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2008 Google Summer of Code Highlights
andrewmin writes "SoC 2008 has begun, and with 175 organizations and 1125 students it looks better than ever before. Here's a quick run-down of a few programs that, if they are finished, will definitely be making their way onto your machine."
Adding a GUI to the upcoming GRUB 2 because its black and white terminal interface is scary? Doesn't GRUB already have a GUI? That pretty blue screen at bootup?
It appears that those new programs still can't handle the /. effect.
http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.cgi/GoogleSoC2008
DragonFly Projects
Enhance dma
* Max Lindner, mentored by Matthias Schmidt
* See EnhanceDmaGSoC for more information
Port DragonFly to the AMD64 architecture
* Jordan Gordeev, mentored by Thomas E. Spanjaard
* See AMD64GSoC for more information.
RFC3542 support
* Dashu Huang, mentored by Hasso Tepper
* The standard application program interface (API) for TCP/IP applications is the "sockets" interface. Although this API was developed for Unix in the early 1980s, it has also been implemented on DragonFly BSD with support for IPv6 applications. Today, to fit new demands, the API standard that support IPv6 applications has experience some changes from RFC2292 to RFC3542. However, the DragonFly BSD operating system now only support RFC2292, and it don't support RFC3542 advanced sockets API, to make it catch up the change, we need to make it support RFC3542. To make DragonFly BSD support RFC3542. My work will research the codes of current IPv6 stack in DragonFly BSD and understand how it works. At the same time, I should understand some related RFC, and how other BSD's such as FreeBSD, openBSD, merged RFC3542. Through this way, I can figure out which part of the old IPv6 stack should be improved. Finally,I will update the old IPv6 stack to make it support RFC3542.
Extend Multi-Processing (MP) support
* Robert Luciani, mentored by Simon Schubert
* Back in 2003 when DragonFly was born, the first subsystem to be implemented was the LWKT. The reduction in complexity achieved by using message passing (as opposed to a shared memory environment using locks) was undeniable. What was also "unlocked" though, was the potential for near linear performance scaling on multiple CPU systems. Unfortunately many kernel systems, such as the network stack, need to be modified to take advantage of this potential, since they are still encumbered by a legacy "Big Giant Lock". In this project I will remove the MP lock in important areas of the kernel that have a direct affect on the performance of popular programs such as PostgreSQL.
Proportional share userland scheduling algorithm
* Mayur Narayan Bhosle, mentored by Jeffrey Hsu
* Proportional share algorithms like lottery scheduling, Stride scheduling algorithm guarantee proportional share of resources like (CPU) to a processes as per their requirement stated specified during the start. The traditional schedulers achieve fairness or resource allocation by adjusting priority, but the effect is observed over a long term. But instead in case of proportional share schedulers we observe the fairness of allocation over a bounded period of time when we adjust the requirement of resources dynamically.
Anticipatory disk I/O scheduler
* Nirmal Thacker, mentored by Simon Schubert
* This project aims at developing an Anticipatory Disk I/O scheduler for DragonFlyBSD. An Anticipatory Disk I/O scheduler will ensure that an anticipation heuristic will nullify all possible deceptive idleness between consecutive disk accesses and at the same time try to maintain an overall good throughput. In the DragonFly BSD operating system it must also take into consideration the MP- safety factors.
LiveCD with a DragonFly-specific X desktop
* Louisa Luciani, mentored by Sascha Wildner
* In this project I will integrate more functionality into the nrelease build system. The build will generate a persistent liveCD with Dragonfly specific features. It will be customized for recovery, demonstr
It seems slow, so have a mirror: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com.nyud.net/columns/2008_google_summer_code_21_projects_im_excited_about
Since VLCs firefox plugin is incompatible with noscript, I've started using mplayer, and as its modular (unlike VLC) I can also throw almost anything at it (actually I can throw more at it as it handles realmedia too). As for interfaces well i personally think Kmplayer beats VLC hands down as a media player too.
I also dont understand the need for a frontend to aptitude, apt + front end is just as powerful, its only dependency resolution that hasn't been well implemented in other front ends.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Nope. I see nothing there that will be on my machine in the foreseeable future.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Coral Cache link: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com.nyud.net/columns/2008_google_summer_code_21_projects_im_excited_about
-FST (anonymous to prevent karma whoring)
A link to the GSoC page is more interesting and the author couldn't have picked projects that interested me less.
