After a very productive group meeting this past Tuesday, our group came up with some useful additions to our wiki page. We added a documentation goal to be achieved by the end of the third week of April. We will add the comments from the header file (they basically describe what the functions do) to the c files to which they apply. Also, we'd like to contribute to the project wiki's documentation page, which currently is pretty unimpressive.
We also came up with a very rough outline for our presentation. We're (possibly) going to start with a discussion of how not to contribute to an open source project (aka lessons learned) from our experiences with the Gnome Empathy chat program. Then we'll move on to a discussion of the OpenKinect project, discussing our contributions (code and documentation) and providing a demonstration of what we've accomplished.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
The Best Laid Plans of Mice...
I actually managed to see all but one of the presentations I intended to see. I didn't talk to all the people I had originally intended to, but, in hindsight, I suppose I could have. Instead of attending Nathan Marz' presentation on efficiency, I went to Steve Sokol's presentation on Asterisk, an open source communications software. The hindsight comes from realizing I could have still found Mr. Marz sometime other than after his presentation.
Like most of the attendees, I talked with the 3D printing guys. That technology is pretty amazing and relatively inexpensive. I particularly like that it can print its own component parts.
My favorite presentation was Walter Bender's learning to learn. He was very passionate about breaking the classroom mold and doing what helps students learn. Learning is an activity that students do, not something that is done to them.
John Diamond confirmed my suspicion that open source gaming isn't of the same quality as commercial gaming. However, Alien Arena, in practice, is really quite good. Some of the improvements he's made to the Quake II engine are quite impressive.
Bryan Johns presentation on open communications was informative as well. When I read the abstract for his talk, I was picturing a personal VoIP service, like Vonage. Asterisk and Digium think much bigger than that. They provide VoIP services, and more, on a company-wide scale.
On the whole, POSSCON was quite interesting. If it had been in Charleston and/or I could have attended all three days, I think I would have enjoyed it even more.
Like most of the attendees, I talked with the 3D printing guys. That technology is pretty amazing and relatively inexpensive. I particularly like that it can print its own component parts.
My favorite presentation was Walter Bender's learning to learn. He was very passionate about breaking the classroom mold and doing what helps students learn. Learning is an activity that students do, not something that is done to them.
John Diamond confirmed my suspicion that open source gaming isn't of the same quality as commercial gaming. However, Alien Arena, in practice, is really quite good. Some of the improvements he's made to the Quake II engine are quite impressive.
Bryan Johns presentation on open communications was informative as well. When I read the abstract for his talk, I was picturing a personal VoIP service, like Vonage. Asterisk and Digium think much bigger than that. They provide VoIP services, and more, on a company-wide scale.
On the whole, POSSCON was quite interesting. If it had been in Charleston and/or I could have attended all three days, I think I would have enjoyed it even more.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
POSSCON Plans, Part: the Second
I've still not thought of good questions to ask the people who interest me. I'm going to attend their talks and seek inspiration there. I'll be posting the talks I plan to attend now. The speakers I want to "interview" are in bold typeface.
Chris Hinkley will be presenting Web Hosting – Knocking Out Application Layer & Open Source Threat from 10:00 to 10:45.
John Diamond will be presenting about Open Source Gaming from 11:00 to 11:45.
Walter Bender will be presenting Learning to Learn: Using & Modifying the Sugar Platform from 1:15 to 2:00.
Bryan Johns will be presenting The Case for Open Communications from 2:15 to 3:00.
David Duggins will be presenting Starting and Running a Business on-the-cheap with Open Source from 3:15 to 4:00.
Nathan Marz will be presenting Become Efficient or Die: the Story of BackType's Success from 4:10 to 4:50.
And, of course, I'll be attending the Tablet giveaway, just in case.
Chris Hinkley will be presenting Web Hosting – Knocking Out Application Layer & Open Source Threat from 10:00 to 10:45.
John Diamond will be presenting about Open Source Gaming from 11:00 to 11:45.
Walter Bender will be presenting Learning to Learn: Using & Modifying the Sugar Platform from 1:15 to 2:00.
Bryan Johns will be presenting The Case for Open Communications from 2:15 to 3:00.
David Duggins will be presenting Starting and Running a Business on-the-cheap with Open Source from 3:15 to 4:00.
Nathan Marz will be presenting Become Efficient or Die: the Story of BackType's Success from 4:10 to 4:50.
And, of course, I'll be attending the Tablet giveaway, just in case.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
POSSCON Plans
In order to get to Columbia by 9:00, we've got to leave here (Charleston) uncomfortably early. Whining about getting up early isn't the overall point of this post, however.
