Day Twenty Eight: Preparation for POSSCON

I will be attending POSSCON with the rest of my classmates on March 28 and 29. In preparation for this event, I have developed a schedule for the events that I will attend. This is necessary because some time slots have multiple presentations.

March 28

9:00 - 9:15        Welcome

9:15 - 9:50         Keynote: Open Source - Now and in the Future

10:00 - 10:45     Demo: Open Sourcing: From Within Your Company, For Your Company

11:00 - 11:45     Education: Working Laterally: Restructuring K-12 Education Based on Open...

12:00 - 1:00       Lunch

1:00 - 1:45         Keynote: Big Data, Hadoop and Open Source

2:00 - 2:45         Big Picture: Open Source: Licenses & Communities

3:00 - 3:45         Demo: How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub

4:00 - 4:45         Big Picture: Changing the Face of Open Identity in Ecommerce

4:45 - 5:00         Wrap Up 

March 29

9:00 - 9:15         Welcome

9:15 - 10:15       Keynote

10:30 - 11:15     Education: Some People Hate Fun: Protecting 3D Printing and Open Hardware...

11:30 - 12:15     Education: Open Source in Art

12:15 - 1:30       Lunch

1:30 - 2:15         Keynote: Let's Talk About Cloud - The State of the Industry, OpenStack and APIs

2:30 - 3:15         Big Picture: Starting a New Open Source Project: The Project Lifecycle and How...

3:30 - 4:15         *Tie between Education and Demo*

4:30 - 5:00        Big Picture: Predictions & Trends for Open Source in the Enterprise in 2012

5:00 - 5:15        Wrap Up

We are also supposed to pick three presenters to talk with during free time. Scott McNealy is an obvious choice, though he may be very busy. Dan French has an interesting position as Superintendent of Schools; it would be nice to get some insight as to how he sees public schools interacting with technology in the future. Jonathan LeBlanc also sounds like a very interesting individual. The social side of technology has always intrigued me. These are my three choices as of now, but this decision is subject to change based on presentations. If I see a presentation that particularly interests me, I might decide to spend some of my time in discussion with that speaker instead. 

Day Twenty Seven: More Work with RMH Homebase

Exercise 6.1:
This is a very simple exercise that involves adding setters and getters for employer, contact person, and contact phone variables in the Person class.
Note: This exercise does not mention implementing a "status" variable, but it is necessary for the next few exercises. I went ahead and included the variable in this exercise.

Initialize the variables:

private $employer;           // name of current employer
private $contact_person;    // name of a contact Person
private $contact_phone;    // phone of the contact Person
private $status;          // a Person may be "active" or "inactive"

Make the setters:

function set_employer ($name) {
    $this->employer = $name;
}
function set_contact_person ($name) {
    $this->contact_person = $name;
}
function set_contact_phone ($phone) {
    $this->contact_phone = $phone;
}
function set_status ($status) {
    $this->status = $status;
}

Make the getters:

function get_employer () {
    return $this->employer;
}
function get_contact_person () {
    return $this->contact_person;
}
function get_contact_phone () {
    return $this->contact_phone;
}
function get_status () {
    return $this->status;
}

Exercise 6.2:
This exercise involves updating Person's constructor to implement status, employer, contact, and contact phone. The unit test, testPerson.php, also needs to be updated.

Modify the constructor with the new variables:


/**
 * constructor for all persons
 */
function __construct ($f, $l, $a, $c, $s, $z, $p1, $p2, $e, $t,
    $bg, $in, $sh, $con, $whe, $exp, $mot, $spe,
    $av, $sch, $hist, $bd, $sd, $pubn, $myn, $privn, $pass
    $status, $employer, $contact, $contact_phone) {
        $this->status = $status;
        $this->employer = $employer;
        $this->contact_person = $person;
        $this->contact_phone = $contact_phone;
        ...
}


Include the variables in the unit test:



