Obtaining sources behind a firewall

[Sree]

Hi

I'd like to contribute to the Octave project - I'm a rookie c++
programmer. So I was trying to get the sources - but I'm behind a
highly restrictive firewall - so while hg clone works, the git
subclone for gnulib fails because it uses the git:// protocol. [ Only
port 80 and 443 works for me  ]

I can clone gnulib separately by using
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/r/gnulib.git. Is there something that I
can do?

Also, could someone point me to resources from where I can get started?

TIA
-- 
Regards,
Sree