Well, looks like it’s time for the annual “great summer” report!
I managed to finish my GSoC project for Plan 9 from Bell Labs this year well in time, and I’m quite pleased with myself. I learned so much, and got to spend time with some of the most brilliant people in the field of computer science… it’s been so amazing that I’m at a loss for words.
I had so much fun implementing the 9P protocol in JavaScript that I almost immeditey began a native PHP implementation; right now I’m polishing it for inclusion in PEAR. And hopefully, someday, my bindings over libixp might get included as a bundled extension in the PHP distribution.
Another cool thing I managed to do this summer was build a firefox extension. Nothing too fancy, but I’m still happy with what I managed to do. Times like this, I can’t help but bow to the IRC and Usenet overlords - couldn’t have done it without the help of those dozens of people!
After working with Plan 9 for a while, I got this crazy idea of trying to build a toy OS of my own, just for kicks. Really, looking at the source code for Plan 9 makes you believe that you don’t have to be a rockstar to build an operating system. Sure enough, after some help from the folks at osdev, I managed to get “Hello World!” on the Parallels virtual machine screen. I feel good.
Freed.IN is coming up (formerly known as Freedel), and I sent in a proposal on creating synthetic file-systems with (guess what) 9P. Irrespective of whether my talk is chosen or not, I’m going to Delhi; there’s too much fun involved to even think about missing!
Oh, and, I got myself a job (tee-hee) at the Computer Sciences Corporation. But, well, Yahoo! is visiting our campus on the 4th… let’s see what the future holds for me.