Google Summer of Code 2014 meetup at Ghent University

Wednesday evening, March 5th, 19u, about 30 students of Ghent university (Belgium) showed up for an info session about Google Summer of Code 2014. Some of them already heard about it, but for most of them it was new.

Google Summer of Code is a yearly initiative of Google, this year held for the 10th time, to introduce students in higher education to Open Source development, by offering them a stipend of 5500 USD for 12 weeks of coding on an Open Source project during the summer. It gives the students realworld experience, writing code that will be used by many users worldwide, collaborating with the teams of the Open Source organisation they will contribute to, improving their teamwork and communication skills.

After a brief introduction about the program, 4 (of the 190 selected for GSoC 2014) Open Source organisations presented themselves.

Sage is an Open Source collection of mathematical tools, ranging from solving differential equations to plotting functions. Some of their projects this year focus on improving the user interface, but there is also a need for adding mathematical tools, fe. for knot theory.

GNU Octave is also related to mathematics, but is mostly used for simulations and numerical computations. Their ideas pages contains several projects, one of them is adding a library for doing finite element simulations.
Both these projects are interesting for students with an affinity for maths and programming, but also for students wanting to improve the GUI or add other supporting tools.

Next up was the phpMyAdmin project, a webbased user interface for MySQL databases. Having participated to GSoC for many years, the list of projects to work on range from improving the AJAX error reporting tool that was added in GSoC 2013, to also report PHP errors, over a tool to normalize and check the structure of a database to interface improvements. If you are proficient in PHP or JavaScript and interested in databases, one of these projects might be for you.

MuseScore was the last project to present itself. It is a free and Open Source music annotation software, but there is also a version for tablets and an online music sheet library to share your compositions. Their ideas for this year's GSoC range from support for visually impaired users to tools for adding lyrics to a music score. Interested students should be proficient with C++ and Qt.

All projects mentioned that communicating with the development team and the mentors, using either the IRC channel or the mailing list is very important and the best way to get into contact with them.

At the reception afterwards, the mentors of the Open Source projects talked to the students answering their questions about GSoC, on how to apply, how to write a good proposal, and many more question that are also answered in the GSoC FAQ.

Thanks to the Open Source organisations (SAGE, GNU Octave, phpMyAdmin and MuseScore) for their talks and sharing their experience, and to the student associations (VTK, Zeus WPI, Ceneka) and UGent for their help in organising the event.

Google Summer of Code 2013 info session @ UGent

About 45 interested students showed up for the Google Summer of Code 2013 info session that was organised at Ghent University on Monday, April 15th 2013 in the Faculty of Engineering in the Plateau building.

First there was an general introduction on what Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is, explaining the goal of the program, the benefits for the students and an overview of the timeline. This was followed by a few Open Source organisations that will participate in this year's GSoC, presenting themselves and potential projects to work on, and a few students who took part in past versions of GSoC, sharing their experiences with the audience. This turned out to be a nice mix of information and different experiences that gave a good view for the attending students on what to expect from applying for and participating in GSoC.

Some useful advice that was spread :

• Put enough time in the preparation of your project proposal. Your future mentors will review this and will base their decision on accepting you mostly on this proposal. Make sure you explain well what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, and how much time you will spend on each part. Be as detailed as possible.
• Be active in the community of the organisation you want to work with. This shows the mentors that you are really interested. Don't be afraid to ask questions, or to participate in a discussion on the IRC channel or mailing list. It helps when your name rings a bell when the mentors are going through all the project proposals.
  The sooner you start with this, the better. Follow the mailing list and try submitting a few patches. It was suggested that you choose an org for next year already and contribute to it, as a preparation for GSoC 2014 (if there would be one).
• Choose a project you like. If you get accepted you'll spend almost 3 months working full time on it, so it helps if the programming language, developing environment, code base and your project are something you are comfortable with. This does not mean that you should choose a too easy project, there can be some challenge. That will keep it interesting for you. Just find something you can chew but is challenging enough to keep you going.
  It was mentioned that having some proficiency with the programming language you will be working with is usually a good point, but one of the organisations (ESUG) mentioned that learning a new language (SmallTalk in their case) can be a nice experience as well.
• It is an interesting experience, that will give you some real world development experience, will get you introduced in the Open Source community and looks nice on your CV.

The evening was closed by a reception with room for the students to talk to the speakers and ask questions.

Thanks to the Google Open Source Programs Office for the promotional material, the Open Source organisations (phpMyAdmin, SAGE, ESUG, MuseScore, Debian and Samba) and previous GSoC students (Jasper Van der Jeugt (worked on Haskell) and Sander Bogaert (worked on K9 mail)) for their talks and sharing their experience, and to the student associations (VTK, Zeus WPI, Ceneka) and UGent for their help in organising the event.

