the past the Isis community has worked on single-page HTML5/JS viewer and on a Windows Store App viewer. For Google Summer of Code our two students are each building their own viewers, one for Android, and one using JQueryMobile (to be packaged using Apache Cordova/PhoneGap). 


Both students have become quite fluent in the REST API, and both have a viewer running that is quite usable and can be deployed to an Android mobile device.  The two viewers are broadly similar in terms of features implemented, and indeed towards the end of the project hit the limits of the available features in the REST API.  Both students have said they are keen to continue developing their viewers after the Google Summer of Code program ends. 

By Dan Haywood, Apache Mentor

 

Apache OODT -- Student: Rajith Siriwardana
Some exciting work to make Apache OODT interoperate with the scalable Ganglia open source resource monitoring system has been undertaken by Rajith Siriwardana. Rajith and his mentor, Chris Mattmann, divided the project up into several manageable milestones, first developing a fast Java parsing library for Ganglia's XML based response format. This is one of the first modular Java-based Ganglia clients that exists, and to our knowledge is the first one to exist at Apache.

With the Ganglia Java client in hand, Rajith and Chris worked to develop a weighted average load balancing algorithm that plugged into Apache OODT's Resource Monitor interface, allowing it to poll Ganglia for current metrics like 5-min, 1-min avg load, and current disk capacity and space. The algorithm then takes this information into account, along with the requirement for job load, and plugs into the Capacity based scheduler part of the OODT Resource Manager, thereby allowing OODT to poll its resource monitoring information from Ganglia.

We are excited that Rajith is now a member of the Apache OODT Project Management Committee (PMC) and a committer on the project. Apache OODT is a better overall project because of his efforts this summer.

By Chris Mattmann, Apache Mentor 

Apache OODT -- Student Ross Laidlaw
Just as a pencil needs to be kept sharp in order to be useful, computer software needs to be regularly improved and polished in order to stay relevant. Fortunately for the Apache OODT project, this is exactly the type of work Ross Laidlaw, under the mentorship of Rishi Verma, has performed over the past few months through the Google Summer of Code program. Ross has taken a component of the OODT framework called the Product Server, and sculpted it into a more intuitive and usable package. He's taken the Java servlet-based set of web applications constituting the Product Server framework, and ported them to easier-to-maintain JAX-RS RESTful end-points. Moreover, Ross has advanced the content dissemination package, that's a part of the framework, to help make available OODT metadata in various forms like: JSON, RSS, and RDF.  

Why perform all this refactoring as well as new development work? Simple: it helps to keep the OODT Product Server framework relevant, maintainable, and sharp. Ross has done an excellent job through his Google Summer of Code project, and we're definitely looking forward to his continuing involvement with OODT. 

By Rishi Verma, Apache Mentor 

Apache Gora -- Apostolos Giannakidis
Data volumes have been growing at an astronomical rate in recent years with the term 'Big Data' being used ubiquitously within tech circles, mainstream media, governments and society alike. Apache Gora is an open source object-to-datastore mapping framework providing an in-memory data model and persistence for big data. Gora supports persisting to column stores, key value stores, document stores and RDBMSs, and analyzing the data with extensive Apache Hadoop™ MapReduce support.  


Apostolos Giannakidis’ project involved extending datastore support for Oracle's NoSQL database as part of the Gora suite of datastore modules. Work on the design and implementation of the gora-oracle module included the provision of full CRUD operations while exploiting the ACID transactions, flexible consistency options and the simple data mode of Oracle NoSQL database. With these, Apache Gora will be able to integrate seamlessly with the Oracle stack and the Big Data Appliance. Also, this module is one step further toward rendering Apache Gora as the standard persistence framework for NoSQL databases. 

By Lewis John Mcgibbney, Apache Mentor

The open source software initiative 52°North is an open international network of partners from research, industry and public administration. Its main purpose is to foster innovation in the field of Geoinformatics through a collaborative R&D process. The R&D process takes place within 52°North R&D communities, which develop new concepts and technologies (examples include: for managing near real-time sensor data, integrating geoprocessing technologies into SDIs, and making use of GRID and Cloud technologies). These communities evaluate new macro trends, such as the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web or Linked Open Data, and find ways to unfold their use in practice. 

