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Updated: 13 hours 45 min ago

Thousand Parsec HackWeek at the Googleplex

Tue, 09/07/2010 - 13:32
On the 7th of August, the Thousand Parsec core developers congregated for the first time at the Googleplex. We arrived in Mountain View, CA from six locations around the world for a week long hackathon including coding, frivolity and fun!

The Thousand Parsec project was started in January 2002 and is a framework for creating a specific group of games, often called 4X games (from the main phases of gameplay that arise: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate). You might be familiar with some of the games that Thousand Parsec draws ideas from such as Reach for the Stars, Stars!, VGA Planets, Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations. The ultimate goal of Thousand Parsec is to allow multiple different 4X games be playable in a single client.

A primary focus of the week was to increase the playability of the “rulesets” (different game implementations). We spent plenty of time playing games, especially the Risk and Minisec games. While tempted to spend a week just playing games, we also fixed numerous bugs, cleaned up obsolete code, made lots of client improvements and reviewed Google Summer of Code students’ work.

By having many of the core developers in one location, changes could be made significantly quicker. An example is the new “Who is ready?” feature, which lets players know who is holding up the game and hence they are now able to guilt them into hurrying up! You can check out all the improvements that we made during the hack week by cloning out our latest git repositories and following setup instructions on our wiki.

Thousand Parsec still has a long way to go before it is as polished as the games which it draws ideas from, but hopefully with the continuing work by the contributors on line and in person at additional meetups, we have a bright future ahead.

Google Summer of Code was instrumental in making the hackfest happen. The event was primarily funded though the mentor payments, and the majority of the developers consisted of former Google Summer of Code students. Stay tuned to this blog for a wrap up of our 2010 Google Summer of Code student projects coming soon!

In the above photo you can see,

Alan ‘alanp’ Laudicina (from Canada), a Google Summer of Code student in 2009, working on MTSec ruleset.
• Lee ‘llnz’ Begg (from New Zealand), project co-founder who wrote majority of the C++ Code.
Kornel ‘Epyon’ Kisielewicz (from Poland), a Google Summer of Code student in 2009 and again this year. Working on refactoring the C++ server.
Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell (me, from Australia), project founder who wrote the majority of the Python Code.
• Vincent ‘Iwanowitch’ Verhoeven, (from Belgium), a Google Summer of Code student in 2008, created our premier AI, daneel-ai.
• Eugene ‘jmtan’ Tan Jie Ming (from Singapore), a Google Summer of Code student in 2008, working on 3d client.

By Tim Ansell, Technical Solutions Engineering Team
Categories: Google

Interviews from GUADEC, Part 3

Fri, 09/03/2010 - 08:45


For the past two weeks, we’ve been sharing Jeremy Allison’s video interviews from his trip to GUADEC. Today we have a third video where he talks to Lennart Poettering, creator of PulseAudio. Jeremy and Lennart talk about PulseAudio features, how Lennart got started improving audio on the linux desktop, and how to be successful in free software. Enjoy!

Thanks to Fabian Scherschel of Sixgun Productions for operating the camera.
Categories: Google

Eclipse Day at the Googleplex 2010

Thu, 09/02/2010 - 13:31
Here at Google, we have engineers using Eclipse every day to build our external and internal products, as well as engineers building and releasing Eclipse tools. Earlier this year, we announced Eclipse Labs, which is “a single place where anyone can start and maintain their open source projects based on the Eclipse platform with just a few clicks.” Since we use Eclipse so much here at Google, hosting Eclipse Day at the Googleplex is one way of giving back to the community and providing an environment for Eclipse contributors and users to network and share ideas. We hosted Eclipse Day before in 2009 and 2008, and last week we hosted our third year where we tried out some new ideas: a brief lunchtime unconference and post-conference Ignite talks.

Ian Skerrett of the Eclipse Foundation wrote on his blog,

Wrap-up of Eclipse Day at the Googleplex
...Over 150 people attended the day long event that included 12 sessions related to Eclipse and Google technology. The presentations are now available online. There was lots of great information presented, like upcoming improvements to the Android SDK (based on Eclipse), Git support in Eclipse, a review of the Instantiations tools that Google just purchased and an introduction to the new Tools for Mobile Web project.Most important, all of us at Google would like to thank Ian Skerrett and everyone at the Eclipse Foundation for assembling three of these great events. We were happy to welcome the Eclipse community to our campus, and we are happy to continue to support Eclipse. Don’t forget that we’re always looking to make this conference better, so give us your ideas! Tell us what you would like to see at future events in the comments, or if you were able to attend, tell us what you thought about this year’s program.

