Christmas came early this year.

Today, Google announced their new open source systems programming language: Go. I’m super excited about this, we all have been wondering what Rob Pike has been upto since he joined the big G, and now we know. Not just that, but Ken Thomson, Robert Griesemer, Ian Taylor and Russ Cox were all involved in the project, with Ken doing what he does best, writing compilers in lightning speed If that isn’t a list of heavyweight respectable computer scientists, I don’t know what is!

I think Go is poised to be the dominant systems programming language of the future. Go has nailed almost every aspect of a systems language, though some would say I’m biased. Go has been strongly influenced by Oberon, CSP languages like Limbo, and the standard libraries have tantalizing similarities to Plan 9. We’ve had Limbo and Plan 9 for a while now (more than a decade), but this is where my real love for Google begins to bubble, they took something awesome but unpopular and gave it a push to the masses. There are very few companies in the world who would attract the talent to do this, and even fewer who would open source the results. The attention Go has been getting is just mind blowing. Pike had been doing amazing work at Bell-Labs for quite a while, but none of it even got an inkling of the publicity Go is currently getting.

Google was what Pike needed to prove Utah2000 wrong.

I know one thing for sure, I’ll definitely be using my Plan 9 virtual machine a lot less; now that I can write clean concurrent programs that don’t make my head hurt, both in Linux and OS X. And GCC, I’m not shedding any tears while I bid you goodbye.

On another note, Google also announced today that they’ll be sponsoring free WiFi at a whole bunch of US airports this holiday season. For all its faults, Google definitely seems to be doing the right thing. For how long, it remains to be seen, but so far I’d say their track record has been better than excellent.

UPDATE: John Gruber points out that “judging from the copyright statements, [Go is] not an official Google project”. Could this be a result of the famous 20% time scheme?

The grand Summer of Code Mentor Summit of 2009 concluded last week and I had the fantastic opportunity of being able to attend on behalf of Gentoo, Plan 9 and Mozilla. What follows is some indication of how awesome the summit was:

(Photo courtesy of warthog from Etherboot)

I met so many folks I’d only interacted with online so far (the classic nickname-to-face matching), but even better was the opportunity to meet folks powering open source projects from so many diverse backgrounds. I met many of my personal rockstars, and learned about a bunch of open source projects I’d never heard of

Also, one of the things that is only possible at an event like the summit was the ability to get a whole bunch of non-linux operating system groups in one room. We had a great discussion, and it resulted in the creation of the “rosetta-os” special interest group. Look for more activity on the common device drivers for non-linux operating systems front soon!

Other sessions worthy of special mention were Open Source Security, Recruiting and Retaining Awesome People, Advanced Trolling (yes, you read that right), and of course the always welcoming Casablanca where I spent most of my time. We discussed everything from our SoC experiences to the Afro Celt Sound System in that room, always full of creative energy and warmth.

After 4 years of participating in the Summer of Code, I am super happy to have finally met the faces behind the program. Every single person I met over the course of last weekend was friendly, intelligent and just generally awesome; that sort of thing doesn’t happen by chance. I feel warm and fuzzy inside to think that I’m actually a part of the revolution that is free and open source software, three cheers to everyone that made it possible!

Offered without comment.

Today we had the pleasure of having Brendan Eich hosting a brown bag for all us interns, and he started out his talk with slides on the Golden Ratio.

I did have a vague idea of what the ratio was – but today I found out a lot more about it – like how it occurs in almost every natural creation or phenomenon. The mysteriousness of the universe is very humbling. Perhaps if we used a different number system that was based on 1.6180339887 instead of 10, everything would make perfect sense…

Anyway, one thing it definitely explains is my love for 16:9 screens as opposed to the old 4:3 ones

As a developer, I have to say that FOSS.IN/08 is possibly the most productive conference I’ve been to until now! In just 5 days, I’ve got more things done than I have in the last 5 months

Let’s start with the Beacon workout: Nandeep joined us via VoIP and we got started almost immediately, thanks to the dynamic nature and small size of our project – we didn’t have any infrastructural trouble as a few other C/C++ projects with huge codebases and complex build systems did. We had a list of 6 tasks in mind, and we managed to complete 3 of them. Salil Kothadia got started with writing a PDO data backend, and promptly submitted the patch to us next day. Thanks Salil, hope you continue to contribute to the development of Beacon (thereby increasing the development team size by 25%)!

I also attended Philip’s workout on porting HTML::Template to Javascript. As mentioned on the Wiki page, we mostly worked on the design during the first half or so, and then moved on to writing a skeleton for the whole framework. I think this is an extremely interesting project, and am very happy to be associated with its birth. Hope we can continue the momentum and work until it is finished.

Perhaps the biggest take-away from the conference for me was the ability to give a lightning talk about Glendix, with several kernel hackers present in the audience. Christoph then kindly offered to review some of the patches during the workout. Even the possibility of Plan 9 binary emulation being considered for inclusion into the main kernel tree is amazing, let alone the fact that I got the guidance of an experienced kernel hacker for a good 2 hours! I think the effort was largely successful – I now have a better idea of what I need to do in order to get a kernel patch in order, and also got a few hints as to how I can implement the missing bits.