As a returning Google Summer of Code mentoring organization, 52°North was particularly thrilled to have four students work on different projects in the fields of Sensor Web, Geostatistics and Geoprocessing this summer. 52°North’s overall goals for the projects were to improve the usability of the products and extend the user base to new domains. 

Khalid Alqinyah created a new admin web application for the 52° North Web Processing Service (WPS). This new application will improve the WPS back end code with an updated implementation and provide the front end with a new and ergonomic user interface. 

Patrick Noble added support for seismic data within the 52° North Sensor Observation Service. This seismic data will then be visualized by the Sensor Web Client. The result of his work will be a comprehensive toolkit for publishing and visualizing seismic data.
Jinlong Yang developed classes and methods that enable trajectory analysis in the R language. We expect this enhancement to become a valuable tool for all researchers dealing with trajectory data as it will open up R for a whole range of new application scenarios. 

Mohammad Ahmed Hamed Yakoub implemented the Open Sensor Search (OSS) idea in an agile software development process. OSS is a platform for the discovery of in-situ sensor data. The resulting discovery solution will become a cornerstone within the 52°North Sensor Web framework, allowing the development of more sophisticated client applications. 

By Jan Schulte, 52°North Organization Administrator

OpenSSL

Capsicum

In August 2010, the University of Cambridge and Google published the Capsicum security model at the USENIX Security Symposium. Initially funded by a Google Faculty Research Award, Capsicum combines security ideas from historic research capability systems with contemporary operating-system design to allow robust, fine-grained, flexible, and application-centred sandboxing. Since 2012, Google Open Source Programs Office and the FreeBSD Foundation have been jointly funding continuing open source development to transition Capsicum from research to practice; Google also has summer students working on Capsicum through Google Summer of Code under the FreeBSD organization. 

The project has been led by FreeBSD developer Pawel Dawidek, who has refined the Capsicum model as our experience has grown, updating existing privilege-separated applications to use Capsicum (e.g., OpenSSH and dhclient). Pawel has also adapted new applications to use Capsicum compartmentalisation "out-of-the-box", including system tools services (e.g., tcpdump, kdump,the high-availability storage daemon [hastd], the security audit-trail distribution daemon [auditdistd]), and UNIX pipeline components (e.g., grep, uniq). The goal is to move gradually towards ubiquitous sandboxing: since it is cheap (and often easy), explore what happens when you try to do it everywhere, mitigating as-yet unknown future vulnerabilities. 

A key contribution of this work is the Casper application framework. Casper manages the creation of sandboxes, launching them on demand with only the rights they require to operate (Saltzer and Schroeder's 1975 Principle of Least Privilege). Existing applications can be linked against Casper to make use of a growing suite of Casper components, including sandboxed DNS resolution, delegation of file-system subsets, cryptographic random number generation, network services (such as sockets), system monitoring interfaces (via sysctl), and system databases such as the user and password files. 

Pawel's current work is due to wrap up later in 2013. FreeBSD 10.0 will ship with Capsicum enabled by default and a suite of sandboxed applications.

Certificate Transparency

Tor

Libpurple

TimVideos.us is a group of projects which together create a system for doing both recording and live event streaming for conferences, meetings, user groups and other presentations. The project combines both software (gst-switch, streaming website and tools, speaker tracking, etc.) and hardware projects (HDMI2USB - A HDMI/DVI Capturing Solution). Parts of the system have been been used at large open source conferences such as Linux.conf.au, PyCon US and others.

Google Summer of Code 2013 has generously funded three students to work on the following TimVideos.us projects:

• EDID Database Website - Code  Extended display identification data (EDID) is a data structure provided by a digital display to describe its capabilities to a video source. Many devices ship with bad or misleading EDID information. The goal of this project is to develop a website to list EDID information, allowing users to browse, search and update them. 

• Developing Python API for gst-switch - Code  gst-switch aims to do interactive live mixing of incoming video streams, designed to meet the needs of conference recording. Designed as a flexible replacement for DVSwitch, and based around GStreamer, this project aims to develop a Python API for controlling and testing gst-switch. 

• Porting Flumotion to the Gstreamer-1.0 API - Code  Flumotion is a streaming media server which uses Gstreamer at its core. GStreamer recently released it's 1.0 API which is not compatible with the old 0.10 Flumotion. 

