Category Archives: IRC

Week 3: Choosing a Project

Prior to week 3, everyone had a homework assignment to research and submit summaries on two open source projects that they would like to work on. The first I chose was Firefox. I liked Firefox as a potential class project because of the extensive documentation the development community provided, and the relative ease of “jumping in” and becoming a contributor. There was also a helpful list of suggested projects that were an appropriate size for an entire class to tackle. The second project I researched was FreeDroid, an open source roleplaying game similar to Diablo. The game is mostly finished at this point, but there was a lot of help needed for bug fixes and game engine optimizations. It would have been harder to get started with than Firefox, but I thought it would have been very cool to work on a video game!

During last week’s IRC exercise in #teachingopensource, we met a developer of an open source cloud platform called Eucalyptus who was lurking in the channel. It turns out that they had just finished developing version 3 of the platform, and were interested in our class helping them by testing it. Professor Wurst wanted us to adopt this as our course project, but decided to be democratic about it and put it up to a vote. We were all asked to rank 6 of the projects that were suggested by our combined research: Eucalyptus, Firefox, LibreOffice (office suite), irrlicht (3d game engine renderer), VLC (media player), and Sage (math software). I personally wanted to see Firefox, LibreOffice, Eucalyptus, or irrlicht as the winning project. Eucalyptus ended up winning, with irrlicht as a close second. After Professor Wurst determined that there was not enough support for a second irrlicht group, it was decided that as a class we would be working exclusively on Eucalyptus.

From the blog Code Your Enthusiasm » WSU CS by Jon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 2: IRC and Wikis

Most of our class during week 2 was spent on activities focused on teaching us how to use IRC and wikis–two important tools of the open source world. We started by installing IRC clients on our laptops and meeting up in the #teachingopensource channel on the Freenode server. I haven’t used IRC in over 10 years, and back then, I used mIRC. Since it had been so long, I figured a quick Google search was warranted to see what IRC clients were popular. The general Internet consensus was that XChat was among the best, but unfortunately it is shareware for Windows with only a 30 day free trial. As I was in a rush to get set up and connected, I stopped researching IRC clients at that point and installed KVIRC, a free client that was recommended by a classmate.

[Digression: KVIrc I found to be poorly laid out and had a terrible color scheme–yellow text on a white background for links… Really?? I stuck with KVIrc through the remainder of the class, but afterwards I decided to look for something better. I ended up finding XChat 2, a freeware version of XChat on Windows (because XChat, while being shareware, is still open source). So now I am using XChat 2 on Windows and XChat on my Linux VM and I am happy with both.]

After everyone had joined #teachingopensource, we learned some essential IRC commands, such as /nick and /join, as well as how to message someone directly. We also learned how to register our IRC nicks (I am registered as JonH_WSU in Freenode). Professor Wurst then explained that we would be using IRC to partner up and edit each others wiki profile pages on the Teaching Open Source wiki. There was only one rule: no talking. All communication has to be done through IRC only!

The channel soon became a whirlwind of activity as everyone started chatting at once. Before I learned how to send a message to someone directly, it was hard to keep up with the rapidly scrolling channel and pick out what was being said to me by my partner. However, learning that trick made it much easier to chat with one person out of the entire channel. As a side-note, it was very amusing to be among a classroom of 25 students, completely silent except for constant frantic typing. And every so often, a burst of laughter would erupt out, then back to silence. It was surreal at times.

Editing my partner’s wiki was easy. I had learned a great deal about wiki editing and its markup language from taking Robotics last semester, where we had to maintain individual course wiki pages. Using IRC chat, Facebook, and some general knowledge of my partner James, I had his profile wiki page up and running in no time. He did a pretty good job on my page, too.

From the blog Code Your Enthusiasm » WSU CS by Jon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

First time using IRC

So last week’s class was spent getting familiar with IRC. Seeming most of the class(including myself) had never used IRC before, it was quite comical. I’m assuming all of my classmates have used some sort of Instant Messaging system before, so we had an idea of what IRC was like. The big difference being people you may not even know can join the channel you are in and talk to you. We experienced this first hand when a few people from outside the class started up some in depth conversations about FOSS projects with a few of us. I think was was most interesting about this class was how much information was thrown around over the course of three hours, and how almost none of it was done verbally.

From the blog clacroix12 by clacroix12 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

IRC/Wiki Editing

Last week in class was my first experience using IRC. I downloaded a nice client for my Mac called LimeChat. It was a very cool experience to see new people from somewhere around the world join the channel and start talking to the class. The assignment that we had in class was to ask someone on the IRC channel to edit our wiki page – that we set up on the Teaching Open Source website.

It didn’t take long to see how useful IRC channels could be for an Open Source project. When people (outside our class) joined the channel, they jumped right in and started talking and answering questions. However, the one downside that I saw to using IRC channels, is that there was many conversations going on. At times it was hard to follow all of the discussion. Overall I thought that this exercise in getting to know IRC channels was very useful.