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Sat, 29 Mar 2008 1:10 UTC
Are you a student or do you know of a student who wants to make money this summer flipping bits instead of burgers? Furthermore, does said student want to make money programming for the PHP project? If so, then the Google Summer of Code and the PHP project provides just the opportunity.
I’m posting this for two reasons: 1) as a favor to Elizabeth Smith and 2) because I’d really like to see some interesting projects go to benefit the PHP community. In the past, the Google SoC has had some interesting PHP projects (2006, 2007), and this year is no different with a slew of potential projects, some of which I find very interesting.
For the math aficionados, there’s an idea for algorithmic optimizations in the language. For Unicode lovers, there’s the suggestion to continue the work to update every function in php-src, giving full native Unicode support to PHP 6. For those who like working with XML, there’s work to be done on PhD, the PHP-based DocBook renderer. OOP buffs will enjoy building support for anonymous functions, delegates, return type hinting, and property type hinting into the language. The list goes on.
And, if none of these interest you, you’re welcome to submit your own project idea. If you want an idea from me that’s not listed on the wiki, perhaps you’d be interested in doing some C# development to implement PHP on Microsoft’s DLR (more info on the DLR).
So, there’s money to be made and cool projects to work on. Plus, it’ll look good on your resume.
The only problem is the deadline. It’s March 31st! So, submit your proposal today!
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Tags: google, gsoc, php
Wed, 21 Feb 2007 5:36 UTC
UPDATE: I’m an idiot. The LinkedIn “info” button shows up next to every e-mail address on every web page because I finally upgraded to the newest version of the LinkedIn Browser Toolbar for Firefox. I feel pretty stupid now for jumping the gun on this, and there is no mysterious partnership between Google and LinkedIn, but isn’t this a good example of how browser plugins are changing the way we view sites? (More thoughts on this later.) At any rate, I wouldn’t mind seeing some kind of mash-up of Google/LinkedIn/Plaxo; it’d definitely make managing my contacts between the three much easier.
There’s no mention of it on Google’s or LinkedIn’s websites, but just days after my post asking for a Google Contacts application, it would seem that Google is doing something about their contacts, and they’re doing that something with LinkedIn.
It’s unclear exactly where this is heading, but when I logged into Gmail today, I noticed a small little “info” image next to the name and e-mail address of the sender of each message I received. The first time you hover over the “info” image, it asks you to authenticate with LinkedIn. After that, when you hover over the image, you automatically see whether the sender has a LinkedIn profile, what degree of a connection they are to you (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.), their position and company, location, how many LinkedIn contacts they have, and their LinkedIn profile summary. You can then click on their name to proceed to their LinkedIn profile. From this little window, you can also invite them to your network if you are not already connected to them.
Now, when you proceed to Gmail’s contacts page, there’s nothing of the sort connecting your contacts with LinkedIn, but this little, quiet addition makes me wonder what Google and LinkedIn are up to. Is there a partnership in the works? Will I be able to use LinkedIn to manage my Google contacts and vice versa in the not too distant future? I don’t think I’d be opposed to that. In fact, I’d laud it.
Now, if only LinkedIn would provide sync’ing services like Plaxo... or, better yet, LinkedIn and Plaxo should work together so that LinkedIn contacts are automatically sync’d to Plaxo, and then end-users could make use of Plaxo’s sync’ing services to synchronize contacts with desktop applications.
But now I’m just day-dreaming in fantasy-land.
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Tags: gmail, google, linkedin, plaxo, time-management
Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:50 UTC
In an effort to organize my life, I’ve been trying out various organizer programs, from Yojimbo to SOHO Organizer to Contactizer. That’s when I realized that I need Google’s help. If I do everything the Apple way, then I need to use Address Book, iCal, and Apple Mail. Then, I can make the most out of organization software like SOHO Organizer and Contactizer, but I don’t use the Apple programs. I use things on the Web like Gmail and Google Calendar. I could go back to using programs like Apple Mail, but Gmail has ruined me simply because of two simple features that seem so obvious I don’t know why other mail applications don’t have them: tagging and conversation threading.