The photo tagging stuff Re: gallery made me laugh, are google sponsoring weekend projects now?
Amarok UPnP rediscover your music elsewhere
- Provide a plug-in to Amarok that will allow users to discover and stream from remote UPnP shares. This plug-in will discover any UPnP MediaServer DCPs on the local network and display their collections as an Amarok collection.
- The plug-in will also provide the capability to control the current instance of Amarok from a remote UPnP ControlPoint. Since UPnP provides no authentication measures, users will be allowed to turn this feature off. Alternatively, an authentication mechanism could be added to Amarok.
- If there is enough time remaining, add the ability to share a selection of the current users music collection on the local network. Again, due to authentication issues this feature would be optional or an authentication mechanism could be added.
I would personally really like to see that, just connect your laptop to a wireless netowrk and then you can play your music on any uPnP capable device.
But as the list seams rather crap, what do you think is missing from it?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
My personal favorites are the project to add Voice and Video to pidgin and the Pidgin theming project. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/VoiceAndVideo and http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/ThemeImprovements . People always ask for these things and the developers don't have time to do things that they don't use, so they never get done. Hopefully these actually get done by the end of this summer.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Agreed, the only thing that sparked any interest from that list was GRUB2, which isn't really even on the list, just some crappy fancy nonsense theme thing for it...
Me and GRUB have never gotten along, but maybe me and GRUB2 will...
Aside from that, that list is just a bunch of Gadgets/Widget/Nonsense... im not sure why the Editor/Poster just didnt do a write-up and link to http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ or something a little more diverse and interesting.
x264 is proud to announce that we have four students this year through the Videolan project; they will be working on frametype decision, more efficient inter-macroblock search, better psychovisual optimizations, assembly and profiling improvements, and an interesting tree project that will track the use of data throughout the video stream to maximize the quality of pixels that are referenced the most in future frames.
After 6 months of improvement resulting in two major visual optimizations and a 30% speed increase, we're now going to have an incredibly productive summer. Happy encoding!
Obvious but will be nice.
The "choice is good" mantra doesn't apply. Windows should look and act like Windows, and Mac OS X should look and act like Mac OS X.
Next thing you know, we have idiots coding things without the OS built-in GUI and we end up with crappy programs that look out of place and behave completely different to the whole OS and all other programs.
Until grub2 has a security module so that i can lock down what you can boot too, im happy with grub, even if grub2 looks nice.
Hell i have 1 second time-out & hidden menu so i never see it anyway, grub doesn't need any nice interface as it shouldn't need to be seen other than when you have a problem in which case a nice UI just adds another thing to go wrong.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
The Dojo toolkit is going to get some love this SoC -- these things might be making their way into your machine even without you knowing it... Markup Previews, 3D effects and Drag&Drop form editor are all among the SoC projects this year.
What's so great about Ruslan Uhjbilatov that he gets his name in Cyrillic but Dzmitry Mazouka in Belarus doesn't?
Hi, I'm the Aptitude-gtk applicant. :) .
If you've used both Synaptic and Aptitude, you should have seen some differences
The dependency resolution is one point, but it's not only that. The whole navigation in Aptitude is just much more efficient. Ever used Synaptic in a mixed-distribution install ? Say you want to install another version of a package and it has some different dependencies. Good luck navigating them in Synaptic. It's really not designed with that in mind.
You can see the full application here and my development blog here
I warmly welcome any input on my project!
Oh, and unless you are running trdos on that laptop, it probably has a desktop environment upon which said items will be installed.
Kudos to the few mentioned that will get some extra attention from this, but it's worth noting that the coverage doesn't represent even 2% of the projects that will be going on. I'd even go so far to say as many of those listed aren't even some of the most impressive or realistic, just one person's sampling of a few they know about.
Captain obvious points out that highlighting even just one project for half of the participating orgs would be about 88 projects and would still represent less than 8%. There's also no guarantee that the student will be successful on their project. About one in five students failed last year, so nothing is guaranteed regardless.
