Planet SoC -

Mixxx's Google Summer of Code 2008 Roundup Report

lh — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:00:00 +0100

By Albert Santoni, Mixxx Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

SWIG's First Google Summer of Code

lh — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:44:00 +0100

By William Fulton, SWIG administrator

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenCog and GSoC

lh — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:19:00 +0100

By Ben Goertzel, PhD, Director of Research, SIAI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pardus' Google Summer of Code Experience

lh — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:27:00 +0100

By Faik Yalcin Uygur, Pardus Google Summer of Code Organization Administrator

For Pardus’ first year in Google Summer of Code™, it was not a surprise for us that most of our applications were from Turkey, since Pardus is the most well known Linux distribution in our country. But as nearly every review about the project mentions, we are working on our global awareness, and we hope to get more international applications in the coming years.

This year we had 17 student applications and 5 students were accepted to the program; four of them completed their projects successfully.

Cihangir Besiktas, worked on adding Internet sharing capability to Pardus’ network manager application. The project’s aim was to make an Internet connected box to act as a gateway to its internal network so that other boxes in the network can connect to Internet. By only selecting the interface that is connected to Internet and the interface that Internet is going to be shared to, everything can be done automatically by the network manager. All the work done by Cihangir has been integrated into the network manager and is now part of the latest release of Pardus. Cihangir kept a blog about his project and documented his work.

Isbaran Akcayir, worked on adding 802.1x support to Pardus’ network manager application. 802.1x provides authentication to devices attached to a LAN port and it is based on Extensible Authentication Protocol. Although it is possible to connect to the network with wpa_supplicant package from the console, Isbaran added a frontend into Pardus’ network manager for easy configuration and connection to 802.1x networks. The work done by Isbaran is integrated into network manager and now is part of the latest release of Pardus.

Mehmet Ozan Kabak, worked on a common notification manager to be used by Pardus’ manager applications. This project was inspired by the Growl application for Mac. Mehmet successfully completed his project which has become a qt4 based, skinnable notification management system working on dbus. He kept a blog while developing and documented his project. The latest release of Pardus is KDE3 based, so it is not possible right now to integrate Mehmet’s work. But with the next release of Pardus, hopefully it will.

Türker Sezer, worked on an easy to use wizard base Pardus CD/DVD/USB distribution media creator GUI application. Pardus does not provide a package selection screen in its installation program YALI. So his project would allow anyone to create a customized Pardus distribution. He completed his project successfully Also while developing his own project, he helped us to fix our live CD creation problems in our own application. He is going to be working on his project. After fixing some layout and usability problems, he is going to package his application and it will become installable from Pardus repositories.

Our first year was beneficial for us and we hope also for our students. Congratulations to all of them and their mentors!

Thousand Parsec and Google Summer of Code

lh — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:29:00 +0200

By PostAuthorsName, Google Developer Programs

This was the second year that Thousand Parsec partook in the Google Summer of Code™, and we accomplished even more than we did in our very successful first year. For those who don’t know, Thousand Parsec is a framework for building turn based space empire building games. Many different types of rulesets can be developed which have a wide variety of features.

In 2008, we had 8 students, all of whom successfully completed their projects. Together they made a massive contribution to our code base, writing more than 130K lines of code across 5 different modules. This year we were also pleased to see a great deal more collaboration and interaction between our students and Thousand Parsec’s wider community.

One of the most exciting projects to come from Summer of Code 2008 is our new 3D client. This takes our existing libraries and couples them with the sweet Python bindings for Ogre 3D(another 2008 mentoring organization) and builds a rich client full of eye candy. Since the completion of the Summer of Code, Eugene Tan has been hard at work to make his first release happen, and plans are on track for him to do so this week. Check out these screenshots for a preview:

Our primary server also got a workout, with 3 students working hard on improving its functionality. All our students work has been merged into mainline and will be in our next release (which is also being preped at this very moment). Ryan Neufeld and Dustin White both added new “quick play” rulesets, while Aaron Mavrinac added ability to remotely configure the server. This gives people a choice of 4 different games to play, 3 of which were developed as Summer of Code projects.

