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.

eyeOS in Action

Grafity

How to Install Intel C++ Compiler 11.0 on Ubuntu Linux 8.10

I’m writing this documentation because I believe that there will be someone out there who are having difficulties or doubt to install the Intel C++ Compiler 11.0

Good thing that Intel provides the FREE for Non-Commercial Software Development of the Intel C++ Compiler Professional 11.0 only for Linux users.

1. download the package (it’s a tar.gz-file)
2. unpack it (tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz)
3. sudo ./install.sh

Add these to the .bashrc and .profile

# Intel Compiler
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/intel/Compiler/11.0/069/lib/ia32
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/intel/Compiler/11.0/069/bin/ia32

For the Linux newbie, note that both of .bashrc and .profile are hidden files, so you have to use View –> Show Hidden Files (CTRL + H) or ls -a to see them. They’re located in the /home/<username>/

4. Restart
5. Have fun!

Reference

• Thinking Parallel, Michael Suess, Installing the Intel Compier on Ubuntu Linux, http://www.thinkingparallel.com/2006/12/23/installing-the-intel-compiler-on-ubuntu-linux/

OSS Speaker Series – Java on Guice: Dependency Injection, the Java Way