Category Archives: WSU

Final Wiki Adjustments

I never got around to putting up this blog post last week but I figure it’s worth posting.

After siting down with Chris while he worked his way through our wiki was great, really gave me a chance to see how a wiki flows through another set of eyes. Luckily we’ve all been doing a great job of working with the wiki adding the needed information and adding it coherently. Only issues really were fixing formatting adding things like, “don’t forget to use sudo” to the top of commands rather than after. Only “big” changes I made to the wiki was adding a bit on git and how to install python user a package manager.

I enjoyed working with Chris getting his input, I think it was smart to do it on my own first, since I knew a bit on how to get everything running from doing it a few times, then having him go through. Since I never posted this Karl mentioned that there is a whole field of engineering in something like that, actually testing your code/wiki/idea on an audience and jotting down notes.

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

Test Run of the Wiki

This week I am going to start from scratch and try to install Eutester+euca2ools from our wiki only, keeping notes along the way to see if we need to update anything to make it more clear. I imagine from what I’ve been reading that we’ve made quite a large amount of progress over this course and when I had to restart last month it took me maybe an hour? (would be been less if I realized >>> meant that you type python ) but that’s besides the point. This blog post will serve as a note pad for anything our wiki should make clearer.

Updated this:

I decided that I would find someone I could use that doesn’t really know much about Eucalyptus and at least knows how to work Linux. It turned out pretty well, I have some notes jotted down that I can finalize the wiki with to make it as fast as possible. Everything was pretty well laid out, aside form small things like the note “don’t forget to use sudo” after they entered all the commands. One thing I need to add is that we never directly say to install boto.

Overall this test went pretty well.

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

More Wiki Editing and Python Learning

I added a big index at the top of the glossary page, learned how to actually link to certain part of a web page in a PMwiki, was actually a lot easier than what I figured it was here was where I found it, turns out you just make a simple [[#anchor | text ]] at the particular part where you want to reference you #anchor that part then use [[#anchor | text]] and you’re done. It was silly tedious to do but, it does give it a quicker and easier way to access the glossary, also props to Dan Adams, the glossary is looking very nice. Since I learned how to use links without having to just post the ‘ugly’ url same page as the anchor tutorial I have been fixing the entire glossary page so it will read “read more”, “wikipedia entry” or something along those lines. With those edits I am also fixing the capitalization of each entry.

EuTester has been great for learning Python, I was long over due to learn it anyways. I started using Zed A. Shaw’s book (great resource for learning a language for free/very cheap) and then after I knew enough to make better sense then I started looking at all the Python that eutester had. Commenting has been great for learning because it forces me to look at the code, analyze what I am reading, then form coherent ideas from that. Zed’s book along with the multitude of forums while google searching has really been great.

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

Make the Wiki as Easy as Possible

I’ve been spending some time trying to clean the wiki but also to make it very user friendly. Instead of text telling you where to go I am swapping that for actually linking the person reading to the page. If you’re confused while trying to set up your cloud, make credentials or anything else the last thing you want is to have to do is to navigate though a wiki you’ve never used before.

Aside from this I’ve also been commenting code, which I will get to in a second blog post, I didn’t know how to push to git, probably should have taken the 30 seconds to read how to do it. But I just kind of left the saved files on my computer and figured I would just submit them when I asked how to submit..unfortunately each one of them have already been commented and pushed. My loss. There is still a bunch of code left to look at.

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

Behind on the blogs, sorry for that

Unfortunately I mistakenly deleted my Xubuntu off of my virtual machine instead of Ubuntu, don’t ask me how I managed. I started over the day before but after I installed Python back, updated boto, paramiko, and all that jazz I get to the point where thought I was in the clear but two lines down:

eutester = Eutester(credpath=”../credentials”) – gives me a syntax error “syntax error near unexpected token ‘(‘ and I can’t figure out whats going on. Been on the IRC for the past few hours, no one has been around to explain this to me. I tried redoing my credentials but unfortunately that didn’t solve the problem. Turns out you have to run python before entering any of those commands but now I’m getting file not found, still better than a stupid syntax error.

I figured out my problem, thanks to Coady and testingcloud’s blog. I ended up getting this:

http://i.imgur.com/Cj6Gp.jpg

I’m glad I got that credentials thing sorted out, now I can start helping out much more.

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

Fail Meter Analysis of Eucalyptus

Professor Wurst decided after viewing this article that we should gauge the project that we plan on spending an entire semester, I guess now is the best time do find out is after we’ve committed to the project. Kind of thought it was a bit silly at first but the more I worked on the test the more I learned about Eucalyptus. After all was said and done it turns out the project isn’t going to completely bomb, which wouldn’t have been the best for the class, or the project…

The tests are broken into several categories:

Size
Source Control
Building From Source
Bundling
System Install
Code Oddities
Communication
Releases
History
Licensing
Documentation

It’s about a 60 something questioner, each question assigns a “fail” value to it and tallies it up at the end. Some of the questions were pretty silly like, “ Your website doesn’t have any documentation” (this isn’t a question, I know).

I learned a pretty good amount about Eucalyptus with this project, pretty much because 50% of what I was looking at had me scratching my head or asking “How would I even find that out”. Got to poke around the source code online in git and on a website called fossies the link I gave is directly to the Eucalyptus section of it. Also this is the my first “big project” of code that I’ve looked at and it feels pretty daunting to see so much code spread out in so many classes but, it’s also awesome to see it all working in unison.

For now my main goal is to continue to read wiki’s and try to play around with Euca2ools and be able to be much more fluent on the systems so I’m not like a lost puppy.

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

Sorry for the Absence

Unfortunately I haven’t posted in a pretty long time, and I’m sorry about that to those few who are following.

Recently my main focus was to pick a distribution of Linux I wanted to use. I tried mint and cent and didn’t much care for either of them, to be frank. I’ve been using Archlinux for one of my classes and love learning though that distro but it proved to be an extra level of difficulty I could do without in this class, pretty much I kept bothering Dave about this or that and felt back. I ended up talking with some friends and they suggested Xubuntu which is a lightweight distro of Ubuntu. Since I am running the OS in a virtual box the more lightweight the better. I reinstalled Git and Euca2ools and have just been reading a wiki every now and then. I am eager to really start the class once the cluster is all set up and I know how to use it properly.

I’ll be posting again tomorrow about our homework assignment once I finish it (aka start it)

From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona 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.

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.