Our prototype and backup server also got some love with Juan Lafont contributing a quick play game of his own creation called “DroneSec”. This ruleset required that he also improve many of the server’s features and he is in the process of preparing a release.

Aaron, who initially worked on creating the remote configuration of tpserver-cpp, has also been working hard on adding single player support. His work touched and improved all our of modules and even other students’ projects. Aaron is currently driving the next release of our primary client, which will include a wizard leting anyone setup a local game including the server, AI opponents and other options.

Two students, Victor Ivri and Vincent Verhoeven, each worked on creating AI frameworks and testing them out on the new rulesets developed this year. Having two frameworks allows us to continually refine their abilities and skills, giving people the ability to play non-trivial game
scenarios without having to find human opponents.

Zhang Chiyuan’s project focused on a completely different tack: adding support for Schemepy to Thousand Parsec. His project allows Scheme to be used from the Python framework. Zhang completely rewrote the existing backends and added a bunch of new backends. In the process, he created a extensive compliance suite which allows for quick checking to ensure our backends are functioning correctly. He has also ported our Python client and servers and to the new interfaces.

Overall, we’re very proud of all our students’ work, all of which has made a dramatic impact on the health and usefulness of Thousand Parsec. Of course, the entire community hopes they continue to contribute in the future. We would like to thank the Google Open Source Team for all their efforts in running such an awesome program.

Finally, congratulations to all of our mentors and students for their many
accomplishments!

Thousand Parsec and Google Summer of Code

lh — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:29:00 +0200

By Tim Ansell, Technical Solutions Engineering Team and Thousand Parsec Project Co-Founder

Finally, congratulations to all of our mentors and students for their many
accomplishments!

Hackystat's First Google Summer of Code

lh — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:25:00 +0200

By Philip Johnson, Hackystat Project Administrator

The Hackystat Project had a great Google Summer of Code™ 2008 experience. Four students started the program, and while one had to drop due to sudden illness, the other three went on to successfully complete their projects. Shaoxuan Zhang worked on a Wicket-based user interface to Hackystat, and implemented a number of new features including support for “portfolio” analyses. Matthew Bassett developed a Hackystat sensor for Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Eva Wong developed a Hackystat sensor data visualization package using Flare. You can learn more about each student’s experience from their own perspective by reading Matthew’s, Shaoxuan’s, and Eva’s blogs. Finally, my blog contains a reflection on Summer of Code from a first time administrator’s perspective. We definitely hope to be back next year, and encourage all Open Source communities to participate.

Congratulations to our mentors and students for their many successes this year!

Wrapping the Season of Usability 2008

lh — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:54:00 +0200

By Ellen Reitmayr, OpenUsability

Inspired by the Google Summer of Code™ program, OpenUsability — an initiative to bring usability into FOSS development — developed and launched a similar but independent program, the Season of Usability. The Season of Usability sponsors students to work on usability, user-interface design, and interaction design and related projects with pre-screened Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects; each student is paired with mentors to help guide them on their project, with mentors chosen from a particular community’s set of key developers and user experience experts. For their work, students receive a stipend of $1000 USD, kindly sponsored by Google’s Open Source Programs Office, the Open Society Institute and Trolltech.

The second Season of Usability took place between May and September 2008, and has been deemed a great success by students, projects and sponsors! Ten students contributed to nine FOSS projects by doing user research, usability analysis or UI mockups. All projects were finished successfully — in average, the teams fulfilled 80% of their initial project goals. Given the fact that most mentors claimed to have set an overly ambitious roadmap at first, this is a very good value. We are especially happy that the Season of Usability inspired the students to further engage in Open Source — six of the ten students will continue their work on the project.

All students created project reports that are published on the Season of Usability website. Summarised, the following goals were accomplished:

Redesigning DrProject’s Administration Interface

This project focused on improving the overall usability for project management portal software, DrProject, especially targeting a redesign of the web administration interface.

