Category Archives: open source

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.

CS 401 – Week 3

Alright, things are starting to pick up!

The class voted on which project we would be working on for the semester by ranking the projects by preference. Among the possibilities were Irrlicht, Eucalyptus, Firefox, LibreOffice, and VLC. We kept the top 2 for consideration: Eucalyptus and Irrlicht,

Eucalyptus is cloud computing platform that bears many similarities to Amazon’s proprietary EC2 platform. Cloud computing is a huge industry buzz word lately that means a different thing depending on who you ask, so maybe as this semester goes on I will know to define it properly. The big advantage this project has is that our instuctor, Karl Wurst, knows 2 of the developers and they really want us to work on Eucalyptus and will offer us as much assistance as possible. There is an open source and a commercial version of Eucalyptus. Being the FOSS advocate that I am, it concerns me a bit that certain features are witheld and appear only in the commercial product. Maybe it’s because I have nightmares about Oracle and what they are doing to MySQL with open core. On the other hand, it’s great that a company is releasing a (mostly) fully featured product under the GPL 3 license. To work on this project we will be installing some flavor of Red Hat style OS (likely CentOS 6) onto 8 machines and making a cluster out of them. I have never made a cluster before so my inner system administrator is excited to get it up and running. Our goal will be to get a functional “cloud” environment set up running the latest and greatest Eucalyptus 3.0 code, which has not been released into the wild yet. The class will be writing installation documentation and bug reporting, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I will be getting some real commits into the code repository by the end of the semester.

The great Karl Wurst (can I have an A, please?) may let some students work on the Irrlicht project as well. Irrlicht is a cross platform 3D library written in C++. The Irrlicht developers are interested in creating a test suite for benchmarking purposes, and they want my class to help write it. As far as resume material goes, I think Eucalyptus will be the more fruitful project. On the other hand, I do dabble in game development and have used a similar library before called OGRE, as well as used the OpenGL C API directly, so I am interested in this project as well. I don’t see myself actually being able to work on this, even if we are given the option as my time will surely be focused on Eucalyptus.

This class is making do all of the good things that I have been too lazy to learn how to use effectively on my own, like writing these blog posts and subscribing to listservs. Listservs are a great resource for project discussion that I never found convenient enough to actually use. Time to change that.

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

CS 401 – Week 2

The class is into its third week already but I have neglected to post about week 2. Better late than never.

The focus of the second week was to become acclimated to Internet Relay Chat. I started using IRC prior to the start of this course so I already knew the essential commands. Our training exercise was to connect to irc.freenode.net, choose a nickname, and join the #teachingopensource channel. Once in the channel, we had to communicate with a partner in the channel (and only in the channel! No talking allowed.) in order to give information that they could use to edit our user page on the Teaching Open Source wiki. It was very entertaining to see the class of ~25 students all trying to talk to one another in the channel. I was pleased that I was able to get several people in the class to use irssi as their IRC client, because it rocks.

Outside of class we had to research 2 FOSS projects that the class could potentially work on for the semester. I researched and wrote about VLC media player and LibreOffice. I made sure to choose applications that mere mortals (people who aren’t necessarily tech saavy) use and could benefit from our work. I also made sure that whatever I chose was cross-platform and not restricted on one OS. Both VLC and LibreOffice are big projects that have a large user base and they had documents specifically targetting and helping new developers. Both projects seem like they would have members of the community that would be willing to assist us and help us get acclimated to the codebase. Doing this research taught me how to check to see if a community has low entry barriers. Some projects have no information about how newcomers can help the project. Other projects want help but not enough documentation to get off the ground quickly.

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

Hello, World/CS 401!

This is my first post on this shiny new blog for CS-401!

I have been excited for this course for quite some time. I am a very big (and vocal) advocate of FOSS, but I have had very little experience actually participating in FOSS projects (aside from a couple of bug reports). I have found trying to get into a pre-existing project to be quite daunting. A few months back I took a look at the xbmc source code because I wanted to implement a feature but I did not have the time nor the patience to sift through the massive amount of code. My course goal will be to actually overcome this hurdle and offer serious contributions to a FOSS project.

I’m not much of a blogger. I’m one of those people that make a few posts and then completely stop and abandon the blog. Since blogging is a course requirement, I will be forced to be a good blogger, at least for a few months.

I am looking forward to putting all of my collective software development knowledge to use. I already know how to use version control systems, mainly git, but I am excited that is finally being formally taught in a course. I already use IRC but I’m glad that the entire class will become aquainted with its glory. I have some experience with editing Wikis because I occassionally write documentation at work. Planets are a new-ish term for me. I recognized the term but did not know that they were an aggregation of community blog posts.

Working in groups is not something I usually do. I’m more of the “lone wolf” character, but a cooperative group will accomplish much more than a single person. That said, I will try my best to work effectively in a group. I worked with a team of two others to make Nonagon last year and that worked out very well.

I am pleased with the “Teaching Open Source” book so far. It did a very good job of covering the basics of what open source is and why programmers like us should care about it. I found a few small typos that I should probably submit corrections for at some point.