Category Archives: CS 401

Ways to contribute to Open Source

An interesting aspect about open-source software is that it allows you to use your skills where you feel comfortable working with. Open-source helps people to discover that you don’t have to master all levels of computer science to contribute a piece of knowledge.

Personally, the readings have opened my eyes, and I’m glad that writing code is not the only way to contribute to large projects. Having 14 or more different ways to contribute to major projects make newbies want to add something to it.

IRC Activity

IRC activity in-class was enjoyable. It’s been a long time since the last time I chatted for over an hour. IRC is a great way to communicate in real time while working on large projects, especially since most people are looking for answers right away.

IRC is a great tool because it can be easily installed on user’s computers who have access to internet, regardless of the operating system running on the computer. IRC has different features such as chat and data transfer, file sharing, and also allows one to one communication using the private message.

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

Week 2

The IRC chat in class This week was interesting i felt that people were willing to contribute to the topics. Although it was very strange sitting in a class with no one talking yet still having a discussion. As for the Reading it became apparent that you do not need to code to help a project along although I doubt Ill be closing bug tickets that were just accidentally left open. The OpenMRS Developers Guide gave a few Good pages on there was of communicating as well as how to contribute.

From the blog Computer Science » CS401 by Renowneddragoon 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.

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.

My Year of Open Source – Post Mortem

Some of you will remember the post My Year of Open Source from 1 January 2011 – almost 3 years ago – where I made a New Year’s resolution to participate more in FOSS. Here are the goals I listed for myself for that year:

I have four main goals (at this point):

  1. Learn the tools and processes myself by participating in a FOSS project.
  2. Figure out what FOSS tools and processes I can begin to introduce my students to in earlier courses.
  3. Figure out what FOSS experience(s) I can provide my non-CS students.
  4. Find a project (or projects) to place my Senior CS students into in Spring 2012.

Well, it was as successful as most New Year’s resolutions – meaning, not very. Or maybe, not completely. I was (partially) successful at some of those goals, although almost none were completed within the year that I so rashly promised.

Figure out what FOSS tools and processes I can begin to introduce my students to in earlier courses.

This one was somewhat successful, although not until this past June (2013) when I managed to have my summer Introduction to Programming class (all six students!) use git and Bitbucket to collaborate with their lab partners and to submit their work to me for grading. Fresh from that (small-scale) success, I tried to have my Programming for Non-CS Majors class do the same, and ran into some scaling issues. We’re working on the solution for that right now – more in a future post.

My Spring 2013 capstone project course did use git and GitHub for our project developing an app for a Worcester Art Museum exhibit. But my understanding of git was not a good as it could have been and the student use of git was spotty. We also planned to use Pivotal Tracker, but didn’t get very far. We did successfully use IRC, however.

Find a project (or projects) to place my Senior CS students into in Spring 2012.

My Spring 2012 capstone project course worked with Eucalyptus, and had some pretty strong interaction with some of the members of the community, but I think that both the students and I felt we weren’t as successful as we could have been due to some technical issues early on in the course. For Spring 2013, I abandoned working in an existing FOSS project in favor of new development when the Worcester Art Museum opportunity presented itself. We did, however, make our code freely available (https://github.com/CS-Worcester/JILOA)

Figure out what FOSS experience(s) I can provide my non-CS students.

This goal got very little attention, other than my abortive attempt at using git in the Programming for Non-CS Majors course.

Learn the tools and processes myself by participating in a FOSS project.

And I still have not made any real progress in my own participation in a FOSS project.

However, that’s all going to change. Stay tuned for My Year of Open Source v2…

 

From the blog On becoming an Eccentric Professor... » CS@Worcester by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

IRC: 1, Nemo: 0

Our CS 401 Software Development class was canceled on Monday, 11 February 2013 due to ongoing snow removal and cleanup on campus from the Nemo blizzard. (Worcester received 28.5 inches of snow in just about 24 hours.) This is a problem for a class that meets only on Mondays, especially with the next Monday being a holiday.

As soon as the campus closing was announced on Sunday afternoon, I emailed the students to announce that we would replace class the next day with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) meeting. (Actually, that’s a lie. The first thing I did was panic, then I screamed, then I ranted to my family about the injustice of cancelling my Monday-only class. Then I thought about holding class on IRC…) Here is the message I sent the students on our class listserv:

Campus is closed tomorrow, so we will not have class. We will not have class next week either due to the President’s Day holiday.

