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.

phpMyAdmin and Google Summer of Code 2013

GSoC 2013 was great for phpMyAdmin. We selected 6 students out of 25 project proposals. The number of proposals was slightly smaller than previous years.

Students Bin Zu and Supun Nakandala refactored many scripts this summer. All the scripts in the Server view and those regarding the SQL executor, along with scripts dealing with the table Structure were cleaned up. Code was moved into functions, variable names were improved, and one of the students wrote unit tests for his newly-created functions.

Through Google Summer of Code, Kasun Chathuranga did much work on implementing new feature requests and improving the interface of phpMyAdmin. Kasun's efforts implemented a number of features requested by users and improved the interface in a number of ways.

Mohamed Ashraf has successfully contributed an error reporting tool to the phpMyAdmin code base. The tool will aid end users in reporting JavaScript-related issues and help phpMyAdmin developers deliver fixes for such issues quicker.

Ayush Chaudhary and Adam Kang were selected for the Automated Testing project. Since it was not planned to take two students, code sections to do unit testing had to be split among them.
While writing unit tests for string manipulation functions in phpMyAdmin, one of the students identified that the functions were not implemented in a way that would facilitate unit testing and went on to refactor them to add new classes before writing unit tests for them.
Besides unit tests Selenium tests for interface testing were added. Existing tests were migrated to Selenium2 and helper classes were added that are needed to write Selenium tests.
Overall the test coverage of phpMyAdmin has increased.


All six students successfully finished their projects and their code is merged with the phpMyAdmin codebase which will be part of the upcoming 4.1 release, which you can expect in the next few weeks.
Some of the students are still around fixing bugs, we look forward to more contributions from them in the future.

Thanks to Google Summer of Code, we had again some great contributions and improvements to the phpMyAdmin project. Now that GSoC 2014 is announced already, we can start preparing for the next edition and another awesome summer of coding and mentoring.

Recordings of phpMyAdmin tutorial at DebConf13 available

The phpMyAdmin team visited DebConf13 and did a tutorial about phpMyAdmin.
The tutorial was recorded and it is now available in four parts on our brand new Youtube channel :

• part 1 : introduction and basic features
• part 2 : relation between tables
• part 3 : display inline picture, zoom search, using table relations, display GIS data
• part 4 : triggers/routines/events and server status monitor

Thanks to Debian for recording our talk and making it publicly available.

phpMyAdmin Tutorial at DebConf13

The phpMyAdmin team is visiting DebConf13 in Vaumarcus, Switzerland.

On Tuesday August 13th, at 15:30 (CEST), four members of the phpMyAdmin team will do a tutorial on basic features and showcase some exciting advanced functionality, in the second talk room at DebConf13.

You are welcome to visit us if you are around, or tune in on the live stream.

It will be recorded, so you can watch it later as well.

phpMyAdmin accepts 6 students for GSoC 2013

phpMyAdmin is pleased to announce that it has accepted 6 students/projects for Google Summer of Code 2013 :

• AJAX error reporting : Mohamed Ashraf
• Automated Testing : Adam Kang
• Automated Testing : Ayush Chaudhary
• Interface improvements : Kasun Chathuranga
• Re-factoring: server view : Bin Zu
• Refactoring: SQL Executor, Column's Structure Manipulation : Supun Nakandala

Details about the accepted projects can be found on the wiki.

Congratulations, good luck and happy coding to all the students.
phpMyAdmin looks forward to their contributions to the project.

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.

Roundup of FOSDEM 2013

Last weekend, was FOSDEM 2013, two days of talks about Open Source, almost 500 in total, spread over more than 20 developer rooms.

It started on Friday night, at the Delirium café in the center of Brussels, where a few hunderd developers had gathered for beer and socialising. I planned to meet some people, but finding them was not an easy task. Ironically, modern day tools like SMS proved useless : by the time the messages I sent reached them (hours later), I had already found them.

After a nightly walk to the hotel and a short night, it was time for the real stuff. First the opening talk by FOSDEM staff, with some practical info about the conference : the new logo, location of rooms and buildings, wireless network, sponsors, catering, first aid, devrooms, lightning talks and main track speakers; finished by the FOSDEM dance, which was a bit more complex than previous years.

