Category Archives: WSU CS

IRC/Wiki Editing

Last week in class was my first experience using IRC. I downloaded a nice client for my Mac called LimeChat. It was a very cool experience to see new people from somewhere around the world join the channel and start talking to the class. The assignment that we had in class was to ask someone on the IRC channel to edit our wiki page – that we set up on the Teaching Open Source website.

It didn’t take long to see how useful IRC channels could be for an Open Source project. When people (outside our class) joined the channel, they jumped right in and started talking and answering questions. However, the one downside that I saw to using IRC channels, is that there was many conversations going on. At times it was hard to follow all of the discussion. Overall I thought that this exercise in getting to know IRC channels was very useful.

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

CS 401: IRC/Wiki Edit

Last week for our second class we began learning how to use IRC to communicate with each other. This was a great exercise because it gave me a perspective of online chat I have never experienced. I have used other chat programs such as AIM, pidgin, but I have never done any real IRC that involved multiple members, some of which were located in other places across the country.

The main exercise we focused on was editing other classmates wiki pages on the Teaching Open Source Planet site without actually taking to each other, but instead entirely using IRC. I really enjoyed this exercise because it forced me to learn the basics of IRC and how to communicate effectively while using it. Hopefully we get to experience more IRC use during the course of the semester, because it is a great and effective development tool.

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

IRC

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.

Learning IRC and Editing Wikis

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.

FOSS project selection

We have started the selection process for the project we’re to work on in CS 401. The challenge in this is finding a project that is not only interesting but also has enough information so that contributing is not arduous.

From the blog sflynn1976 » wsu-cs by sflynn1976 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.

Hello blogging world and CS401

I have used computers since I was 10 years old; however in this 11 years I have not blogged before, so I am expecting it to be an interesting experience.

I use multiple Free Open Source Software (ex: multiple Linux OS distributions, Chromium browser, Apache web server, and many more), and I have occasonally visited the IRC channels, or support forums for these open source projects to find answer to my problem, and bugs. I loved finding the answer to something I had a problem with, or the ability to actually edit the source to make the software work on my system. Also I am a fan of the libre part of the FOSS; being able to chose what features I want by either adding them myself or picking the fork that already has the feature I need, and it is not bloated with every feature possible in case a portion of the user base wants the feature (like commercial software–mainly the OS like Windows). I now want to give back to FOSS projects by contributing through this class; I have been looking forward to this, and I hope it is the learning experience that I want it to be.

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

CS401 First Post

This is my first post, some of the things that I am looking forward to the work that we are going to get to be doing in this course. Some of the things that i wish to accomplish is to just gain overall experience in working in a larger project, as compared to the smaller programs we have done previously; Another thing is being able to contribute something to the project that we get to work on, that could possibly benefit hundreds or even thousands of people that use that open source software.

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

CS 401 First Post

This is my first post for CS 401 this semester!

I am very excited to be in this class and receive some on hands experience working with open source software. I personally am not too familiar with open source software apart from open office and I have never experienced what it is like to contribute to an open source project either. I do have a good amount of experience working in teams, but never entirely over the internet it will be very rewarding to see how real life large projects function with people contributing from all over. This seems like it will be my most interesting Computer Science course thus far and I hope that I can take what I learn from this course into my future career.

Go Pats!

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

CS401 First Post

What do I want to accomplish in this course? I’m not really sure, yet. All I know is I would like to further my knowledge of open source software and help in any way I can, I guess I picked the right class. I hope we can find a project that we can actually make an impact on and can look back and think, “I helped make that work”. I’m sure I will like working in a group this semester as long as we all can work together and not end up one or two people doing all the work.

What do I want to learn in the course? More About Open Source. I like the concept of it but I have to admit my knowledge for the differences between “open source”, “free”, “libre”, and more of the terms we talked about on the first day are pretty limited. I thought I had a slight bit of knowlege on the subject but, unfortunately on the first day that was quickly invalidated.

About the book, I don’t know how I feel about reading for long periods of time on a computer screen, I just read for about 15 minutes or so and took a break and I’m fine but the idea of a book not costing money while being directly related to the course is great. and the whole “not having to pay” is great, as I mentioned. Free is good.