Today was focused on what project to work on.  The potential candidates were VLC, Firefox, Eucalyptus, Irrlicht, and Libre Office.  I joked, we should play the 5-3-1 game.  The 5-3-1 game is where you have a set of 5 options, the first person (The professor in this case) eliminates two options, and the second person (the students in the case) eliminate two more, leaving you with the winner.  We played something similar.  Each student ranked the 5 from least to most favorite, and then we tallied it up.  Eucalyptus won!  This project seems like a really good fit, since we will be able to work with the lead developers and gets everyone’s hands wet in cloud computing.

I also have very little experience with Python, so it will be interesting to pick up a new language along the way.  There is an infrastructure portion that will let the students who are less program-driven and more network-driven a chance to contribute equally.   There are a handful of students who aren’t intrigued by writing code.  Hopefully they are willing to get some hands-on experience early on with the infrastructure.

There was a lot of hard feelings when we came to the conclusion to work on Eucalyptus.  It’s important that they realize that this is the class project, and are willing to contribute to the best of their ability.  It doesn’t mean they can’t contribute to another open source project, but they’ll just have to do it on their own free time.  I have finally installed X-chat on my home desktop, so I can idle the appropriate channels.  This will help me keep up-to-date on the project and assist me with any questions I have once the project gets off the ground floor… which is hopefully sooner rather than later…

From the blog jforkey » wsu-cs by jforkey and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 2 was focused on learning IRC and Wikis. I have a lot of prior experience with IRC.  In the past, I used mIRC for windows, but since I have moved to using Linux as my main OS, it was a little different to get used too.  First, I had to research GUI IRC clients.  I first connected through the terminal, but the interface just isn’t clean enough for me.  I don’t want to have to type a command to see who is currently in the server.  I wanted something that I could see everything on one clean screen.  I finally stumbled on X-Chat.  This is very similar to mIRC for Windows.  It has all the information you need in a simple, easy-to-use, interface.

The Eucalyptus project sounds interesting, but I was also interested in another 3D graphics project too.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to work on both projects simultaneously.  The main developers have us working on the eutester portion of the project.  They said there is more documentation than actual code to write.  I wasn’t very thrilled with this idea, but I guess we will see how everything falls into place.

I wasn’t present for the class, and I never made the Wiki, but I have some experience in editing Wikis from a robotics class last semester.  I would really like to see this project get off the ground floor and some serious progress made, but my group hasn’t but the most cooperative at this point.  We’ll just have to wait and see how things develop over the next few weeks.

From the blog jforkey » wsu-cs by jforkey and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In today’s class we explored the use of Git, which is a program used for version control.  Git allows users to clone existing source code from a repository, make changes to the code (whether adding new files or changing existing ones), and to move those changes back into the repository.  The program helps coordinate changes between users, so that a file changed by multiple users is not simply overwritten by the latest user to make a change.  We performed a simply exercise to help learn some of the commands available in Git.

We are also moving forward with our class project, which involves the use of eutester, a program designed to provide a framework to test a Eucalyptus or Amazon cloud.  I beleive our goal is to make the program more robust/ user friendly, without changing the core functions.  There are several tracked issues listed on the github page, so that might be a great place to start.

From the blog sflynn1976 » wsu-cs by sflynn1976 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Doing the Git exercise in class was pretty cool. Luckily I have used git before, so I am pretty familiar with the syntax as well as how it works. Once my RSA key was registered, I had a fairly easy time of pulling down the repo and editing files to be pushed back out. My group members seemed to grasp the concepts very quickly as well, so it was not difficult for us all to work around each others changes. We had very few conflicts when making changes.

The one thing that seemed to get me, as well as another of my group members, was when we were setting the git config stuff, we both accidentally set out user.name variable to “color.ui” because we misread the instructions. So when we pushed committed changes to the repository, our names showed up as “color.ui” instead of our actual user names. Once we went into the config file and made the proper changes, all went smoothly. The actual git part of the assignment was not difficult. I think by the end of the class almost our entire group had added a separate file to the repo and also edited a common file so we could all see each others changes.

I’m looking forward to actually using git with this project because I have only used it on a very large scale at work. So I think using it in class on a smaller repository will be much more interesting because I will actually be able to tell exactly what was changed at a quick glance. Also, I am wondering if we are going to be committing patches or if we will simply do a git commit of our changes and then push them out to the repo. At work, I am used to doing a git format-patch HEAD^ and generating a patch for review before it is added to the repository, however it seems like the way we are doing it in class is a little more straightforward, even if it is more likely that someone will commit code that doesn’t work 100%. It would be nice if there was a designated person in the group to review the patches before committing them so that someone doesn’t push out something broken and overwrite good code. I guess that will have to be up to the group members to investigate how well the code works before pushing it out.

Looking forward to getting started!

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

In class today, we discussed the possibilities of working a few different projects, including VLC, Firefox, Irrlicht, Eucalyptus and Libre Office. Eventually, we reached a decision as a class to work on the Eucalyptus project. This seems like a very cool project because we will be able to work very closely with some of the lead developers. I like the idea of getting involved in cloud computing as well, even if it really is not that much different from regular programming.

I am also excited to use Python to do most of the programming. I really like Python and I think it should be fairly easy for the class to pick up. This project also gives students with other computer interests, such as networking and security, something to learn and apply. I know that there are several students that strongly dislike programming, so this is a good opportunity for them to use their skills in a helpful way to those of us who prefer programming.

In addition, I really hope that the people in the class who are not yet on board with this project are able to accept the fact that our minds are made up. There are plenty of other projects that I would enjoy working on, in addition to Eucalyptus, but I think this project will be fun and I am looking forward to learning as much as I can. I am also really enjoying using the IRC to talk with the Eucalyptus people. They have already been very helpful in giving us information and helping us reach a decision.

Overall, this should be pretty interesting to set up and start working on!

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

In last’s week class we were tasked with downloading and using an IRC client (I’m using Chatzilla for Firefox).  The class populated the #teachingopensource channel, and our follow-on task was to use this space to talk back and forth in order to create a wiki page on the teaching open source website for a fellow student.

Using IRC is fairly straightforward.  And while there are a number of advanced options, these are unneccesary to use the client.

From the blog sflynn1976 » wsu-cs by sflynn1976 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Last week we were introduced to using an IRC client. It was an interesting experience as it was quite hectic with the number of people that were included in the chat. A “regular” chat session consists of much fewer participants, making it quite a different experience. It took some time to get used to the chaos, but after a few minutes it was easier to follow the conversations in the chat room. IRC seems as though it can be a very useful tool to communicate with people all around the world to discuss various topics regarding Computer Science projects that one may be working on. It allows for communication among programmers in a manner that is very straight-forward and easily accessible.

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

Last week was pretty interesting. Learning how to setup and use IRC was not very difficult, but once we were all in the chat room, everything got crazy. I think that the IRC channel #teachingopensource could be very useful for working closely with other developers as we learn more about open source software.

The Eualyptus project sounds very promising and I am very interested in learning more about it. I am looking forward to digging into the code and hopefully making something useful happen. The main developers do not seem to think that our class could actually contribute much to the project, but I am planning on learning as much as I can and trying to actually make something decent.

As for the editing wiki part of the IRC experience, I found it somewhat unpleasant. I couldn’t get anyone to edit mine because everyone was talking about random things the whole time in the IRC. When I finally got someone to do it, they wrote one line on it that said something like, “I don’t know what to write.” Overall, I learned a little more about editing wikis, but the process of doing so was not simple because of the IRC channel distracting the groups.

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