Well, today is my last day. I've thoroughly enjoyed my time here at CC. Thanks to everyone here at the office and elsewhere who I interacted with this summer. I've met a lot of innovative, hardworking folks and they all deserve a big kudos. While I've been here I've created liblicense which had been conceived for a while by Jon. I think its at a point where inclusion into content platforms is now the key. We've done three releases but technically four. None of this would have been possible without the help of Jason Kivlighn. Back at the University of Washington (UW) him and I were roommates and will be living in the same house this fall. Jason is a super coder who finished his own Google Summer of Code project about halfway through the summer. Instead of just fizzling out he helped me by revamping parts of liblicense and writing modules to support all of the formats we currently support. I wouldn't have gotten nearly as far without Jason's help. Before I bid farewell and move on, let me recap a bit of what I did.

Well, my primary project was liblicense. Basically, I was handed down the idea of tracking licenses on 'the desktop'. I arrived to find tons of UI mockups created by Rebecca for my implementing pleasure. Before I began implementing the UIs I spent the first three or four weeks conceptualizing and implementing the core liblicense library. The first (and second) release was on July 13. After this release I began focusing on Gnome desktop integration. I really enjoyed seeing a frontend to the hardwork I did on the backend. Hopefully, more will be done. At the same time as I did the Gnome integration, Jason mirrored my efforts in KDE4. After the release of the gnome stuff and library changes on July 30, I moved onto Sugar integration. I've since finished the Sugar integration and the files are available here: http://cctools.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cctools/liblicense-sugar/trunk/ . We'll probably never officially release it due to its exclusivity to the Sugar interface. I'm proud of where liblicense has come. Like I've written before, I think that license awareness is important and liblicense is a small, important step in the right direction.

My other project which I volunteered to help with was the LiveContent liveCD. When I got here Tim was assigned the task of producing the new Creative Commons LiveCD with a target of LinuxWorld (August 8th) as a release date. After a week or so here I offered to technically advise the project. While my intention was to only be a reference I quickly became technically responsible for the CD and its creation. Although this was not what I had bargained for, it was well worth it. To create the CD we utilized livecd-creator, a Fedora LiveCD creator. It was a challenge for me to adapt to a different packaging system (from portage for Gentoo to rpm for Fedora). Additionally, although livecd-creator is a step in the right direction (like liblicense) it did not fulfill all of our needs and resulted in some hacky scripts to build the CD. To counter those frustrations I added an easter egg to the CD which I will not disclose. :-D Having Tim orchestrating the entire project also reduced my stress level quite a bit. However, it is quite nerve-racking creating a LiveCD to be duplicated 1000 times and pushed by both Creative Commons and Fedora. All in all, it turned out great. The next version(s), which I will not be a part of, should be even better.

I'm moving on. While I've enjoyed my time here at CC, I'll not be continuing on these projects. I've got a somewhat short attention span for projects and it has run dry for both LiveContent and liblicense. Over the last few days I've been brain dumping so that Asheesh can pick up where I left off. This move should be good for the projects because Asheesh is a very smart and driven person. You should check out his current project jsWidget. Since I'm done, I'll be driving home to Washington (the state not the district) tomorrow morning. When I get there I'll be enjoying home and working on educational materials for teaching Python in the intro Computer Science course at UW. After that I plan on focusing on my own projects.

Lastly, I'd like to thank everyone here at CC. Alex, our graphic designer, has been a huge help on both liblicense (he wrote the Ruby bindings) and LiveContent ( he did the sweet packaging). Nathan Yergler's flexibility allowed me to switch between projects on my own will and thus keep stress to a minimum. All of the other CC interns, Tim, Rebecca, Cameron and Thierry, made this summer great because we bonded as a group as we worked hard and hung out at various events. Finally, Jon has been an immense help by entertaining my questions, dealing with my grumpiness and encouraging me on both of my projects. As always, there are many others who made this a great experience but the folks mentioned are those who I worked with day-to-day. Thanks, everyone. I hope that what I started while here at CC sees much use in the future. Cheers.