Our topic for today's class is version control. We saw the need for this kind of system when we worked on our project last semester in 362. My team's project, Sugar Labs, uses GIT for their version control, but I'm sure what we learn in class about Subversion will help with GIT as well.
Our assignment for today was to download Subversion and experiment with it. I started out with a CollabNet version of Subversion. I must have missed something because when I tried to open it, nothing happened. I was re-routed to a web page that was non-existent. Then, when I tried to use Python for a different project, I got a run-time error because it tried to open the Python version that comes with Subversion. I un-installed Subversion, and Python worked.
This morning, I decided to try a different version of Subversion. I had heard of Tortoise, so I tried that one. It seems to work fine, so far. I plan to work with it a little more and interact with the 462playground on the CIRDLES server.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
More Sugar...
We continue to learn more about the Sugar Labs project and try to figure out how we will be able to work on it. For our class presentation, we researched the history of the project and some of its main members. The open source community is very intriguing to me. I see some of these names pop up in the mailing list emails I'm receiving and don't think much about them. Then after doing a little research (it's not hard to find their blogs and web pages), they become interesting people who have contributed a whole lot to this and other projects.
We still haven't nailed down what we'd like to do to contribute to the project. I think our first step is going to be getting a hold of the source code and figuring out how to fix one of the reported bugs. From there, we will have a better idea of what we're getting ourselves into.
It's been a little frustrating trying to get into the actual OS and activities so we can see how it works. I've downloaded Sugar on a Stick several times. It seems to work once, and then I can't get back in so I must re-install the program on my flash drive. Since that wasn't working so well, I decided to download Ubuntu and try the Sugar Emulator that is available in the Software Center. I was able to get to the Sugar desktop, but there weren't many activities, and the mouse wasn't working very well (kept trying to grab when I wanted to click). And then when I closed the Emulator, my mouse was still not working in the rest of Ubuntu. I think there are several other routes that I haven't tried yet. I've been reading a FLOSS manual for Sugar, and I'm hoping it will give me some direction.
We still haven't nailed down what we'd like to do to contribute to the project. I think our first step is going to be getting a hold of the source code and figuring out how to fix one of the reported bugs. From there, we will have a better idea of what we're getting ourselves into.
It's been a little frustrating trying to get into the actual OS and activities so we can see how it works. I've downloaded Sugar on a Stick several times. It seems to work once, and then I can't get back in so I must re-install the program on my flash drive. Since that wasn't working so well, I decided to download Ubuntu and try the Sugar Emulator that is available in the Software Center. I was able to get to the Sugar desktop, but there weren't many activities, and the mouse wasn't working very well (kept trying to grab when I wanted to click). And then when I closed the Emulator, my mouse was still not working in the rest of Ubuntu. I think there are several other routes that I haven't tried yet. I've been reading a FLOSS manual for Sugar, and I'm hoping it will give me some direction.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Blog #3
My team has officially chosen to use Sugar Labs for our term project. I've been trying to download Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) so that I can see how the activities work. Also, I think we'll eventually be developing on SoaS. (Not quite sure about that yet.) I was able to download the newest version of SoaS (Mango Lassi) and had it working several days ago, but it shut down when I tried one of the activities (with the snake icon). Hopefully I can't get it running again this weekend.
We were able to join the IRC channel for newbies and test it out a little. Tonight there is a meeting on one of the IRCs. I'm going to join it for a little to see what kinds of things they talk about in these meetings.
We joined the mailing list for the development team. There is a lot of traffic on the mailing list, and I think I might unsubscribe for a while because I've been getting 20+ emails per day.
Raymond presents some interesting ideas about open source projects and how to handle them so they are successful. A lot of his ideas center around realizing the importance of everyone involved, from the best coders to the users who don't know anything about code. All of these different people can catch bugs and contribute new ideas to the project. Another important aspect is working together and accepting criticism and better ideas that may be different from yours.
We were able to join the IRC channel for newbies and test it out a little. Tonight there is a meeting on one of the IRCs. I'm going to join it for a little to see what kinds of things they talk about in these meetings.
We joined the mailing list for the development team. There is a lot of traffic on the mailing list, and I think I might unsubscribe for a while because I've been getting 20+ emails per day.
Raymond presents some interesting ideas about open source projects and how to handle them so they are successful. A lot of his ideas center around realizing the importance of everyone involved, from the best coders to the users who don't know anything about code. All of these different people can catch bugs and contribute new ideas to the project. Another important aspect is working together and accepting criticism and better ideas that may be different from yours.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Sugar Labs
Our team (Flux Capacitators) has tentatively decided to work on the Sugar Labs project. It is a spin-off of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program. The project consists of activities that run on the OLPC XO-1 netbook. I think this will be a great project for us to get involved with because it seems very well-organized and well-documented. They also seem to be very willing to help students get involved in projects. Many of their bugs and ideas for new features are labeled are labeled "easy" so that students who are just getting started with open source can easily get involved. The tough part about this project will be sorting through all of the documentation and determining what we want to work on. I think a good first step would be to work on one of the easier to fix bugs. This will help us get familiar with the code and the scope of the project. Ultimately, I think our group would really like to add a feature or work on a new activity.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
My First Blog
This is my first blog!
I signed up for POSSCON today. No problems. I would like to attend both days of the conference, but I will have to make sure I can miss my non-computer science courses on those days.
I signed up for POSSCON today. No problems. I would like to attend both days of the conference, but I will have to make sure I can miss my non-computer science courses on those days.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)