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.

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.

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!