By Robert Konigsberg, Software Build Tools Team
Categories: Google

An update on JavaOne

Fri, 08/27/2010 - 10:30
(Cross-posted from the Google Code Blog)

Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we’re sad to announce that we won't be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we've participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.

We understand that this may disappoint and inconvenience many of you, but we look forward to presenting at other venues soon. We’re proud to participate in the open source Java community, and look forward to finding additional ways to engage and contribute.

By
Joshua Bloch, Google Open Source Programs Office
Categories: Google

Interviews from GUADEC, Part 2

Fri, 08/27/2010 - 09:57


At many open source conferences, discussions about diversity come up and there is a lot of talk about how to make the open source community more inclusive and welcoming. While the Open Source Programs Office’s Jeremy Allison was at GUADEC, he had a chance to talk to someone who is actively doing something to get more women involved in free software. Marina Zhurakhinskaya, GNOME Shell developer and Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, is an organizer of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women and she spoke to Jeremy on camera about the program’s activities.

On of the projects that the program has completed was a mentoring program similar to Google Summer of Code, which provided six women with mentors and stipends to help stimulate open source development. They plan to repeat their success again this year with the 2010 GNOME Outreach Program for Women, which will run from mid-December through mid-March to coincide with the Southern Hemisphere’s school break. If you’re interested in participating, take a look at the list of participating projects to see what sparks your interest, check out the mailing list, or help spread the word to anyone who you think should apply!

Thanks to Fabian Scherschel of Sixgun Productions for operating the camera.

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team
Categories: Google

Acre, an open source platform for building Freebase apps

Thu, 08/26/2010 - 14:34
Freebase is an open, Creative Commons licensed repository of structured data that contains information about 12 million real-world entities including people, places, films, books, events, businesses, and almost any other thing you can imagine. Our graph database has about 400 million facts and connections between entities, and all of it is accessible via our REST API. Freebase was acquired by Google last month, and one thing we knew would happen was that Freebase would become “even more open.”

We first launched Acre, the hosted, server-side JavaScript platform behind Freebase Apps, just over a year ago. Since then it's become more and more important to us and to the Freebase community. Not only are all kinds of individual developers and businesses using Acre to build apps and integrate Freebase data into their own platforms, but we've also recently announced our intention to develop the Freebase.com site on the platform, too.

Until now, Acre development has always been tied to Freebase.com, meaning that you need to develop your Acre apps on our server, using our app editor. But we know that most software developers prefer to use their own native development environments -- their favourite text editor, version control system, and so on -- so lately we've been working on ways to make Acre work with source code that's not stored in Freebase.

Last week we announced that we're releasing the Acre platform as open source software. This means that you can run Acre on your own machine, pulling templates and other files from your local disk and using your own development environment. While Acre still has close ties to Freebase (such as API hooks for easily making Freebase queries), this also means that you'll be able to develop standalone, non-Freebase apps using the platform if you want. And, by running Acre on your own platform, you can avoid the resource limitations that are necessary in a shared environment.

If you're interested in server-side JavaScript platforms, you may also be interested in some of the technical details of Acre.
  • Acre is based on Rhino, Mozilla's implementation of Javascript in Java. (In fact, "Acre" stands for "A Crash of Rhinos Evaluating.") Acre, by default, uses the Jetty servlet engine as its HTTP server, but can be run in any servlet container.
  • Acre includes a module system that supports high-latency source retrieval using extensive caching. Although Acre was originally designed to fetch data only from Freebase itself, it can also fetch data from disk and will support a wider range of require() options such as WebDAV.
  • Acre is capable of running on Google AppEngine, with support for the Keystore and for synchronous and asynchronous HTTP requests. Soon, Freebase's own Acre installation will run on AppEngine.
Please download Acre and try it out, and let us know what you think! You might also like to look at some of our other open source releases, like freebase-python (a Python library for working with the Freebase API) or freebase-suggest (a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to have your users select Freebase topics based on any criteria). For more information about Freebase and our open source efforts, see the Freebase wiki or post to the freebase-discuss mailing list.

