I will be at the Southern California Linux Expo 9X this weekend from Friday-Sunday. I will be at the Debian booth for a large portion of the event most likely, so feel free to stop by for Keysigning/BSing.

I created this new blog and am starting from scratch on this blogging thing. I plan to blog more on open source software and Debian development.

As this year's admin, I wrote up the following summary which has now been posted at the R site in the appropriate slot. My thanks to this year's students, fellow mentors and everybody else who helped to make it happen.

Projects 2010 As in 2008 and 2009, the R Project has again participated in the Google Summer of Code during 2010. Based on ideas collected and disussed on the R Wiki, the projects and students listed below (and sorted alphabetically by student) were selected for participation and have been sponsored by Google during the summer 2010. The finished projects are available via the R / GSoC 2010 repository at Google Code, and in several cases also via their individual repos (see below). Informal updates and final summaries on the work was also provided via the GSoC 2010 R group blog.

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rdx - Automatic Differentiation in R Chidambaram Annamalai, mentored by John Nash. Proposal: radx is a package to compute derivatives (of any order) of native R code for multivariate functions with vector outputs, f:R^m -> R^n, through Automatic Differentiation (AD). Numerical evaluation of derivatives has widespread uses in many fields. rdx will implement two modes for the computation of derivatives, the Forward and Reverse modes of AD, combining which we can efficiently compute Jacobians and Hessians. Higher order derivatives will be evaluated through Univariate Taylor Propagation. Delivered: Two packages radx: forward automatic differentiation in R and tada: templated automatic differentiation in C++ were created; see this blog post for details.

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A GUI for Graphics using ggplot and Deducer by Ian Fellows, mentored by Hadley Wickham. Proposal: R puts the latest statistical techniques at one's fingertips through thousands of add-on packages available on the CRAN download servers. The price for all of this power is complexity. Deducer is a cross-platform cross-console graphical user interface built on top of R designed to reduce this complexity. This project proposes to extend the scope of Deducer by creating an innovative yet intuitive system for generating statistical graphics based on the ggplot2 package. Delivered: All of the major features have been implemented, and are outlined in the video links in this blog post.

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rgeos - an R wrapper for GEOS by Colin Rundel, mentored by Roger Bivand. Proposal: At present there does not exist a robust geometry engine available to R, the tools that are available tend to be limited in scope and do not easily integrate with existing spatial analysis tools. GEOS is a powerful open source geometry engine written in C++ that implements spatial functions and operators from the OpenGIS Simple Features for SQL specification. rgeos will make these tools available within R and will integrate with existing spatial data tools through the sp package. Delivered: The rgeos project on R-Forge; see the final update blog post.

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Social Relations Analyses in R by Felix Schoenbrodt, mentored by Stefan Schmukle. Proposal: Social Relations Analyses (SRAs; Kenny, 1994) are a hot topic both in personality and in social psychology. While more and more research groups adopt the methodology, software solutions are lacking far behind - the main software for calculating SRAs are two DOS programs from 1995, which have a lot of restrictions. My GSOC project will extend the functionality of these existing programs and bring the power of SRAs into the R Environment for Statistical Computing as a state-of-the-art package. Delivered: The TripleR package is now on CRAN and hosted on RForge.Net; see this blog post for updates.

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NoSQL Interface for R by Yasuhisa Yoshida, mentored by Dirk Eddelbuettel. Proposal: So-called NoSQL databases are becoming increasingly popular. They generally provide very efficient lookup of key/value pairs. I'll provide several implementation of NoSQL interface for R. Beyond a sample interface package, I'll try to support generic interface similar to what the DBI package does for SQL backends Status: An initial prototype is available via RTokyoCabinet on Github. No updates were made since June; no communication occurred with anybody related to the GSoC project since June and the project earned a fail.

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Last modified: Wed Sep 22 19:39:43 CDT 2010

Just for a bit of fun, I took a flip along to UDS and did a little vox-pop for things that devs found exiting. Enjoy!

Starting about a year ago, I started following the release of videos from TED events. If one looked interesting, I would download the video to watch later. In this way, I accumulated a substantial collection of talks which I never managed to watch. I spent a Saturday evening working my way through the list. These are my favorites out of this batch.

• Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory exploring the subtle and evasive nature of happiness, how we can study it, and the surprising way in which it manifests in our lives
• Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success a critical look at how we evaluate ourselves and others, and how this shapes our social constructs
• Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity an insightful questioning of commonly held and accepted ideas about the creative process, and how they could be changed for the better
• David Logan on tribal leadership a taxonomy of tribal groups in modern society, and how leaders influence them
• Eric Dishman: Take health care off the mainframe a radical perspective on health care, and how technology can help to transform it into a more decentralized and personal system
• Erin McKean redefines the dictionary a humorous and accurate look at lexicography: where it came from, where it is and where it needs to go
• Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action deriving design inspiration from natural systems
• Jill Bolte Taylor s stroke of insight a riveting first-person account of a stroke from a brain scientist: funny, bizarre, transcendent and awesome
• Margaret Wertheim on the beautiful math of coral coral reefs, non-euclidean geometry, general relativity and more unfold from a global community art project
• Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds a look at different types of mental capacities within the autism spectrum, how they create our perception of the world, and how they can be nurtured in young people

I have been at Amazon.com for a very short while (I have only gotten one paycheck from them so far), but long enough for first impressions to have settled. Dress is casual, Parking is limited. Cafeteria food is merely OK, and is not free. There is a very flat structure at Amazon. The front line work is done by one-or-two pizza teams size measure by the number of large pizzas that can feed the team. Individual experiences with the company largely depend on what team you happen to end up with. I think I lucked out here. I get to work on interesting and challenging problems, at scales I had not experienced before. There is an ownership culture. Every one including developers get to own what they produce. You are responsible for our product down to carrying pagers in rotation with others on your team, so that there is someone on call in case your product has a bug. RC (or customer impacting) bugs result in a conference call being invoked within 10-15 minutes, and all kinds of people and departments being folded in until the issue is resolved. Unlike others, I find the operations burden refreshing (I come from working as a federal government contractor). On call pages are often opportunities to learn thing, and I like the investigation of the current burning issue du jour. I also like the fact that I get to be my own support staff for the most part, though I have not yet installed Debian anywhere here. While it seems corny, customer obsession is a concept that pervades the company. I find ti refreshing. The mantra that it s all about the customer experience is actually true and enforced. Whenever a tie needs to be broken on how something should work the answer to this question is usually sufficient to break it. Most other places the management was responsible for, and worried about budgets for the department this does not seem to be the case for lower to middle management here. We don t get infinite resources, but work is planned based on user experience, customer needs, and technical requirements, not following the drum beat of bean counters. The focus is on the job to be done, not the hours punched in. I can choose to work from home if I wish, modulo meetings (which one could dial in to, at a pinch). But then, I have a 5 mile, 12 minute commute. I have, to my surprise, started coming in to work at 7:30 in the morning (I used to rarely get out of bed before 9:30 before), and I plan on getting a bike and seeing if I can ride my bike to work this summer. All in all, I like it here.

Last night, in two different instances I read the claim that the England s first copyright act, the statute of Anne passed in 1710 was never intended to protect authors but to protect the reproducers like printing houses and presses investing in authors implying that printing houses loved the act. After pouring through hundreds of pages of Adrian John s history of piracy, that statement is pretty off and in fact I don t think the Statute was really about printers/booksellers or authors but the public. While licensing had all together lapsed for a period before this statute was passed, and the printing houses and book sellers were indeed clamoring loudly for an official recognition of property in literary works, they wanted a perpetuall right in literary property rooted in common and natural law. Like I am talking here about forever, not like a measly, paltry 14 years. They were not exactly thrilled at this statute (in fact, they were downright pissssssssed off) for it severely limited how long they held a property right over books. In fact, so pissed were they, they challenged the statute, went to court in 1769 (Millar v Taylor) and got what they wanted: a perpetual right to literary work. It took s a fiery Scot and bookseller by the name of Alexander Donaldson (I kind of think of him as the RMS of booksellers; he was quite a rabble rouser) to challenge Millar and he finally got his day in the highest court of the land in 1774 in Donaldson v Beckett and the outcome was that a perpetual right in books was tossed out the window. The court ruled that copyright was a limited statute. One of the lords in the case even stated Knowledge has no value or use for the solitary owner: to be enjoyed it must be communicated. Adrian John s explains the significance of this case in the following way: Copyright, they decided, was not a right of man at all. Indeed, it was almost the very opposite: an artifact, and one that replaced a prior right established by an author s work of creation. . . In terms of revolution principles, liberty won out over property Again the printers booksellers (minus the pirate ones) were not happy a bunch. Unfortunately the subsequent history is one we all know well, one in which booksellers and others with vested interests in copyrights pushed to extend property rights in all sorts of ways to get to where we are today (obviously with a lot of different historical developments), a land, time, period where perpetuity may not be forever but it is long enough to nullify the very public domain envisioned by the first copyright act. However, I think it is nonetheless important to recognize how radical in many respects the first copyright act was: given what the book printers and sellers wanted (and they were a powerful bunch). For those interested in learning more about Alexander Donaldson, I would check out his Some Thoughts on the State of Literary Property, where he rails against the London booksellers for being monopolistic and calling for a limited property right in books.