//I need to make an object to test. This is just dummy data.
 $myPerson = new Person("Taylor","Talmage","928 SU","Brunswick","ME",04011,
 2074415902,2072654046,"ttalmage@bowdoin.edu","applicant,volunteer,sub","no","no","no","", "", "", "", "", "Mon9-12, Tue9-12, Wed12-3", "", "", "02-19-89", "03-14-08","this is one of my notes","this is a cool note","this is another note","Taylor2074415902", "active", "McDonalds", "Ronald McDonald", 8034563452);



Test getters and setters:


$this->assertTrue($myPerson->get_employer() == "McDonalds");
$myPerson->set_employer("Burger King");
$this->assertTrue($myPerson->get_employer() == "Burger King");


$this->assertTrue($myPerson->get_contact_person() == "Ronald McDonald");
$myPerson ->set_contact_person("The King");
$this->assertTrue($myPerson->get_contact_person() == "The King");

$this->assertTrue($myPerson->get_contact_phone() == 8034563452);
$myPerson->set_contact_phone(8035467654);
$this->assertTrue($myPerson->get_contact_phone() ==  8035467654); 


$this->assertTrue($myPerson->get_status() == "active");
$myPerson->set_status("inactive");
$this->assertTrue($myPerson->get_status() == "inactive");



Exercise 6.3:
This exercise asks how set_status could be implemented in order to error check the values provided to the method. Since a valid value for status can only be "active" or "inactive", it would be easy to set up a Boolean expression for error checking.

function set_status ($value) {
    if ($value == "inactive" or $value == "active") {
        $this->status = $value;
    }
    else {
        echo (""active" or "inactive" are the only valid inputs for status");
    }
}

Exercise 6.4:
This exercise involves removing mutators that are not called in any part of the code. As is stated in the book, none of the setters for the Person class are ever called because a new Person object is created every time information is changed; however, the book suggests that we leave these methods intact for reasons that will be discussed in future chapters. All of the getter methods are called at some point in the code base.

Day Twenty Two - Twenty Six: Condensed Update

The focus this week has been on our FOSS project rather than individual assignments. There is not much to say here that is not on my group's wiki page. I can briefly mention the work that I have done individually, but four separate blog posts would just be a waste of everyone's time. This post is a condensed version of what I have been working on over the past week.

Release Candidate 2 (RC2) was released on March 2 and further refines features that were added in RC1. All of the recent changes can be tracked here on XBMC's github page. RC2 quickly fixed a few major bugs, such as video lag, that were present in RC1. It is clear that the developers rapidly respond to problems that are readily defined in the bug tracker and on the forums. RC1 and RC2 were released only a week apart. The first order of business during our first group meeting after spring break was to catch up and compile the latest release from source. A weekly release schedule can eat up a lot of our time: it takes over an hour to compile on my poor little netbook. Speaking of my netbook, Ubuntu 12.04 is running nicely, and all of my previous problems appear to be fixed with this latest update. The newest kernel includes a fix for the back light problems that most netbook users are having.

It is crazy to think about how much XBMC has changed since we first started working on this project. When I first mentioned XBMC to my group earlier this semester, I was using Dharma on my desktop. Now, we are three beta releases and two release candidates into Eden. The pace is pretty hectic, and any contributions in this project are welcome to take some of the stress off of the developers. Matt and I replied to the Xbox 360 controller bug report, and offered to help fix the problem now that it has been discovered by the developers. CrystalP asked for us to test the changes and submitted a pull request (PR) on github. Git has a high learning curve. My experience with SVN last semester was pretty straight forward, but Matt and I had some trouble figuring out how to actually implement a PR in Git. There are a couple of Stackoverflow questions and various blogs that suggest possible solutions, but there are so many conflicting answers. Cherry-pick seems to be the best command to pull in a patch from a single commit. The process is very convoluted, and, unfortunately for our group's contribution (fortunately for the entire XBMC community), CrystalP went ahead and implemented the PR. At least we contributed to the conversation and gave the bug the push it needed to be fixed for Eden.