We hope that through our projects, the costs and expertise currently required to produce live streaming events will be reduced to near zero. We wish to develop a system where everyone has the ability to record presentations and host live remote participants across the globe.  

By Tim Ansell, TimVideos.us Google Summer of Code Organization Administrator and Mentor

-----

lmonade is a scientific software distribution that can be installed without administrative rights on Unix based systems. Building on the Gentoo packaging system, we hope to solve the dependency nightmare experienced by all sufficiently complex scientific software packages which have release schedules that do not fit the restrictions of packagers for large GNU/Linux distributions.

We are thrilled to be a part of Google Summer of Code as a new organization this year. As an umbrella organization, lmonade promotes ideas to improve various open source/free mathematical software, especially computational algebra projects. After the midterm evaluations, we are continuing the Google Summer of Code with 4 projects:

• Tom Bachmann - C++ wrapper for FLINT - FLINT is a highly optimized library for performing computations in number theory, written in C. This project aims to create C++ wrappers using expression templates, which compile down to code which achieves performance as close to native C as possible. 

• Remus Barbatei - Continuous integration platform for lmonade - This project is about improving the existing CI infrastructure used by lmonade to take advantage of the build instructions and dependency information stored in its package repository and easily set up nightly testing facilities for more scientific software packages. 

• Verónica Suaste - New decoding algorithms for error correcting codes in Sage - The main goal of this work is to implement decoding algorithms based on Gröbner bases methods in Sage. While improving the coding theory module of Sage, this will provide the opportunity to compare performance of this new algorithm with implementations in computer algebra systems. 

• Ioana Tamas - Binary decision diagrams for Boolean polynomial rings - Zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams are used by Polybori for efficiently representing Boolean polynomials. At the moment, they are manipulated via CUDD, which is not specialized on these types of diagrams and only uses C in the implementation. The goal of this project is to implement an independent library in C++ that is specialized on zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams. 

We wish all our students continuing success in their projects. 

By Burcin Erocal, lmonade Organization Administrator 

The Funf Open Sensing Framework is an extensible sensing and data processing framework for mobile phones. The Funf project aims to help both developers as well as non-technical researchers and individuals. The Funf-in-a-Box service lets users configure and build a custom data collection app in less than five minutes, with zero programming. Funf Journal, a mobile app available on the Android Play Store, allows users to collect and explore data about their lives (quantified-self), and gives developers/researchers a chance to evaluate the capabilities underneath the hood. All of these are built on top of the Funf SDK, which can be used by developers to incorporate sensing functionality into their apps, and can be extended to provide new sensing capabilities. 

This is Funf’s first year in Google Summer of Code and we formed a small and tight working group consisting of our two organization mentors and our two amazing students, Swetank Kumar Saha and Pararth Shah. We have been working on two fronts: Adding core functionality to the Funf SDK and enhancing Funf In A Box (FIAB) which has become very popular with researchers and data collection enthusiasts. Pararth has spearheaded work on the core library and added support for high bandwidth probes, including raw audio, video, and timelapse. We’re now diving into advanced triggers and scheduling that will allow for dynamic sensing configurations. On the FIAB side, Swetank is adding support for configuring and deploying custom surveys and capturing additional user input.  Amazingly, he also managed to fit in porting the FIAB architecture from a single Amazon server to Google Cloud Services, which is going to greatly reduce our costs and increase our performance. The summer isn’t over yet, so stay tuned for more new features and updates! 

By Nadav Aharony and Alan Gardner, Funf Organization Administrators 

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The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) has a clear mission: "To support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development." We have three exciting Google Summer of Code projects contributing to CloudSim, Gazebo, and ROS, which currently represent three of our biggest open source efforts.  

Esteve Fernández has been adding support for OpenStack to CloudSim, a project developed by OSRF to run robotics simulations in the cloud. CloudSim was used to support the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge and currently supports the Amazon and SoftLayer clouds. Esteve added support for private clouds to CloudSim, enabling organizations to run simulations on their own networks. Furthermore, Esteve is contributing to CloudSim by fixing bugs, improving the code base and helping with any task that comes up. In the following weeks, he will be making CloudSim constellations accessible to users in an OpenStack cloud provided by OSRF as a public service. 

Andrei Haidu is developing a fluid dynamics physics engine for the Gazebo robot simulator that will enable the use of aerial and underwater vehicles in simulation. 