Last night, in two different instances I read the claim that the England s first copyright act, the statute of Anne passed in 1710 was never intended to protect authors but to protect the reproducers like printing houses and presses investing in authors implying that printing houses loved the act. After pouring through hundreds of pages of Adrian John s history of piracy, that statement is pretty off and in fact I don t think the Statute was really about printers/booksellers or authors but the public. While licensing had all together lapsed for a period before this statute was passed, and the printing houses and book sellers were indeed clamoring loudly for an official recognition of property in literary works, they wanted a perpetuall right in literary property rooted in common and natural law. Like I am talking here about forever, not like a measly, paltry 14 years. They were not exactly thrilled at this statute (in fact, they were downright pissssssssed off) for it severely limited how long they held a property right over books. In fact, so pissed were they, they challenged the statute, went to court in 1769 (Millar v Taylor) and got what they wanted: a perpetual right to literary work. It took s a fiery Scot and bookseller by the name of Alexander Donaldson (I kind of think of him as the RMS of booksellers; he was quite a rabble rouser) to challenge Millar and he finally got his day in the highest court of the land in 1774 in Donaldson v Beckett and the outcome was that a perpetual right in books was tossed out the window. The court ruled that copyright was a limited statute. One of the lords in the case even stated Knowledge has no value or use for the solitary owner: to be enjoyed it must be communicated. Adrian John s explains the significance of this case in the following way: Copyright, they decided, was not a right of man at all. Indeed, it was almost the very opposite: an artifact, and one that replaced a prior right established by an author s work of creation. . . In terms of revolution principles, liberty won out over property Again the printers booksellers (minus the pirate ones) were not happy a bunch. Unfortunately the subsequent history is one we all know well, one in which booksellers and others with vested interests in copyrights pushed to extend property rights in all sorts of ways to get to where we are today (obviously with a lot of different historical developments), a land, time, period where perpetuity may not be forever but it is long enough to nullify the very public domain envisioned by the first copyright act. However, I think it is nonetheless important to recognize how radical in many respects the first copyright act was: given what the book printers and sellers wanted (and they were a powerful bunch). For those interested in learning more about Alexander Donaldson, I would check out his Some Thoughts on the State of Literary Property, where he rails against the London booksellers for being monopolistic and calling for a limited property right in books.

The video of our talk at FOSDEM 2010 didn t come out great, so I ve made a slidecast of the RDF beginners guide that I gave as part of that talk. Enjoy below! At FOSDEM we also announced a competition for the coolest hack using RDF, SPARQL and Tracker with the prize kindly sponsored by Codethink. The prize is a Google Nexus One. After some discussion we ve decided to open up the competition to everyone and extend the deadline to the 15th of March. So if this tutorial inspires a great idea, get it coded up and submitted! On #tracker on GIMPNet there are great bunch of hackers who can help you get your idea up and running. There are no hard rules for the competition, we just want to see implementations of cool ideas. The code doesn t have to be perfect, the only requirement is that the judges can check it out and run it on their systems. All entries should be submitted to tracker-competition@codethink.co.uk by the deadline. <object height="300" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9848513&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="300" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9848513&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400"></embed></object> RDF Beginner s Guide from Rob Taylor on Vimeo. Update!
Looks like I hit a bug in PiTiVi that caused the render to get mangled. I ve rerendered and it should all be good now. If Vimeo is being slow for you , you can download the ogg here. Edward, I promise to log a repro as soon as I can!

I will be attending SCALE 8x from Feb 19-21. Hopefully the event this year will be just as great as the previous years that I have attended it. Hope to see others there!

In a couple of weeks at FOSDEM, I ll be giving a talk in the GNOME developer room on the semantic desktop and showing the new world of interaction that RDF, SPARQL and Tracker make possible. I ll be joined by Philip Van Hoof and Roberto Guido. We ll be digging behind the buzzwords, explaining what it s all about and most importantly showing off cool real-world apps using this stuff. We ll also announce a competition for the coolest app using Tracker and RDF, for which Codethink will sponsor a prize. See you all there!

Dear Lazyweb, I m looking for a streaming video provider that Codethink can use for streaming demos, talks etc. I want it to use HTML5 video with ogg or x264 if available and if not, fall back to Flash. Good quality streaming is a must and HD would be good. I m happy to pay for the service. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!

Magnus Larsson gave an interesting TED talk about using bacteria to transform dunes into architecture [1]. The concept of making a wall across Africa to stop sand dunes from overtaking farm land is obviously a good one, the idea of using bacteria to convert sand into sandstone to do so cheaply is also good. But making that into houses seems a little risky. I wouldn t want to live under shifting sand with only bacteria generated sandstone to protect me. Cory Doctorow gave an interesting speech titled How to Destroy the Book , here is the transcript [2]. He talks about how much he loves books and described his opposition to the DRM people who want to destroy the book culture. Sendmail has a DKIM Wizard for generating ADSP (Domain Signing Policy) records [3]. If I knew that ADSP records were so easy to implement then I would have used them a year ago! Loretta Napoleoni gave an insightful TED talk about the economics of terrorism [4]. Apparently the US dollar used to be THE currency for international crime, when the PATRIOT act was passed it s anti-money-laundering provisions encouraged many shady people to invest in Euros instead and thus led to the devaluation of the US currency. It s also interesting to note that terrorist organisations are driven by economics, if only we could prevent them from making money Ryan Lobo gave an interesting TED talk about his photographic work [5]. The effectiveness of the all-women peace-keeping force is noteworthy. The part about the Liberian war criminal who has become an evangelical Christian and who now tours Liberia begging forgiveness from his victims (and their relatives in the case of the people he murdered). Should someone like that be permitted to remain free if his victims forgive him? Charles Stross has an appealing vision for how Apple and Google can destroy the current mobile telephony market [6]. I can t wait for the mobile phone market to be entirely replaced by mobile VOIP devices! James Geary gave an interesting TED talk about metaphors [7]. The benefits of metaphors in poetry are well known (particularly in lyrics), but the impact of metaphors in influencing stock market predictions surprised me. Shaffi Mather gave an interesting TED talk about his company that makes money from fighting corruption [8]. Instead of paying a bribe you can pay his company to force the official(s) in question to do the right thing. Apparently the cost of doing so tends to be less than 10% the cost of the bribe if you know what you are doing. His previous company was an ambulance service that charges what the patient can afford is also interesting. John Robb wrote an interesting article about lottery winners and griefers [9]. He suggests that publishing the names, addresses, etc of rich people will be a new trend in Griefing. One thing I ve been wondering about is the value of the HR database at a typical corporation. A single database typically contains the home addresses, phone numbers, and salaries of all the employees. It would be very easy to do an SQL dump and store it on a USB flash device to carry out of the office. Then it could be sold to the highest bidder. They could probably make a market in the private data about rich people in the same way that there is currently a market for credit card data maybe they have already done this but it s kept quiet to stop others from implementing the same idea. Michael Smith wrote an interesting article for the Washington Times about home schooling and socialisation [10]. It seems that people who were home schooled as children tend to be more academically successful and involved in civic life as well as being happier and having career success. Richard Seager wrote an interesting article for American Scientist about ocean currents and heat transfer from the tropics [11]. It seems that when the ocean currents shut down the UK and other parts of northern Europe won t be getting a mini ice-age. Ian Lance Taylor (most known for the gold linker) has written a good summary of the situation in regard to climate change and what must be done about it [12]. The Wrath of the Killdozer article about how one angry man converted a bulldozer into a tank [13]. This wasn t a big bulldozer (every mining company has bigger ones) and he didn t have any serious weapons (only rifles). Imagine what terrorists could do if they started with a mining vehicle and serious weapons Simon Singh has written about being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association [14]. The BCA didn t like his article criticising chiropractors for claiming to be able to treat many conditions unrelated to the spine. Remember, chiropractors are not doctors all they can do is alleviate some back problems. See a GP if you have any medical condition that doesn t involve a sore back or neck. Avoid uppity chiropracters who claim to be able to cure all ills. Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an interesting article for the New York times about how happy the people in Costa Rica are [15]. He claims that the Costa Rican government s decision in 1949 to dissolve it s armed forces and invest the money in education is the root cause of the happy population. Maybe if the US government would scale back military spending the US population could be as happy as the Costa Ricans. While there are good arguments for having some sort of military, there are no good arguments for spending more money on the military than the rest of the world combined (as the US does).

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html
• [2] http://thevarsity.ca/articles/23855
• [3] http://www.sendmail.org/dkim/wizard
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/loretta_napoleoni_the_intricate_economics_of_terrorism.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/ryan_lobo_through_the_lens_of_compassion.html
• [6] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/12/21st_century_phone.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption.html
• [9] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/01/journal-ultimate-griefing-in-a-lottery-economy.html
• [10] http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/13/home-schooling-socialization-not-problem/
• [11] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.999,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx
• [12] http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/296
• [13] http://www.damninteresting.com/the-wrath-of-the-killdozer
• [14] http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/340
• [15] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/07kristof.html

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Ludovico Cavedon (cavedon)
• Gilles Filippini (pini)
• Christopher Taylor (ctaylor)
• Oliver Korff (okoli)
• Franck Joncourt (franck)
• Antonio Radici (antonio)
• Emmanuel Bouthenot (kolter)
• Tim Retout (diocles)
• Dario Minnucci (midget)
• Hector Oron (zumbi)
• Albin Tonnerre (lutin)
• Modestas Vainius (modax)
• Christoph Egger (christoph)
• Andrea Veri (and)

Congratulations!

Hopefully this is my first successful post to Planet Debian. I am terrible at introducing myself, however I will give it a try. I have been actively using Debian for about the past 7-8 years, and have been contributing to it for about 3-4 years now. I currently maintain a few packages, varying from audio/video to network security and testing. I am on the last step of the NM process, and will hopefully have completed soon.

Last month, Codethink turned 2 years old, to coincide we had a company-wide hackfest in Brussels straight after FOSDEM. It really brought home how much it d grown. Just a year ago there was just me and Mark. Now we are 8! So i m gonna take a moment to shout out to the great job these guys are doing. In order of appearence . Mark Doffman
Mark has been consistently working on transforming AT-SPI (the GNOME Accessibility and UI automation technology) into a D-Bus based cross-desktop project. From nothing a year ago, working with Mike Gorse from Novell, he s now got something that more or less works and it s getting a lot of focus and testing as we plan for GNOME 3.0. I m looking forward to a brave new future for cross toolkit accessibility on the Linux desktop. John Carr
John came to us from working on Conduit, and he s continued on his dream of making all the devices and web services of the world talk seamlessly to each other. John s been in charge of pushing the Wizbit project along and now the core of this is pretty stable, he is going to be turning his eye to working on using Wizbit for synchronisation. J rg Billeter
A stunning hacker who needs no introduction! J rg s been continuing to hack on Vala and it s getting more and more mature each week. His main work, however has been on the stunning tracker-vstore, a branch of tracker that brings full RDF capabilities, which Philip van Hoof has been blogging about. I ll be writing a biggish blog post on this soon and what RDF could really mean for the desktop experience. Karl Lattimer
Karl came to us from working on UI at Nokia. At Codethink he s continued to focus on graphics technology and user experience, bringing his keen eye to Wizbit, amongst other things. One of the most impressive things I ve seen for a while was Karl s kinetic scrolling widget for the Wizbit timeline view. I m hoping we can turn this into something more general in the future. Ryan Lortie
Another hacker who needs no introduction, Ryan s our low-level infrastructure guy. He s been working on GNIO, a library to do network operations using GIO stream abstractions and continuing to hack on DConf, which is gradually coming together. He s also been helping J rg out with Vala. Mukund Sivaraman
I knew Muks from his GIMP work, and his work on Herb is really impressive. Muks is mostly working on top secret stuff that we can t talk about, unfortunately! Peter Charlton
Our documentation guy. This guy knows how to write and knows how to take something vague and unintelligable and turn it into crystal clarity. Invaluable! Of course, through all this I ve been here, dancing about architecture and generally doing the best I can to hold the whole shebang together. I ve been mostly working on some top secret stuff which hopefully will be getting opened up soon. I ll dance about that then

Arthur Liu is doing a great series of posts following up on the results of Google Summer of Code '08 projects in Debian. (post 1 post 2) Most of them failed to produce code that's actually used in Debian, though there were some very successful projects, too. My experience with ikiwiki in '07 parallels that: latex Patrick Winnertz produced a working teximg (latex -> image) plugin that's in ikiwiki. The initial proposal also included doing latex -> html and wiki page -> latex conversions; that work never happened. file upload and image gallery Ben Coffey had an ambitious proposal to add file upload support to ikiwiki and also write an image gallery plugin using that. Ben did produce a working file upload interface, but that code never got into ikiwiki. This was due to a combination of at least three things:

1. The only outside communication with the ikiwiki community was doing a design proposal at the beginning, and a code dump toward the end of the project.
2. There was an existing complex spec for how to limit who could upload what files, but Ben didn't choose to implement those access controls.
3. The code dump was not even noticed until much later, when I was putting the finishing touches on my own implementation of an attachments plugin.

By the way, since I happened to do that attachments plugin as a paid consultant, I have an interesting data point: It took me 19 hours total to implement it, vs roughly a summer of work for the GSoC project. I don't mean this to reflect poorly on Ben, it just shows that someone who is familar with a code base and has thought a lot about a problem can work on it much more efficiently than a newcomer. AFAICS, Ben never did get to the gallery part. His involvement in SoC was cut short for personal reasons. Wiki WYSIWYG Editor Taylor Killian produced a working interface to Wikiwyg, but it tragically never made it into ikiwiki. This seemed to be going swimmingly -- Taylor set up a subversion repository for his work and produced several revisions of the wikiwyg plugin in response to feedback. At the end of the summer, it was close to ready to be included in ikiwiki. Then we lost contact with Taylor, and his site fell off the net. Subversion repo: Gone. Tarballs: Gone. The final tragic part of this story is that I had a local copy of all of Taylor's work. And when I moved ikiwiki over from subversion to git, I set up a wikiwyg branch, and put his work into it, and happily deleted my other copies of his work. But I made some kind of newbie mistake pushing that branch, and so his work never made it onto my git server, and at this point seems completly lost. (I still hope to hear from Taylor..) gallery Arpit Jain produced a working gallery plugin for ikiwiki. But that code never made it into ikiwiki. The main stumbling block seems to be that it used the lightbox javascript library, which, at least at the time was licensed under a non-free CC license. The code is present in a branch in ikiwiki's git repo, but at this point there is still no image gallery plugin in ikiwiki, though others are now working on other implementations. Conclusions I learned some important things from participating in the '07 SoC:

• There needs to be a well-defined place where students check in their code regularly, and where it is regularly reviewed. Either give them each accounts and branches in the project's main subversion repository, or better use distributed VCS. Ikiwiki switched to git as a direct result of the problems I saw with students publishing their code in the ad-hoc ways that resulted from not having that. And I keep backups of every ikiwiki git repo I am aware of, because any could fall off the net at any time.
• If your goal is to have a student develop something that is included in your project, that needs to be one of up-front success criteria for the SoC project. Otherwise, most of them will fail to get all the way there. Students need an incentive to deal with licensing issues, to respond to maintainers' feedback, and to keep following up until their code is merged. I suspect that requiring students leap over this sometimes very tall bar will scare a lot of them away though. You have to decide whether your goal is indeed to get working code in production, or if it's more to mentor a student for the summer.
• Just because one is very familiar with a code base and very productive in working on it, and has had lots of success getting others to contribute to it in the usual free software manner, does not mean that one will be a good mentor for a student working on that code base. In fact, it probably means you won't be, unless you have some prior experience teaching students. Which is why I've not participated in SoC since. :-/

For those that haven t heard yet, Lisa accepted my proposal of marriage this Christmas Eve on a cold night in Stockholm. I m very happy! Merry Christmas / Winter/ Summer solstice celebration to all and happy new year where applicable

Many people piled into the small bathroom. I knew this bathroom, but I did not know how it had gotten into the edifice that it currently occupied. The occupants of the bathroom began to organize a formal fight, and one of the participants, appointed without prior consent, insisted on forestalling the proceedings by taking a shower. He did not use the bathroom in question for said shower, and after what seemed like an eternity, the match was declared forfeit, which then freed us all to go about our business. The subsequent business turned out to be a strange party, replete with all manner of foodstuffs, rooms, passageways, drunks, IOIs, and reorganizations. While naked, I ran into one of the Taylor twins in a black stairwell between the room with the pizza ovens and the room with the madcap tables. I still don't know which one.