Category Archives: WSU CS

Git Exercise

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.

FOSS Field Trip Choosing the Right Project

Week three was dedicated to our search for an open source project we would like to work on. Since were doing the assignment “FOSS Field Trip 2” we would each bring 2 projects to discuss. It sounded simple enough, but the class was divided between two projects. Eucalyptus for which we had the support of mentors already in the program, and they had asked us to join; including a proposal with their ambitions of what they hoped to accomplish with our help. Irrlicht which was a project one of our class mates has worked on before, and has contact with many of the developers still, we were told that we would be building a test suite for their 3D engine. It came down to a vote where eucalyptus won due to the support that the two mentors showed, and their proposal which gave us a real plan for the future of the class.

From the blog WSU CS – Live and Code by dhimitraq and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

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.

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.

Discussion on proposed Projects

Last week their was a class discussion on which projects the class most wanted to work on. Two projects that i had researched a bit that i though would have been interesting included Mumble or PuTTY, but i figured that these projects might not have been substantial enough for the whole class.

Some of the bigger projects that seemed to be top picks included Eucalyptus, Irrchlicht, Mozilla, Chromium, and OpenOffice. There wasn’t a real certainty of what each person wanted to work on, so we did a class vote to see what the front runners were going to be. The projects that came out ahead included Eucalyptus, Irrchlicht, and Mozilla. After the final shuffling of the votes however the project that had the majority of votes was Eucalyptus.

There was also a class discussion going on at the same time in the IRC Channel, however i was not able to get into the chat because of certain hardware issues i was having with my laptop that day.

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

IRC Chat Excercise

During class we were all introduced into the world of IRC Chat. The exercise that we were given to complete was for you and a partner to edit each other’s profile pages on the Learning Open Source site, but with certain rules attached. In order to complete the assignment we had to only communicate using the IRC channel, talking back and forth in chat.

The whole process was very intriguing because the whole class was silent with chuckles filling the room every once in a while. Although this is wasnt my first time in an IRC Chat environment, it was my first time partaking in an IRC that contained class mates of mine during a class, and talking about the various subject matters going on, such as possible projects to work on.

Over the course of the semester i am sure that the IRC chat will become a very useful tool in communicating with others on the current project we will be working on, and also be a tool that we could use when we have questions, such that we can go on the IRC channel and ask the question we seek an answer to.

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

Meeting 3: Deciding on an open source project to work on

After giving sometimes to do research about some open source projects that the class might interests in working on, there were 6 projects that the class might choose to work on: Firefox, VLC player, Eucalyptus, Irrlicht, Libre Office, and Sage. And the class voted for Eucalyptus. Well, the idea behind this project is pretty cool and I am looking forward to work on it, but the class was informed that we might not be able to get to do any coding in this project, so it was kind of a let down because I really wanted to do coding for this class to improve my experience. But that aside, this will still be a valuable learning experience and I can’t wait to get started on it.

From the blog longnguyen16 » wsu-cs by watever10 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Meeting 2: Using IRC client to communicate

In the second meeting, the class had to install an IRC client on their laptop for future communication. Because this was like a first time logging in to an IRC channel for everyone, the whole class was giving a fun exercise, where everyone cannot communicate verbally with each other, but through the IRC. And each person had to ask one of the classmates to edit his/her own blog on the teachingopensource.org. After the exercise had been done, the class moved on to look for an open source project that we could work on together for this semester. A classmate proposed irrlicht, which is an 3D rendering engine, which seems pretty cool. Near the end of the meeting, some of professor Wurst’s acquaintance joined in. After knowing that the class is currently looking for an open source project, they proposed Eucalyptus, which is an open source project they are currently contributing to. The meeting was dismissed and each of us had to go home and look for 2 potential open source projects that the class might interests in working on on popular sites like Sourceforge, Ohloh, OpenHatch, etc.

From the blog longnguyen16 » wsu-cs by watever10 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.

Cloud Computing and Me

This past week I did something which I have never done before: I helped to set up a cluster to be used for cloud computing. The cluster is not yet fully armed and operational, but it’s getting there. I met up with my friend Mike one afternoon shortly after he and another of our classmates had finished putting a server rack together. We then loaded eight Dell GX270’s onto the rack and started the long and arduous process of cable management and wiring the machines together. The wiring itself went fast, but we spend about an hour and a half just working on the cable management to ensure that everything looked nice and we had easy access to everything we needed.

Once we finished with the wiring it was time to begin the OS installs. For this cluster we chose to use CentOS 6.1 since that’s what the folks over at Eucalyptus suggested we use. Sadly we were only able to get the OS up and running on two of the machines before we both had to leave to attend to other obligations.

I am very much looking forward to learning more about cloud computing. Before last Wednesday I had never set up a cluster and now I know how to use a KVM and all the other various gadgets and tech goodies that go along with setting up a cluster/server. Now I get to look forward to learning how to turn eight individual machines into a cluster, followed by learning how to use that cluster for cloud storage and processing. We aren’t even halfway through the semester and I’ve already learned a lot so I cannot wait to see what the following weeks have in store.

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.