Along with mentors Paula Bach & Greg Wilson, Liz Blankenship, a student of Science in Information at the University of Michigan (USA), did a redesign of the web-based administration interface for DrProject. She documented her activities on her blog.

Redesigning Gallery’s Image Upload Tools

The goal of this project was to improve the image upload tools of Gallery, a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website.

Mentored by Katrin Goetzer and Chris Kelly, Jakob Hilden did a comparative analysis and created mockups for a new image upload tool. His work is documented in Gallery’s Wiki. After having finished his own Season of Usability project, Jakob offered to mentor two more design projects related to Gallery for a design course at the University of Michigan, School of Information.

Human Interface Guidelines and Design Patterns for KDE4

The purpose of this project was to finalize the Human Interface Guidelines for the K Desktop Environment.

Becca Scollan, a student of Science and Information at the University of Baltimore (USA), and Thomas Pfeiffer, studying Psychology at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany) identified common interaction problems in KDE4 and created generic design solutions. Additionally, they complemented the KDE4 HIG by several guidelines. Their mentors were Celeste Lyn Paul and myself, Ellen Reitmayr.

Improving Jeliot user Interface and Workflows

This project focused on improving the user interface and workflows of Jeliot 3, an Open Source Java Program Visualization application that helps Java beginners to understand coding concepts. Sharad Baliyan, student of interaction design from India, identified possible pitfalls when newbies of programming make use of Jeliot, and created paper prototypes to overcome those issues. Sharad was mentored by Roman Bednarik, Andres Moreno and Niko Myller.

Toolbox and Palette Interaction for KOffice

The goal of this project was to improve the toolbox and palette interaction for KOffice, the office suite of the K Desktop Environment. Supported by her mentors Celeste Lyn Paul, Ellen Reitmayr and Boudewijn Remp, Neha Pahwa analyzed the tool options of KOffice. She identified the major interaction problems and created first paper mockups for an improved tool interaction in KOffice.

3d Widgets for MakeHuman

The goal of this project was to design and test 3d widgets for MakeHuman, a free software for modelling 3-Dimensional characters.

Eugenio Passacantilli, student of Science in Communications at the University La Sapienza di Roma (Italy) designed and tested 3D widgets as a new concept to present options to users. Eugenio was supported by his mentors Stefano Fabri, Manuel Bastioni and Simone Re.

Handheld-Mode Interface for the OLPC XO Laptops

This project focused on designing a system of interaction for the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop with limited input methods.

Along with mentors Mentors Eben Eliason and Marco Gritti, Alessandro Vona, student of Science in Communications, analyzed different handheld interaction models to come up with an interaction design for the XO Laptop handheld mode.

Improving HDR imaging with Qtpfsgui

The goal of this project was to improve various tools and the overall usability of Qtpfsgui, an open source graphical user interface application that aims to provide a workflow for High dynamic range (HDR) imaging.

Supported by his mentors Roman Bednark, Giuseppe Rota, and Alexandre Prokoudine, Vladimir Smida created sketches for Qtpfsgui that will improve visual rather than parameter-centric working modes. Vladimir documented his work on his blog.

IM and VoIP with SIP Communicator

This project focused on the integration of multiple protocols in a single instant messaging application, SIP Communicator.

Mike Oren, PhD student in Philosophy at Iowa State University (USA), performed user research and a comparative analysis of different instant messengers. Mike was mentored by Raphael Wimmer and Emil Ivov.

A big “Thank You” to all participants and congratulations for all their good work!

2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

lh — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:34:00 +0200

The good folks at Aspiration Technology are once again creating their magic with the second Nonprofit Software Development Summit. Given current economic conditions looking rather sucktastic to say the least, I’m looking for inspiration these days. And I find I’m really excited about the power of FOSS to help organizations that have limited IT resources to accomplish their goals. Pragmatism, accompanied by noble goals, is unstoppable. Provided there is action.

