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Google SoC Launched on Fyodors B'day

Google Summer of Code 2007 which has the most number of Sri Lankan students in the 3 year history of the program, is now officially underway. It started on 28th of May which happened to be the birthday of the popular Open Source developer Fyodor. This reminds me that I haven't posted anything about me being participating GSoC. Well, in fact I am taking part in GSoC 2007, obviously with Nmap :) Sorry, I forget to post that. It has been a very hectic (yes, hectic) few weeks for me (about which I don't feel like writing right now :)

Ok, I know I have to slow down. Well, Google Summer of Code (GSoC or SoC) is a program where Google pays selected students who in turn will work for an Open Source software development project during 3 months of the summer (from end of May to end of August). It draws attention of thousands and thousands of students all over the world. I'm not yet aware if the number of applications received this year, but the number of selected students for this year is 600 according to an unofficial source. I went through the student list and found out that there are 30 (or 29) students from Sri Lanka which is 5%! The official statistics will be available after the program.

Then Nmap is arguably the most popular Open Source security/networking tool around. Nmap was founded by and still lead by Fyodor. To get a picture about the popularity I'll mention this. If you do a Google search for fyodor, the first hit you'll get is about this Fyodor. The very popular writer Fyodor Dostoevsky will come in second to him (who claims he in turn made his handle after Fyodor Dostoevsky :). Anyway, Fyodor of insecure.org remains one of the most respected and most friendly developers around. So to me, it is a privilege to work with Nmap project.

As some of you may remember I applied last year also, but didn't make it there. However I wasn't discouraged by that. As you can see, I applied again this year for the Nmap Scripting Engine - Script Developer slot, and I made it. So now I'm working on creating an interesting set of plugins to utilize the new NSE system. So if anyone of you has ideas about this, please leave a message or try to contact me. Your ideas are welcome. If you are looking for more details about my GSoC work please refer to my Wiki site at Schtuff.

PS: My Wiki site is now moved to PBwiki.

Comments

  1. Anonymous5:06 PM

    Congratulations! 5% is a big number, thinking of places like India and Russia. Good on yeh!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, it's a big number. Sri Lanka has always been active in Open Source front. As you may already know significant if not vital development for Sahana, Apache, WSDL, etc. are linked with Sri Lankans.

    Thank you for your comments.

    ReplyDelete

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