Category Archives: WSU CS

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.

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.

CS 401: Project Decision

This week in our class we finally decided which project we will be working on all semester. This project will be the focal point of the course and I am very excited to get to work and learn more about it. We chose the Eucalyptus project, which is basically an open source cloud computing project. I have never experienced much with cloud computing but the setup alone interests me and I can’t wait to be able to add something like this to my resume.

A few things that we learned about Eucalyptus during the last class involved familiarizing ourselves with cloud computing products. We were given documentation to read up and learn more about Eucalyptus itself. They also recommended that we setup free accounts with Amazon EC2, which is Amazon’s cloud computing product, in order to get better experience with similar products. I also signed up for the Eucalyptus listserv in order to stay in the loop with what is going on regarding the project itself.

I look forward to working on this project and I would very much like to assist in the setup as well. I have networked multiple computers together, but I do not have a lot of experience with configuring the network using the command line and working with new operating systems, for example CentOS.

From the blog michaelkenny2 » WSU CS by michaelkenny2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Big Decision

Today’s class basically decided the rest of the semester for us, we had to choose what FOSS project we would be working on. Most of the projects that were brought up I had already heard of before and done some research on, such as Firefox, VLC, Eucalyptus, and Libre Office. A couple however were completely new to me, those were irrlicht and Sage. After an hour or two debating on how we would decide on the project, we put it to a vote. The majority of the class seemed to be happy with the idea of working on Eucalyptus.

I believe this project stood out to everyone because it deals with cloud computing which is a new frontier for everyone and looks great on a resume. Eucalyptus also has the benefits of our class being able to communicate directly and easily with a couple of the big names on the project, which will prove to be very beneficial when we encounter problems. Overall I think this project will be super interesting and fun, as well as a giant headache on most of the class. But what’s fun about a project that won’t challenge us, huh?

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

Project Debate 2_7_12

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.

Post for 2nd Class – 1/30

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.

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.

Choosing FOSS Project

Today we went about discussing and ultimately deciding upon an FOSS project to work on during the course of this semester in Object Oriented Design & Analysis. It was interesting to see the various ranges in opinions regarding the choices in projects. After much discussion, the final verdict was ultimately made through a class-wide vote. Some of the options for FOSS projects included: Firefox, Sage, Eucalyptus, LibreOffice, and VLC Media Player. Voting was done through each student listing their preference from highest to lowest on a piece of paper. The top choice on each ballot was then sorted, in which Eucalyptus came out on top. After sorting through the remaining ballots, Eucalyptus was ultimately the receiver of the majority of the votes. Therefore, the FOSS project that was decided upon to be worked on during the course of this semester is Eucalyptus.

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

Picking Open Source Project

Today in class we started to discuss which open source project we should have as our class project. At times it was a little chaotic, but we ended up all voting for favorites. The project that I wanted to work on the most was Sage, the program used on campus for the math department. Unfortunately, Sage only got one other vote, so it was tossed out. Eucalyptus was my second choice, because they seem to have many active contributors that would be willing to help us out. My last choice was Irrcht, because I’ve never done anything with graphic rendering or 3-D modeling (so I figured it would be fun to learn if it was picked).

Dr. Wurst is considering breaking up the class into two groups (Eucalyptus and Irrcht got the most votes) so I guess we will see what happens… Out of the two I think I would rather work on Eucalyptus because it seems like it has more relevance to the fields I would like to go into. Greg, from Eucalyptus, was on the IRC channel for little bit today as well. He suggested that we read up on cloud networking and EC2 (Amazon supercomputer). I am a little nervous about the amount of coding that would be done for the Eucalyptus project. It seems like it would be more of writing documentation than doing actual coding. Either way, I am excited to get working on an open source project!