Binary Elysium

Huzzah! Google announced the list of 1125 fortunate students that will be developing for Google’s Summer of Code program. I’m a member of this group, which means I will be writing code for an open source project and getting paid for it!

I was asked by my community mentor to write an introduction that was posted at various places, and I will re post it below.

Hey everyone! My name is Casey Link and I am an undergraduate Computer Science and Philosophy major at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. As a part of Google Summer of Code I will be tightly integrating the MP3Tunes service with Amarok 2 as well as implementing a generic synchronization framework between Collections. In Amarok 2, collections have been abstracted, allowing Amarok to treat a local SQL collection the same as an online Web Service based collection. Why is this awesome? With the addition of the service architecture (thanks to Nikolaj) it is now possible to plug in remote, local, and soon portable collections without having to differentiate between their interfaces. Not convinced yet? Here is a real example of just how cool this is. Enter MP3Tunes. MP3Tunes provides an "online music space" for its users to store their entire music collection so they can listen to their music anywhere. Using their API and client libraries, applications can be developed for just about any device, so you can literally listen to your music anywhere! This summer I will implement full MP3Tunes functionality into Amarok so you can seamlessly synchronize your local music collection with your MP3Tunes Locker. Not only will you be able to upload your local music collection, but if you add music to your MP3Tunes Locker via other methods - such as buying music from an online store - the new tracks will be added to your collection. This is just the beginning. Technology is seeing a trend towards ubiquitous connectivity and information storage in 'the Cloud'. It won't be long before "local" and "remote" are terms of the past as you are able to seamlessly access your information everywhere. Amarok and MP3Tunes will be on the forefront of this technological shift. I hope you'll be there with us.

In case anyone is interested I’ve posted my original project proposal that was a part of my GSoC application.