Author Archives: jamescelona

Which project to participate in?

Last week was the real start of our cs401 class, we got to finally pick a project to work on and after a little downsizing of the list we ended up with 5 (in no particular order):

Libre Office
Sage
Irrlicht
Firefox
Eucalyptus

Personally I wanted to work on Sage because some of the students in class have an interest in math (trevor/matt) but, most students don’t have a passion for math and that wasn’t the winner. First off the list was Sage, Firefox, and Libre Office. It was down to just two which, up until yesterday, we were going to work on Irrlicht and Eucalyptus together but only a few people were passionate about Irrlicht so the project was dropped to fully focus on Eucalyptus, which is a cloud based computing system that is open source and we will be testing on CentOS.

Irrlicht would have been interesting to work on but with Eucalyptus we get a chance to do something that will be used, unless we completely ruin it somehow. We are going to be fully testing their 3.0 version and doing all the documentation that we can complete. We get a chance to try to break it, too. I don’t have enough experience with a Linux distribution. I have had Ubuntu but it’s only on my virtual machine so I never really fully immerse myself in it and can’t get fully comfortable with it. I plan on dual booting with CentOS so when I’m working on this project I fully experience it. I am very excited to work on this project, and can’t wait to start.

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

IRC chat/Wiki Edit (My first experience)

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to keep blogging as much as I should, so I am sorry for the few week delay between posts and hope it doesn’t happen again.

For our second cs401 class we wanted to plunge into the idea of working with a group of people that we won’t necessarily be in the same room, or even the same continent. It was..interesting. I had used software similar to IRC, for gaming mostly, so I wasn’t completely lost in the subject and after a few minutes of figuring out how to get in the teaching open source channel, it began.

Our assignment was to edit another persons wiki page the only stipulation being that we were not allowed to talk to the person’s page that we were editing, aside from the IRC chat. I ended up working with a classmate named Jonathan and his wiki page ended up not too shabby, if I do say so myself, wiki I had a little fun with it and my person favorite comment from him was, “it reads like a Nigerian scam letter”. Overall it went pretty smoothly because of the external resources we had, I had his facebook page and twitter, IRC chat was more just to confirm details and get a little more information.

I enjoyed using IRC chat, it wasn’t really applicable in this situation considering I have Jonathan on facebook, twitter, and I am capable of texting him but obviously if it was someone I didn’t have those resources for than the IRC would be perfect.

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

CS401 First Post

What do I want to accomplish in this course? I’m not really sure, yet. All I know is I would like to further my knowledge of open source software and help in any way I can, I guess I picked the right class. I hope we can find a project that we can actually make an impact on and can look back and think, “I helped make that work”. I’m sure I will like working in a group this semester as long as we all can work together and not end up one or two people doing all the work.

What do I want to learn in the course? More About Open Source. I like the concept of it but I have to admit my knowledge for the differences between “open source”, “free”, “libre”, and more of the terms we talked about on the first day are pretty limited. I thought I had a slight bit of knowlege on the subject but, unfortunately on the first day that was quickly invalidated.

About the book, I don’t know how I feel about reading for long periods of time on a computer screen, I just read for about 15 minutes or so and took a break and I’m fine but the idea of a book not costing money while being directly related to the course is great. and the whole “not having to pay” is great, as I mentioned. Free is good.