Gonzalo Abella is developing a new parameter server prototype for ROS. He is exploring making all parameters dynamic, and integrating the capabilities of the dynamic_reconfigure package into the core API. 

By Carlos Agüero, Open Source Robotics Foundation Organization Administrator

MLton is an open source, whole program, optimizing compiler for the Standard ML programming language. Standard ML is a strict, statically typed, functional programming language with type inference, abstract data types, a sophisticated module system, garbage collection and many other features. As a high-level language with advanced programming language features, Standard ML is a challenge to implement efficiently. MLton uses whole program compilation to provide both advanced programming language features and superior performance.  

This is the first year that MLton is participating in Google Summer of Code and we are excited to be mentoring two students. Tucker DiNapoli is working on adding a rich collection of SIMD primitives to the compiler and developing an SML library that exposes these primitives to the programmer. Nate Burgers is working on tooling support that will allow MLton to target RTEMS (Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems) and runtime system improvements to make MLton generated code better suited for real-time embedded systems. 

By Matthew Fluet, MLton Organization Administrator 

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In the context of embedded Linux systems, one often needs to create highly-customized Linux systems, comprising a Linux kernel, a bootloader and a root file system with multiple libraries and applications. Buildroot is a tool that allows one to build from source all the components of an embedded Linux system, using cross-compilation. It supports a wide range of CPU architecture (x86, x86-64, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, Blackfin, ARC, Xtensa and more) and more than 1000 userspace packages (including X.org, Gtk, Qt, Gstreamer and many more). Developed by an active community, Buildroot is used by many embedded CPU vendors as the base for their development kit, and is also used by a number of embedded system makers for their products.  

The focus of our Buildroot Google Summer of Code project by Spenser Gilliland is to improve the support of the multimedia features of various ARM processors in Buildroot. This involves creating Buildroot packages for the various OpenGL libraries or hardware-accelerated video encoding/decoding libraries that are needed on ARM processors. So far, thanks to the Google Summer of Code, improvements to video decoding on Raspberry Pi have been integrated, OpenGL support for OMAP3 and AM335x platforms (BeagleBoard, BeagleBone) has been integrated, as well as OpenGL support for Allwinner SOCs (Cubieboard and other similar platforms). 

By Thomas Petazzoni, Buildroot Google Summer of Code Organization Administrator 

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The Privly Project is developing browser extensions to layer stronger security and privacy properties onto the web. The system works by injecting security applications into the context of potentially untrusted websites. Since the injected content is contained within its own application, Privly can support all relevant cryptographic protocols without downloading server-stored JavaScript on every request. This fixes a fundamental issue with security in the JavaScriptable web. 

Since mobile browsers are not commonly extendable, Privly needs a different approach for Android and iOS. After a design process led by Google Summer of Code applicants, two students were selected to create a novel way of integrating Privly's security applications with mobile platforms. The mobile apps will be able to post content securely through other mobile applications, as well as pull encrypted content from various sources and display it in-app. 

By Sean McGregor, Privly Organization Administrator

The LTTng project (Linux Trace Toolkit - next generation) aims at providing highly efficient tracing tools for Linux. Its tracers help to track down performance issues and debugging problems involving multiple concurrent processes and threads. Tracing across multiple systems is also possible. Apart from LTTng's kernel tracer and userspace tracer, viewing and analysis tools are also part of the project. LTTng's performance relies on techniques such as Userspace RCU, lockless algorithms, per-cpu data structures and cache impact minimization. 

During Google Summer of Code 2013, our two students will work on the following projects:

• Zifei Tong will work on dynamic instrumentation support for the userspace tracer (UST). The current UST tracer relies on static tracepoint probes manually inserted in the traced application’s source code. This project aims at providing dynamic instrumentation capabilities in arbitrary applications. 

• Xiaona Han will work on improvement to the Babeltrace Python bindings. Most of the public Babeltrace API is currently mapped using SWIG. However, a more “Pythonic” set of wrapper classes will make trace reading and writing more accessible than using the current native API. 