By Kirrily Robert, Freebase Team
Categories: Google

Our 6th Google Summer of Code Has Come to an End

Tue, 08/24/2010 - 16:54

We’ve just finished our 6th year of Google Summer of Code™, our innovative program designed to introduce students at colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. Over 2000 mentors and over 1000 students from 69 countries began working together on over 150 open source software projects, and we're happy to announce that 89% of our student participants have received passing final evaluations, which is about 4% better than 2009. This is our best success rate to date.

These successful students are now preparing code samples to present to the rest of the world; we'll post an update here when the source code produced during this year's Google Summer of Code has been made available on project hosting on Google Code. Of course, there's no need to wait for code samples - you can check out their work by visiting the websites and mailing lists of the participating projects now. We'll also be publishing more extensive statistics from our program evaluations, along with wrap up reports from some of our participating mentoring organizations, so stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

Congratulations to all of our students for their hard work this summer. We hope you will continue working with your project communities with source code, documentation, and enthusiasm long after this summer has ended. Many thanks also to our community of mentors whose time, skill and dedication make this program possible.

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team
Categories: Google

Interviews @ GUADEC, part 1

Fri, 08/20/2010 - 17:57


Jeremy Allison, co-founder of Samba and member of the Google Open Source Programs Office, recently returned from GUADEC, the GNOME conference held in The Hague, Netherlands. Jeremy was kind enough to bring his video camera along with him so he could interview some open source community notables and share the recordings here on this blog.

Jeremy’s first interview is with Bradley Kuhn, who is a board member of the Free Software Foundation, the president of Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Policy Analyst and Technology Director at the Software Freedom Law Center. Jeremy and Bradley discuss the GPLv3 and Bradley’s work as an advocate of free and open source software.



By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team
Categories: Google

Ready, Set, Go

Thu, 08/19/2010 - 11:51
Rob Pike, Google Distinguished Engineer and co-creator of the Go programming language, presented an OSCON keynote last month about his motivations for creating Go. For those of you who weren’t able to catch Rob in person, you can now watch the video of his talk.



If you’ve been curious about an open source programming language that offers, in the Go team’s words, “the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++,” check out the video and then get Going!

by Ellen Ko, Open Source Team
Categories: Google

FISL, I was there \o/

Fri, 08/13/2010 - 15:05
GNU and Me

My name is Marcos Paulino Roriz Junior, and I’m participating in Google Summer of Code™ for the first time this year. I’m really excited because I’ve been developing in Java for some time and this is my first step into FOSS. My project is hacking on GNU Classpath on Escher which is an X11 client written in Java, used by the XPeer code to request and handle drawings. I’m learning the X11 protocol which is amazingly cool and surely ahead of it’s time. This is not only helping me with Google Summer of Code but is also the main protocol behind thew idea that I’m using in my final year project.

When I applied to Google Summer of Code I had no idea how it was going to change my life. So far I have not only learned new things, but also met awesome developers. The climax of this was when I joined several other Brazillian students to ask Google for some financial help so that we could travel to FISL (Forum Internacional de Software Livre – International Free Software Forum) in Brazil. Google did an amazing favor and helped us so that we could learn about and spread free software to others. I met with several other students from the #gsoc-br IRC channel, met excellent FOSS developers, and gave a lecture about the Google Summer of Code experience.

At that talk I met more Google Summer of Code students, we shared our difficulties and we exchanged tips on how to solve problems. They all laughed a me when I said that I preferred svn over dscm, like git or mercurial. But at the same time they gave me a very brief and informal talk/introduction to git (which I’m kinda liking). I talked also a lot about X and XCB with friends and hackers there since it’s directly related to my proposal.

Google Summer of Code Students

I had a chance to meet some seriously cool developers (like Jon “Maddog” Hall) and attend amazing talks (like Glassfish in OSGi Bundles and What’s New on OpenJDK 7). Overall, It was a amazing experience, and I want to thank again Google, all the cool people at FISL and my mentor Mario Torre, who understands that I’m a little behind on my project but getting back to the schedule now =).

By Marcos Roriz, 2010 Google Summer of Code Student
Categories: Google

BSDCan through the years

Mon, 08/09/2010 - 09:00
I’m Kirk Russell, a Google Site Reliability Engineer who moves files around the cloud at a massive scale. I use BSD software on a daily basis -- in my Android phone, my home NAS and my MacBook. My newest toy is a small ARM board that runs FreeBSD.

