Slashdot Mirror
Highlights From the 2009 Google Summer of Code
mask.of.sanity writes "Over a 1000 students were accepted into the fifth year of the program from 70 countries and will work on about 150 open source projects with mentor organisations.
The program, created in 2005, has exposed some 2500 students to "real-world" software development and opened employment opportunities within mentor organisations and in fields relevant to their academic study.
The United States scored the lion's share with 212 accepted students; 101 from India; 55 from Germany; 44 from Canada, 43 from Brazil. The Dominican Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg and Nigeria were new entrants to the program each with a single accepted student.
Check out the slideshow summary of some project highlights, with hyperlinks back the detailed project pages."
Oh man.. no projects to make Joomla more secure and less bloaty? oh well
The enhanced User Auth will be good however
I dont know why they didnt liked my confiker worm :(
I am so pleased that I have an extra pair of hands over the summer.
my liqbase project was one proposal out of 10 selected for the maemo.org community.
we are building applications for the nokia internet tablet device.
obviously I should show off what I'm building ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXp0Dg_UaY
liqbase
Is there a good place to look at Nokia's plans for the platform (new hardware, etc.)?
http://maemo.org/news/ isn't it (to rule out the very obvious), and I haven't found anything else in a fair amount of looking around.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Go, Luxembourg, go!
I was accepted to work on a Windows package manager called WinLibre for GSoC 2009. I can't wait! You can read about it here: http://www.excid3.com/2009/04/20/accepted-into-google-summer-of-code-2009/
A few basic definitions to make this post clearer:
participant: student accepted into the program
sponsoring organization: pretty obvious one, the organization sponsoring the participants
mentor: the person from the sponsoring organization delegated to manage GSoC participants
I'm pretty psyched. I've got two students to mentor on two different projects - I think it's going to be a great summer.
GSoC is a brilliant program on google's part - they are transparent about their aims: to get the "sponsors" to evaluate the participants so google can think about hiring them.
Google avoids headhunter fees, gets an in-depth real-world evaluation with a significant codebase to review and open-source projects get quality work.
Google may still pwn my datas, but hey: this is clearly not evil.
According to the article: "Eight Australians and five Kiwis have made the cut for the 2009 Google Summer of Code, announced today."
Should Aussies and Kiwis be eligible for "summer of code"? It seems to me that they should only be able to enter the "winter of code" contest if it takes place during June through August.
Soon. It will come. I can almost see it.
"Highlights from the NAN Microsoft summer ~#33-
ccc00003322"
And a large BSOD.
Major kudos to Google for continuing to run the Summer of Code despite the hard economic times where most of silicon valley is cutting way back. Those 1000 students and 150+ open source communities represent more than a 5 million dollar investment this summer, which is not petty cash or an insignificant investment for *any* organization. The raw horsepower of the program itself (roughly and easily) represents more than 400 years of development "staff-years" going into open source software just over this summer with much more coming from those that stay involved with the open source communities and continue to contribute. Very cool.
It's a great symbiotic relationship. Google gets major attention, which is of course very important to their business model. The open source orgs get passionate and motivated developers, many that stay long after GSoC. The students get the experience of a lifetime, an introduction into a life-long relationship with open source and their ability to directly make a difference.
Cheers!
Sean
That's right, all this for 14 giant-size icons on 14 pages of ads and other garbage to read the 14 sentences of text that contain all the important info.
Or I could paste them here.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Using slideshows you get more pageviews and more opportunities to show ads.
But rather than coders focusing on a "fast adaptive resampler tailored for transformations which mostly downsample," they'd have been better served by a "Summer of Marketing" and maybe some kid could come up with a better name than "GIMP" or a logo better than that stupid weasel, or whatever the hell it is.
Why is this a useful paradigm these days? How many of these stupid slideshows have I clicked on, just to read something that could have been contained on a single non-scrolling web page?
Page hits + ads = money.
Thought I'd share a basic summary of our student's projects for this year that are working on BRL-CAD. We accepted five students.