So, what am I to do? As a member of the Cult of Google, I beseech thee, O Google, to overhaul your crappy contact system and make a full-fledged Google Contacts application to go alongside with your suite of productivity apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. Follow your normal protocol and keep it beta indefinitely and open only to invitees (but invite me, first, please), and make it awesome, as usual. Help us to log our calls and all communication with our contacts, much like you already allow us to see all e-mail communication with a particular contact. Let us schedule meetings with a contact that show up on our Google Calendars, and allow us to define relationships and assign tasks.
Give us the tools we need for a complete virtual on-line office, and make it free! We don’t mind the text ads on the side; in fact, we love them. O Google, we love thee!
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Tags: google, productivity, time-management
Thu, 27 Jul 2006 21:28 UTC
Right now, I’m sitting in Greg Stein’s A New Google Service for the Open Source Community presentation at OSCON where he has just announced project hosting on Google Code starting today for open source projects. This service is similar to Sourceforge, but it’s done the Google way. Here are my quick notes from the presentation:
Unique features:
- Simplicity, scalability, reliability
- Rebuilt Subversion on top of Bigtable (instead of using Berkley DB or filesystem)
- Complete re-think of issue tracking (simple system with labels on each of the issues, using the Google search infrastructure to easily search across the labels, titles, and descriptions without the need for complex workflows to track issues)
It’s located at: http://code.google.com/hosting/
There’s no project approval process; project goes live right away. They are working with existing projects right now to ensure that project names are not all grabbed up. They will be running a number of different analyses on project patterns to ensure that tons of bogus projects are not created. There are lifetime limits of project creation. They don’t use a CAPTCHA when creating your first project in a day, but if you try to create more than one project a day, you will receive a CAPTCHA on all subsequent project creation pages.
Sample project located at: http://code.google.com/p/hostingdemo/
There will be emphasis on e-mail messenging for issue tracking, but RSS feeds will also be available for issue tracking as an alternative. Projects can have links to Google Groups, blogs, mailing lists, etc., all of which will be reflected on the project summary page. The Subversion repository can be viewed through the Web browser.
An Open Source license must be selected when created a project, and Google is limiting this to a short list of seven licenses because Google doesn’t want to encourage license proliferation. These seven licenses are: Apache, Artistic+GPL, Mozilla, MIT, New BSD, GPL2, LGPL. (Google’s code for this service will not be available on their own service, nor will it be available through an open license.)
They will be working on how to best integrate the service with other Google services. They will be working on APIs to access and/or dump the data. However, Greg is hesitant about opening up an API because it sort of locks them in. They may think about ways to connect with Sourceforge, but, again, this means they need an API.
The service is still (surprise!) in beta.
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Tags: google, oscon, oscon2006, sourceforge
Tue, 22 Jun 2004 14:04 UTC
I have joined the likes of Aaron Wormus and Tobias Schlitt in attaining a much desired status level. Yes, I am now one of the few, the proud; and I’m gloating, as well.
Courtesy of Patrick Reilly, I now have a Gmail account. The accounts, during this beta stage, are by invitation only, similar to Orkut. I’m not sure when I’ll get any invites, but if you suck up to me enough, I may just invite you.
Contact me at my Gmail address at benramsey at gmail.com
Related:
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Tags: gmail, google
Tue, 20 Apr 2004 9:24 UTC
Speaking of Google, I found a very interesting blog concerning their very massive clustered computer. It’s well worth the read.
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Tags: google
Mon, 19 Apr 2004 18:17 UTC
A while back, I wrote about Bloomba and how Alison Overholt of Fast Company raved over its powerful search features. At the time, I dismissed the search features, my mind still lingering in the world of distinct folders and locations to store e-mail messages, files, etc. However, after reading around other places (I’ve looked for links but could find none), it seems that searching is the wave of the future. As systems and applications seek to be more and more user-friendly, they are turning to more abstract, search-based designs. In a sense, I guess they’re becoming more like the human brain (granted, I know very little about how the human brain works).
So, in steps one of our most beloved Web applications: Google, the little search engine that could. Now not-so-little, this search engine has become a giant in all respects and is finally joining the game of Web-based e-mail—and they’re bringing along their search features to boot.
[read more]
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Tags: bloomba, gmail, google, orkut, yahoo