This is going to seriously mess up our schedule. I’ll think about how we can carry on in the two weeks.

Let’s try to hold an IRC chat tomorrow during class time (2:00pm-4:30pm). I’ll send out instructions on installing (optional) and using an IRC client later tonight. I have instructions already written up, I just have to find them, possibly update them, and send them out.

Holding class on IRC would be a little bit of a challenge since the students had not used IRC yet, so this would have to serve as both an IRC familiarization exercise and a useful meeting. I sent them the following message to prepare them:

We are going to meet today on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) at 2:00pm.

You should read through this in advance so that you are prepared. Especially if you are going to install an IRC client – you will need time to set it up. I suggest trying this out at least 1/2 hour in advance to make sure you get the connection working. I’ll stay on IRC all day so you can try out chatting.

You have two choices for connecting to the IRC server:

  1. Install an IRC client. There are many available, you may want to try a few to see which you like the best. Some are standalone applications, and some are browser plugins (like Chatzilla for Firefox.) I’ve heard that mIRC is the most popular for Windows, I use Colloquy on the Mac.
    Here are some of the most important settings you will need. How you set these will depend on your client. You will want to install your client and do the setup in advance of our meeting, so you aren’t late.

    1. Server: irc.freenode.net
    2. If you can set a port, you may want to use 7000 since it can be used for an SSL connection.
    3. Nickname: Choose your own*
    4. Channel: ##WSU-CS401
  2. Use the webchat page on freenode: https://webchat.freenode.net
    1. Nickname: Choose your own*
    2. Channels: ##WSU-CS401
    3. Complete the reCAPTCHA
    4. Connect

* You may want to register your nickname, so that no one else can use it. That way we can all get used to looking for a specific nickname for you. See the instructions: http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#registering

IRC Resources

The most important commands which chatting:

  • /SERVER new-server-hostname
  • /NICK new-nickname
  • /QUIT
  • /JOIN #channelname
  • /ME does something
    This command is used for saying that you are doing something like:
    /ME is looking for that information in my email
  • /LEAVE

Chatting:

  • If you want to address your comments to everybody, just type your comment and hit return.
  • If you want to address your comments to a specific person, type their nickname followed by a colon, then your message. E.g.

         kwurst: I have the answer to your question

I had created a course-specific channel on freenode last spring, so we could use that channel, but to hold a useful meeting, felt that it would be vital to have a MeetBot running to take minutes. I could have used used the #teachingopensource channel, which has zodbot installed, but then the minutes would be saved on Fedora’s website, rather than ours. So I decided to install Supybot with the MeetBot plugin on our own server here.

I managed to get MeetBot installed (mostly – gives me an error message for every meeting command I give, but then does it anyway) and we had a very successful meeting for a class of IRC newbies: http://cs.worcester.edu/kwurst/wsu-cs401/2013/wsu-cs401.2013-02-11-21.13.html

From the blog On becoming an Eccentric Professor... » CS@Worcester by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I built my first PhoneGap app!

My CS 401 Software Development class for Spring 2013 at Worcester State University is developing an iPad app for the Worcester Art Museum (more on that in another post.)

Because few of the students have Macs the development environment was going to be a problem. There was the option of using either WSU’s or WAM’s Mac labs, but I figured that the students would want to work outside of the normal hours of the labs. Fortunately, Stoney Jackson at Western New England University suggested that I look into PhoneGap, a free and open source framework for developing cross-platform apps using the web technologies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. PhoneGap will take a site developed using those technologies and compile it into a native app on a number of platforms, including iOS.

Even better, Adobe, which now owns PhoneGap, has set up a build server. That means that we can just have their site do the build, rather than having to rely on the few students in the class who do have Macs to do the building. To use it for free, your code does have to be in a public GitHub repo, but we were going that route anyway.

Last night I decided to do some more reading on PhoneGap, and discovered that it’s really simple to build a working Hello World app using their Getting Started documentation and GitHub respository of code. I forked the code, and submitted it to the build server, then downloaded the working app to an Android tablet. I wanted to download it onto my iPad as well, but it seems that I’ll have to go through the Apple developer provisioning setup to get a key. I’ve done that before to work on a native iOS app, but I’ve got to go dig through all my notes to get back up to speed on that process.

I decided to write up this post so that my students can see the steps I took, and get the example working on their own systems. This is pretty much just what is posted in the Getting Started page on the PhoneGap Build site.

