Adam Leventhal's Weblog

inside the sausage factory

Wednesday October 19, 2005

Fall of Code?

Actually, Fall, Winter and Spring of code. Sun just announced the Solaris 10 Univesity Challenge Content. That's right, it's a challenge and a contest and with three times the staying power of single season of code. Apparently in a modern day treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Google ceded the rest of the year to Sun. Perhaps this was the real beef of the recent Sun/Google agreement.

This is actually pretty cool: be a college student, do something cool on OpenSolaris, take a shot at winning the grand prize of $5k and a sweet box (I imagine there might be prizes for other interesting entries). There are some ideas projects on the contest/challenge/seasonal coding page ranging from good (MythTV), to mundane (support for inkjet printers from Epson), to confusing (internet gaming -- I thought online gamling was its own reward), to inane ("A joystick driver - for gaming", oh for gaming? I've been using it for system administration). Here's my list off the top of my head -- if you want more ideas, feel free to drop me a line.

Work on an existing open source project

pearpc runs ppc applications on x86. I started working on porting it over and was able to boot Darwin.
valgrind is very cool (I've only just seen it). It would be great to port it or to use pieces like KCacheGrind and plug in DTrace as a backend.
Port over your favorite application, or get it running in some emulation environment of your own devising.
Make something go faster. MySQL, Gnome, mozilla, some random system call, whatever; there's a lot of inefficiency out there.

Write something new (using cools stuff in Solaris)

I'd love to see more dynamic languages with native DTrace support. We've already got support for Java, php, Ruby, and Perl in some form; make it better or add support for some other language you know and love (TCL, python, scheme, LISP, ML, etc.).
Build another kind of analysis tool on top of DTrace. We're working on a Java binding which is going to make this easier.
Write a device driver for your favorite crazy device (which I assume is your new iPod nano or something; you're such a hipster Apple fanboy).
Build a tool to simulate a distributed environment on Zones and use DTrace to monitor the communication. WARNING: your distributed systems professor will be your new best friend.

That's what I'd do, but if you have a better idea, go do that instead.

Technorati tags: OpenSolaris Summer o' Code

(2005-10-20 00:21:25.0/2005-10-19 16:15:00.0) Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/fall_of_code

Comments:

What ever happened with the Solaris Challenge? http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/dp/?anchor=solaris_challenge_competiton_update

The link to the competition is dead, and the last I heard mention of it, the winners "are currently being contacted." http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=22659&messageID=72479

Posted by 65.182.51.67 on October 20, 2005 at 07:16 PM PDT #

Good question -- I'll investigate.

Posted by Adam Leventhal on October 22, 2005 at 08:17 AM PDT #