GeekInterview.com

Don’t know how long this site has been out there so far, but I just love it. A list of all kinds of interviews questions, ranging from career goals to specific technical problems, browsable by category and company as well. Very nice.

Skebby.it: cheap texting (for us as well)

Believe it or not, the price of a single SMS text message here in Italy is 0.15 EUR (0.20 USD, more or less). Let’s get it a bit more impressive: a single character is a byte, a single text message is 160 characters long, so I get charged 0.20 USD to send you 160 bytes, which means transferring a megabyte of text would cost to the final Italian user 1325 USD. It looks like a lot of money, right?

Fortunately a lot of smart people live on this planet, and Davide Marrone – a 24-years-old computer science student @ University of Milan – developed Skebby, a java app to enable people texting via their mobile phones (through Skebby’s servers) at a much lower rates.

The free membership allows users to send a limited number of text message (exploiting free services) at a cost of 0.01 EUR.

The premium membership allows no-limit texting at rates depending on how many text messages you buy in advance, but you might get till a 50% 70% off the current price.

[UPDATE: You should also add the cost of connecting from your mobile to Skebby's servers. ]

I don’t remember but if I’m not wrong Skebby.it is still only in Italian (actually it was on the national TVs yesterday, so servers went down immediately, they’re moving on right now ). If so, I hope they’re going to get an English version as soon as possible.

Semantic-aware component provisioning: “pencils off” status report

I want to recap my summer of code so far, before the final evaluation starts. Here’s what I accomplished so far. It was a lot of work, and a huge fun as well, hope to catch your interest and get some feedback on future developments!

GUI CONTRIBUTIONS

• new component submission view (drag and drop support from the repository explorer to add dependencies easily )
• repository explorer view
• preference page (set repository URL)

IMPLEMENTED FEATURES

• submit a new component
• usual search features (name, version, tags)
• search components providing a set of tasks
• search components providing all the tasks of the selected ones
• “smart” search of components functionally equivalent to the selected one (reasoning here)
• search components depending on the selected one
• assert functional equivalence between components

HANDS-ON

Let’s take a test drive. I submit a new component, in this case (just as an example) the “last-gsoc-demo” one. I fill in some data, and press submit. I can just drag-and-drop dependencies from the repository explorer to the dependencies viewer.

I previously submitted some sample components. Now since all jdbc drivers implement the same specification, to some extent it is correct to consider them “functionally equivalent”, and I push this statement in the knowledge base.

For sake of brevity I ask you to trust me without further shots, what I did is just assert all jdbc drivers in the repository (besides the “dummy-jdbc” one) “functionally equivalent” to the postgresql one, and then assert the “dummy- jdbc” only equivalent to “mysql-jdbc”. I can ask now the repository to give me components “functionally equivalent” to the selected one (“dummy-jdbc”), just clicking on the context menu item:

Here’s what I obtain:

You might notice that the selected item is still there, which makes sense since everything is of course functionally equivalent to itself. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to note I only said the “dummy-jdbc” was equivalent to “mysql-jdbc”, full stop! The rest is just the result of the reasoning process.

Now, I can also describe a component in terms of the “tasks” it carries out. Let’s suppose – just as an example – I have two components, one for “dom-parsing” and the other for “sax-parsing”.

Suppose now I was not on earth in the last years and I want to know if there exists a single component doing the two things.

I can select both of them, click on the shown item and I’ll get xerces-j actually does both things. I might decide to use it if it fits my needs, since a single dependency is better than two, in most cases.

I also could want to know if other components rely on mine, or for instance how many components actually use one, which usually means it has great reputation. Remember the “last-gsoc-demo” component? I put “mysql-jdbc” as a dependency there. I just right click on the component, and find the components depending on the selected one.

CLIENT-SERVER ARCHITECTURAL VIEW (after latest modifications)

KNOWN BUGS

• troubles with SPARQL queries involving literals: searching against id and tasks is ok, versions and tags are not (yet the http://repo.url/tag/{tag} resource works fine… i had no time to investigate further befor pencils were off)
• dangling dependencies (i.e. after a delete operation) are not handled yet.

COMING SOON (random order)

• rest (not in the soa-ish meaning)
• enable license and license-style search criteria on the plugin
• associate a new perspective with the provided views
• improve repository explorer (i don’t like that tree very much)
• bundled repository exploiting the eclipse embedded jetty server
• import existing metadata from maven POM or OSGi manifest (URL drag and drop from web browser?)
• address repository data access layer performance issues
• setup an update site somewhere on the globe

CHEERS
That’s all for now, I really enjoyed the work, and I am confident this both- side fruitful collaboration will go on. A lot of things remain to be done on this project, and I won’t let it down after Google Summer of Code stops.

I want to thank Philippe Ombredanne for mentoring me, and all the guys @ #eclipse-soc for supporting me and other students day after day. It was an invaluable experience to work with you guys.

See you online,

cheers,

Savino Sguera.

GSoC Midterm Evaluations

Summer of Code Midterm Evaluations are in, Leslie Hawthorn reports on Google Summer of Code Blog.

Looks like a slight decrease in successful students percentage have been experienced: 90% against last year’s 95%. Maybe some kind of relation between the higher number of accepted students and the success rate decrease could exist.

After all, it’s no surprise at all that software projects’ success rate is not even close to 90% (some numbers here… however, in most of studies I walked through success rate does not exceed 50%), so – assuming the law of large numbers applies here too – increasing the number of students (and thus projects), SoCers success rate necessarily results closer to actual rates.

That being said, glad to read my answers to the survey were close to most students’ ones . Congratulations to all SoCers who made it so far, thanks to my mentor and the whole Eclipse SoC community for the great job they did and keep doing every day … now c’mon let’s get those t-shirts (that’s what all of this is about, ain’t it? )!

Google Summer of Code Logo

Official Google Summer of Code 2007 Logo is ready!

I definitely love it, click on the image on the left to see other flavors .

Looks very sleek and “surf-ish” !

• Original post @ Google Summer of Code Blog

Plans for the summer?

A few hours ago Google published accepted students for the Google Summer of Code 2007.

I’m in!

Just received the official “Congratulations!” e-mail from Google: I have been accepted by The Eclipse Software Foundation, I’ll work on a project I proposed and I’ll be mentored by Philippe Ombredanne.

A brief high-level description of what the project will consist in is here @ my Google Summer of Code application information page. More details are coming right away on this page .

I really want to thank all the people who made this possible, especially guys @ Google and The Eclipse Software Foundation.

Btw, looking forward to get the t-shirt !

Do not post your springbreak pics to your MySpace page!

I just discovered through digg a – quite old – post about MySpace implications in an eventual job search process. That’s absolutely true in my opinion.

I’m not saying MySpace is evil, but if you love social networking maybe you would like to take a look at this post @ toplawstudent.com, and read some smart tips to avoid embarassing situations and use this kind of services in a more responsible way .

Find a job with Crunchboard: early stats

After its first week of activity, Crunchboard releases a couple of interesting stats. You find them in this post @ TechCrunch. What I am very impressed by is the massive presence of very big names posting jobs – MySpace and NBC, just to name a few.

Here is an nice post about the quick rising of niche job boards, as (but not only) Crunchboard, 37Signal and paidContent. Looks like actually the job search segment is attracting a lot of investments and startups.

Moreover, it’s very interesting to me considering how the usual job search practice has been rapidly changing, and new channels are growing faster and faster, from job boards 2.0 to social networks.