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I am proud to share the news that Google Summer of Code 2012 was announced this morning at FOSDEM.

This will be the 8th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past seven years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 90 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2012 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

For the second year, the Sahana Software Foundation participated in Google Code-in (GCI), a program which gives pre-university students the chance to get involved in open source projects. I was Sahana’s Administrator for this program and am incredibly happy with how well the program went for us. Out of the 208 tasks that we posted for students, 193 were completed – which is an amazing effort!

After last year, we knew that Google Code-in wasn’t for the faint of heart as it would require responding to students, answering their questions and reviewing work around the clock, so we reached out to our volunteer community and gathered a team of 11 mentors together. We put together a roster with 3-4 mentors covering each week to ensure that there was always someone on duty, while also ensuring that mentors would be able to have some time off. A big thank you goes out to all our mentors: Dominc König, Fran Boon, Graeme Foster, Nuwan Waidyanatha, Pat Tressel, four former Google Summer of Code students: Praneeth Bodduluri (‘09), Pratyush Nigam (‘11), Robert O’Connor (‘10), Shikhar Kohli (‘10) and Tony Young (a Google Code-in student last year). Sahana’s participation in Google Code-in couldn’t have happened without all of you!

But the biggest thank you goes out to all the students who have completed tasks – unfortunately/fortunately there are too many of you to name! We had many students review chapters in the Sahana Eden Essential Guide to make sure that the instructions were clear enough for them to follow. I was really pleased to see that the book was easy for students to use plus we also got some great feedback on how to improve it. Once again the translation tasks were very popular and we have complete translations of Sahana Eden in Romanian, Bulgarian and Hindi. Abhishek Arora and Leizel Puzon completed one of the more interesting tasks; taking minutes during our community calls – which gave them insight into how our community works. For me the highlight was the task completed by Daniel Klischies (Nostraa) to design a theme for the Sahana Eden wiki to align with the Sahana Software Foundation’s branding. Daniel’s work transformed our wiki into a very professional looking site which I get  great pleasure using and sharing with others. I’m also glad to see that for some students, their involvement with Sahana doesn’t end with the end of this year’s Google Code-in, such as Sriram Raghu who is giving a talk on Sahana Eden to other students at his school.

I would like to pass on a big thanks to everyone behind the scenes who made this happen: Sverre Rabbelier, Daniel Hans, Madhusudan. C.S and the rest of the Melange team who were under extreme pressure from students and mentors alike to ensure that Melange was running smoothly throughout Google Code-in. And, of course, the Google Open Source team whose continued support of open source projects is what makes great programs like this possible!

By Michael Howden, Sahana Software Foundation Google Code-in Organization Administrator

Google’s RE<C renewable energy research project has recently open sourced a new tool and a significant amount of data to support future CSP (concentrating solar power) heliostat development.



HOpS Open Source Site

HOpS, heliostat optical simulation, is an open source software tool for accurately and efficiently performing optical simulations of fields of heliostats, the actuated mirror assemblies that direct sunlight onto a target in CSP applications.

Google used this tool to help evaluate heliostat field layouts and calculate heat input into a CSP receiver for power production. HOpS works by passing "packets" of light between optical elements (the sun, heliostats, and elements of the target surface), tracking shadowing and blocking masks along the way. For our analysis goals, this approach gave our researchers more flexibility and accuracy than analytic tools (such as DELSOL or HFLCAL), and it was easier to set up for thousands of runs than using ray tracers. Output from the simulation includes heliostat efficiency, target irradiance, and more, while an included shell script facilitates plotting heat maps of the output data using gnuplot.


REC-CSP Open Source Site
The REC_CSP open source project contains data sets and software useful for designing cheaper heliostats.

Available on the project site are:
1. Thirty days of three-dimensional wind measurement data taken with ultrasonic anemometers (sampled at ~7 Hz), recorded at several near surface elevations.  The data is presented in the RE<C wind data collection document and is available for download on the open source site here.


2. A collection of heliostat aerodynamic load data obtained in a NASA wind tunnel and graphically represented in the appendix.  This data is available for download on the open source site here.


3. Matlab software for high-precision, on-target heliostat control with built-in simulation for testing. This is essentially the same software used in the RE<C heliostat control demonstrations and described in the accelerometer sensing and control system design documents.  The source code is available for download here.




By Ross Koningstein, Engineer, Google RE<C team

Drupal is an open source content management system with thousands of active community members behind it. A popular solution for both small and large scale websites, Drupal is extremely flexible and offers thousands of add-on modules.  Drupal’s user experience (UX) layer, however, can be daunting and frustrating for beginners to learn. I am working on an exciting project in conjunction with the Drupal User Experience team and the Google Open Source team to help determine some of the key UX issues new users of Drupal encounter. The usability study will have participants (all Googlers) building a website and will help to gain insight into the stumbling blocks users encounter along the way.