Looking at the list of talks I have attended (with more than 20 simultaneous talks at any time during the conference, it was impossible to go to all 500 of them), I'll mention some highlights :

• I went to quite a few talks about legal and licensing issues. Over the years I've come to realise this is an important part of the Open Source world. Choosing an Open Source license and publishing your work under it, being it software, hardware design, or other creative work, is one thing, making sure the license terms are not violated, is another. Although some talks were informative, some raised more questions than were answered.
  For example, if I publish my software under an Open Source license as a European citizen, will European law protect my copyright and license terms? If the software is used in the EU, this would probably be the case. But what about other regions in the world?
• Maintaining a kernel subsystem : informative talk and good speaker. Although it was about maintaining a kernel subsystem, the methods he used, can be used to maintain any Open Source project.
• Welcome to the Symfony2 World  gave an overview of the current state of the Symfony 2 framework, with some history and what components and possibilities it has.
• Vehicular traffic estimation through bluetooth uses a Raspberry Pi and some Open Source tools, to track traffic connecting to bluetooth capable devices. Nice application of the Raspberry Pi.
• What's new in BIND 10 and Samba4 : both telling a story about rewriting the previous software to come to a newer, better and improved version. Samba 4 will now support SMB3 protocol and Active Directory.
• One of the most interesting talks explained what the actual problem is with UEFI SecureBoot, who the different players are (from users, over system builders, to hardware and OS vendors) and how the problem can be solved.
  Basically : Windows 8 requires UEFI Secureboot to be enabled (UEFI replaces the old BIOS), otherwise it will not start up. Secureboot ensures that the OS being started is valid, by checking it's signature with one stored in the UEFI chip. As such, this is not bad, but when you want to boot an OS that is not signed by a key, or the key is not present in the chip, it is impossible to start this OS, making dual booting linux/Windows 8 very difficult.
  Luckily some intiatives are done to make the dual booting possible, with the most recent one : Linux Foundation obtained a Microsoft key, making it possible to boot a linux distro on a device were Windows 8 is installed. (this happened after FOSDEM, so it was not mentioned during the talk)
  Of course, it is still possible to boot Linux, or any other OS, on a device with UEFI, when you don't want to use Windows 8. Then you can just disable the SecureBoot option.

And last but not least, I had my own presentation about the Present and future of phpMyAdmin in the MySQL and Friends devroom. About 50-60 people attended, although it overlapped with the final key note and was one of the last talks at FOSDEM. The talk went well, small hickup during the demo and there were some questions afterwards.

It was a nice weekend, lots of interesting talks, meeting a few current and previous team members of the phpMyAdmin and some people I've met at the GSoC mentor summits. Still only 51 weeks to go before the next FOSDEM.

Present and future of phpMyAdmin talk at FOSDEM

If you missed the talk about the Present and future of phpMyAdmin at FOSDEM 2013, you can get the presentation here. Only slides, so without the demo's. ;)

Summary of the talk : What's new in phpMyAdmin and what's coming up? An overview and some demos of the new features and changes in the current release (3.5) and what to expect in the upcoming 4.0 release.

talk about phpMyAdmin at FOSDEM 2013

A few more days and FOSDEM 2013 starts again. I've been looking forward to this since I left FOSDEM 2012. ;)

A lot of talks and presentations to go to, some people to meet (again), but most importantly : I will do a talk about phpMyAdmin!

If you are at FOSDEM and want to know more about the Present and future of phpMyAdmin, then come to room H.2214 (MySQL & Friends devroom) on Sunday, February 3rd, 2013 at 17:00.

I will talk about the new features in the current version (3.5.x) and what you can expect in the upcoming version 4.0.0.

Hope to see you there!

Fosdem 2012

The yearly meeting of Free and Open Source Software Developers and enthousiasts is about to start. This weekend about 5000 people will come to Brussels for FOSDEM, to attend presentations, meet people and share knowledge.
I intend to go as well, if my health allows : I was hit by a virus in the beginning of this week and I am still recovering.
Anyway, apart from a lot of talks and presentations I want to go to, there is also a team meeting planned of my project, phpMyAdmin. And, at some point, I hope to run into some people I met at GSoC mentor summit last year.

GSoC Mentor Summit 2011

I'm on the bus back to the hotel, after a weekend of meeting and collaboration with a lot of inspired Open Source developers. We met at Google Headquarters for the annual GSoC Mentor Summit, discussing last year's Google Summer of Code in particular and Open Source collaboration in general. More than 300 people of 175 participating organisations, from all over the world, were present.