Earlier this year I attended BSDCan, a software conference for BSD based operating system projects. I attended this conference to learn about new BSD technology that will someday become part of my daily life and to meet people with similar interests -- there is time to chat in-between the scheduled talks and in the pub. BSDCan is a conference where I learn about new development that I can put to use both at work and at home. Learning these things from the original developers makes it that much more interesting.

Here is a quick reflection on some highlights of past conferences:
In 2004, I attended Ryan McBride's talk about PF, a BSD licensed packet filter.

In 2005, I learned about spamd at a talk from Bob Beck. After the conference, I deployed spamd at home -- my spam count dropped to almost zero. Spamd uses PF to block spam at the IP level. This saves resources on your server because you do not actually receive the mail. Adding packet filtering features to the base operating system has enabled new applicaitions, like spamd, to develop.

In 2006, I attended the Debugging Kernel Problems tutorial (PDF) given by Greg Lehey-- I continue to use these debugging tricks when debugging FreeBSD kernels today.

I attended Pawel Dawidek's ZFS talk in 2007. Today I use FreeBSD/ZFS on my home NAS -- I wouldn't think of running my NAS without the features of ZFS. I want my data to have data corruption detection. It is fantastic that a production filesystem can work in my tiny NAS! In 2007 I also saw the brilliant Poisonous People talk by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman. Part of this talk is about avoiding bikeshedding -- it was funny to watch when Fitz and Ben realized that Poul-Henning Kamp, the author of the original bikeshed email, was attending their talk.

2009 was a good year for NetBSD and filesystems. There was a talk about WAPBL a journaling filesystem in the NetBSD tree and RUMP -- a framework that allows NetBSD kernel filesystem code to execute in user space.

2010 showed BSD continuing to be used as a platform for OS research. Kirk McKusick's new Journaled Soft-Update improvements now allows fsck in a few seconds, instead of hours.The BSD community continues to produce exciting software that can be used in small gadgets and production servers and BSDCan continues to be a fantastic venue to meet the people behind the scenes. Congrats to Dan and his team to volunteers -- I am looking forward to 2011.

By Kirk Russell, Site Reliability Team
Categories: Google

São Paulo Open Source Jam 2

Fri, 08/06/2010 - 13:45
On July 14th, Google Brazil hosted the 2nd Open Source Jam in São Paulo, Brazil. We had about 40 attendees and 10 talks! Here is a quick summary of the talks that were given.

The jam began at about 19:00, and after Rodolpho Eckhardt welcomed our guests, João Paulo Rechi Vita presented his Google Summer of Code™ project on improving support of AVRCP (Audio and Video Remote Control Profile), a Bluetooth protocol for controlling media players, in BlueZ.

Next, Rodrigo Strauss talked about his “nosql“ multi-platform container server Tio built using a publish/subscribe pattern.

Rodrigo Strauss and his NoSql project Tio

The third project presented was the GPL v3-licensed LibreDWG by Anderson Cardoso, an Open Source implementation of the DWG format used by several CAD applications.

Guilherme Chapiewski talked about acceptance tests using Pyccuracy, a tool for behavior-driven development written in Python.

CoGroo, an open source grammatical structure checker for Portuguese for OpenOffice, was presented by Wesley Seidel.

For the last talk before a break, Saracura was introduced to us as a concept to fill the gap between weather forecasts, reports and collective intelligence among people. By cross-checking the available information, disasters could be prevented or alleviated.

André Luiz introducing Saracura

After six talks it was time for a break. Delicious pizza helped spur conversations among attendees, who talked about their projects and established new contacts. There was so much pizza it had to be delivered by taxi instead of the usual delivery by motorcycle.

Following the break, Radames presented IT3S, a project which intents to promote the use of information technologies with non-profit organizations.

Radamés describing his work at IT3S.

Milton Afonso showed his concept for a framework providing a multi-language programming environment. Alan Justino took the opportunity to start a small debate on certain issues with object-relational mappings. Potential solutions were discussed, as well as comments and ideas.

Alan Justino answering the questions

Our last talk of the day was presented by Luciano Ramalho who talked about ISIS-DM, an independent API for database schema definition and data extraction.

We'd like to thank everybody who attended the 2nd Google Open Source Jam in São Paulo and hope to see you again next time. If you have missed this jam, stay tuned on our events by joining the Open Source Jam Brazil Google Group! Open Source Jams are hosted by the Google Open Source Team.

