VBoxMount is a little tool for providing virtual disk images from VirtualBox as linux block devices. It uses the linux kernel's network block device driver to do it in userspace (otherwise we'd have to bring vbox code into kernelspace which is a no-go).
I have been developing it for Topalis. From the very beginning of the project it was clear that it should become open, and maybe integrated into VirtualBox itself later. It is currently hosted on Launchpad, including all its awesomeness (bazaar branches, releases, bug-tracker).
Grab the first release here. File bugs here. Have fun!

The next item on the ToDo is snapshot support.

P.S.: It is a bit ugly to build right now, mostly because the VirtualBox' SDK doesn't include the necessary headers, nor a package-config file. I will file a "bug" about that at their bug tracker and hope that this will change.
If out-of-tree building doesn't work, you could try the old in-tree branch here. The in-tree version is not as up-to-date as the out-of-tree since I only use the latter one for developing.

OMG, The Travelling GNOME was here ...

... he met the gang ...

... enjoyed the view ...

... and watched the humans coding.

The other human on the photo is Clemens Buss, my SoC Student, who visited me to hack on GEmblem and GEmblemedIcon. Which landed upstream. His first code in GNOME, already at the very heart of it! I am a proud Monkey - aeh Mentor! :-)
Next step is to make use of it in the HAL volume monitor in gvfs and patch nautilus to use it. Of course its also the foundation for the general use of Emblems ins gvfs/gio - which of course needs lots of thinking and coding.

Weave is the new Google Browser Sync. Weave also seems to be really open. Maybe we can have our own http://services.gnome.org and an Epiphany extention. ;-)

The Gtk+ Hackfest was good in many ways. Not only did I see a lot of cool people that I haven't seen for a long time (since I missed GUADEC last year) but I also met a few new ones, that I only knew from IRC before, like e.g. hpj. Having those clever people around is also a good way to learn new tricks and steal some useful scripts. It was really motivating for me. I used most of the time in Berlin to do some real hacking and the result of it was the implementation of GtkMountOperation which hit svn yesterday. My first (major) patch to Gtk+. Yay! Of course I also spent time hacking on the webdav backend and gvfs in general which is also my main job these days since we have spring break and canonical is contracting me, until university starts again in mid April, to hack on gvfs to make it stable for the next ubuntu release, i.e. Hardy. I also became maintainer of gvfs, thus continuing the tradition to co maintain the virtual file system for GNOME. I checked when that all started the other day: Dave Camp committed my re-write of the http method for gnome-vfs at the 22nd July of 2004. Its going to be 4 years soon. I also noticed the first patch I *reviewed* and committed was from Ryan. Beginning in April I will also try to do the impossible and fill in the big, big whole that will be there when Alex takes his well deserved break to be there for his little daughter Alice. Its going to be hard when there is no alex__ to ask for advice, but I am pretty confident that we will be fine, since there seem to be a lot of energetic and motivated new gvfs hackers, like Cosimo Cecchi, Carlos Garcia Campos, A. Walton and Wouter Bolsterlee. And of course the old guys like Bastien, Benjamin and David. Everybody is also very welcome to join the excitement and make gio/gvfs even more rocking! Start by joining the new gvfs mailing list. :-)
Last but not least, I had the job to sent "invitation" mails to mentors for this year's SoC but Ryan already announced on planet that everybody should just sign up and I think that makes more sense to do it that way, so I just repeat that invitation here: Help students and apply as a mentor if you are a member of the GNOME foundation. I have done it the last few years and its also a great experience.

Dear Lazyweb,

I am currently writing the dav backend for gvfs and I use apache + mod_dav for most of my my testing. I was now wondering if there is open webdav server out there that supports more features of the various webdav RFCs then mod_dav does. (E.g. ACL [RFC3744] or Redir [RFC4437]). An non-free but open server that I could use for testing would be fine as well.

The Google SoC Mentor summit was great fun. I realized how may different OpenSource projects are out there. The other thing that I did notice and that made me think a bit was that there were many OpenSource developers using Mac OS X or Windows. So while for me OpenSource is more the idea that software (and thus all the software stack I am running) should be not only free for everybody but also its code should be it seems that there are a lot of people that do think different. Or does Linux on the Desktop still suck so much? Oh, and the KDE guys rock. I recently overheared a KDE vs. GNOME discussion at my University and I think it is really ironic that the developers seem to get along quite well with each other while the users are fighting. ;-) All in all the summit restored a good deal of my hacking mojo. One last note: Leslie has so much energy, I believe she has coffee instead of blood in her veins.

As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top:
(note quite true, it was his idea)

We also had original American food ...

... which I should totally regret since I had to throw up 3 times during this night. I am now sooo looking forward to that 12 hour flight to Munich.

The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

(N.b. yes that is me on the picture and yes my hackergotchi is totally outdated, but Vincent loves it)