My point? There is a LOT of cool stuff being worked on. Check the projects out for yourself at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/
They're all listed. Show your support, get involved, help them succeed if you really care.
Cheers!
Sean
All I have to say about the plan to put widgets into the KDE screensaver is "why?" -- The purpose of the screensaver is to be there while you are not.
I suppose having passive widgets that merely display information could be useful, but as TFA references using it to post to twitter and crap, I can't say it sounds particularly useful.
Personally, I would prefer it if somebody would get GRUB 2 "production ready" first, instead of making fancy GUI menus for it.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd really like the ability to boot from LVM and get proper EFI support (though not really an issue until EFI is in wide distribution for x86) without having to install an experimental package.
It's a bootloader, guys. Functional first, form later.
1. Why the hell has it taken this long to get a Voice Recognition front end implemented?
2. Who decided that tomboy notes is a worthy front end?!?! Who uses tomboy notes? Couldn't we have something that would allow us to use speech to text in a way which is useful?
These optimizations are nice, but leave out the most obvious and important improvement to the codecs that have yet to be made. Most processors sold nowadays are 2 or more cores. And smooth single-threaded processing of 1080p x264 is impossible on all but the absolute highest end processors. So the most important step is obvious multi-threading. There's a summer of code project for that too. I'm surprised the author of the article missed it.
the grub gui, if its actually any good will eventually get installed on my desktop linux machines...
... another rss solution? ooxml for abiword? bragging rights for game I've never heard of? Theming support for Pidgin? VLC for Windows CE? I can gaurantee you that I'm not going to EVER go out of my way to install ANY of that crud.
The rest of the crud the article mentioned? Wow... what a completely uninspiring and underwhelming list.
Oooh
Not that I have a problem with people working on its... its their time. But none of this is remotely 'must have' software.
A nice UI may be more important for a Live CD install/rescue disk, for instance, where there are many choices, and you want it to simple to use and self-explanatory for any user booting the disk. Also, GRUB 2 uses dynamically loadable modules for virtually everything, so you can just not load the future 'gfxmenu' module if you like. Then it will consume no memory and will not be a possible source of problems.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
> Pidgin's clean interface is one of its strongest points ..
.. where do I begin .. :) I saw the following elsewhere,
Oh my
and I think it's pretty accurate summary of the situation -
> Pidgin is an IM client designed and coded by programmers.
> Trillian is an IM client designed and coded by UI designers.
While ideally designers should design and programmers - code.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
A screensaver that allows me to post to twitter????
Isn't a screensaver supposed to work when I'm AWAY from the computer?
I'm completely confused over why anyone would want to theme their applications differently. Breaking consistency across the desktop is a huge usability and maintenance issue.
Why do you need to have a Pidgin window that has an OS X look to it while the rest of your desktop has a standard Clearlooks theme? Every user adjusts their desktop for optimum individual accessibility and usability. Introducing custom themes means that people with poor eyesight won't be able to use Pidgin because it lacks the accessibility features which a standard system GUI/theme has. Or users (and developers) will stop using Pidgin because they realize that they need to change GUI settings (and code) in EVERY application instead of ONE system-wide control panel.
Maybe I'm missing something. Can someone explain to me why individual application theming is a good idea?
Yeah, I read this article on Osnews earlier I think and I didn't get stiff by the projects mentioned either. Maybe the Pidgin webcam/voip-part will work but except that meh.
And there are LOTS of work in LOTS of projects which will be done, so only 21 things are way to little. Just look thru the official list instead.
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/
GoC is sorely lacking one hell of a kickass project: ReactOS. Bad Bad Google.
Yep; nothing in this list excited me at all.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Nuff Said.
As the article mentions Google ended up funding a number of Gaming projects. There are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects for a total of over 40 slots.
The following game projects have been accepted,
My own project Thousand Parsec got 8 slots for a number of critical features. One of the coolest is a 3d client, which should make the games much more interesting to look at.
We will also finally have a few more interesting games to actually play, including a clone of Risk in Space and a very interesting game called DroneSec. Finally, we should have some opponents for you to play against as 2 AI clients being developed for our premier RFTS ruleset.
Thousand Parsec - http://www.thousandparsec.net/
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome