Potential GSoC Projects

From searching through the available projects that are on the GSoC delicious list, I’ve come up with three potential ones that I’m going to look in to. By the end of the week I would like to have a project picked out and an application submitted to work on it.

Here are the three projects that have caught my eye, and why I would like to work on them:

VideoLan VLC: Qt Pimping

Some people that I work with have used Qt previously and I was amazed at the nice animations that were possible within Windows. And don’t forget the fact that the framework is cross-platform. The project says that you should have some Qt knowledge and C++ experience. I don’t have any Qt knowledge, but I do have the willing to learn.

AbiWord: Porting AbiWord from ANSI to Unicode

Internally AbiWord uses Unicode between methods, while the controls are all Microsoft ANSI controls. This project will look at converting the controls from the ANSI ones to Unicode. This doesn’t sound too tough, although when switching character-encodings, there are always bugs that manifest. Also, to make this a true internationalization effort, it should support “international” filenames and dragging and dropping of these files in to the interface. Some of the other benefits that come with switching from ANSI to Unicode will be better integration with the features of the NT platform and better support of the Multilingual UI (MUI) features of Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

Chromium: Extensions

Everyone that sits down at a computer has a different use for the internet and there are many ways to accomplish the same thing. Extensions allow for users to customize their setup and make their user experience better. There are API’s that need to be implemented and also unit-tests to go with it. The code for Chromium is written in C++. Downloading the source and getting it to build in VS2008 has been a learning lesson, but this looks to be a nice project.

What do you think about these projects? Is there one that sticks out to you that you think I should go forward with?

Google Summer of Code is upon us

I am currently looking for a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project to participate in over the summer, particularly to get my feet wet with Python. This will be my first summer working on a GSoC project, and I will be doing so during the hours of 5pm – sleep, since I will continue to work full-time during the summer months in between semesters of my Masters in Computer Science at MSU.

I have used Python previously when I created a basic distributed checksum system for ensuring data integrity over time and am looking to see what interesting problems that are available for GSoC.

If you are l0oking to participate in GSoC, there is a delicious account set up with links pointing to all the different mentoring organizations and their project ideas that they have out there.