Planet SoC

It’s been a long time since I last wrote on my blog, well almost a month! June has been a very busy month for multiple reasons. But It didn’t  stop me to make progress on my GSoC project. Last month I wrote about an audioscrobbler plugin for xmms2 written in C. Well this audioscrobbler is almost finished. All submission are functional, the only thing left to be done is to improve the whole submission process. This means to be completely compliant with the Audioscrobbler protocol version 1.2. This audioscrobbler is a good part of what I wanted to accomplish befor the first evaluation and it turn out that my scrobbler will be more useful than I first thought. It can be used with any xmms2 installation, which means on the OSD as well as on your linux box.

So that was the first official week for the summer of code and I spent it compiling and compiling over and over again. Basically my first task is to port a newer version of xmms2 to the OSD. This mean applying and adapting patches, cross compile the xmms2 source and then rebuild the whole OSD environment. This is a lot of code and a lot of time spent compiling. So basically I spent the week figuring out the build system of the OSD and how to cross compile properly. Then I started my work on the port of xmms2 0.4 DrKosmos to the OSD. This part was quite straight forward except some confusing compiling error but once these was figured out everything went right.

This week started slowly as I had some troubles with my Internet provider. It made me realize how much I depend on the Internet. It’s my primary mean of communication as well as one of my primary source of information. I spent nearly 3 days offline and it was hard, I guess it make me a slave of technology. So I took this time offline to think about my project as well as playing around with my OSD. I recorded some shows and played around with the device. I set up my development virtual machine and took some time to look at the OSD source code. I also set a samba share in order to play media from my computers with my OSD. This is a bliss, seriously I was looking for such a solution for a long time.

My summer of code is finally on! I had my last exam today, everything went fine and I’m now ready to begin my work for the summer of code. It was a fairly busy day, I had a couple things to do and I had to move my things back home because it was my last day at university and I’m gonna spend my summer in my hometown. Talking about home, guess what was waiting for me there ? Indeed, a shinny Neuros OSD! Big thanks to Neuros for giving me this nice piece of hardware.

What a crazy week I had. Of course it all started Monday when I received a wonderful e-mail telling me that one of my proposals was accepted for the Google summer of code. Then since it’s the end of the semester at university I had exams to study and papers to submit. Now I have to take care of all the paper work needed for the summer of code and find a way to fax it to Google. Well, to be brief, this week was crazy, I had a lot of good news and I must say I’m very happy on how things take their places.

The deadline is tomorrow and I only managed to prepare 4 proposal for the Google Summer of Code. Although I’m confident and exited about every proposal I did, I wish I had the time and the skills to apply on more project. There’s a lot of interesting project but most of them are about topic I simply don’t know or don’t get. Most of the time the problem isn’t that I wouldn’t be able to do what’s needed, it’s more that I don’t have the time right now to investigate and write a decent proposal with good ideas.
Anyway, like I said I’m confident with  the applications I had time to prepare and I hope that concerned peoples will like my ideas. Let see what will happen. Fingers crossed until April 14th.

The list of organization approved for this year GSoC has been released yesterday. I took a look at most of the ideas proposed and I’m surprised by the level of complexity of some. Just for an example the GCC compiler offer a lot of idea with a very high level of complexity.  Though I wish I had the skills to apply on them, compiler stuff and language design always been something I’m particularly interested in.