[Openicc] Google Summer of Code 2009: Student application

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

a student applied for a color management project in this Google Summer
of Code via the Linux Foundation. See the application below. If someone 
of you wants to mentor him or participate in evaluating his application, 
please sign up as a GSoC mentor for the Linux Foundation (organization 
link ID: LF) on http://socghop.appspot.com/. This does not oblige you to 
actually mentor this student.

If the same application arrived also for OpenICC we can choose which org 
will host this project depending on how many slots each of us gets and 
how urgent our other projects are.

    Till

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Title:  	 Printer configuration backend for Oyranos
Student: 	joe simon
Mentor: 	No mentor assigned
Possible Mentors: 	None
Abstract:
This project will help extend printer color profile capabilities for 
Oyranos, a Color Management System (CMS) that allows users to configure 
ICC profiles. At the moment, CUPS has a workable but limited solution 
for configuring ICC profiles associated with printing devices. By 
modifying Oyranos to receive profile data from CUPS, it is possible to 
utilize a more customizable printer pipelining system for Linux, as well 
as enhance Kolor Manager (which relies on Oyranos as a backend).
Content:

My name is Joseph Simon and I am a CS student attending a community 
college in California, while taking upper division computer science 
courses at Chico State University through an online concurrent 
enrollment program.  I am in my early twenties and living in the San 
Francisco Bay Area, where I was raised for most of my life (even though 
my birthplace was in the Philippines).  Computers have always had a 
special place in my heart, although it wasn't until I got into college 
that I really started to appreciate them through programming.

Since I use Linux for most of my programming work at school, I mainly 
stick with coding in that environment (along with using a simple text 
editor).  I regularly program with Java and C/C++, although Perl and 
python are languages that I am not too familiar with.  In the expected 
skills section of the proposal, I am able to communicate ideas in a 
'faceless' environment on-line, and am able to program using portable 
plain C code.

In the past, I have worked alongside the OpenICC organization in 
successfully completing two GSOC projects: one involving the improvement 
of Hal's code for Lprof in the 2007 GSOC, and another project in 2008 
involving the creation of a system-wide color management frontend for 
KDE-Linux (called "Kolor Manager"*), using Oyranos as a backend. 
Outside of working on programming assignments in school, both those 
Summer of Code projects were actually my first exposures in programming 
actual OSS code.

Regarding the project itself, I would like to achieve two main goals:

    1.

       Have CUPS functionality integrated with Oyranos.
    2.

       Integrate the printer-enabled Oyranos with Kolor Manager. (A 
slight extension of the original proposal.)

I chose this idea because being able to work with printer profiles is 
something that is very much needed for open source color management. 
Oyranos is able to fully transport monitor profile data between itself 
and KM at this time.  Helping write the code so that the Oyranos is able 
to also receive printer profiles will not only improve the functionality 
of Kolor Manager, but the entire open-source printer pipeline scheme. 
Having worked with the Oyranos code in the past, as well as implementing 
snippets of the CUPS API in KM, I feel that I am the most qualified to 
tackle this particular project.

In trying to work with a seemingly long (but in reality, short) three 
month period, I developed a basic roadmap for scheduling this project. 
Much of the project will rely on getting the backend updated, making it 
is necessary to plan out CUPS/Oyranos solutions before GSOC officially 
begins. An OpenPrinting Summit will take place in April, which means 
working closely with members who will have attended the summit will be 
beneficial for additional project input. Researching and figuring out 
the best way to leverage the CUPS API with Oyranos during the interim 
period will make planning the three months of coding much easier and if 
possible, will result in an early head start of the project.  The 
expected commitment for this will be a third of a full-time schedule, 
since this is around my school year and finals.

If the two main goals are completed within the project time frame, we 
can consider working on a tertiary goal of a general update for Kolor 
Manager. By updating the code and adding new features to the GUI, we can 
expect Kolor Manager to be promoted to a level above the beta KDE 
“playground” status.

When there are some coding issues or unexpected bugs that occur after 
GSOC is over, I will try my hardest dto find time in the weekends to 
solve them (as school will be back in session by then).  But overall, 
the majority of my summer will comply with a full schedule and that no 
day will be without something that is accomplished in the project, 
whether big or small.

*For a link to the original abstract of my Kolor Manager project and 
sample code, please see the additional info link.
Additional info: 	http://code.google.com/soc/2008/openicc/about.html