HackProp 2: Paint Partners

Hack Prop Title: Paint Partners

Description:

A collaborative drawing tool made in Python using PyGame as the GUI, and homemade networking code borrowed from Hack1. Ideally would be able to be used as a teaching tool, by limiting the teacher to be the only one able to draw.

Libraries:

The only library we need to be using is PyGame.

Upstream Repository:

pypi.python.org

Hardware:

The only hardware we need is the Raspberry Pi, Display, Input Devices

Team:

I will be working with mstubinis for the project

Project Milestones:

1. Develop non-server side code to modify and display an image, load config data, and prepare text fields
2. Develop server side and networking code to send and process information: pixel data, chat messages, client connecting and disconnecting from server, admin issuing commands through console
3. Finish development tasks, build documentation, distribute upstream.

License:

GNU GPL2.0

Upstream Mentor:

Currently none, but the project isn't really different from our last one in terms of what needs to be done.

Final Thoughts:

This project should be an interesting build off of the work that was done on Hack 1 and should serve as a cool project providing a service.

Adventures in being a Teaching Assistant

This is probably the first in a short series on my perception on being a Teaching assistant. Hopefully this will be a good place to give my thoughts for a few different thoughts I have from being on both sides of taking a class.

I am a teaching assistant for an intro level programming course at RIT. I have been one for almost a year now and I have become accustomed to the way the teacher I help teaches, the kinds of questions the people come up with, and certain pitfalls from of early level programming. That said, the most difficult thing is remembering what a person should be expected to know and what they probably don't know yet. For example, I had a student ask me a question, which I had to stop and think of the answer for a minute or two, because my normal go to method hadn't been covered by the course. I feel like that is probably the biggest issue in teaching in general, and one of the biggest to overcome in becoming a good teacher.

Another interesting thing is seeing the difference in proficiency that you run into across multiple people doing the same thing. I have a few students that I never need to say anything to because they already either know everything or just catch on quickly enough that they don't need help. On the other hand, there are students who don't quite seem to understand anything that the professor just went over and ask questions about everything. Of course there are also plenty that fall in between.

I think the biggest thing I have noticed is the different ways that students attend class. What I am meaning is, how are they handling class time. I can see in every student is different ways that I have been a part of class at one point or another. It really is eye-opening seeing yourself in the people you are working with and realizing that you were there at one point. Overall, I am enjoying my time and I have several students that are fun to interact with from day to day. I hope this continues for a while more.

Tic-Tac-Pi - Final Thoughts

This was the second project that myself and mstubinis did for the ADVFoss class. This one was overall a much simpler project, mostly because it was doing something that we both thought would be fairly simple from the get go. I personally didn't have an overwhelming amount to do since mstubinis took charge right away and knocked out the game code itself in fairly short order. That left me pretty exclusively in charge of getting everything packaged. I originally had the same issues that I did in when it came to packaging up PyTalk, but more on that in a minute.

What I'm most surprised by was the expediency with which mstubinis actually got everything together. He had me write some very simple resolution code and had me do the testing to make sure it was working, but otherwise, he pushed out everything else in the time between classes in the first week. After that, it was fairly slow until we had to package it up because we had already had everything finished.

For some reason, my laptop finds it impossible to build python eggs. This happens to be a fairly large problem when trying to push things up to PyPi. Naturally this means I needed to go elsewhere for my uploading needs, which the first instinct is to go to a lab machine. Problem is that the lab machines are fairly finicky when it comes to actually using python on them. I finally managed to find a work around using my roommates laptop because he has a linix partition on his drive. After moving over the files, the upload and registration was extremely quick.

Overall, I found this project to be a little lackluster since I personally didn't have a lot to do for the project and I hope that changes as we move forward into the third hack for the class.

A little behind on posts

This blog has been rather inactive, partly because of the lack of Community contributions that I have done, and partly because I just haven't been doing a blog post for every week. The real issue that I have with getting one put up every week is mostly not having anything to talk about. I am hoping to change out that paradigm for the future as my workload gets a little more involved. I will be adding discussion about what the class I am teaching assistant for as well as work that is going on with the current projects. This should make things a little more lively. I thank you for reading

RocPy Meet-up - October edition

We once again set out on our way to RocPy. This time without our illustrious leader, DeCause. This meant that we had a new set of carpool leaders. The only annoying thing about the carpooling was that it had started to lightly downpour. I normally don't mind the rain, but is a little disheartening just standing around waiting in it. Regardless, we left for the University of Rochester right on time. The car I as riding in was full of complete strangers to me, so conversation was rather non-existent.

Once we got to U of R, we made the long trek up to the 4th floor corner that is the ever drab home of the meet-up. We had a surprising amount of people there, not counting the merry band that was coming from the FOSS classes. One thing that I am learning is that public speaking is not the forte of many of the organizers for the meetup, which is a little surprising as they seem to be teachers. This was most prevalent in the first portion where they were going over Python in the news.

Following that, we got a rather lengthy lecture on how to bridge Python into other languages. Despite that being the main premise of the lecture, the only thing that I really came away from it regarding bridging Python with other languages is that Python is a very slow language. The actual bridging was sort-of glossed over. It was almost like a cooking show, with all of the bridging done before hand and just showing off the results of the bridging on sample code. Ironically enough, certain examples didn't actually prove to be that much better, namely the Haskell implementation.

The thing that ended off the meeting was another of the organizers talking about His Raytracer which was being implemented in Python. What I found to be most interesting was the justification being used to use Python for the program despite being so slow. "It can be used as a teaching tool, because it is easier to read." I find that to be a remarkable sentiment. While it is true that Python can be made to look like almost psuedocode next to something like C++, a decent amount of that can be written off as the person writing the code in the first place. Programming languages are like tools, you use the tool best suited to the job, and Python is not that language for something like this thought experiment.

Overall,, RocPy was far more dull this month than it was last month. I hope that the November and December meet-ups are a little more lively.

Hack Prop 1(2): Tic-Tac-Pi?

Hack Title - Tic-Tac-Pi

Description:

This will be a Tic-Tac-Toe board game made using PyGame and meant to be played on the Raspberry Pi. Ideally we want it to be able to be played by two people on seperate Pi's using networking, but we will have a Computer player regardless.

Libraries:

We will only really be using PyGame and writing our own net code.

Upstream Repository:

We will be pushing it to PyPi

Hardware:

We will be using the Raspberry Pi, a keyboard, a mouse, and an internet connection (for the newtowrking).

Team Members:

I will be working on mstubinis for this project.

Project Milestones:

• Get a working Server and Client application
• Set up base game using PyGame
• Integrate client with game
• Package up the game

License:

We will be going with the MIT license for this project.

Final Thoughts:

Since neither of us is really all that familiar with networking in general (mostly due to the GDD program offering little inside the major itself), it will be interesting working on the subject. Even if we can't get it working, we always have the regular game to fall back on. Here's hoping!

Advanced FOSS Guest Speaker - Google

During class on Thursday, we were greeted by a very special guest that DeCause had asked to come down to talk with our class. As it turned out, Google had been at the Career Fair and doing interviews and such. While they were there, DeCause asked one of them to swing by our class and talk to us if they were able. To our good fortune, they were able to do just that. I am deeply regretful that I don't remember the man's name. It was a truly enlightening talk that helped to really put perspective on what I was doing and working towards for the past few days.

The man started off by introducing himself, telling us what he did at Google and some things that he worked on. Right away I could tell that the man far outdid anything that I even thought about doing for a job. After introducing himself he asked us if there were any questions that we specifically had for him. We chose to ask him about what it was like working at Google and what this 20% work was. As it turns out, while working at Google, you have projects that you choose to work on for a main project and a secondary project that you do sort of on your own time.

Afterwards, DeCause asked a few simple questions as it related to the Advance FOSS class. The main important questions were the use of file revision systems and the use of IRC channels for communication. While I never doubted that it was used, it was interesting to see the reasoning behind their use.

The last thing we asked about was how it was that he managed to find himself working at Google and if he would ever think about leaving. He told us about how he wasn't exactly the best student, though far above my level, and he more or less lucked into getting internships at Microsoft and Apple, which gave him the chops to be put up for consideration by Google in the first place.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed the talk. It was slightly disheartening to see just how far I am from being a competent hacker by any stretch of the imagination, but it has also given me some inspiration to try that much harder in the upcoming future.

PyTalk - Final Thoughts

This was an interesting experiment. The entire class is weird due to the fact that I have nowhere near as much mojo when it comes to all of these tools we are using like coding in python and using the Raspberry Pi. Especially after seeing all of the other projects in the class. PyTalk works, though it is a little rough when being used on a Pi, although that portion needs a little more testing when it comes to making statements like that.

Our demo for the class was a little rough since it was on a Pi that we had never used before. It managed to connect up to the IRC chat and post a few things, but the speech recognition was a little off, much like the first builds of the project. That said, we are hopefully doing another demo today which should go much smoother.

The only thing that we have left to do is upload the project up to Pypi, which is my job and overall it has been going horribly. I would never have expected that the issues I'm getting. What is a little more impressive is that there doesn't seem to be anyone else who understands the error either. Hopefully uploading from the Pi itself might work better, although that will probably end up taking a long time.

Regardless I am looking forward to the next project s that we will be having. I don't really have any thoughts on what I want to do, so I'm just going to try and stick with mstubinis with whatever project he wants to do for this milestone.C'est la vive

PyTalk woes

This has been an interesting experience. It honestly has. I have learned a lot more about using Python than I originally did and also doing some interesting things with IRC. my partner, mstubinis, who is a pretty awesome hacker, is responsible for writing the greater majority of our code while I was working on more of the management side of things, documentation and packaging. This project would probably not have gone nearly as well without all the work Mst put in.

That said, packaging is really weird. As I am not really fluent in python, using it in the shell is still a little weird to me and the errors that it throws make it a little hard to discern. It has certainly been a humbling experience as it shows me how little I know when it comes to my own field. I think the greatest challenge has been trying to keep up with everything that has been going on as far as the project is concerned. The time frame for the project really made this interesting. I would never expect something like this to be done in five weeks.

The current crossroads I am stuck at is getting the project up and hosted on pypi. I have everything setup and ready to be put up, (although as it isn't uploading properly, it means something is missing...somewhere).

At current, I am testing out different methods of getting the file uploaded onto Pypi. I hope this whole process will go much smoother later...

September 16th: RocPy meet-up

So this was a new experience. I had never been to RocPy before, but I was moderately aware of what happens at the events because of what DeCause talked about regarding it during class. I knew that it would be over at the University of Rochester, and I knew that people would be giving talks about the various works they had done in the last month while working with Python. What I was not expecting was that we would be in a classroom off hidden in a corner of one of the buildings. It was a little jarring and made it easier to see why they didn't have many people outside of the people that DeCause had brought with him.

The actual information presented was pretty interesting. RyanSB gave a presentation on the general make up of the course website and what goes into it. There was also a large portion dedicated to being able to create things using OpenShift. At least I believe that was the premise, what was happening while RyanSB was talking was a little over my head for the majority of the technical aspects.

There was a few lightning talks, with the first one being by a fellow classmate who presented on why you shouldn't include the .git folder where you host your website. It was rather interesting overall. DeCause also gave a lightning talk which was over a tumbr blog that he came across which mashed up a programming book and the King James bible. DeCause ran with this and made wupotus, which is a mash up of speeches from President Obama and lyrics from the Wu-tang clan. He showed it off, but then quickly remembered it was very NSFW.

Overall RocPy was an interesting experience and I am looking forward to going back again next month, though I do wish the accommodations weren't so...sketchy? Just my thoughts.

Back to FOSS

So it has been a good summer, but I'm ready to delve back into the world of FOSS. The ADVFOSS class I am a part of now is doing 5 week sprints for its projects. and so we are gonna start with that first one.

PyTalk (Working Title)

PyTalk is going to be a Speech to text program for IRC using the Speech Recognition 1.1.0 Python Library When we are finished with the project, we will be putting it up on pypi.python.org. The main hardware we will be using is the Raspberry Pi and a microphone. Mstubinis and I will be working together on the project, and we are still looking for a mentor. We are going to go with an MIT License for the project.

Update: I talked to Anthony Zhang, the author of the Speech Recognition library we were looking at and he is willing to work with us and be an upstream mentor.

Milestones

1. Get Speech Recognition to work on the Raspberry Pi

2. Learn how to configure an IRCBot.

3. Get IRCBot to accept the information it is being sent

4. Get IRCBot to post text to IRC 

Since we are only going to have a 5 week sprint for this, we can hopefully get everything done in the two development weeks. I will be trying to keep the documentation up to date through the process so we don't have as much to do come Week 4 and we can work a little longer on making it look nice.

HFOSS Wrap-up

For the last fifteen weeks, I have been part of a HFOSS class at RIT. Every Monday and Wednesday at 5:00 to 6:15. When I enrolled in the class, the only thing that I had to go off of was the word of my friend. It has probably been one of my favorite classes to take during my time at RIT, partly because of the students in the class, and partly because of my instructor. DeCause loves what he does. He helps make the class what it is and helps push his student to not just be better programmers, but also better people.

The HFOSS program recently got a minor approved, which is the first minor for FOSS in the nation. HFOSS really has an important message and it isn't something that a lot of people really know heading into the job market. Before I took this class, I only vaguely knew what Open Source development was, and I think that is the same for many people. The FOSS minor will help to educate people about this subject and will hopefully encourage many to join in on Open Source development.

Python Math, the game that I helped develop has been a good example of working under limited environments and my team was fairly smooth running. We had some issues, but we managed to get everything we really wanted done, with exception to getting outside sources interested in development. It was a fun experience and one I will be more than happy to help with in the future should someone else pick up the project.

Overall, I am really proud to have been a part of this class and have learned a fair amount. I will enjoy taking another class with DeCause in the fall. I look forward to the future.

Pharas, signing off~

A link to my Github: https://github.com/Pharas
A link to Python Math's repository: https://github.com/danShumway/python_math
Some screenshots from Python Math

Python Math: Final Thoughts

We are doing a presentation today on Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure. What we learned from it, what challenges we faced, and what could have gone better. Honestly I am proud of what my little team managed to come up with and I am also proud of what we will be leaving behind for the next HFOSS class to work with. While I think that in the long run I could have contributed more than what I ended up contributing, I think that we all did a good job.

The most important thing that I have taken from the whole experience has to be how fast development can be when you have people that really care about a project and also what happens when you have very limited development time. Roughly 4 weeks is not a long time to go from nothing to "finished" product. We still don't have that honestly, but I think we have something worth while.

I hope that there are people that will be picking it up in the future, especially as the next HFOSS class comes into session. I would like to see more done with the game. The framework is complete. It just needs some dedicated people to write up some cool levels for it and a fresh coat of paint. With those two things, I think it could very well shine. I have to give a big thanks to danShumway for starting this project and I hope I will get to work with him more in the future.

Python Math: A Playtest and Ice Cream

So last week, Python Math: Adder's Garden adventure got to do some playtesting with 4th graders. This was the first time that we got to have any sort of interaction with our game regarding actually playing it outside of our little group. The playtesting itself went rather smoothly.The children really seemed to like our game, even if it had a few bugs that needed working out. I think the biggest issue was mostly from a visuals standpoint. As we only have rather simplistic assets in the game at current, it is a little difficult to understand which way you are facing.

There is also an issue where some of our map design in that if you go through an addition gate in the wrong way, Adder will just fall off the back of the map because he is too long. There is an inverse problem where if traveling through a subtraction gate with too few segments. In that case, you just lose all of your segments and then are unable to go through the gate.

Altogether, we managed to get some good feedback and found some things that should be fixed with the game. On the way back we stopped for some ice cream which was a nice little diversion. All in all, a good way to spend the day.

HFOSS Quiz: Logical Fallacies

When?

1. When was the latest version of the infographic published?

The latest revision was put up in November of 2012

Who?

2. Who wrote and designed this infographic?

David McCandess

3. Who did the research and collected the data?

Marley Whiteside, Kathryn Ariel Kay, and Peter Ayres

4. Who did the translation of this graph?

Gilles Peyroux, Klaus-Michael Lux, and Ivan Galarza

Where?

5. Where on the internet can this infographic be found?
The graph can be found here

6. What sources did the authors use to create this visualization? List each one in the form of a hyperlink
Wikipedia
FallacyFiles
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosphy
Skeptic Dictionary
Changing Minds
Logically Fallacious
Evolution Wiki
Infidels.org
Philosophical Society
San Jose State University
TV Tropes
Stantarosa.edu
Concise Introduction to Logic
Beginners Guide to Scientific Method

What?

7. According to the graphic, how many major categories of fallacies are there? Please list each one

Appeal to the minds, Appeal to emotions, Faulty deductions, Manipulating content, Garbled Cause and Effect, On The Attack

8. How many different languages has this infographic been translated into? Please list each one.

English, French, Spanish, German

9. Under what license is this infographic released?

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0

Bonus

10. Why might understanding these fallacies be important?

The more you understand and recognize faulty logic, the easier it is to see bad arguments for what they are and it can help you to make good decisions.

Lit Review Two: Fallacy Boogaloo

This time we turn our attention towards, not an article, but a webpage. In particular, this webpage is meant to teach people logical fallacies that are commonly practiced. So let's take a look.

Who

The page was written and designed by David McCandess with help from Tatjana Dubovina on the design front. Marley Whiteside, Kathryn Ariel Kay, and Peter Ayres did the main research for the project.

What

Rhetological Fallacies: Errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logic thinking

When

The project was put up sometime in April, 2012.

Where

The page can be found here

Gist

Show a wide swath of different logical fallacies that are commonly committed in everyday life and examples of what they are.

The Good

- Wide variety of fallacies commented on

- Simple examples of said fallacies

- Split up into the different related types of fallacies

The Bad

- The page is fairly bland outside of the fallacies, which are just sort of listed

- There is nowhere to go to learn more directly on the page

- The simple examples can confuse some of the more complex fallacies like Sweeping Generalization

Questions

- Why were certain fallacies left off?

- Why choose to use this style to provide the information?

- Will the group continue to add to this document?

Final Thoughts

Things like this are important as is anything that raises public awareness and intelligence. The logical fallacies brought up are so common in basic discourse, it is hard to not commit one or two every once and a while. If we are aware of them though, it helps make us better in discerning when arguments aren't very good. All in all, a valiant project and one I greatly appreciate. 8/10 gavels

Change of Pace: ImagineRIT & Face-painting

So ImagineRIT is a showcase for all sorts of projects and booths that RIT puts together every year. I had quite a few friends present their projects and had some pretty good showings. I was not one of those people that had a real showcase. I spent time with my club. We got together, grabbed two tables, and made little masks and did face-painting for the kids. I was pretty tired after the entire affair was over, but it was also probably the most fulfilling thing I have done.

I don't know why, but seeing a child's face light up is just amazing. I am not the best artist, as displayed by some of the artwork my fellow club mates showed off, but I know I made some kids really happy. I even had one parent personally thank me because I had just made their son's day. It is the little things like that which make the entire thing worth while. I'm hoping that we will get to do something like this again next year.

Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure - First Meeting

Our group is...interesting. Our group leader did not remember when we had a meeting. One of our members has been doing all of the engine work. I don't really know what the last member of group is supposed to be doing. During the meeting itself, we spent a large amount of it waiting on the group leader to get there. After he finally did get there, I wasn't really in the loop about what was going on in the engine work, so I sort of had to sit next to the leader and our engineer and watch them try and figure out what was wrong with our install package.

I had to leave a little early due to previous engagements, so I don't know what happened after I left. That said, I have been assigned to working on getting the remainder of our design documents finished as well as reaching out to some artists that I know so that we can get at least some assets into the game. I have managed to get two of them interested and I'll try to at least get a third to see if they will help as well.

For now, I'm still hopeful that we can get things together for the end of the semester, but I do believe it will be more difficult that we had originally planned for. Into the future we go.

Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure - Beginning Trials

My HFOSS class has grouped people up to make educational games. My group has decided to make its own game. The result of our planning has come up with Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure. The idea is that you are a snake learning math in a garden. Like other Snake games, as you play, the snake gets bigger. In this case, Adder goes through various gates to increase his size by the number that is on the gate. Adder must grow until he is able to go through the door to the next puzzle. What makes it different is that Adder can also go through gates that will subtract from his size to allow for more interesting puzzles.

So far it seems like my role in the group is to be the main designer, which both makes me in charge of keeping our design documents up to date. So far I have already made documents for our puzzle design, mechanics design, and menu design. The documents themselves are not completely full since we are still going through the planning stages for most of the game. I'm quite interested in what will become of the game.

Project Team Proposal

So It is time for us to group up for our first real open source project, or at least first for some of us. I'm pairing up with danShumway, though we hope to have a few people join us. Regardless, here is our proposal:

Project 1 Proposal

Team Members:

danShumway (Daniel Shumway)

Pharas (Brian Escriche)

Project Choice:

We have decided that we are going to try and make our own game, Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure.

Description:

Python Math is going to be a small puzzle game for the XO designed to teach early math concepts like addition, subtraction, and order of operations. Players will be trying to get the length of Adder to a certain value to clear each stage which is accomplished by traversing through addition and subtraction gates to hit the right number.