Jason's bug was also fixed by a developer while he was looking though the code for possible solutions. I let David borrow my netbook to test more LIRC bug reports, but these reports seem to be very hardware specific. He has not had much luck replicating bugs that deal with LIRC. It is difficult to keep up with such a fast-paced community with everything else that is going on this semester. We have decided to continue working on any bugs that come our way, but we need to refocus some of our effort to areas where we can contribute more. In our next meeting, we will come up with a schedule for our poster and find a couple of important pages on XBMC's wiki that need to be updated. Much of their wiki was designed for Dharma, and they desperately need some updates in order to be ready for Eden's release. From now on, I will focus my blog posts that are not dedicated to individual assignments on possible bug fixes to discuss with my group or specific pages on the wiki that needs to be updated. I hope this condensed post is more informative then three or four scattered posts.

Day Twenty One: Reflection and Review

Our current assignment is to read two articles from opensource.com and blog our response to these articles.

Sebastian Dziallas' article, How to Teach Undergrads How to Become Open Source Contributors Without Writing Any Code, caught my attention because it involves a different approach to teaching open source. As a computer science major, it makes sense to include coding as part of the core open source experience in a software engineering class; however, not all contributors to open source projects are programmers. Chapter 8 in Teaching Open Source describes the importance of documentation and technical writing. There are many opportunities to contribute to these vibrant open source communities outside of the realm of coding, but it seems as though very few classes offer a glimpse into this alternate perspective.

Dziallas' Release Engineering course started as somewhat of an experiment, and it developed into a highly educational experience. From his descriptions, projects went better than expected, and students were given the chance to see Tom Callaway, the Fedora Engineering Manager, talk in person about some of the same issues that Dziallas mentioned in class. I would like to see more opportunities for people to branch out and explore the world of open source. Dziallas mentions that he has been working with Fedora since he was 16. I am only beginning my adventure at the age of 21, but I am glad to have this opportunity.


Another article that sparked my interest is Anthony Biller's A Cure for the Common Troll. I mentioned much earlier in my blog that I read tech-blogs, such as engadget and gizmodo, on a daily basis. I have not seen as much mention of it lately, but, for a while, lawsuits concerning patent infringements dominated the headlines. Samsung and Apple battled it out constantly over, what is in my opinion, trivial matters. The authors of these posts and many of the readers pointed out that this incessant bickering is a common marketing scheme to help fill the coffers when business is slow.

The trolls that Biller mentions go above and beyond the previously mentioned form of trolling. "Patent trolls," as he calls them, hold patents to technologies and manufacturing processes that they will probably never use. Some trolls make six to seven digit figures based on abusing the patent system alone. Apple has been known to patent anything and everything that they can, but the real patent trolls have no real plans with these patents other than threatening other companies and making an absurd amount of money in the process. I am not a big legal buff and do not understand all of Biller's suggested solutions, but his first solution seems to plug a major loophole in the patent system. Without vague "umbrella" patents that cover every possible domain, patent trolls would have a much harder time abusing the system.

Day Twenty: An Update on our Group Progress

My group met at our usual time and place on Sunday to discuss our accomplishments and decide what to work on over spring break. Matt Vaveris and I decided to focus on bug #12653. This bug involves an Xbox 360 controller, and we both have access to such a controller. Julie will focus on bug #12594 because her laptop has a built-in Blu-Ray drive. David is looking into bug #12699 because the bug report itself is difficult to read. If the broken English cannot be deciphered, the report is useless and needs to be deleted. Jason was not able to attend the meeting, but he can work with David or Julie depending on the level of progress that is made respectively.

I was able to reproduce my bug on two different systems running Windows 7 with the latest updates. My laptop, running XBMC Eden Beta 2, experienced a crash exactly as the reporter described. Here are the steps to recreate:

1. Plug in the controller and make sure that it is on (you need the appropriate drivers for Windows to recognize it).
2. Start XBMC
3. Unplug the controller and Alt+Tab out of XBMC
4. Wait 3-4 minutes
5. Bring focus back to XBMC

I tried this process again on my desktop PC, running XBMC Dharma, with a wireless Xbox 360 controller, and I experienced the same crash. I want to contribute to this bug report with my findings, but the webmaster for the XBMC forums must not be receiving my messages for some reason. The forums still mark me as a spammer, regardless of my email address (I have tried yahoo and multiple gmail accounts). Luckily, Matt has a username, so he can do the talking for us. It is surprising that a bug like this has persisted through Dharma and three beta builds.

