Monthly Archives: February 2014

Week Two

I really enjoyed the IRC chat class. I thought that the silence was excellent, and that the logs were a good way to get everyone on record for what they said. As far as the readings go, I felt that the most interesting one was the “14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source” article. I felt that the author hit on many important, easy, quick ways to contribute. One way that stuck with me was creating a real world example. Personally, I always look at the usage examples when learning a new cli utility. 

From the blog ckelley6 » CS401 by ckelley6 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week Two, more ways to help than just programming

So, it appears that I’ve been under the false assumption that my only way to contribute to a large project, regardless of corporate or open source, was through straight programming.  How fortunate I am that I’ve been wrong.

I’ve never considered myself an ‘ace programmer’ by any means, and I have more than one not so fond memories of staring at pages of code wondering why it won’t work.  This has lead to a more favored past time of coding, debugging.  Generating code for me is often slow, and tedious.  While the pseudo-code can flow easily, actual implementation takes a bit more work and requires even more headaches.  But, once I get the general code going, debugging it for errors and making it run a bit more efficient seems to be something I can do, rather easily; especially when its belongs to someone else.  Perhaps that is what I should be setting my sights on, improving how well I can debug code, as it appears to be just another valuable facet of coding.

In a somewhat related event, the class I am working with on the OpenMRS project has been introduce to yet another invaluable tool, IRC chat.  Nothing can help you become familiar with a new program then spending a couple hours straight working with it and communicating with your peers.  Reminds me a little bit of MSN messenger or AOL back in my youth, but now with actual purpose.

From the blog aboulais » CS WSU by aboulais and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS-401 Week 2

This second week of the course, we were able to use the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in class to host a discussion about on going activity in the class. We discussed about the reading assignments, we discussed about some of the basic commands to use during an IRC. It was a good experience to be a part of because we had a normal class in the classroom by only using the IRC to do all the communication and disscussions.

This week’s reading assignment involved various topics. Chapters 5 and 6 in the OpenMRS guide gave insight on how to get invlove into the world of openMRS and the kinds of tools needed to get the ball rolling. The chapters also talked about team work and how to get help from a team member. Another article that I enjoyed reading was “14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Genius or a Rock Star.” I like this article because it encourages individuals who are not so good in programming like me, to participate in a software project without worring too much no about the programming task. The article suggest a few other tasks that can be contributed to the project. I also read the two articles on the bug tracking system which I find to be helpful in the field of software development. The bug tracking system is used to record of any bugs that were found during the development process. This can be helpful and saves time during debugging.

From the blog ~~~ACordor Blog~~~~ » CS@Worcester by juwee05 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

A week of Refactoring

I began this week hoping to finish the hip rafter roof system implementation for my new Rafter Maker app.  However, I ran into a bit of a snag which required some restructuring.  The issue was – up until now, every roof system I have done, shed and gables, has only required one rafter, but a hip roof has three different rafters.   At first it did not seem like much of an issue but it became apparent that with the way the apps navigation was set up; I could not simply add a next button.  The underlying reason was thus far every class and activity has been reusable, because rafters are very similar whether or not they belong different roof systems.  Thus far I was developing separate input classes for each roof type, which would cause my program to have unnecessary repetitive code.  Instead, I chose to simply build a few FragmentActivities and fragments, which take in common inputs.  They passed a RoofState by the main menu when a roof is selected which has allowed me to reduce the number of classes and code overall.

In addition to this, there was a more obvious design issue with having multiple instruction sets.  With only one rafter to handle for shed and gable roofs it was easy to just offer an instruction button once the template data was generated.  However, having the one button for instructions would not allow room for a ‘next rafter’ button; in the case of a hip or gambrel roof, which require multiple different rafters, without effecting the ascetics of the app.  For that reason, I spent a good bit of time studying the android action bar.  I set up an spinner and several buttons and menus to get a feel for what I liked and eventually settled on just using an Xml menu item with other nested menu items creating the effect of a button with a submenu.  This allowed me to display an icon as well as text in the action bar that offers other options for instruction.  Now the app will be able to offer multiple instructions sets to help users throughout the process of building their roof, as well as handle roof systems with multiple different rafters.

