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

• An IRC Tutorial by IRChelp.org. I suggest reading the first two sections.
• Fedora’s How to communicate using IRC
• Freenode’s guidelines on IRC etiquette
• Chatzilla Firefox addon for IRC

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.

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.