  1. Fork the https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-start repo. The fork button is in the upper-right hand corner of the page (https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-start/fork_select).
  2. Go to your own GitHub page to see the repository you just created.
  3. You can clone that repo to your local machine if you want, but that is not necessary at this point, unless you want to make changes. I decided to leave making changes until later.
  4. You will need the http URI for the repository, so either copy it or leave the page/tab open.
  5. Go to the https://build.phonegap.com/ build site, and choose the Completely Free plan.
  6. Sign in through your GitHub account.
  7. Click the +new app button.
  8. Make sure you’ve clicked the open-source tab.
  9. Paste the URI from your fork of the GitHub repo.
  10. Click Ready to Build.
  11. When it’s done, click the appropriate device icon to download it to your device.

Next steps for me:

  1. Make some changes to my fork, build, and download again.
  2. Figure out the iOS provisioning so I can build and download to my iPad.

We’ll have to figure out how to set up the provisioning for the class after we determine which iPads we have available (student- and/or museum-owned) for testing.

From the blog On becoming an Eccentric Professor... » CS@Worcester by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Final blog post and all is well it seems

The semester is over and this is basically my last blog post for now, but im actually thinking of keeping this blog and beginning to use it for things that i find interesting.

 

Basically the euca2ools group presentation seemed to have gone pretty well and everything worked while giving it(which is awesome). Considering the amount of problems that we have been running into coming up to this day we were very excited that everything worked.

John in our group was actually able to upload a CentOS image and get it running on our cloud the previous day of the presentations, and then on the day of the presentations we were able to get a third image up and running with no Walrus errors and SSH into that instance. Dhimitri and I were kind of surprised to say the least cause the day before Walrus was giving us the 403 Forbidden error, so it seemed to have fixed itself….

 

Walrus may have just had a hiccup and that restarting it that day may have solved the issue we were having. Dhimitri also managed to get up a new node running which you could see with the euca-describe-availabilityzones command. All in all, it seemed that the Euca2ools wiki worked out for the best and seemed that a lot of people were able to follow a lot of the steps to use for themselves. This was a really fun and interesting project to work on despite a lot of the issues that kept happening on our way but i think it was for the best cause many of us gained a lot of experience and a lot of understanding of the whole Cloud computing and what it is.

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

Couple of weird oddities..

Leading down to the couple of weeks of the semester and beginning to finish up/wrap everything that we have done up to present, we ran into a couple of issues.

Dhimitri and I were in the same Euca2ools group for the presentations so we were working together through the weekend on what we were going to present and go through as a demo during the presentation. As he was working on a script, i was going through and testing our cloud by uploading a different image and kernel and trying to get more instances up and running, and also deleting images from the cloud.

 

The first issue that we ran into was a problem with getting a new instance up and running. At first i thought it was cause i did not bundle the kernel and image together correctly, so i tried it over and over again until i though it was perfect. The image that i used was the same image as the one that was currently running, so when it was not working we knew we had a bit of a problem. From what the NC log told us we were getting some type of 403 forbidden error and seemed to be stopping us from running instances.

A second issue that occurred, was after uploading quite a few images, kernels, and ram-disks the amount of images on the cloud was kind of cluttered so i wanted to delete some of them. When running the command to delete these images however they were not being removed. We would de-register them and delete but they were not being removed. They stayed on the cloud and listed as de-registered so we restarted the services and still nothing the images appeared back on the cloud as normal.

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

Success at running images!

Towards the final weeks of the semester we actually managed to put together a cloud that was basically running. I say basically running because there still seems to be a few bugs here and there that causes some issues every once in a while.

In the week that we managed to finally get an image up and running Dave actually had decided to reinstall eucalyptus on our cloud with the packages that Eucalyptus team had end up putting together halfway through the semester. During class he actually managed to quickly install all of the packages and set everything up, while long and I managed to package and image with a kernel that was working on the ECC cloud, and we actually managed to get it running.

This was a success at running an image and all seemed well but there was still some work to be done, we could run one image but when we tried to run more it was not allowing us to due to not enough resources and seemed not to be assigning IP’s correctly. So there must have been a problem with the network configuration, Mike was tasked with flattening the network and after some tweeks that Dave did to the networking configuration on the cloud all seemed much better.

We were able to get multiple instances up in the long run and the troubleshooting that Dhimitri and I have been doing seemed to help locating where some potential problems were by going through the nclog file.

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