That’s where the crew at Aspiration comes in. I go to a fair number of conferences. I spend most of my time with the hackers, documenters, artists, user experience researchers, users and partners of people in FOSS, and I know what motivates them to get things done. Hearing from people like Gunner, Lena, Michelle and San, people want to go GSD. (There are a whole host of other folks who belong on this list, as well; you’ll find their names among those partners collaboratively developing the summit agenda.) Every time I go to an Aspiration led event I leave refreshed and inspired. And I get more good things done.

I’ll be giving a talk about Google Summer of Code™ and how Google’s support of the participating projects has helped provide tools to the non-profit world. I want it to be more of an open discussion and to find out what the non-profit world wants from FOSS developers.

In so many situations, I think we lose momentum because there are so few people who can translate between the divide of, for the sake of brevity, users and hackers. You know, those people who think their computer is, at best, a tool with many inconveniences. These are smart people. They are just not you - they do not breathe it, live it, love it, feel it in their fingertips the way you do. They want to accomplish a task and they don’t have much of a budget to do it on. You can help with that. Though you likely need someone to help you them help you figure out what they want. Then again, you may be one of those less-rare-than-previously-thought-but-still-rare-nonetheless social geeks who really digs talking to people. If you are, you should totally come. If you are one of those people who is good at getting people to geek out together when they are in totally different disciplines, you should totally come. I think we will learn a lot from one another.

FreeBSD's Fourth Google Summer of Code

lh — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:40:00 +0200

By Murray Stokely, Software Engineering Team and FreeBSD Core Team Member

FreeBSD has participated as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code™ each year since 2005. This year, FreeBSD mentored 21 students with a final success rate of 91%. Robert Watson and I have written a detailed summary of the FreeBSD 2008 Summer of Code experience. With the help of our mentors we’ve selected three successful projects to showcase here:

Edward Napierala successfully completed a complex project to implement NFSv4 ACLs in a similar way to how POSIX.1e ACLs are supported by extending user utilities (setfacl(1)/getfacl(1)), libc API, and adding necessary kernel hooks for ACL storage and enforcement on both UFS and ZFS. Regression tests were implemented to ensure correct operation. There is also a wrapper (distributed separately) that implements a SunOS-compatible acl(2)/facl(2) API to make porting applications like Samba easier. This project required balancing standards, portability, and implementation complexity, as well as backwards compatibility. This project was Edward’s first significant foray into the kernel, and his focus on testing and completeness was outstanding. Needless to say, Edward was granted full commit access to the FreeBSD source repository before the program ended. Robert Watson mentored this project.

Nick Barkas, with the help of his mentor, David Malone, spent the summer modifying the dirhash code in UFS2 to use better dynamic memory allocation. The code is now able to free up memory used by older dirhashes when the VM system invokes vm_lowmem events. This will allow the default dirhash_maxmem value to be increased, improving performance on large directory lookups when there is memory to spare on they system. There are versions of the low memory event handling code for both -CURRENT and 7-STABLE. A number of tests have been run showing the new event handler seems to work properly. Additional testing and benchmarking is ongoing to tune the default values for best performance.

Johannes Maximilian Kuehn was able to work with both the FreeBSD and NTP communities and his mentor, Harlan Stenn, to work on a reference implementation of the SNTP client. SNTP is a lightweight client that enables admins to synchronize with NTP servers. SNTP’s networking code is written protocol independent and should work with almost any protocol like IPv4 or IPv6. SNTP supports MD5 authentication to verify the authenticity of the queried server. This code will be included in the upcoming ntp-4.2.6 release.

We’ve only highlighted three of the 19 successful FreeBSD projects here, and would love to hear more from the community about their favorite FreeBSD projects from Summer of Code 2008 or years past. Post a comment and share your thoughts with us. Congratulations to all of FreeBSD’s mentors and students, as well as the FreeBSD community, for their fourth year of successful participation in Summer of Code!