Google Hosts CIFS Workshop

By Jeremy Allison, Open Source Team and Samba Core Developer

Around sixty developers from over twenty different companies converged on Google's Mountain View Campus at the end of September to sample the free food. Oh yes, and also to test their implementations of the CIFS network protocol for interoperability.

CIFS, the Common Internet File System (that's Windows Networking to you and me), is the file sharing protocol build into all Windows versions, and also MacOS X, Linux, HPUX and now Solaris clients. Samba is the best known Free Software implementation of CIFS, and most of the Samba Team were there to help improve Samba3 and Samba4's interoperability along with the other CIFS vendors.

Over the three days much code was written, much beer was drunk, and the air was turned blue with cursing when bugs were found! As the Samba Team were mentoring several Google Summer of Code^TM students, we also got to record a podcast about our experiences participating in the program over the past three years.

Thanks to Google for hosting the event and setting up the gigabit networking required. The endless coffee supply was also essential when dealing with network protocol problems.

The best summary of the success of our testing occurred on the final day of the event, when a sad and frustrated CIFS client programmer wrote the following on our testing notes whiteboard:

"the server *hates* me :-) :-)"

It was great to see everyone coming together, even people from competing companies, to help fix problems with everyone's implementations of CIFS. Look for the resulting improvements in new versions of products and future releases of Samba.

The Samba Team takes a break during the CIFS Workshop.

(Photo Credit: Leslie Hawthorn)

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Google Funds COLLADA Support for Mac and Linux

By Christian LaForte, Feeling Software

COLLADA, the standard 3D interchange format, makes it much easier to translate complex animated 3D models across Google Earth, Google Sketch-Up, Adobe Photoshop, Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3, Autodesk Maya, and many other applications. COLLADA integrates 3D geometry, textures, complex material, complex skeletal and facial animation, physical simulations, and many more aspects. With such power comes complexity: integrating COLLADA from scratch in your application is not for the faint-hearted. Luckily developers have created reusable libraries to simplify this process, including FCollada, which is open-source, well tested, can import all versions of COLLADA and has been integrated into many applications.

We've worked on development of FCollada over the past two years, thanks to support from Google's Open Source Progams Office. Until recently, the library was only offered for Windows; it is now available for Mac OS X and several Linux distributions.

Google's sponsorship also enabled us to distribute and support two additional tools for Linux and Mac OS X enthusiasts:

• ColladaMaya, a complete COLLADA translator designed for Autodesk Maya. It's now available for all three major platforms under the MIT license.


• Feeling Viewer, a reference viewer for COLLADA content, supports all standard COLLADA features. A stand-alone version of the viewer is available for free on Linux and Mac.

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Convert Google Gadgets to Other Widget Platforms

Post by Dann Lee, Associate Support Engineer

The Google Gadgets directory contains thousands of gadgets you can use on various google.com sites. In October 2006, we released Google Gadgets For Your Page, allowing you to embed your favorite gadgets in your blogs, websites, and other webpages. Now you can take Google Gadgets and convert them to run in your Windows Vista Sidebar or Mac OS X Dashboard. With the use of third-party utility applications, this is trivial to do.

Mesa Dynamics offers a free widget converter application called Amnesty Generator which converts Google Gadgets to Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets. On February 2nd, they announced a public beta release that's capable of converting Google Gadgets to Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets as well. This increases distribution of Google Gadgets further and gives gadget authors access to an even wider audience. In addition to Amnesty Generator, Widgetops Universal Google Gadget Widget is a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget that converts Google Gadgets to run on the dashboard.

Viewing Google Gadgets on different sites or platforms does not require any changes. The answer to the question "Why should I write a Google Gadget?" is hopefully becoming more and more clear as rendering platforms become increasingly available, which now includes:

• Google Personalized Homepage
• Google Gadgets For Your Webpage (anywhere on the web)
• Google Page Creator
• Google Desktop
• Windows Vista Sidebar (converter)
• Mac OS X Dashboard (converter, dashboard widget converter)

For more information on creating gadgets, visit Google Gadgets API.

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