It was my first time, both as a GSoC mentor for the phpMyAdmin project as on attending the summit, but it was great (or awesome, like some would state it). I've met and talked with many people. I learned a lot from the different sessions I attended and was pleasantly surprised about how much drive, knowledge and experience was present.

Awesome!

FOSDEM 2011

It's been great again. Over 5000 Open Source developers and enthousiasts meeting to share more than 200 hours of knowledge over the course of a weekend at FOSDEM 2011, held at campus Solbosch of ULB in Brussels, Belgium.
Last year I went there for the first time, for just one day, and I liked it so much I immediately decided to go back this year, but for the whole two days.

So there I was, on Saturday afternoon, after taking two trains, a metro and a bus, entering the ULB campus where FOSDEM is held, seeing the signs pointing to all different buildings and rooms where talks were held, the catering trucks, and a busy bunch of enthousiastic people.

I headed for the MySQL & Friends devroom, where I met some of the people of the phpMyAdmin team, which I joined last year. I hadn't met them before, so this was a nice opportunity.
These are some of the talks I attended on Saturday :

• What's new in MySQL 5.5
• Data Recovery for MySQL
• flashrom: Run your BIOS/EFI/firmware updates under any free OS
• 0MQ: Multithreading magic 
• Seeks Project: let's take back websearch
• Multimaster MySQL failover
• Multi-Master Replication Approaches

After this, we had a phpMyAdmin team dinner and afterwards I introduced them to  some fine Belgian beers.

Sunday was a bit chaotic, I hadn't planned to see that much talks, one of the talks I planned to attend was canceled, and I missed another one, because I left early to catch the canceled one (but I didn't know it at that time), but I still went to some :

• The difficulty of forking 
• Can we build a simple, cross-distribution installation framework?
• Cold boot attacks on RAM readout 
• Really fast x86 boot
• Building a free, massively scalable cloud computing platform
• How kernel development goes wrong and why you should be a part of it anyway 

After the last talk, it was time to go home. A special FOSDEM bus brought us back to the railway station, were I had some dinner before I headed home.
It was a nice weekend, with a nice Open atmosphere, again perfectly organized by and for the community.  In case you missed it, this was FOSDEM 2011 (a video artists impression).

I'm looking forward to next edition already!

busy weeks, digging into code, learning new tools

I've had a few busy weeks, both at work and at home.

I've started creating a new website for my department, and I chose Drupal as the supporting framework. I didn't use Drupal before, so it took me some time to get to know how it works, and that also means getting into the code, because I have to implement some custom things, like creating a new theme to reflect the corporate layout of my university. It took me some time, but I'm almost where I want to be, with only some minor tweaks to do. Now I can get started on the structure of the website and later, I'll start exploring the code some more when I start building custom modules.

When I get home, I start digging into the internals of phpMyAdmin, an Open Source project that is written in PHP and provides a web interface for the MySQL database.
After attending a talk about phpMyAdmin on FOSDEM 2010, a few weeks ago, I decided to get involved in that project so I sent an E-mail to the project admin. After some weeks of getting acquainted with the code, trying to solve some bugs and getting patches out, I got accepted last week as a developer on the phpMyAdmin project.

Besides digging into the code of both Drupal and phpMyAdmin, I'm learning to use vim, a powerful text editor, and git, a distributed version control system, because phpMyAdmin switched to git last week.

I almost forgot to mention that I'm trying to get my new server up and running as my current server is getting a bit outdated.

Much to do, and I guess I found the challenges I was looking for some time ago. And I still have social life and get enough sleep. ;)

phpMyAdmin accepted for Google Summer of Code 2010

Since 2005, Google organises the, by now, well known event Google Summer of Code (GSoC). This programming event gives students the opportunity to participate in popular Open Source projects. When they successfully complete their assignment by the end of the summer, they even get paid. :)

Today, the list of mentoring organisations for GSoC 2010 was made public : phpMyAdmin, an Open Source project that provides a webinterface for popular database MySQL, written in PHP, is one of them.


From now on (18 until 29 March), would-be student participants are invited to discuss the ideas that phpMyAdmin proposes. If you're interested, take a look at the guidelines and discuss your ideas on the developers mailinglist. Other ideas are possible too.

You can find the full time line and more information on the GSoC 2010 website.