By Christian Babeux, LTTng Organization Administrator 

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Constellation is a young academic group at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Our goal is to provide the creative environment for realization of different aerospace projects. As one branch the group offers a distributed supercomputing platform for solving aerospace related numerical problems. The massive computing power is provided by volunteers donating their idle computing time at home by forming a virtual super-computer via the internet. For this citizen space science method we are using the open source software called BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing). We are currently supported by 7,000 volunteers providing 20,000 host PCs to our computing grid where they help us optimize the thrust curve of a hybrid-engine sounding rocket by the student group HyEnD, and find a trajectory between Earth and the Earth-Moon-libration point EML-4 for the communication relay satellite mission TYCHO.

We are really honored to be part of this year's Google Summer of Code, and we have three students working on diverse ideas. We try to find the optimum interplanetary trajectory for one probe to all eight planets in our solar system and Pluto with "Solar System Grand Tour", which includes n-body simulation and implementing optimizing algorithms. We want to support flying observatories like SOFIA by NASA and DLR to maximize their observation times by optimizing flight routes with "airborne observatory". And lastly, we want to excite children about space with an educational and fun "space trumps" card game for Android mobile devices, so that they will be involved in STEM professions when they grow up. This is the power of citizen science and open-source!

By Andreas Hornig, Constellation Organization Administrator

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PLASMA is a research group at the University of Massachusetts that works on a diverse array of projects that span the space of programming languages and systems. We are very excited to take part in Google Summer of Code for the first time! This summer we are fortunate to have three excellent students on board working on two of our projects, Doppio and CheckCell. 

Doppio is a Java Virtual Machine written in CoffeeScript that can run unmodified JVM programs in the browser -- no plugins or recompilation required! Giles Lavelle is working on adding AWT and Swing support to Doppio, which will enable us to run GUI programs. Braden McDorman is adding networking support to Doppio using WebSockets, which will let JVM programs make use of the network through standard Java socket APIs. 

CheckCell is a tool for finding input data errors in spreadsheets. CheckCell combines statistical and program analysis techniques to find errors: values that have an unusually high influence on formulas or charts. These values are either extremely important, or are wrong. Our Google Summer of Code student, Alexandru Toader, is porting CheckCell from Microsoft Excel to Google Spreadsheet, allowing anyone with a modern web browser to use CheckCell online. 

By John Vilk, Daniel Barowy, and Emery Berger, PLASMA Organization Administrators

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is a leading digital humanities center that pursues disciplinary innovation and institutional transformation through applied research, public programming, and educational opportunities. Jointly supported by the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and the University of Maryland Libraries, MITH engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of technology and humanistic inquiry. MITH specializes in text and image analytics for cultural heritage collections, data curation, digital preservation, linked data applications, and data publishing. 

We have two students working with us on Google Summer of Code projects. One student is working on a JavaScript library to engrave MEI-encoded music notation using VexFlow. Part of the work will be dedicated specifically to support variant handling, a distinctive feature of the MEI data model and an essential component of critical editions of musical works. Our second student is creating a set of demonstrations and coding infrastructure for MITHgrid, a JavaScript library we’ve been developing to support graph-based JavaScript applications in the browser, such as a video annotation toolkit and a Shared Canvas viewer. 

By James Smith, Organization Administrator for MITH 

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Motion planning is a key area in robotics that finds feasible paths for a robot from some initial state to some desired goal. Over the last couple of years we have developed a standard library for sampling-based motion planning algorithms, a class of algorithms that has been shown to work well on a large variety of systems, ranging from car-like robots to humanoid robots with many degrees of freedom. The Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) is designed to be very general; the library makes no assumptions about the type of robot or how the environment is represented. This allows it to be integrated into a larger robotics software system such as ROS. 

Manipulation Planning - An example of using OMPL on the PR2 from Willow Garage. The robot is asked to move and manipulate the objects on the table. The demo is using ROS. 

We are excited to have two very talented students working with us this summer. Caleb Voss is developing a plugin for Blender (a 3D modeling program) that allows one to plan motions for robots in environments drawn within Blender. The project integrates many different components, it relies on the Blender Game Engine to simulate physically realistic robot motion, on MORSE for robot models and high-level controllers, and on OMPL for planning. 

Luis Torres is working on a core future within OMPL - the representation of costs and the way planners optimize costs. There already exists some functionality in OMPL to optimize path length and some other common path properties, but in the redesign that Luis is working on this will be done in an abstract way so that the user can specify almost any kind of cost function. 

By Mark Moll, OMPL Organization Administrator