Sunday 25 February 2007
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Notes from FOSDEM



Google was proud to sponsor this year's FOSDEM. We hope that you had a chance to catch the updates on the Linux kernel and SAMBA from our very own open sourcerers, Andrew Morton and Jeremy Allison.

We also hope that you had a chance to speak with us there, and we were all excited to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. FOSDEM rocked!

Friday 23 February 2007
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The Value of Google Gadgets



The past year has been very exciting for Google Universal Gadgets. We've seen developers create nearly 4000 gadgets that can be syndicated, enabling users to do anything from monitoring their water intake to checking their location on a map. These gadgets can be added to any page on the web, not to mention the Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, and most recently the Windows Vista Sidebar and Mac OSX Dashboard.

In order to promote a more transparent and open ecosystem for gadget developers, we have introduced a new feature in the Gadgets For Your Webpage directory detailing the approximate number of gadget views each gadget receives per week. We expect that gadget developers (and potential gadget developers!) will be able to use this information to better understand the reach of their gadgets. A quick check will show that hundreds of gadgets are getting tens of thousands of pageviews each week -- and many are even getting millions.

And now, the technical stuff: These numbers are approximations, representing the number of times each gadget is rendered across all places Google Gadgets can be viewed. The pageview count is aggregated weekly to smooth out the normal daily fluctuations and we have filtered out automatic page refreshes. Individual gadget authors who want to know more specific information about their gadget's traffic should make use of the Google Analytics library.

As always, we're listening to your feedback on the Google Gadgets Developer Forum -- and if you want to get started writing gadgets, you can dive right into our API Docs. You can have your first one out the door before you know it.

Google Summer of Code & Danish Linux Forum



The Danish Linux Conference is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and the date is coming up soon! I'll be there to present on Google, Open Source and the Google Summer of Code ™ program on Saturday, March 3.

GSoCers, keep an eye out for me; I'll be sporting the orange and black Google Summer of Code t-shirt. If anyone in attendance has any questions about Google or our open source efforts, I would love to talk to you.

Hope to see you there!

Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Ian Lance Taylor



Next Tuesday, February 27, the Open Source Developers @ Google Speakers Series will welcome Ian Lance Taylor, prolific contributor to GCC and author of the popular Taylor UUCP package. Ian's presentation, "GCC: Current Topics and Future Directions," will give the audience insight into both the current trends in GCC development and how Google's GCC team is helping these efforts.

Doors open at 6:30 PM at our Corporate Headquarters; guests should plan to sign in at Building 43 reception upon arrival. Refreshments will be served and anyone is most welcome to attend! Ian's presentation will also be taped and published on Google Video.

For those of you who were not able to attend Bram Moolenaar's recent talk "Seven habits for effective text editing, 2.0," you can check out the video.

Thursday 22 February 2007
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New APIs for Google Apps



With today's launch of Google Apps Premier Edition, we're proud to announce the availability of new administration APIs for fusing your business with Google Apps:

Single sign-on - Use this SAML-based interface to drive a consistent and unified login experience across all of your web applications.
Provisioning - Use this GData API to integrate with your existing user management system.

Don't forget, you can integrate with and extend many of the individual Google Apps services -- create gadgets for your start page, build custom visualizations on top of spreadsheets, synchronize calendars, archive your mail with a mail gateway, or build a video sharing tool on top of Google Talk.

Check out the Google Apps APIs page for more details!

Thursday 15 February 2007
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Speaking of Summer



Google Summer of CodeTM 2007 is on! Last year, Google funded over 600 students in 93 countries to work with 100 open source groups. We're extremely happy to announce that we'll be holding Google Summer of Code again this year. We look forward to helping new contributors join the community and write more code.

We won't start accepting applications until March, so in the interim check out the FAQs for more information. Our program administrators will also be hanging out in the Google Summer of Code discussion group and in #summer-discuss on Slashnet. We'd love to hear from you!

Tuesday 13 February 2007
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Feels Like Summer



After a busy year running Google Summer of Code, hosting community conferences, adding new features to our project hosting site, and helping transform the Google Web Toolkit into an open source project, our team has finally had a chance to clear out the old inbox and catch up on the news.

And the news is awesome! All over the world, programs are springing up to get students involved in open source:

GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program: On top of mentoring 20 students for GSoC, GNOME funded six additional developer projects in Summer 2006, all by women. The GNOME journal has more information.

The OCaml Summer Project: To encourage growth in its developer community, Jane Street Capital will fund OCaml student projects this summer and then bring the students together in New York City at the close of the program.

Season of Usability
: Student developers from several countries are working with mentors to improve usability in Inkscape, KDE and more.

Winter of Code: Korean games publisher NCsoft just finished taking applications for their program in late December. We look forward to hearing about the results of their efforts to get students from middle school through university level involved in open source development. (Note: The Winter of Code program site is in Korean, but feel free to try an English translation. If you would like to read more about the Winter of Code in English, ZDNet Asia has further details.)

We've also heard that the MySQL folks are planning their own Winter of Code program.

Heard about other programs like these? We'd love to hear from you!

Note: Post updated to correctly attribute sponsorship of the OCaml project to Jane's Capital.

