Introduction to SVG Web

A very quick one minute run-through showing the SVG Web project and it’s demos. The SVG Web project is at http://code.google.com/p/svgweb

SVG Web is a JavaScript library which provides SVG support on many browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Using the library plus native SVG support you can instantly target ~95% of the existing installed web base.

Once dropped in you get partial support for SVG 1.1, SVG Animation (SMIL), Fonts, Video and Audio, DOM and style scripting through JavaScript, and more in about a 60K library. Your SVG content can be embedded directly into normal HTML 5 or through the OBJECT tag. If native SVG support is already present in the browser than that is used, though you can override this and have the SVG Web toolkit handle things instead. No downloads or plugins are necessary other than Flash which is used for the actual rendering, so its very easy to use and incorporate into an existing web site.

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MIT Education? Why Not? MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT provides free course materials through their MIT OpenCourseWare.

Google Summer of Code 2009 InfoTalk @ Cal State L.A.

I hosted the Google Summer of Code 2009 InfoTalk today at California State University, Los Angeles. Overall of the event was great. There were about 27 students who attended the event, some left early, and some came in late, but in my perspective, I have successfuly achieved the goal of getting them excited about Open Source and start to get involved!

The event’s report is also published at Google Open Source blog. Thank you to Google, Googlers, and my friends who’ve been very supportive! Cesar, thank you for helping me getting the chips and sodas

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Google Summer of Code 2009

Some people asked me about tips in applying for Google Summer of Code, so I decided to just blog about my experience, and hopefully that could be helpful for everyone! By the way, if you live close around Los Angeles, I’ll be hosting a GSoC Info Talk event at Cal State L.A. If you’re mentor and interested to share your experience or give a presentation about your project, please feel free to contact me at my email directly or through the student mailing list.

Here’s the information about the event:

Friday, March 27,2009
E&T C159
11:00AM – 1:00PM

Agenda

• Introduction of GSoC
• GSoC Presentation
• Guest Speaker: Jon A. Cruz, GSoC 2008-2009 Mentor, Inkscape & OpenICC
• Q/A, Chat, Discussion

Free foods and drinks would be served at the event for the attendees. If you’re interested to come, feel free to come to the event, it’s open to everyone who’s interested.

Now let’s get to the meat of the blog post. Without you realizing it or not, as a student, Open Source software has help a lot in our daily lives. Instead of paying hundreds of thousands for software, we have these open, and freely available software to use and learn. I’ve been the fans of Firefox, WordPress and Eclipse. Now, and soon with the addition of eyeOS. Don’t forget though that there are people who are writing these software without getting paid! Don’t get me wrong, these guys are hackers, and they do have a good job. A lot of them are working on open source as a side job. They decided to make these software freely available to you and me because of their believe in open source. I’ve always have the feeling to contribute with the open source software, but the problem is, I don’t know where to start! Here’s where Google comes to help in the Google Summer of Code program! If you’re new to these, don’t be surprised for that Google has its own Open Source Program office division and contributed million lines of code.

The program is simple. You will be working with one of the Open Source organisation with the assigned mentor for your project, and Google will pay you. Isn’t that crazy? I thought of myself, this company must be insane! They pay other people to work for other organization! That’s right, Google also believes in open source! So I applied, and I got accepted to 2 organizations last year: Linux Foundation and Moodle. Since I didn’t know so much about C++ as much as I know Java, so I decided to go with Moodle. But the more confusing part is that, I also got accepted for a summer internship position at Southern California Edison, and Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. I was so depressed for a day that I have to decide about this very quickly. Since the open source organization had let me know the earliest over all of the opportunities that were offered to me last year, so I decided to go with the Google Summer of Code program and Moodle, which ended up to be a wonderful experience!

I coded for the whole summer and was invited to go to one of the Google’s office here at Santa Monica. Read about my other blog post on that. Although it was a wonderful experience, if I wanted to change of something that I should have done last year, I should say that I should have get to know more about the mentor earlier. As far as tips to apply in the Google Summer of Code program, first, make sure that you will be working on a project that you really want to work on and enjoy. Second, get to know the mentor for that project as early as you can. Third, don’t apply too much such that you won’t be able to focus on one thing, make sure you have a couple of things that you are sure, it’s just that something you really wanted to work on. At last, although this is not a formal internship, but a lot of industries take this experience very seriously, trust me, it’s really worth all of the pennies that you have to put on your resume.