By Licio Fonseca, Hardware Operations Team
Categories: Google

Google Summer of Code Midterm Evaluations

Thu, 08/05/2010 - 10:26

Midterm evaluations for Google Summer of Code 2010™ have wrapped up and we have some great news about the program.

Out of the over 1,000 participating students from the beginning of the program, 964 have passed their midterm evaluation. That’s just a over 90% pass rate - exactly on target for what we expect from the program.

Since Google Summer of Code started in 2005, we’ve had over 5,000 students complete the Google Summer of Code program. Take a look at the timeline on our website for more details about the program - our final evaluations are approaching!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team
Categories: Google

Swivel Viewer, an open source embeddable album viewer

Fri, 07/30/2010 - 12:15
A while back, we noticed that lots of sites were starting to show 360 degree views of their products.

So a few months ago we added a feature to Picasa Web Albums that lets you flip through the photos in an album in “Full Screen View” or “Slideshow” mode by dragging left and right on the current photo. This works especially well if you put an object on a turntable, but it also works fine for other albums, like our featured shots from the 2010 Winter games.

The embedded album viewer also supports this feature:



So any albums you've embedded already support swiveling.

If you prefer to host a viewer and images on your own site, check out
the Swivel Viewer site at code.google.com, where you'll find an open source embeddable album viewer that also supports zooming and panning. Alternatively, you can go directly to the page about hosting your own viewer, or check out these other albums from the gallery:




We also posted tips on how to take your own 360 views, and even some sketches for our experimental high-volume object scanner:


Swivel viewers are fundamentally simple, but it’s tricky to communicate to the end user what they can do. I actually used the viewer for several weeks without realizing I could shift+drag to pan around while zoomed in! So we’re excited to see what UI enhancements you can come up with.

By Jason Holt, Google Street View Team
Categories: Google

Notes from useR! 2010

Thu, 07/29/2010 - 08:30
R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, used by a growing number of economists, engineers, and data analysts every day at Google. We’ve even published our R Style Guide on Google Code. The R community has done a lot of great work with Google APIs, such as integrating the R programming language with Google Earth, Protocol Buffers, and Google Docs.

I've just returned from the annual useR! conference for the open source R programming language. This year the conference attracted nearly 500 individuals to the NIST campus outside Washington D.C.

The conference provided a great opportunity to meet with some of the package authors that are working on third-party extensions, including Romain Francois and Dirk Eddelbuettel who jointly gave a pair of well-attended talks on their RProtoBuf and Rcpp packages.

In addition to the 3 days of tutorials, panels, and presentations, Google sponsored a dinner for conference attendees at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. to facilitate the "hallway track" of informal discussions outside of the official conference program.

Thanks to all those presenters, sponsors, and organizers involved in putting together a successful conference. For those who weren’t able to attend, the abstracts and slides from the 168 presentations and a more limited number of videos are available from the technical sessions. Hope to see you next year...

By Murray Stokely, Software Engineering Team
Categories: Google

London OS Jam 17: Speeeeed

Wed, 07/28/2010 - 11:40
Just over a week ago, we hosted Google London Open Source Jam 17. The event is an opportunity for open source developers to give five minute presentations to their peers, socialise, eat pizza, and drink beer. The topic for this Jam was “Speed” and — unusually for us — many of the talks were on-topic:

Simon Stewart, pondering

Simon Stewart started off by telling us how to measure things: using tools like Firebug and Speed Tracer to break down client-side latency.

Matt Godbolt gave us some tips for making speedy Android apps, and Tim Cox presented a “Rant at Speed” that covered everything from CPU cache latency to the speed of light, all in five short minutes!

Glyn Wintle gave a quick rundown on common exploits: “How to break into a computer — fast”, covering the top five security mistakes made by web developers. You can try out some of these attacks yourself using the Google Gruyère codelab.

Ade Oshineye gave an impromptu (and not entirely serious) plan for “Making it faster.” Mike Mahemoff talked about speeding up web applications with the new shiny features in HTML5, and chatted briefly about the ever-blurring distinction between web applications and web pages. Paul Downey gave us an overview of TiddlyWiki, and TiddlySpace, where he hosted his presentation.

Squirrel

Squirrel gave a talk about Performance Secrets, which — uniquely for a Squirrel presentation — didn’t involve a flipchart.

Matthew Wild told us about Prosody, an XMPP server written in Lua. Apart from praising Lua as a great language, he also showed us how his continuous build generated annotated performance graphs on each commit to the repository.