The progress made this week was undoubtably in the right direction, but it has left me slightly behind on my timeline for completion.  In an attempt to make up lost time I will implement hip and gambrel roof templates this week.  The following week will be spent adding a few more templates and then the week after that on drawing up the rest of the diagrams I need and instructions.  I will be hoping to launch the android beta in about four weeks.  Then I will begin working on the iOS version, which should go smoother having already worked out a good many kinks developing for Android.  I have decided I will post pics in a few weeks once I have completed the necessary diagrams to truly show off the apps functionality.

Till next time,

Jason Hintlian

From the blog jasonhintlian » cs-wsu by jasonhintlian and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Starting CS401

I am hope to get a bridge out of this class as I’m not a very public person it is difficult for me to contact people i don’t know i am hopeful that this class will allow me to learn how other developers both stay in contact as well as starting to think like them. as For the readings i think that most software could be open source and free but it  is not something the world is ready to do yet. we are slowly moving to a point were we will be ready.

From the blog Computer Science » CS401 by Renowneddragoon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

GitHub activity

Doing the github activity I learned that I can also use a gui for commits, and other git commands. I am used to the command line however one great benefit I got from the activity was through the gui it is very easy to see the diffs between the files commited to git.

From the blog tbruceblog » cs401 by tbruce731 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS 401 – Software Development Process

This is my first blog post ever. Huzzah.

[What do I expect?]

Entering into my last semester at WSU, I expected my capstone class to be heavily interwoven with the knowledge gained from the other CS courses up to this point. Using all skills and techniques of software design and analysis and my average level of coding, I believe it is going to be a hard but valuable 16 weeks. I think it’s taken too long for us to learn about GitHub, something that should be taught to us very early on so we are masters at using it as the years build up. It’s unfortunate that I am only just beginning to know how to use one of the biggest platforms for version control and I head out into the real world in a couple of months. The same goes for IRC. Having heard about and generally knowing what IRC is for years, I’ve never had a reason to use it so I never bothered with it. Not having the class time to go over it was a shame, but I think I’ll be able to figure it out.

[Readings]

After reading through the articles, it doesn’t exactly add to anything I didn’t already have a grasp on as far as the ideas go for free and open source software. The quote from The Cathedral article, “Too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love”, pretty much describes how I feel for a future of software programming.

Free software, as defined by the other articles, was pretty strict in cases where it defined certain things not free, but I guess it has to be in order to promote the truest form of open source software. I think overall it’s a nice premise and cause worth promoting, but in the end it just results in things like where we are with Linux (dozens of distro’s, i.e.). Open source projects should more be used for promoting concepts and ideas as ways to teach people to code better. Grabbing source code to investigate what certain things do and see the inside of the program is a good learning tool, but developing and tweaking each aspect of it and releasing it to the public convolutes everything.

[Git activity]

The entire GitHub activity was confusing and too “hardcore” from what I experienced. The whole manual process of doing it via command line was simply done in a matter of a few minutes with the GUI version. I think in this day and age, to say that you “aren’t a real programmer if you use a GUI/mouse” is too harsh of a constraint that people try to abide by in this field. It’s 2014. There are UI’s to make people’s lives easier and actions simpler, and we should use them. I was able to get up and running using the GUI GitHub install (not the 3rd party site download) and I think it represents it pretty well.

[IRC activity]

I have not done anything other than download an IRC client (HydraIRC: http://www.hydrairc.com/content/downloads) so I am not sure how much I can comment on this. Hopefully we can use it more in depth in the next coming class meetings.

