Google / Portland State University Summer of Code

The 2008 Google / PSU Summer of Code is long over. Here's a quick, belated summary of the 2008 year.

Portland State University was able to mentor seven projects in 2008. Of these, six completed successfully. These were:

• Mentor: Joshua Triplett; Student: Alexey Zaytsev. A C code "linker" based on SPARSE. The student successfully constructed this key component of a multi-file static analyzer.

• Mentor: David Percy; Student: Devin Chalmers. CocoaBugs: An Artificial Life Framework. The student created a framework / testbed for a particular class of a-life models, with a beautiful user interface.

• Mentor: Greg Kroah Hartman; Student: Loren Davis. Open Doors. The student built an open-source Linux implementation of Sun's Doors interprocess communication framework.

• Mentor: Len Shapiro; Student: Tom Raney. The PostgreSQL Optimizer Exposed. The student combined some existing solutions for instrumentation and visualization with new code to obtain a powerful tool for understanding the detailed workings of the PostgreSQL query optimizer on a given query.

• Mentor: Keith Packard; Student: Ralf Juengling. Revamping Lush's Memory Management. The student wrote an incremental garbage collection library for Lush based on ideas from the Nickle programming language implementation. The result will also be folded back into Nickle.

• Mentor: Len Shapiro; Student: Adam Bresee. A System for Patent Categorization and Analysis. The student wrote natural-language analysis code to mine the US Patent database.

Congratulations to all these students, and our most grateful thanks to their mentors. This was highly appreciated.

We are both proud and grateful to have once again been accepted by Google as a Summer of Code mentoring organization for 2008. We look forward to your high-quality proposals, and to working with some of you over the Summer!

In 2008, Portland State University is once again applying to be a Summer of Code Mentoring organization. We don't plan major changes from last year, but there will be a couple of things we're going to try to improve the program.

PSU Prof. Len Shapiro has agreed to help me with the program this time around. I am excited about this on two counts. First and foremost, Prof. Shapiro is a brilliant scholar and brings to the table administrative and time-management skills that I can really use. Secondly, his interest in open source databases fills a big hole in our capability set.

Of course, we are not guaranteed a slot in Google Summer of Code this year. We will let you know when we receive word on this; we are hopeful for another good year of SoC.

Here, in no particular order, are the students and mentor who will be participating in Summer of Code projects supervised by Bart Massey in 2007. Congratulations to those students and mentors participating, and thanks to all of you, accepted or not, for the work you put into making this program a success.

Google/PSU Summer of Code

Our proud tradition continues. Google was quite generous with slots for us this year; we look forward to many successes.

• Douglas McKenzie
  autoAuto - A mechanical simulation package for amateur motorsport
  Mentor: David Allen
  
  
• Sean McLaughlin
  A Formal Proof in Algebra: The Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory
  Mentor: Thomas Harke
  
  
• Arnoldo Jose Muller Molina
  A distributed similarity search engine: matching Xenarthras and ...
  Mentor: Cynthia Brown
  
  
• Yevgeny Binder
  Using Software Defined Radio for Aircraft Navigation
  Mentor: Erik Walthinsen
  
  
• Chris Wu
  Linear algebra package for Sympy
  Mentor: Mike Haertel
  
  
• Bhuricha Deen Sethanandha
  TracMetrix: Integrated project tracking and metrics repository
  Mentor: Bart Massey
  
  
• Spencer Janssen
  XHSB: an X binding for Haskell, based on XCB
  Mentor: Jamey Sharp
  
  

Google/X.Org Summer of Code

This year marks the first that Bart Massey is running Google Summer of Code for X.Org also. There were some very tough competitors for these slots; we only had three.

• Tiago Vignatti
  Moving the mouse handling code into a separate thread
  Mentor: Daniel Stone
  
  
• Thomas Hunger
  Generating the XCB C code in Python
  Mentor: Anselm R. Garbe
  
  
• Andrew Howe
  Server Side XCB
  Mentor: Ian Osgood
  
  

X.Org Vacation of Code

In response to the large number of quality proposals received for Google/X.Org Summer of Code that could not be funded by Google, the X.Org Foundation Board voted unanimously to fund proposals itself. This is the first year for the X.Org "Vacation of Code" program; we hope it will be a success, and can be repeated in the future.

• Arthur Huillet
  Xv support for Nouveau driver
  Mentor: Alexander Deucher
  
  
• Nicolas Martyanoff
  Patent-free S3TC compression implementation for Mesa
  Mentor: Brian Paul
  
  
• Philipp Heise
  XCBScope/Dissector-Library
  Mentor: Matthias Hopf
  
  

Again, thanks to all of you who applied.

Thanks to the continuing generosity of Google, it is time once again for Summer of Code at PSU. Please see the ideas and ideas forum links above for project guidelines. Proposals that follow the guidelines of the propose link above have a much, much better chance of being accepted. Please do let us know if you have any questions. Looking forward to your application…

Google generously sponsored 3 students through PSU for Summer of Code 2006. Project selection was much more challenging this year than last; Google received more submissions than last year (half-again as many) and had more sponsoring organizations than last year (2.5 times as many), making the environment for our proposals highly competitive. Many strong proposals had to be turned down for lack of resources.

Each of these students produced source code in a period from May 23rd through August 21st. The students also produced web documentation of their work, and made source repositories available to those interested in using or contributing to it. The projects were as follows…

Google generously sponsored 8 students through PSU for Summer of Code 2005. Each of these students produced source code in a period from early July through September 1. The students also produced web documentation of their work, and made source repositories available to those interested in using or contributing to it. The projects were as follows…