My last day at Mozilla this summer was last Thursday. I didn’t take a lot of pictures this summer, because, you know, I took a lot last time around. Also, this strategy turned out pretty well because now there are more pictures of me floating around on the tubes! After a longish trans-atlantic flight, I’m back in Amsterdam now resuming work on my Master’s (because hacking on Minix is awesome).
No other internship has been ever so satisfying: over the summer, I worked on a wide range of mini-projects which allowed me to exercise skills ranging from systems to application level programming. I even did a bit of work in the mobile space (turns out programming in limited memory and processing speed is a *lot* different).
One such project that I’m especially excited about is support for video recording in the browser. Yes, there is even a canvas-based live preview of your webcam feed, in addition to Ogg/Theora encoding support! Combined with the audio recording support I wrote sometime ago, some really cool applications are now possible. Skype-like dialer in the browser? Why not?! (*hint* anyone is free to send in a patch for multiplexing the audio and video, they’re currently two separate Vorbis and Theora streams *hint*).
We also had 3 major releases for Weave during the summer: 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6. The last one was especially big, given the completely new, HTML based UI (big kudos to thunder for pulling it off!) and a bunch of other performance fixes. Also, the web UI I wrote last year underwent so many great changes by the wonderful folks at Glaxstar. Now we’re putting up a community design challenge to revamp the UI so we can ship the thing! (*hint* if you’re good at UI design you should participate in the challenge *hint*).
There’s so many more cool things I worked on that I’d like to talk about, but perhaps they deserve a separate blog post. Soon… (I keep promising myself that I should blog more often, it never works).
To add the already good times, my two students in the Summer of Code this year passed with flying colors. Yay!
