For our second year in a row, I'm delighted to announce that BRL-CAD has once again been accepted into the 2009 Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! GSoC is a summer program hosted by Google every year where they pay students a stipend of $4500 to work on specific open source projects. It's a highly competitive program both for the students and for the mentoring organizations. This year, there were approximately 400 open source organizations that applied with 150 being selected to participate.

BRL-CAD uses a fantastic system called "CIA" to instantaneously announce source code changes to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) discussion channel. It has pretty much nothing to do with the US gov't agency of the same name, but everything to do with keeping the most dedicated members of our project instantly informed of on-going activities. Notoriously difficult to track, though, are changes made to our wiki ... until now.

Included below are some BRL-CAD project statistics that have been tabulated for the past fiscal year, from October 2007 to October 2008. It was rather interesting to pull the numbers to see how we compare to the previous year, so I thought I'd share with you some of the details. Since, we've not ever (publicly) done this before, a few words are worth mentioning before getting to the results...

I'm happy to (belatedly) announce the release of BRL-CAD 7.12.6 with several enhancements and bug fixes. Notably, NIRT gets several new output formatting options allowing users to easily select different data reporting options without having to define their own custom configuration files. The tire tool's behavior has been improved with better data protection, more editing flexibility, and improved rendering.

I'm happy to announce the availability of BRL-CAD 7.12.4. This release contains numerous enhancements to MGED's mirror command, now with the ability to mirror an object across arbitrary vectors or points along a standard axis. Additionally, NIRT now has a new "gap" option for reporting the empty spaces between objects with additional formatting options being considered. The release also has an impressive new procedural database geometry tool for generating vehicle tires.

There's a great new tutorial on the MGED 'oed' object edit command now available. This tutorial was written by Cliff Yapp and provides a good introduction to some of the fundamental command-line object editing capabilities in MGED.

With a few minor updates, bug fixes, and tweaks, the 7.12.2 release is now available. Contrary to the 7.12.0 release notes, we're *actually* finally providing an updated installer for Windows (really .. it's already uploaded!). With much thanks and appreciation, we now have a new and improved installer for BRL-CAD on Windows due to the efforts of Jonathan Bonomo. There are also useful enhancements to RT, RTAREA, and MGED's clone and saveview commands among other enhancements.

I'm very pleased to announce the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student selections for BRL-CAD! After a detailed evaluation and review period, we requested and were approved to mentor four students over the upcoming summer. Our students were selected from among nearly two dozen applicants based on their potential as a new long-term developer, their ability to communicate effectively, the quality of their project proposal, their technical ability, and our ability to effectively mentor them.

BRL-CAD has been accepted as a mentoring organization in the 2008 Google Summer of Code! The program pays students a stipend of $4500 over the course of summer to work on open source projects. The student application period is open March 24th through April 7th (extended from March 31st). Students interested in participating should visit the BRL-CAD GSoC wiki pages for more information about the submission process and details on some of our suggested project ideas.

We are proud to announce the release of BRL-CAD 7.12.0, bringing together many months of effort from the BRL-CAD developers. This version is the most feature-filled backwards-compatible release to date, providing more than 75 new features, bug fixes, and other enhancements. Included in those efforts are enhancements to the Windows port, a new INTAVAL geometry importer, return of the "clone" command to mged, Tcl/Tk dependency enhancements, and much more.