John Diamond will be speaking about open source gaming. He is the CEO and lead developer of COR Entertainment LLC, a company that was initially formed in 2006 that developed the popular open source game Alien Arena.
Bryan Johns will be speaking about open source solutions in telecommunications. Bryan spent nearly 20 years in and around the businesses of technology and telecommunications. He has started, grown and sold a handful of web application development and VoIP technology businesses and in 2004, found a home in the disruptive world of open standards and open source telecommunications platforms.
Nathan Marz will be speaking about big data. Nathan Marz is the lead engineer at BackType where he builds analytics tools for social media. BackType collects many terabytes of data from Twitter, Facebook, social news sites, millions of blogs, and provides analytics on this data in real-time.
All three of these topics interest me to some degree, big data and gaming more so than telecommunications. Over the next few days I will ponder some questions to ask them.
John Diamond will be speaking about open source gaming. He is the CEO and lead developer of COR Entertainment LLC, a company that was initially formed in 2006 that developed the popular open source game Alien Arena.
Bryan Johns will be speaking about open source solutions in telecommunications. Bryan spent nearly 20 years in and around the businesses of technology and telecommunications. He has started, grown and sold a handful of web application development and VoIP technology businesses and in 2004, found a home in the disruptive world of open standards and open source telecommunications platforms.
Nathan Marz will be speaking about big data. Nathan Marz is the lead engineer at BackType where he builds analytics tools for social media. BackType collects many terabytes of data from Twitter, Facebook, social news sites, millions of blogs, and provides analytics on this data in real-time.
All three of these topics interest me to some degree, big data and gaming more so than telecommunications. Over the next few days I will ponder some questions to ask them.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
OpenKinect: Documentation and POSSCON
The source code for our chosen project is documented fairly well already. I think we should add some comments to the code in the few places that lack an explanation of the function/segment of code. Further, I think we should document our additions to the code with more in-depth comments for those with little experience with C. A working source with good documentation can effective for learning a new language.
POSSCON is coming up soon. I'm looking forward to that seeing how professionals use and contribute to the open source community. In a later post I'll cover the people I intend to talk to at the convention and the questions I want to ask them.
POSSCON is coming up soon. I'm looking forward to that seeing how professionals use and contribute to the open source community. In a later post I'll cover the people I intend to talk to at the convention and the questions I want to ask them.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Catchup
It seems I was remiss in my blogging. I completely forgot to blog about TOS chapter 8. Chapter 8 is titled Explaining the Code, but it's really about documentation; I suppose the two aren't mutually exclusive. The text describes two types of documentation: ad hoc and planned.
Basically ad hoc documentation occurs during the working process. Any code that gets developed must have documentation that explains the reasoning and any unclear code. We've learned good practices to use to develop sufficient ad hoc documentation in every programming class we've taken.
Planned documentation is the development of a formal document that fully explains a piece of software. This type of document is of much higher quality than the ad hoc documentation. We learned how to generate these kinds of documents in Software Architecture and Design.
An important concept the chapter addresses is the waterfall method approach to technical writing. It outlines
Basically ad hoc documentation occurs during the working process. Any code that gets developed must have documentation that explains the reasoning and any unclear code. We've learned good practices to use to develop sufficient ad hoc documentation in every programming class we've taken.
Planned documentation is the development of a formal document that fully explains a piece of software. This type of document is of much higher quality than the ad hoc documentation. We learned how to generate these kinds of documents in Software Architecture and Design.
An important concept the chapter addresses is the waterfall method approach to technical writing. It outlines
1. Planning -- who is the audience? What are the book's goals?
2. Content -- what are the chapters about? Where will you get the information?
3. Writing -- first draft, review, second draft ...
4. Internationalization/Localization -- will the book be translated? Into what languages?
5. Review -- what worked? What didn't? How will the book be maintained?
and says that starting with the first and proceeding down is the best approach.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
OpenKinect Schedule
After reading through James' most recent blog post, I've created and posted a rough schedule for the rest of the semester on the project wiki. It isn't very detailed yet, but it does provide a good outline for what we've done and what we will be doing. As we make progress, we can fill in the details, which registers we'll focus on at any given time, for example.
After some initial discomfort with C programming and low-level hardware driver manipulation, James' amazing progress and coding skill have swayed me to the feasibility of actually succeeding with this project. We've already made some non-trivial contributions, and the more we accomplish, the better off the project will be as a whole. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do by the end of the semester.
After some initial discomfort with C programming and low-level hardware driver manipulation, James' amazing progress and coding skill have swayed me to the feasibility of actually succeeding with this project. We've already made some non-trivial contributions, and the more we accomplish, the better off the project will be as a whole. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do by the end of the semester.
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