Monday 12 February 2007
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Drupal and GSoC: The students that keep on committing



Robert Douglass, Drupal's organization administrator for Google Summer of Code 2005 and 2006, recently sent an update on the progress of Drupal's students. He writes:

I was surprised at how active Drupal's SoC student contributors are! It is notable that 12 SoC students (four from 2005, eight from 2006) have checked in new code in the last three months. So out of 25 students who we have mentored, 12 are still very active as code contributors. This doesn't include contributions in the form of patches, forum posts or activity on IRC or the development list.

Robert has also posted a table of recent CVS commits by Drupal's GSoCers.

Congratulations to the whole Drupal community on your amazing success keeping your students active and committing long after the "Summers" have ended.

Friday 9 February 2007
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Google Summer of Coders at EclipseCon 2007

If you'll be in Santa Clara for EclipseCon 2007, be sure to stop by to meet some of Eclipse's GSoCers at the panel session The 2006 Google Summer of Code at Eclipse. Steffen Pingel, now a a committer for the Mylar project, will be joined by his fellow student Remy Chi Jian Suen, who created a Java implementation of the BitTorrent protocol for integration into the Eclipse Communication Framework. Eclipse organization administrator Philippe Ombredanne will also take part, as will Eclipse mentors Francois Granade and Mik Kersten and our very own Leslie Hawthorn.

We hope to see you there!

Wednesday 7 February 2007
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NetBSD and Google Summer of Code

After participating in the Google Summer of Code program for 2005 and 2006, NetBSD has many reasons to be proud. Most of their students are still active contributors. Several have had their code integrated into NetBSD's releases. On top of all of that, the project gained three new committers.

Alan Ritter worked with NetBSD during GSoC 2005 to port the NDIS driver from FreeBSD to NetBSD. He continued to work on his GSoC project after the program ended for the year, and he later imported his code into NetBSD's source tree on March 30, 2006. He became a developer in April 2006.

Arnaud Degroote's GSoC 2006 project to add ipv6 support to the Fast_ipsec stack will be imported into NetBSD's source tree soon. As a result of his work during GSoC, Arnaud is one of NetBSD's newest developers.

Ruibiao Qiu's 2005 GSoC project to implement wide character support in NetBSD's curses library will also be integrated into NetBSD's source tree shortly. Ruibiao became a developer for the project in January 2006.

For more information on all things NetBSD & GSoC, check out NetBSD's roundup posts for 2005 and 2006. Congratulations to NetBSD's students and mentors for their tremendous success, and thanks to NetBSD for joining us for the two years of the Google Summer of Code.

Convert Google Gadgets to Other Widget Platforms

Post by Dann Lee, Associate Support Engineer

The Google Gadgets directory contains thousands of gadgets you can use on various google.com sites. In October 2006, we released Google Gadgets For Your Page, allowing you to embed your favorite gadgets in your blogs, websites, and other webpages. Now you can take Google Gadgets and convert them to run in your Windows Vista Sidebar or Mac OS X Dashboard. With the use of third-party utility applications, this is trivial to do.

Mesa Dynamics offers a free widget converter application called Amnesty Generator which converts Google Gadgets to Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets. On February 2nd, they announced a public beta release that's capable of converting Google Gadgets to Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets as well. This increases distribution of Google Gadgets further and gives gadget authors access to an even wider audience. In addition to Amnesty Generator, Widgetops Universal Google Gadget Widget is a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget that converts Google Gadgets to run on the dashboard.

Viewing Google Gadgets on different sites or platforms does not require any changes. The answer to the question "Why should I write a Google Gadget?" is hopefully becoming more and more clear as rendering platforms become increasingly available, which now includes:
For more information on creating gadgets, visit Google Gadgets API.

Google News and Book Search via the AJAX Search API

The AJAX Search team launched two new features today: the dynamic Google News bar and support for Book Search. Both offer a simple cut-and-paste tool that makes it easy for anyone to add rich search results to a website. And as always, the full AJAX Search API is available for more involved projects.

Learn more about Book Search and the dynamic Google News bar at the Google AJAX Search Blog.

Monday 5 February 2007
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And the code lives on....

We've got some great news from the Dojo project about Google Summer of Code: as a result of their participation in GSoC 2006, two of Dojo's students have obtained committer status, and all three have had their GSoC code included in Dojo releases.

For more information on the students' accomplishments, check out the write-up of Satishkumar Sekharan's JavaScript linker project and the details of Heng Liu's improvements to Editor2. There's also a cool demo available showcasing Hiran Shyanaka Ganegedara's plug-ins for OpenRecord.

Congratulations to all of Dojo's students and mentors for their success in GSoC 2006!

Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Bram Moolenaar

Bram Moolenaar, creator of the Vim text editor and Software Engineer in Google's Zurich office, will be visiting our Mountain View headquarters on Tuesday, February 13th to discuss the "Seven habits for effective text editing, 2.0." Bram's presentation will give an overview of several ways to effectively use Vim to edit programs, structured text and documentation.

Please join us for Bram's presentation if you're in the area. Doors will open at 6:30 PM and Bram will begin speaking at 7:00 PM. Refreshments will be served; please plan to sign in at Building 41 reception when you arrive.

For those of you who were unable to attend the last session of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, you can check out the video and slides from Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick's talk on "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)."