The usability study will be streamed live and available for everyone to watch. The usability study is planned to take place February 1-3. Details about the live stream will be posted in the comments section below in the coming days. You can follow the discussion about this study on the Drupal.org wiki page.

Saturday, January 28 at Drupal Camp San Diego (SANDCamp) I will be presenting a talk called “Usability Studies for you and Drupal too!” on the fundamental principles of user experience and an introduction to the usability study. Jen Lampton from Chapter Three is co-presenting with me to talk about why UX is so important to Drupal, what the Drupal UX team has discovered through past studies, and how to get involved with the project.

Stay tuned for another post on the results, and make sure to check back on the Drupal.org wiki for details on how to watch live!

By Becky Gessler, Google Search Quality team

Over eight busy weeks, 545 high school (pre-university) students competed in the Google Code-in contest completing tasks for 18 open source projects. The Google Code-in contest is designed to introduce high school students to the world of open source software development by having them complete ‘bite sized’ tasks while gaining knowledge and earning prizes along the way.

Stay tuned to this blog as we will be announcing the 10 grand prize winners on February 14. The grand prize winners will win a trip for themselves and a parent or legal guardian to Google’s Mountain View, California campus in June.

Congratulations to all of the students who completed tasks during this year’s contest. We hope you all learned more about open source and will continue to work with the organizations you built relationships with during the contest and with other open source projects in the future.

And a hearty thank you to all of the mentors and organization administrators who helped the students these past couple of months. We couldn’t do this contest without all of your incredible work!

For more information on the Google Code-in contest check out our site. We will post more statistics from this year’s Google Code-in in the coming weeks, stay tuned.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Today, we’d like to announce the release of DartBox2D, a port of the wildly successful Box2D physics engine to Dart, Google’s new language for the web.


Box2D has been ported to other languages, including JavaScript, but this release opens the door to Dart becoming a language for games on the web, which, as we all know, is what the web is really for (that and pictures of cats, of course). The work was started by two interns at Google, Greg Bigelow and Ahmed Hussein, continued by Joel Webber, and finished up by Dominic Hamon.


DartBox2D is a straight port from the Java version and isn’t yet using all of the great features the Dart developers have built into Dart, but moving forward it will become a template for how to write great Dart code. The ease with which this port was developed speaks to the great job the Dart team have done with the language.

As developers, we’re always wary of premature optimization even when working on a codebase like this one where performance is a key feature. Fortunately, it is already performing well with almost all of the included demos hitting a solid 60 FPS, though optimization efforts are a large part of the ongoing work on the project. You can see for yourself by viewing the demos and more in-depth benchmark results.

All feedback is more than welcome, and you can discuss the project either by joining the dartbox2d-discuss Google Group or the #dartbox2d IRC channel on FreeNode.

By Dominic Hamon, Google, Make the Web Faster team

Google Body was built by Google engineers in their “20% time” and was retired along with Google Labs last year. Today we’re pleased to announce that the software underlying Google Body is now open source.

Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google Body, has used this open source code to build Zygote Body (zygotebody.com). Zygote Body offers the same navigation, layering, and instant search as Google Body. Like Google Body, Zygote Body can be used in browsers that support WebGL, like Chrome and Firefox, without needing to install additional software.


To support the release of Zygote Body, the Google Body team built a new open source 3D viewer, now available at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. This viewer provides a standard way to create and view 3D models in a Web browser, with multiple layers and instant search. A sample model (by 3D artist Leo White) is included; Google Body users may recognize it as the Google Cow, first seen on April Fool's Day 2011.


By Roni Zeiger, Google Body 20% team

Have you ever wanted a fun and beautiful way to publish videos on your own site like the new 60 Minutes or RedBull.tv apps from the Chrome Web Store? I'm excited to announce the release of The Video Player Sample! The Video Player Sample is an open source video player web app built using the same architecture as the 60 Minutes and RedBull.tv apps. It can be customized, extended, or just used out of the box and populated with your own content.




How it's built
The Google Video Application is written for the open web platform using HTML and JavaScript, broadly following the MVC (Model View Controller) pattern and structure.

• It is built using the open source Google Closure JavaScript library 
• Compiled with the Closure Compiler 
• Distributed through the Chrome Web Store to take advantage of notifications

Browser Support
In addition to working as an app that can be installed through the Chrome Web Store, the Video Player Web App has been tested and works in all of the modern browsers.

Try it out
You can see a demo of the video player in action in the demo app, or by Adding it to Chrome through the Chrome Web Store. To learn more about how the app works, check out the documentation.

You can grab the code from Google Code.

Enjoy!