Google Summer of Code infosessie @ UGent

Zin om deze zomer $5000 te verdienen met een vakantiejob? Lijkt het je wel iets om vanuit thuis te werken wanneer het je uitkomt? Wil je een echte bijdrage leveren aan open-source software? Google maakt dit mogelijk dankzij de Google Summer of Code!

Op maandag 15 april organiseren Zeus WPI, VTK en CenEka een introductieavond rond Google Summer of Code. Dieter Adriaenssens, mentor van het phpMyAdmin-project, introduceert het concept en de procedures. Daarna komen enkele mentors hun projecten voorstellen, afgewisseld met studenten die hun ervaringen van vorige jaren delen. Achteraf kan je eventuele vragen aan de mentors stellen of gewoon gezellig napraten bij een drankje op de afsluitende receptie.
Deze introductie vindt plaats in de Jozef Plateau-zaal in de Plateau en begint om 19:00. Iedereen is welkom! Om een idee te hebben van het aantal aanwezigen vragen we om op deze pagina in te schrijven.

Ben je zelf een mentor of heb je ooit meegedaan en ben je geïnteresseerd om je project voor te stellen of ervaringen te delen op deze avond? Laat iets weten!

Wanneer : maandag, 15 april 2013, vanaf 19:00
Waar : Jozef Plateauzaal, faculteit Ingenieurswetenschappen UGent, Plateaustraat 22, Gent
Gratis toegang, maar best op voorhand inschrijven.

New department website launched

Last week, the new website of my department, that I've been working on for the last few weeks, was launched. In its first week, it got about 1200 visitors.
Although not completely finished, I thought it had reached a stage were it could be made public. I consider it a starting point anyway, a basis to start improving on by adding new features.

The previous website was created about 4-5 years ago, and was in need of a face lift. I could just have replaced the css file, to refresh the layout, but the code running in the background was replaced as well.

After some comparing, I decided to use Drupal 6 as the CMF of the new website. I hadn't worked with Drupal before, but heard and read good things about it, being developed in PHP and strong focus on modules as strong points.
First, I started developing a custom theme that reflects the corporate style of my university. I didn't do this before either, so it took me some time to understand how a page is built in Drupal and what parts it consists of, but in the end I got it working.

The new website should be bilingual (English-Dutch), so I had to look for a way to do this. Luckily, Drupal provides some modules (Locale, Internationalization) to make a website multilingual, and tools to do the translation (core module Content Translation).

I wanted to integrate the login system into the single sign-on system (CAS) of my university, so that the users of the website wouldn't have to create yet another account with matching password for this website.
There is a CAS module available for Drupal, but I got a custom one from a colleague, which I modified further, to take advantage (through CAS) of groups that are defined in the LDAP system of my university and of groups I defined in a seperate database, and thus assigning the right roles to each user on login.

With the different roles defined and assigned, I used the taxonomy module (in Drupal core) to define different parts of the website. My department consist of three research groups, so each lab has it's own section within the website. All sections have a public and private (intranet) part, so by using Taxonomy Access Control access to these pages could be linked to the defined roles.

Some pages are just static HTML, being maintained using a WYSIWYG editor, provided by Drupal module CKeditor.
Others are dynamic, getting their data from a database table, using a PHP script to generate the page. Module Cache Exclude was needed to keep these PHP generated pages from being cached by Drupal. Otherwise changes made in the database, would not show.
And core module PHP filter, to be able to execute PHP code in a page.

As I mentioned before, I'm new to Drupal so I'm still discovering possibilities, new modules and ways to do things, every day. Things that are still on my list is learning how to write modules, find a way to integrate my current database management PHP code with Drupal, basically using the Form API, not only to insert data into a database, but also update and delete data, and expand the features of the new website (both on the intranet as on public pages). Luckily I've got a good guide for the upcoming developing journey.

New challenge

About a year ago I started something that, a few days ago, came to a conclusion - but to be fair, it's more a milestone than a conclusion.
In August of last year (2008), I applied for a job at Ghent University. In the months that followed I went through the selection process, and after some hurdles I got selected. In April of this year (2009), I started on my new job. And now, six months later, my trial period is over. After a very good evaluation, I was appointed to the job, starting October 1st.
It took me over a year to get so far, but now I've reached what I was aiming for since then. But of course, this is just the start of it all. I have the rest of my life's working career ahead of me at Ghent University. And I'm still getting started, with a lot of plans to accomplish, projects to start, task being assigned, ... I'll know what to do the next few years.

