Author Archive

Two Googlers will be speaking at FOSDEM 2006, which takes place in Brussels on February 25th and 26th. Greg Stein will be talking about Subversion, and Jon Trowbridge will tell you all about Beagle.



If you see us there, come up and say hello: we'd love to talk to you!

So if you live in Europe and care about free software, you should really be going to FOSDEM. The organizers did a fantastic job, and I was impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of the attendees. Greg and I had a blast!



While we were in Belgium, a whole gaggle of Googlers were in Texas for PyCon. Ben Collins-Sussman reports that "Dallas was full of rain. And meat." But despite (or maybe because of?) that, he says it was a great conference and that a high point was our very own Guido van Rossum's keynotes on the past and future of Python.



The best thing about conferences is always the opportunity to meet new people. As great as the Internet is as a tool for communication and collaboration, there is still no substitute for talking to someone face-to-face. When I say that you should come up and say "Hi", I'm not kidding --- that is what we are there for! But if you missed us this time, don't worry: we'll be at plenty of conferences this spring and summer. Watch this space for more info...

If you do web development and need your pages to render properly in any browser, you should take a look at the latest open source project from Google. ExplorerCanvas is a JavaScript implementation of the canvas tag for Internet Explorer. The HTML element allows you to create programmable 2-D graphics, and it is supported by Firefox, Safari and Opera 9. To make your canvas-ified pages work in IE, all you have to do is add a single script tag.



We've made the code for ExplorerCanvas available on SourceForge: check it out!

The code just keeps on coming! Today we've released Google Ctemplate, a library implementing a simple but powerful template language for C++ that emphasizes separating logic from presentation. You've already used Ctemplate: this is the same code that formats all of the pages for Google's web search.



Source code and RPMs for Ctemplate are available from SourceForge. Give it a try!