GSoC really has shown to be a fantastic opportunity for both open source communities and students, getting smart motivated passionate people working together on improving open source software and growing those communities. The program has an impressive ability to motivate and organize open source groups, helping them "get their act together" in many respects. While it's highly competitive with many organizations and students that will get left out, it's no more so than most graduate programs. There are similar short-term rewards and even greater long-term potential. To top it off, even if you don't "get in", you can still contribute! Some of our best new developers were students that were rejected in a previous year but then became involved and were better prepared next year.
Cheers!
Sean
Don't we just call them "links" nowadays?
It's more than that, it's also because of SEO & PageRank. The more links you have, to and from other relevant pages, the better.
Were the BSDs not involved in GSoC this year? If not, disappointing, especially given they borrowed a portion of Google's campus for meetBSD.
Any guesses as to what the Nigerian student will be working on?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
too lazy to rtfa, but the numbers in the summary add up to 459, not "over a [sic] 1000"
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Why is this a useful paradigm these days? How many of these stupid slideshows have I clicked on, just to read something that could have been contained on a single non-scrolling web page?
It isn't. Web 2.0 is shit. Seriously. For every cool app (e.g. Google Streetview) or cool mashup there are tens of thousands of arduous, information obfuscating, time wasting and soul destroying websites that do nothing other than get in the way of what you're trying to do (e.g. book airline tickets) or trying to discover, while spamming you with useless graphics, animations, advertising, and generally teaching your eye to ignore almost everything displayed in your browser...and then hiding the bit of info you're looking for in the area of the screen your eye has trained itself to skip over because of so many ads previously.
Someone needs to develop a browser (or proxy) that downloads a web 2.0 site, disassembles the logic, deconstructs the page, and reconstructs it as a simple HTML page (with forms if necessary) so those of us not interested in spending our hours wading through visual SPAM can get something useful done before the sun expands into a red giant and envelops the Earth.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
We are thrilled to be part of this program and will be working with our students to ensure that the code produced is of high quality and merged. Google and the very small number of people there who make this possible really deserve a thank you. This was also the first year for Melange as the project web system and that team of three worked their fingers to the bone. Thanks.
Google SoC Projects per Capita:
United States: 0.69 ppm
India: 0.09 ppm
Germany: 0.67 ppm
Canada: 1.31 ppm
Brazil: 0.22 ppm
PPM = projects per million. Figure the U.S. benefits from Google being a U.S. company, and by the fact that English is the native language. Canada would also benefit in that respect. But if that's the case then where's the U.K.? Germany suffers from not having English as the native language, but then again, open source in general is probably more popular in Europe than in the U.S.
I know nmap has some projects in GSoC as well but I didn't see them listed in the slideshow. Any others that didn't make the show?
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
Oh! The Price of Nigeria finally got into Summer of Codes! I knew the 1000$ entrance fee I gave him wouldn't go to waste.
Google seems to be openly blocking anyone from Iran accessing the GSOC sites for some time
2 years ago:
http://jadi.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2007/5/1/2917242.html
Today:
http://i41.tinypic.com/20gy3j4.jpg
The Mozilla organization is going to sponsor a program to automatically identify dupes? Don't they realize what this could mean for the future of the entire internet AS WE KNOW IT? Think of the disaster it would cause... not being able to re-read the same flamewars over-and-over again.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
The increasing importance of mobile computing where small screen size and less powerful hardware are important factors might result in more websites offering a true simplistic and lower res/bloat alternative. It needs to be automatically detected and redirected though to be really useful. One can hope anyway, because there really are just way too many "supersized" 5,000 calorie a serving websites out there and it gets worse daily. As it is now you have to load the bloated page first just to start to hunt for the "print" option. I would also think that those interested in "accessibility" might have a hand in encouraging these websites to have a simpler offering that is easier to use for text based browsers and so on.
As to that deconstructing and reconstructing idea, opera mobile does something like that, but I've never used it so can't comment on how well it works.