# Google Summer of Code 2008? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 19, 2008, 6:17am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326 "2008-03-19T06:17:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Chiyuan_Z)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2008, 6:17am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326/1 "2008-03-19T06:17:05Z")
Hi, Ruby community is participating Google Summer of Code through Ruby Central. However, although project ideas of other organizations have been announced, I found that there’s still no under the Ruby Central page. I’m willing to take part in Google Summer of Code this year, especially working for a Ruby related project. So, what’s the current status of Ruby of GSoC? Is there any project ideas collected? Maybe something about Ruby 1.9, Rubinius etc. I myself haven’t come up any good idea yet. So I’m looking forward to the suggested ideas. Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Chiyuan_Z)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2008, 2:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326/2 "2008-03-19T14:35:35Z")
On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Chiyuan Z. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > any project ideas collected? Maybe something about Ruby 1.9, > Rubinius etc. I myself haven’t come up any good idea > yet. So I’m looking forward to the suggested ideas. I hope to have this up today. I’d hoped to have it posted yesterday, but the best laid plans … If anyone has ideas they’d like to share, I’m all ears. ---
**Author:** ![Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Chiyuan_Z)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2008, 3:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326/3 "2008-03-19T15:06:31Z")
On Mar 19, 2008, at 12:16 AM, Chiyuan Z. wrote: > Is there any project ideas collected? Maybe something about Ruby 1.9, > Rubinius etc. I’m sure we can brainstorm some for you. Regarding your Ruby 1.9 idea: many libraries don’t work correctly yet in Ruby 1.9. You could come up with a list of favorites that don’t work and offer to patch them for Ruby 1.9. I think that could be quite a resource to the community. I got this idea from Greg Brown who may be doing a similar project soon, but I think there are more than enough libraries to go around. Beyond that, here are a few other random ideas: - There’s been a lot of talk about better documentation tools lately. I believe Eric H. is working on revamping RDoc. Perhaps you could see what you could do to help with that. James B. has also looked at better ways to assemble the documentation for [ruby-doc.org](http://ruby-doc.org), so that may be another place you could help out. - I’ve recently had need of a multiprocess event safe logger. What I mean by that is that I have two processes writing to the same log file. They may log five things for each event. In the log file, I would prefer the resulting ten entries not be interleaved. You could provide a start event method and an end event method and only add events to the log file after the event ended. This is more complicated than it sounds since you will want to deal with large logging data for a single event (probably using Tempfile), badly behaved programs that don’t manage to call the end event method, long running events, etc. - Daniel B. has requested a pure Ruby implementation of zlib a few times now. This might give new options for Windows installers. I do encourage you to think up your own ideas though. I’ve been a mentor for the last two years and I can easily say that the applications for unique ideas were generally more appealing. There are two reasons for that. The first is that lots of applications come in for the ideas we post publicly, so you’re competing with a lot of people who want to do the exact same thing. The other is that you will just be more creative when running with your own idea. Don’t hesitate to latch onto one of your own needs and run with it. James Edward G. II ---
**Author:** ![Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Chiyuan_Z)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2008, 4:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326/4 "2008-03-19T16:41:59Z")
On 19/03/2008, James G. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > On Mar 19, 2008, at 12:16 AM, Chiyuan Z. wrote: > > > Is there any project ideas collected? Maybe something about Ruby 1.9, > > Rubinius etc. > > I’m sure we can brainstorm some for you. There’s been some talk about the memory management - the GC. The GC used in 1.8 is clearly suboptimal. Running the same code under jruby results in great cut on memory requirements and thus great performance gain, at least for my application. I am not sure about the status and plans for the 1.9 GC. If you are into this kind of stuff you will likely not face too much competition, and could make a lasting contribution to the 1.9 implementation 😉 Thanks Michal ---
**Author:** ![Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Chiyuan_Z)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2008, 5:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326/5 "2008-03-19T17:16:59Z")
Hi, Thank you for so many ideas. And maybe you’re right. I might also think about my own ideas besides those published. 🙂 2008/3/19, James G. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid): ---
**Author:** ![Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Chiyuan_Z)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2008, 11:21am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326/6 "2008-03-20T11:21:45Z")
I want to create a project devoted to Neural Networks. Would Ruby Central be interested to support me and this project for Google Summer of Code? Right now, there are two gems with a Neural Network support - [http://ai4r.rubyforge.org/](http://ai4r.rubyforge.org/) É [http://ruby-fann.rubyforge.org/](http://ruby-fann.rubyforge.org/). But both of them implement only one learning algorithm - back-propagation (and accordingly to that fact only one type of Neural Network - multilayer perceptron) - also they don’t have ability to choose different activation functions for different layers and so you can’t even build Radial Basis Function Network with those gems. They don’t have a built- in interface to use even widespread learning strategies (e.g., begin learning with a high learning rate and then switch to a low learning rate after approaching some threshold). So as a GSoC project I decide to implement several Neural Network types, including multilayer perceptron, self-organizing feature map (Kohonen net), auto-associative memory (Hopfield net) and recurrent neural network. I want to build an easy but powerful interface to use with. So it will support a range of learning strategies for fast start but it will be very customizable in case of need. It will have a built- in visualization module so you could see a net topology with all values of weights, errors, input and output values in any moment of time. You could also see a graphic of values (good to see a final approximation) and errors (to understand a dependence on epoch count). And as the last step i want to build a Neural Network web-editor via silverlight and IronRuby. So what does RubyCentral think about my proposal? ---
**Author:** ![Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Chiyuan_Z)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2008, 1:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326/7 "2008-03-20T13:45:53Z")
On Mar 20, 2008, at 5:20 AM, RaL wrote: > I want to create a project devoted to Neural Networks. Would Ruby > Central be interested to support me and this project for Google Summer > of Code? Obviously I don’t speak for Ruby Central, but I think your idea is great. Definitely send it in. Be sure and mention your plan, as you did in this email, and the kinds of problems it would help users solve. Good luck! James Edward G. II ---
**Author:** ![Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Chiyuan_Z)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2008, 4:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326/8 "2008-03-20T16:43:07Z")
RaL wrote: > Radial Basis Function Network with those gems. They don’t have a built- > in interface to use even widespread learning strategies (e.g., begin > learning with a high learning rate and then switch to a low learning > rate after approaching some threshold). If you are also interested in pulsed (or spiking) neural nets, take a look at Yinspire [1](http://www.ntecs.de/projects/yinspire/), which is a fast simulator I am developing at my university using Ruby and C++ (using Cplus2Ruby). Regards, Michael ---
**Author:** ![Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Chiyuan\_Z](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Chiyuan_Z)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2008, 3:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/google-summer-of-code-2008/132326/9 "2008-03-20T15:48:01Z")
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 6:44 AM, James G. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > On Mar 20, 2008, at 5:20 AM, RaL wrote: > > > I want to create a project devoted to Neural Networks. Would Ruby > > Central be interested to support me and this project for Google Summer > > of Code? > > Obviously I don’t speak for Ruby Central, but I think your idea is > great. Definitely send it in. Be sure and mention your plan, as you > did in this email, and the kinds of problems it would help users > solve. Good luck! I agree, this sounds like a very interesting project. No decisions will be made about which projects to sponsor until we see all the proposals, and the prospective mentors can weigh in on them.