Tag Archives: gsoc

No summer of Rockbox 2012

For the first summer in many years I’m not doing any admin or mentor work for an organization for Google’s Summer of Code program this year.

I’ve been mentoring, co-mentoring and admined within the Rockbox project the last… 4-5(?) summers and as a result I now have a good collection of t-shirts. 🙂 This year, the project sadly came to the conclusion that there was not a good enough number of mentors and projects ideas gathered for it to apply to become a mentor organization.

Taking care of a student for full-time work during many weeks is not something to take lightly. To do it properly you need a dedicated and qualified mentor. To provide a good starting point for students to figure out and come up with a good project proposal you need an really good and detailed list of ideas.

The gsoc task is hard enough as it is with many mentors and many good ideas, so when there’s a sign of us not being able to fill up both lists we thought it better not to waste anyone’s’ time or energy. We also value and treasure Google’s very fine help with open source over the years thanks to gsoc, and we would hate to end up looking like we try to just take advantage of our role of having been accepted as mentor organization for many years in a row in the past.

In the other end, I was very happy to see that my friends in the metalink project finally after having applied many years got accepted as a mentor organization. I’d like to think that perhaps we (as in the Rockbox project) by standing back this year can let others get the chance to shine and join in the fun.

There is nothing said or planned for Rockbox for next year. If people want to mentor and if we manage to get a good pile of ideas I’m sure we will apply to be a mentor organization again. If not, well then I’m sure other organizations will still participate in the program and possibly I will find myself involved in there via another project. I am involved in a bunch of other open source projects, but none of the ones I’m very active in have applied nor participated as mentor org in gsoc so far.

Rockbox gsoc2009

So finally it went public that this year Rockbox will be mentoring five students to reach their

individual goals and get their projects turned into realities.Gsoc 2009

The projects are new codecs, one is a new port, one is USB HID work and finally there’s this “make Rockbox an instrument” project.

Personally I’m admin for Rockbox gsoc effort for the third year, and this year I’m also co-mentoring a student (Robert Keevil) in his project to bring Rockbox to the Sansa View.

Let’s make this a great gsoc year!

Rockbox in gsoc 2009

Gsoc 2009

For the third year in a row, the Rockbox project participates in Google’s Summer of Code and has just now officially been accepted as a mentor organization.

This is a great chance for every student or others who have been looking for a good chance to join in an open source project, and in particular if you’re interested in embedded systems developing for (relatively) low-resource devices.

The Rockbox project also has a very large developer base, a very large community and a healthy and friendly surrounding that is welcoming to newbies.

If you’re even just the slightest intrigued, please don’t hesitate to read further on the Rockbox gsoc 2009 page.

The two previous years we’ve had four students each year with 15-20 applications.

Let’s make this a great gsoc year!

4 gsoc projects to Rockbox

It was just publicly announced that Rockbox will get 4 slots from Google for this year’s Summer of Code:

  1. Accessibility and localization improvements for Rockbox, which bascially means work on getting speech and translations work for plugins. I will personally mentor this project/student.
  2. ARM Emulator and a set of peripherals, to allow a real ARM-based firmware to execute and run in an emulator. Should be handy for reverse engineering, debugging and optimization. Most likely this will be based on SkyEye.
  3. Rockbox as an application on a Unix based smart phone – the student mentioned a Motorola Linux-based phone, but I’m not sure if that is carved in stone yet.
  4. WPS/Theme Editor – a PC based tool to help designing WPSes and themes for Rockbox.

Is gsoc 2008 doomed?

On the gsoc mentors list one of the Google admins brought up the suggestion that the application period should be extended another week to allow students somewhat longer time to apply. This caused a flood of responses from many organizations and a lot of them (although not all) told stories that we share in the Rockbox project: at this time (with only some 13 hours left until the deadline) we have less applications than last year and they also seem to be of lesser quality. At the time of me writing this there have been no verdict if the period will be extended or not. Of course voices have been raised against the idea as well citing well-argued reasons such as the students who did manage to apply before the deadline might be less favored by an extension and that it will affect the time line in general etc.

Google Summer of Code 2007 front print

In the #rockbox IRC channel we figured out that the total sum a gsoc student gets (4500 USD) has gone down quite One dollar billconsiderably to a European student as last year’s students got about 3500 Euros but the same amount of USD is currently worth not more than about 2800 Euros. And remember that this is payment for a supposedly full-time work during twelve weeks. Ok they’re students and everything ,but still… and this 700 Euro drop (ok since currencies fluctuates it may be more or less at the end of the summer) may in fact be a contributing factor why less students apply.

A lot of poeple also suggested that having the application period over the easter period might’ve hampered this as well, as easter time is holiday time in many countries all over the glob.

Summer of code ideas and mentors!

To get good results from Google’s Summer of Code, we need a fair amount of volunteering mentors and we need a good set of interesting projects to make students get attracted.

Rockbox tinyIf your interest is in the Rockbox project, add your project ideas or add yourself as mentor on this wiki page.

curl tinyIf your interest is in the cURL project, read this page about the existing ideas and provide new ones or submit yourself as mentor on the mailing list!

Organizations can apply for becoming part of this starting tomorrow, March 3 2008.

A Google T-Shirt

What doesn’t a man do when there’s a free t-shirt involved?

Google Summer of Code 2007 shirt

I was Google Summer of Code admin for project Rockbox, and it did result in some cool new code. As newbies this year we of course did a bunch of mistakes that we hope to get a chance to correct if we’re allowed to participate again…

I also volunteered as a mentor, but we had something like nine or ten guys stepping forward, we got a lot of students applying for various projects but in the end we were given four slots by Google so I ended up not having to mentor anyone this time.

Apparently, this involvement was good enough for me to be given a shirt, and it arrived in my mailbox today and I took a few crummy shots with my lousy camera in my phone and I thought I’d share them with you!

Google Summer of Code 2007 front print

Google Summer of Code 2007 back figure

On the backside there’s this weird face with a monster-like guy (much appreciated by my daughter!) with binary numbers in its mouth. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the binary does mean something if we translate it to ascii… for a second or two I was about to investigate it, but then I lost my motivation and bah, why bother?!

Did anyone else check yet?