But now that I've reached some stability on the work front, I might think of a new challenge, some new projects to start, or some overall reorganisation of the goals and priorities in my life. I've been thinking of a few, some silly or ridiculous, others infeasible (at least on my own), or down right impossible ways to pass time:

• Find a way of solving any Rubik's cube in maximum 21 steps. The current proof says maximum 22 steps are needed.


• Write a socio-philosophical essay addressing some effects of globalism : economy, environment, politics, communication, pluralism, culture, migration.


• Now that, Gianfranco Gentile, a researcher of Ghent University has discovered that dark matter is needed to explain certain behavior in galaxies, it might be time to create a theory combining classic, relativistic and quantum mechanics together with dark matter.


• Work on something revolutionary to save energy, use available energy more efficiently, not only by technology, but also by a change of mentality.


• Build a render farm.


• Start beatboxing.


• Research methods of efficiently stacking solids, and by extension, deformable solids (f.e. a sealed bag containing a liquid).

But some are more realistic so I'll focus on those :

• Learn to solve a Rubik's Cube. This is trivial, but I would like to find it by myself.


• Pick up playing the piano again.


• Read more, by which I mean : books, literature.

Or I could just try to look for goals in my work, find a girlfriend, buy a house, get married, start a family and raise some children.

Calculus

Tomorrow at this time the first part of my first exam will come to an end. Hopefully I will be able to fill out the right answers. I've been preparing for this exam for the last three weeks and feel like I know some of it, but it's a very hard course.
Nearly 200 pages full of mathematical formulas and principals, including proof of all statements that are made. On average there is a statement with proof on every page throughout the whole textbook. This means a little less than 200 statements with proof that I must be able to reproduce tomorrow.
Although I feel confident I will be able to produce some of the most important ones, I'm not sure about a whole lot of other statements.
Unfortunately the exam consists of two parts. The theoretical part is tomorrow in the afternoon, the second part consist of excercises and is scheduled the day after in the morning. It is a good thing to have some time between both parts, where I can review some excercises. But it's also a very long time where pressure will start build.
With less than 24 hours to go I'm going to review the most important statements again, in order to be prepared as good as possible.

electronic scholarship

Today I applied for a scholarship to study at the university. That's not very special, as a lot of people do this every year, but starting from this year it is possible to do it via the internet.
Over the last few years, my government is putting a lot of effort into administrative simplification and e-government. A lot of government departments are starting to process forms and information digitally, using computer and internet. This means that a lot of information is available through digital databases. Because of this, less forms are needed and the forms that still exist are shorter. You don't have to provide the same information over and over again, as part of it is already available to the administration.
Part of this e-gov wave is the possibility to fill out the tax-form using the internet, for the past 4 years now. Starting this year, applying for a scholarship is also possible using the internet.

I don't have to leave home to submit my application for a scholarship. Using my digital account on the government website I can fill out the digital form and send it electronically through the internet.
The best part is that a lot of information is already filled in, like my postal address and social security number.
In the past I had to prove I could get a scholarship, providing documents of my university, the tax-departement, etc. But due to the e-gov thing, the scholarship department can access this information directly from my university and the tax-database. I don't need to provide this information anymore, which makes it much easier to apply for a scholarship.

Migrated mailbox

Yesterday, when I opened my mailbox, I noticed that it seemed to be corrupted. All folders I use to organise the vast flow of mails I receive every day had disappeared. After checking the university helpdesk, I learned the IT-department had started migrating the current student's mailboxes to the new server that evening. After further investigation of my 'corrupted' mailbox I found a mail (with no subject) which stated that my mailbox was migrated and provided the new settings to be used in my E-mail application.
I was a little relieved when I changed the settings and after connecting to the new server, I noticed that my folders appeared again. But not all. Two of them where still missing. When trying to create the folders in the new mailbox, I found out why they where missing: the folders contained a '@' in the foldername, and apparently this character was refused for foldernames in the new mailbox. This explains why these two folders weren't copied when my mailbox was migrated.
But one of those folders contained over a hundred E-mails I still needed. After copying the original mailfolder, which wasn't yet deleted from the old server, using another server I managed to restore them.

So now I have a new mailbox on a new server, which has a lot of advantages. The old server was getting slow, as it is quite some years of age and has to serve the mailboxes of over 27,000 students at my university. During last semester one had to be very patient when checking E-mail arround lunchtime.
Checking E-mails should be much faster now with the new server.
My mailbox is a lot bigger too and doesn't consume space in my networkdrive.

I'm very pleased to already have been migrated to the new server. But I'm wondering what criteria where used to select which student's accounts where to be migrated first.