Day Nineteen: Explaining the Code

Chapter 8 in the Teaching Open Source textbook is all about documentation. The information in this chapter is easy enough for a newcomer to understand, and it acts as a refresher for more experienced individuals.

Exercise 8.1.1: Practice Good Code Commenting
My team's first contribution to XBMC is an updated readme file with information that was simply left out and referenced in the forums. This is exactly the kind of thing that chapter 8 talks about. The information is there somewhere, but it is rarely easy to find. A well documented project simply takes all of the sources (mailing lists, IRC discussions, and wiki pages) and makes them readable and easily accessible. Open source projects are more approachable if they document this information for new and old users/developers alike.

Exercise 8.4: Plan Your Technical Document
The Nexus Mod Manager (NMM) that I mentioned in a much earlier blog post finally has some documentation in the form of a wiki page here. I still use NMM to this day for all of my Skyrim mods. Steam's workshop seems like a decent alternative, but I still feel attached to the nexus community. My plan was to add a wiki page that documents how to add non-NMM mods, but it appears that another user meatwad2021 already has this idea in mind. Under the "discussion" part of the wiki, meatwad has this to say:

"Considering the chaos that has ensued with Nebula's Skyrim HD 1.5 pack conversion from loose file style to the .bsa/.esp packaging, I've been creating a few new pages dealing with 7zip and SKSE. The next step is to teach users how to deal with files not offered with the Download with Manager option as is required for Nebula's 1.7Gb update. Sooooo, I'm going to take a crack at addding that section here to the existing page."

This update was posted on the 25th, so I might try to contact him and see if he would like some help. Even though my group chose XBMC as our FOSS project, I would still like to contribute to the Nexus community in some way.

Day Eighteen: RMH Homebase Continued

After wasting countless hours on a virtual machine running Ubuntu 10.04 and another virtual machine running Ubuntu 11.10, I finally got RMH Homebase to work on the 11.10 virtual machine. A fellow classmate of mine posted an install guide to his blog here. Although I followed very similar steps during my own installation attempts, his guide corrected whatever I was doing wrong.

The assignment for today is exercise 5.7 and 5.8 in the Software Development book.

Exercise 5.7: Debugging
As the book mentions, there are two places in RMH Homebase that display a shift's "notes" field for editing, calendar.php and calendarFam.php. Both of these modules include calendar.inc, so refactoring this "bad smell" should be as simple as adding a function to that file and replacing the old code with a function call. I added the following function to calendar.inc:


function predates($a, $b) {
return ($a->get_year()<$b->get_year() || ($a->get_year()==$b->get_year() && $a->get_day_of_year()<$b->get_day_of_year());
}

This function will return true if a's year is less than b's year or, in the case where both a and b are during the same year, a's day of the year is less than b's day of the year. In other words, this function returns true if a predates b. Unfortunately, the test file"testCalendar.php" is not present in my tests folder. I will have to hold off on unit testing until I can find a copy of this file or make a file of my own.

Exercise 5.8: Examining the Code
A. Sub Call Lists (SCLs) are viewed and edited through functions included in the module subCallList.php. In editShift.php, either "View Sub Call List" or"Generate Sub Call List" is displayed depending on whether the shift has an associated SCL or not. Here is the code:


if(!$shift->has_sub_call_list() || !(select_dbSCL($shift->get_id()) instanceof SCL)) {
echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"_submit_generate_scl\" value=\"1\"><br>
<input type=\"submit\" value=\"Generate Sub Call List\" name=\"submit\"style=\"width: 250px\">";
}
else {
echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"_submit_view_scl\" value=\"1\"><br>
<input type=\"submit\" value=\"View Sub Call List\" name=\"submit\" style=\"width: 250px\">";
}

As you can see from the if-else statement, not every shift has a sub call list.

B. Archived weeks are weeks that are set to the status "archived". The status can be set using the function set_status($s) to "unpublished," "published," or "archived." Calendar.php includes a statement that does not allow archived weeks to be edited by anyone. I cannot find any modules that call set_status($s). I only see if statements that check to see whether a week is archived in order to hide it from view.