George Cox proposed a need for making operational changes at speed — new deployments, and so on, while Luca Colantonio discussed his experiences implementing txty.mobi, a cloud-based web application for sending SMS messages via your own Android phone.

Tom Quick talked about the open source stack he’d used to develop GlastoTag, using Redis as a fast, persistent storage layer, and how using Django had helped to speed up their development process.

Jag

Last but not least, OS Jam favourite Jag gave us an overview of some of the performance decisions he’d made while developing Din.

As always we retired to the pub afterwards to continue our discussions. If you’re around London you’re welcome to join us for the next Jam. Join the mailing list or keep an eye out on the Jam site to find out more.

By Malcolm Rowe, Software Engineering Team
Categories: Google

Chris DiBona’s OSCON Keynote: Your Work in Open Source

Wed, 07/28/2010 - 11:19
If you missed seeing Google’s Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona speak live at OSCON last week, the video from his keynote is now available online.



There are also notes available from multiple OSCON sessions on Google Wave - check out the full listing if you want to catch up!

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team
Categories: Google

Live Waving at OSCON 2010

Wed, 07/21/2010 - 11:37
With OSCON underway, we're excited about the opportunities that many of us have to present at the conference and we've taken some time to prepare resources for OSCON attendees to use Google Wave to "live wave" during the event.
If you're not familiar with live waving, it's a way of capturing what is occurring at a live event in real time on a wave. It’s similar to live blogging, but provides a smoother experience for the publishers and viewers. For example, you can take a look at the live wave that was used to capture the keynote address at this year's Google I/O conference.
We've put together the following resources for OSCON:

If you'll be attending OSCON, we would like to ask for your help in getting the word out about the live waves. You can let your fellow attendees know about the waves by tweeting, waving, or emailing the following link to folks: http://bit.ly/OSCON2010Waves. Everyone can contribute and we encourage you to join in on the live waves -- or start your own for one of the hundreds of sessions.
We think that live waves will serve as a great resource for attendees to share information and to connect in real time. If you want to learn more about Wave, please join us for Joe Gregorio and Dan Peterson’s talk, “Open Source Google Wave: Building Your Own Wave Provider” at 5:20 PM on Thursday or for the “Wave - Open Source and Open Protocols” Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at 8 PM on Thursday.
By Andrés Ferraté, Developer Advocate Team
Categories: Google

Don't Copy This Code

Tue, 07/13/2010 - 16:37
UPDATE July 13: We have changed the name of the codelab application to Gruyere. The codelab is now located at http://google-gruyere.appspot.com.



Normally, when we release source code we're hoping that other people will build on it and improve it. Today's release of Gruyere, a small yet full-featured microblogging application, is a code release of a different sort entirely.
Gruyere has one feature that most applications usually do their best to avoid: lots of security bugs.
In fact, Gruyere was written specifically to teach about security. More specifically, it is a tool to show how to exploit web applications and, in turn, protect against those exploits when developing software. Gruyere is the software component of the "Web Application Exploits and Defenses" codelab being released today on Google Labs in cooperation with Google Code University. The codelab walks participants through a number of common web application vulnerability types and demonstrates how an attacker could exploit such vulnerabilities.
So while we don't want you to copy the code in Gruyere, we do hope you'll check it out and learn from it.

By Bruce Leban, Software Engineering Team
Categories: Google

Google Summer of Code BoF at USENIX

Mon, 07/12/2010 - 08:27

USENIX is a technical organization that has a lot of community members associated with our open source efforts as well as lots of strong ties to the research community. A couple weeks ago I attended the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC). Googler Dave Presotto was a member of the program committee. ATC is a federated conference that brings together researchers and developers working in a wide variety of focus areas. We love to support the members of this organization in their efforts throughout the year. Among the presentations I enjoyed most were the one on robotic honeybees, another on power usage in smart phones, and really enjoyed the keynote on concurrency from Ivan Sutherland.

We held a Google Summer of Code™ Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetup on Thursday night after the conference reception. We talked about Google Summer of Code over ice cream and beer well into the evening. In all we had about 25 attendees, many of whom hadn’t heard of Google Summer of Code before. It was great to tell some people new to the program about it and also to hear from those who have participated about how its changed their lives. A great time was had by all; we even ended up closing the place down that evening.

Don’t miss the next Google Summer of Code BoF at OSCON in just a couple weeks!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team
Categories: Google