By Pete LePage, Chrome Web Store Developer Relations Team

This was the first year CERN participated in Google Summer of Code, and it turned out to be an amazing experience for us! We were given four students to mentor, all of whom proved to be very skilled developers. The students quickly familiarized themselves with our code base and managed to make valuable contributions within the three month time frame of Google Summer of Code. Our students were very open and willing to learn and spent a considerable amount of their time researching tools, libraries, and the latest technological developments. As a result, all four students were able to solve their problems and come up with interesting ideas for future development. The code and the documentation they produced is available here. The specific problems (projects) that we suggested to our students spanned several domains, ranging from consistent replication of terabytes of data across several remote sites to automated testing of virtual machine releases.
                                           

Josip Lisec was working on the development of the monitoring system for the CernVM Co-Pilot framework, which is mainly used as a distributed computing platform within the LHC@home 2.0 volunteer computing project. The LHC@home 2.0 project currently has more than 9,000 registered users who contribute their spare CPU cycles for the simulation of the particle collision events in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). After some research, Josip decided to integrate existing tools with the Co-Pilot as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel by rewriting everything from scratch. This resulted in a nicely engineered monitoring framework, parts of which were put into production while the Google Summer of Code was still going on (Josip's developments have now been fully integrated after completion of the program). Since this was Josip's first encounter with Perl, he has been seen adding support for 'my' keyword to every other major programming language since the Google Summer of Code concluded.

The goal of Yin Qiu's project was to devise a mechanism for a consistent replication of changes made to the central repository of CernVM File System (CernVM-FS) to a globally distributed set of mirror servers. CernVM-FS is used to host and distribute the application software of CERN LHC experiments to hundreds of Grid sites, as well as the laptops and workstations of users worldwide. As such, it is currently one of the central components of the distributed computing infrastructures on which CERN ATLAS and LHCb experiments rely. Yin's approach was to organize CernVM-FS mirrors into a Paxos-managed replication network and to enforce state machine version transitions on them. Following the suggestion of Jakob, his mentor, Yin implemented a messaging framework which is used to orchestrate the replication process and facilitates the implementation of new features. He also managed to implement a couple of Python plugins which ensure the consistency of data across replicas. The project is currently in the state of a working prototype.

Jesse Williamson took up the challenge of designing a new library for CernVM-FS to consolidate support for various cryptographic hashing algorithms. The first task was to survey the implementation of CernVM-FS and establish a list of requirements. Next, quite a bit of effort was spent on designing the library specifically so that it would be easy to use, comparatively simple to extend, and robust enough to support extensions like a streaming interface and compression. Since CernVM-FS is heavily used in production, it has been very important to make sure that the new developments do not break anything. Jesse has developed a set of unit tests which ensure that all the existing features and properties were maintained.

The design of new C++ libraries was certainly an improvement, but it also became clear late in the cycle that a further abstraction to fully separate digests and hash functions will be necessary to avoid memory fragmentation issues and ensure stronger const-correctness

Jonathan Gillet worked on implementing a solution for automating the testing of CernVM virtual machine images on multiple hypervisors and operating systems. The solution, which is a ready to use testing infrastructure for CernVM, was developed in collaboration with other open source projects such as AMD Tapper (used for the reports and web interface), libvirt (interaction with hypervisors), and Homebrew (OS X support).  The main goals of the project were accomplished with support for all major hypervisors running on Linux and OS X platforms. The framework automates the task of downloading and configuring the CernVM images on the fly, and executing a series of thorough tests which check various features of CernVM images before release. Documentation was also an important goal of the project; in total there are now over two hundred pages of documentation which cover everything from setting up the testing infrastructure and virtual machines to a complete API reference.

We certainly enjoyed Google Summer of Code 2011, and we sincerely congratulate all of our students and mentors for successfully completing the program!

By Artem Harutyunyan, Senior Fellow, CernVM Project (CERN) and Google Summer of Code Mentor

Once in awhile at Google our illustrators get excited about lasers, Morse code, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds – and then come up with beautiful Google doodles that find their way onto our homepage. Sometimes our programmers also get excited and team up with the illustrators, and that’s how we found ourselves with Google doodles celebrating Les Paul’s guitar, Pac-Man, Jules Verne’s bathyscaphe, and even your own customized turkey that you could then share on Google+.

I’m one of those people who is more comfortable with 80 monospaced characters endlessly repeated than with a paintbrush. Earlier this year I worked with Sophia Foster-Dimino from the Google doodle team on a doodle celebrating Stanisław Lem, my favorite sci-fi writer and philosopher.


Just like picking the right paintbrush and palette is important for all our doodles, so is figuring out the right technologies and proper user interface for those we want to make interactive. That’s something I’m personally really excited about and that’s why today I wanted to share that excitement and the entire source code of the Stanisław Lem doodle with you – accompanied with an article explaining HTML5 technologies that we used… or didn’t use:

• read the article about Stanisław Lem doodle on HTML5 Rocks
• view the complete source code 

Please note: We are sharing the code of the doodle under the Apache 2.0 License, but the images and animations accompanying the doodle under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License. The big difference between those two is that the first one allows commercial re-use, whereas the second one forbids it.

So take it for a spin, play with it, and if you do something interesting, find a flaw, or have a comment – let us know at stanislaw-lem-google-doodle@googlegroups.com. Thanks!

By Marcin Wichary, Senior user experience designer, Chrome