Category Archives: Science and Technology

Writing a test case

This week I spent most of my time dealing with doctors and interviewing for jobs. Again. However, I had some time to do a bit of research on writing a test case with Eutester. It was a pretty informative experience and I had a chance to really see what Eutester could do. I was fortunate enough to stumble across this blog which told me everything I needed to know.

Essentially what the blog does is walk you through writing your own testcase with Eutester and a Python library called unittest. unittest allows you to quickly setup test cases to run against the cloud; more specifically it is for creating, cataloging, and executing test cases. If you want to see the code either head to the blog mentioned above or check out the wiki for my CS 401 class.

From the blog The Mind of Mattamizer » WSU CS by mattamizer and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Eucalyptus and euTester

I haven’t blogged recently, life has gotten a bit in the way. To this point, though, I have been rather busy so let us start from the beginning.

A while back we had a discussion in class about how we were going to license our documentation and wiki content which was a problem that needed an immediate solution. I was able to get in touch with a gentleman in charge of such things over at Eucalyptus and learned we will be using the CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) to license all our content. Additionally, I found that the people over at Eucalyptus use XML for all their docs so I encouraged the class to convert all current documentation over to XML.

The next project that I jumped on to is documenting the existing euTester code. I’m working on that project with a few other classmates and it’s unlike any other project I’ve worked on. This will be the first time that I look through someone else’s code and document it. I am looking forward to it though. Aside from that I’ve spent the last few weeks taking care of some health issues that popped up, but I’m happy to report that I’m back on track. Look for more consistent updates starting this week.

From the blog The Mind of Mattamizer » WSU CS by mattamizer and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Version Control

This week I did a lot of reading on traditional version control systems (VCS) versus distributed version control systems (DVCS). Both sides of the aisle had good arguments for and against one another, but in my humble opinion DVCS is the way to go. It seems to me that the benefits of having a distributed code base outweigh the negatives of potential security issues. As long as everyone on the project is a semi-competent computer user there should be no problems with security.

I did, however, recently discover that not only was there a hack exploited against GitHub; the guys over at GitHub seem to have dismissed it completely without trying to patch the hole. My understanding is that the exploit uses Rails and requires the code base to be locked in order to work. Still, it is something that merits a patch.

I apologize for the scattered nature of this post and the shortness as well, I’ve been heavily medicated the last two days after a medical procedure. My next post will have more substantial content and coherent flow, I promise.

From the blog The Mind of Mattamizer » WSU CS by mattamizer and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

FOSS and IRC and Blogging, OH MY!

So, today was my first real experience with chatting in IRC. As a class, my Object Oriented Programming/Design classmates and I joined an IRC channel to edit some Wikis and get some information flowing about FOSS projects that we may want to work on. For the most part it was a bunch of silliness but there were some really cool ideas thrown out. One of my classmates suggested a project called irrlicht that seems pretty neat. Another couple of ideas that were tossed around were GIMP and Inkscape. The one that people seemed most interested in towards the end of class was a suggestion by someone outside of the class that happened to be in the channel; a project working with Eucalyptus.

Cloud computing seems to be the way of the future and it would be AWESOME to get in on a project involving the cloud before I even graduate. We’ll have to see what the class decides on in the next week. Whatever we decide to do this class promises to be an amazing experience for all of us involved.

From the blog The Mind of Mattamizer » WSU CS by mattamizer and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Object Oriented Design

As the capstone to my final semester at WSU I am enrolled in an Object Oriented Design class. I have very much been looking forward to taking this class as I expect to learn quite a bit as well as cementing my programming skills.

I think what I’m most looking forward to is becoming intimately familiar with VCS. I’ve messed around a little with git but overall I’m a complete beginner with VCS. As such, one of my goals for the course is to be proficient with whichever VCS we end up using for our project.

Another goal that I have for this course is to ensure that I’m ready for “the real world”. Throughout my college career I’ve been concerned that I won’t be able to make in an actual job and I think this course will help me to build my confidence that I’m prepared for my first real job.

I really hope that over the course of this semester I am able to contribute to whatever open source software project we choose to work on. It would be great to have my name on an OSS project and it would certainly help bolster my resume.

From the blog The Mind of Mattamizer » WSU CS by mattamizer and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

iOS Development

I recently undertook an independent study in iOS development at Worcester State University with a few of my classmates. Overall it was quite the experience. Objective C is a fairly straight-forward, object oriented language so it was fairly nice to work with, but what made it really great was Xcode. I’m not usually one to drink the Apple kool-aid but they hit the nail on the head as far as iOS development in Xcode. Everything was amazing. Since the development is completely proprietary (shame on you Apple, shame) development in Xcode is extraordinarily nice. The only real drawback is that you need to own a Mac of some sort to develop for iOS. I can’t say this is 100% true anymore, however, since VMWare now has OS X support. Alas I cannot afford a VMWare license and my free license through the college expired early this year.

Overall it was an awesome experience which not only taught me about iOS, Xcode, and Objective C, but also gave me some applied experience with group development and lessened my disdain for all things Apple.

From the blog The Mind of Mattamizer » WSU CS by mattamizer and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.