From the blog slykrysis » cs-wsu by slykrysis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 1

This class seems like it is going to be a lot different then some of the Computer Science classes that i have taken in the past. Up to now i feel like we have been doing just a lot of busy work type programming nothing that i feel is actually too practical. I think it will be very interesting to work on something a lot larger and more practical then in the past. I am also interested to see how the open source aspect will play out.

I feel like a lot of the ideas in The Cathedral and the Bazaar where things i was already familiar with but it was still a very informative article. Seeing the author first getting into this open source project and him starting to see all of the benefits of open source programming really helps reinforce some ideas that i was already familiar with.

The free vs. open article although interesting was not something that i particularly worry about.  The only difference that i could really see was that in some cases software under Open source initiative might have restrictions on who can release the executable version however the source code is still available. I see that free is more of an ideology versus open which is more about just getting a better piece of software but at the end of the day for me the differences are not really big enough to concern me.

I really liked reading the OpenMRS developers guide because it gave some background to what where going to be working on. Seems like the project is for a good cause and beneficial to many. The project is also very large containing 40 thousand lines of code and being used in many parts of the world. These things all seem very exciting and i am looking forward to working on this project

I haven’t used too much of Git or Irc however i did get both setup and working. I am interested in seeing how these things work more closely since both seem like great tools for making your life as a programmer and especially as programmer that’s part of a team much easier.

From the blog Dhimitris CS Blog » CS401 by dnatsis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS-401 WEEK 1

I am really excited about this class because it serves as a bridge
from the class room to the real world of solving problems. I am expecting to get a lot out of this class. I want to get the experience and skills of working with a team to find a solution to a problem, I also want to experience the open source software community and learn more about it. I want to develop professional skills from this class so I can an easier transition to the real world.

As far as the two activities (IRC and Git activity) I was able to do the
IRC activity. I went online and into the chat room just to test it out and see which wasn’t bad. I have not been able to complete the Git activity
because I cant find the instructions on the wiki page.

From the blog ~~~ACordor Blog~~~~ » CS@Worcester by juwee05 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Initial Blog

As I thought about my expectations of this course, Software Development Process, undoubtedly hope to have the opportunity to learn the techniques to solve development problems in an effective and efficient manner. Also, I am excited to work on a real and large project. I think it will give me the experience I need within the Computer Science field.

Writing blogs will be challenging because this is something that I did not expect at all. I’m not a blogger, actually this will be my first time writing blogs.

This course could not have had a better start than by reading “Free vs. Open”, along with other readings and the in-class activities.

Free vs. Open

When thinking about Free Software, most people might think about software free of charge. However, the idea is more complex since it promotes user’s respect and freedom, even if one has to pay for such software. Personally, I think that free software it a good way to express our intellectual and to contribute in the improvement or development of new  software.

For software to be considered as “free” must meet four conditions: 1. Users have the freedom to run the program, 2. freedom to study and change the program, 3. freedom to redistribute copies, 4. freedom to distribute  copies of the modified version.

On the other hand, open source licenses are too restrictive; cannot be use it as it is our means, and do not allow the user to install modified versions of executables.

OpenMRS: Health IT

An electronic medical record (EMR) is not only a need of replacing paper with digital technology, but it also provides the opportunity to improve the workflow. Persuading physicians to use information technology (IT) in their practices may result in increased efficiency and reduced costs. OpenMRS is one among many of the different EMR softwares and here are the key points:

  • Accuracy (e.g. can reduce medical errors.)
  • Efficiency (e.g. improve data exchange between health it applications.)
  • Better patient care (e.g. can support decision making by health care professionals)
  • Understanding data about public health (e.g. data captured can be used to monitor public health standards.)
  • Serving as a record of patient care (e.g. historical record of patient care that can be easily transferrable to different locations.)

The information provided in the OpenMRS Guide is a good start for a better understanding of this project.

Git Activity

The Git program is something new for me, but the activity in class gave me a brief idea of the software. Since we are going to work in teams during this semester, this free-open software seems to be easy to learn and appropriate.

From the blog Naty Zelaya » CS@Worcester by natyzelaya and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.