And what is Beacon you ask? Beacon is the new name for the new Haiku Full Text Indexing tool, that's what it is. Yesterday Ankur Sethi wrote over at the Haiku website an update to his project, along with the revealing of its new name. Ankur's been making good progress and at the moment, beacond (Beacon's daemon) can look for changes in files (text files only for now) and index the changes along with new files, start indexing when BFS volumes are mounted and stop when they're umounted and exclude certain folders from being indexed.

There's still work to be done of course and he mentions several items, but shortly after writing the progress update he posted a comment saying that he'd been able to reduce beacond's memory usage from 60MB to 7MB, quite a nice improvement. Head over and read the full post, it's an interesting read. Keep up the good workAnkur.

Earlier today Matt Madia wrote a piece over at the Haiku site detailing the progress made so far, in its first month (of three) by both Google Summer of Code 2009 and Haiku Code Drive 2009 students.

Progress has been made by the 6 students mentioned in Matt's piece, some more than others of course which is only natural and we'll all be looking forward to the second month progress report. Head over and read Matt's piece. Good work everyone!

Google Summer of Code student Maxime Simon (who was interviewd here at ICO last month) wrote earlier today a progress report on his project, including a couple of screenshots.

According to Maxime (and to a comment posted by him to his own report), he has now managed to build not only JavaScriptCore but the WebCore itself. Lots of more work is to be done by himself and Ryan but this is awesome work by the two already. Can't wait to see the final result. Who am I kidding? I can't wait to see the alpha result :)

Today we here at ICO bring you one more interview in the Google Summer of Code series, with both accepted and non-accepted students. Today's interview is with Alexey Burshtein, Israeli with Russian origins.

So without further delay, click below and I hope you enjoy reading it.

This time Haiku Italy gives us an interview with GSoC student Tom Fairfield. As you may recall (it was really recent), Tom will be taking part of the Haiku Code Drive 2009 working on the Services Kit and the interview was conducted by his mentor Pier Luigi Fiorini. Head over and enjoy the reading.

Soon we'll bring you yet another GSoC interview, so stay tuned.

Giuseppe Gargaro,member of the Funky Idea Software company (the company behind the software BePodder and Flickr Uploader), wrote to let us know that they'll, has released BePodder as freeware. It's a really good aggregator software and you have no more excuses not to give it a spin.

You can download it along with a free license keyfile and start using right away. Thanks Giuseppe (and Fuky Idea Software) for this.

There's been talks about it but now it's official: there will be a Haiku Code Drive 2009! In case you have no idea what I'm writing about, Haiku Code Drive is an opportunity for Google Summer of Code students who didn't make the cut to still work on their projects during the summer, while being paid of course, as if they were part of GSoC.

This year HCD will sponsor two students and their projects, which are:

• Ankur Sethi - Full-text indexing and search tool for Haiku. His mentor will be Rene Gollent(yay!)
• Tom Fairfield - Services Kit.

Haiku will pay $2500 USD for a complete project so that's a pretty good motivation :) Let's hope both these and GSoC's projects all come to a happy end and help improve Haiku further and further.

Three more interviews with Google Summer of Code students have been posted around the community. First we have BeOSNews' interview with student Ankur Sethi, who proposed to work on adding full text search and indexing capabilities to Haiku.

Next there's BeGroovy's interview with accepted student Bryce Groff who will be working to finish implementing the disk_device system in Haiku (improving DriveSetup), allowing for a better (functioning) partition tool in Haiku.

Finally HaikuWare brings us an interview with Ma Jie. Ma Jie is also one of the six accepted students and will be working on Zeroconf support. Head over, read them and enjoy.

More to come...

Today we bring you yet another in the ongoing series of GSoC student interviews. The interview was conducted by Humdinger of Haiku Gazette and we're delighted to host it for your reading pleasure:

Sean Healy is one of the programmers that have applied for Google's Summer of Code 2009. Sadly, his Haiku project wasn't one of the six granted slots for Haiku this year. Nevertheless, as a part of a series of GSoC interviews that is being held by various Haiku news sites, he took the time to answer a few of our questions.

[You can find this interview in German at the Haiku Gazette.]