My primary focus at the conference was to give a talk on Mozilla Labs and Innovation. I think I managed to stir up a decent amount of interest in the various Labs initiatives. I covered the different ways in which members of the community can contribute, specifically focussing on Weave, Ubiquity and the Concept Series. We even covered how easy it is to actually write an Ubiquity command. I now look forward to increased participation by the Indian Mozilla community in Labs projects. Don’t forget to thank Mary for all the goodies!

All this, apart from regular conference happenings like catching up with old friends, making new ones and free swag (great mugs and t-shirts this time around) makes FOSS.IN/08 one of the most successful conferences I’ve been to so far! I can’t wait for the 2009 edition

Glendix has been making the rounds on the web lately, with coverage from OSNews, Reddit, and even a Russian site, Linux.org.ru. It’s really motivating to see some buzz around the project, giving me the extra boost needed to push the completion of a usable release!

Some of the major obstacles that have to be crossed before making a beta-quality release are the completion of critical synthetic filesystems – especially /net and /draw. We also have to work out the kinks with per-process namespaces and union mounts. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Rio running as a WM before an official release; if not, Plan9Port’s Rio and WMII are good candidates.

The biggest criticism of Glendix seems to be the reasoning that Plan9 user-space tools are somehow superior to their GNU counterparts, and several people have asked us to substantiate our claims. At this point, however, I don’t think that it is really important, or even relevant. Even if Plan9 user-space tools aren’t somehow better – I think it is generally a refreshing idea to see Linux combined with a user-space other than GNU.

We’re at FOSS.IN this year, where a large number of kernel developers have gathered; and I hope to get some of their valuable input on the problems Glendix currently faces, and maybe even write some code to solve them

Thanks for all the community support and critical comments, they are all very vital feedback for the project and are much appreciated!

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling in the past few weeks, starting with the really exciting “Northside Weekend” at the Dutch towns of Tolbert and Groningen. Copious amounts of embarrassing pictures were generated on Facebook: I wouldn’t expect any less from a group of 60 students hanging out over the weekend

Allowing for just enough time to recover, I had to write my final exam for the Parallel Programming course. Having courses compressed into such short time periods can be both and good and bad, I guess I will decide for myself when the results come in!

I left almost immediately after the exam to catch a flight to Barcelona, for EU MozCamp 2008. There was a Labs Session at the Facultat d’informàtica de Barcelona the next day, part of Dan and Aza’s Europe tour. I managed to reach just before the session ended, thanks to me getting lost and then someone pointing me to a different place in the opposite direction. thunder, aza and myself then traversed the excellent Metro system in the city, to catch up with cbeard for lunch. I had my first experience with Tapas, and it wasn’t bad at all – the fact that thunder knows spanish helped a lot. mconnor joined us shortly after. A fabulous dinner later, we were all set for the first day of MozCamp

Most Mozilla events are all about meeting new people and catching up with people you knew already. I made the most of it, it was nice to see faces back from Mountain View, and some new ones. Aza was scheduled for a Labs keynote on the first day, which was pretty good. Unfortunately, he seemed to have contracted food poisoning, or maybe just general exhaustion and insomnia from the whole Labs Europe tour; so they postponed the session on Ubiquity to the next day. David Ascher’s talk was fantastic with some really cool demos, Thunderbird 3 is going to be prodigious! We had a session on Weave that evening, which also went off reasonably well, though the audience seemed more focused on the legal and privacy aspects of the project. Not a bad thing, just not interesting to me – I’d rather think and talk about technical challenges

I had the wonderful opportunity to have dinner with Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. I also met up with Suneel who had just recently joined Mozilla at Mountain View, and we all had a great time! mconnor had to stay awake a little later than the rest of us, to prepare for his talk the next day.

Highlights of Day 2 were mconnor’s talk, 2010 goals discussion and the session on Ubiquity. I also had a brief discussion with Dan on some of my plans for Weave 0.3, it’s going to be awesome! Labs team did a little sightseeing that night, and then caught up with John Lilly, accompanied by his wife, for dinner. A perfect end to an excellent weekend.

Thanks Mozilla Europe, and Barcelona!

Mozilla is making great strides towards making impacting innovations built on the open web. If you haven’t already heard, the always awesome Chris Beard was appointed as Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer. He’ll be heading the newly formed Developer Tools Lab which was formed after the co-founders of Ajaxian, Ben and Dion, were hired by Mozilla. That’s in addition to his existing responsibilities with Mozilla Labs and Evangelism.

I feel extremely privileged to be working with a group of such brilliant people

With projects like Geode, Ubiquity, Weave, and Snowl already on the table; I simply can’t hold my excitement in anticipation of the great things that are to come out from Mozilla in the near future!

The 9fans list has produced TWO fortune-worthy quotes this weekend, a rather rare occurrence

If you cannot read this, reply. Otherwise, disregard. -Pietro Gagliardi

Come _on_. I’m not that subtle a “baiter,” or… am I? -Eris Discordia
you’re a master baiter. -Skip Tavakkolian

I must say the quality of traffic on the list has been detoriating even over the relatively small amount of time I’ve been subscribed to it.

Another meme has begun:

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair… just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.