Roles:

At current with the team we have -

danShumway - Documentation, Core Engine work

Pharas - Design, Engine Work

Source Repository:

We are hosting our repository on Github at this address

Upstream Mentors:

As neither myself nor Danny are the most proficient python hackers, we will be asking for help from deCause and Mansam.

Communication:

We hope to keep the majority of our communication going through both email and in person meetings that we should be holding fairly regularly in addition to whatever time is spent in class working together.

Easy Parts:

We are hoping that the engine itself will be fairly easy to create as the idea behind the game is tile based.

Foreseeable challenges:

Due to the main design goals for the project, we are looking to have people create their own puzzles for contribution. Danny also feels that keeping everything reasonably well documented will be a little challenging, but I don't really see it. Time will tell.

Overcoming obstacles:

Hopefully we can reach out to people in the foss-box to help with puzzles and ideas for us to work with. Otherwise, I feel like we have a nice project which should opefully be easy to keep within scope.

Commarch Results

My group and I decided to take a look at the Monogame project and see how good it is at maintaining its open source presence. Let's find out.

A little about the Project

I think it is more pertinent to let Monogame speak for itself.

Here is also a link to their repository for the main branch on Github.

Who manages the repository

There has been about 8 main contributors over the course of the project, with 4 main contributors still maintaining the project on Github. These people are as follows: Steve Williams, Tom Spillman, Andrea Magnorsky, and Jacob Anderson. Tom Spillman seems to be the main lead responsible for managing the commits to Monogame and is probably the leader for the project overall. The repository itself has around 138 contributors with over 6,000 commits between them.

GIT by a bus/ Calloway Coefficient of Fail

So we tried to use the Git by a bus program, but that failed spectacularly as we couldn't find a computer to handle the process outside hijacking one of the computers they use to calculate collisions with black holes. Seeing as we would like to remain students, we just went with what we could get.

The Callaway Coefficient of Fail was....interesting as there were rather huge swaths of points taken off for some fairly minor things. I don't know that I agree with the final assessment. Regardless, the results are as follows:
[Callaway Coefficient of Fail]:
--------------------------------
Size: +0
Source Control : +0
Building from Source: +50
Bundling: +0
Libraries: +20
System Install: +20
Code Oddities: +20
Communication: +15
Releases: +0
History: +10
Licensing: +10
------------------------------
145 - So much fail, your code should have its own reality TV show

Just past the benchmark for that result

Front and Back End

As Monogame is more a library, it doesn't really have a specific person dedicated to the front end part of the project. That said, between all of the contributors, there is probably only one or two people as most people work in their own separate forks for the project. Which sort of leads into the next point...

More relevant issues

A large majority of contributions are in their own separate forks on Github with several admittedly lined up to be merged, but that doesn't change the fact that the project is rather spread thin between all the forks. It makes it hard to know what is actually been implemented and what actually needs working on.

Trending?

It is trending rather highly as there are several game projects coming out that are being made or ported with Monogame which is drawing more and more people to the fold.

The Raptor Test

This is getting to be a case of too big to fail in some regards. There are enough developers and members of the community that I do believe that something like a meteor striking every core team member dead, there would still be a fair amount of people that could still contribute to the project. That said, there are a large amount of commits and contributions attributed to a small number of people.

Start-up?

Monogame has...not all that much for the purposes of getting people really involved right off the bat. The barrier to entry could be a little better, but that is neither here or there

Monogame's Communication/Documentation

For the most part, the greater portion of Monogames discussion either happens on their forums or on the issue tracker on their Github repository. This is a fairly active community and the developers seem to comment often, so it does well enough in that regard. There is also a decent amount documentation, though it is holdover from XNA itself rather than specifically made for Monogame.

Would you like to contribute?

I...would rather not. I don't mind developing with Monogame, but that is completely different from developing for it. It just doesn't really appeal to me.

Final Conclusions

Monogame is a fine project and I would like to see where it goes. It has a lot going for it and will be a cool framework to work with in the future, but I don't find the community itself very appealing. The large sense of independence is both a benefit and hindrance depending on your skill level.

Here is a link to the powerpoint that we presented with

Meet-up Report: March 14th meeting of Linux Users Group

This was interesting. The Linux Users Group is a club on the RIT Campus that meets on Fridays in the Golisano college. The group itself is roughly 5 years old according to the club's President. The general meetings seem to be centered around spending the first hour giving a presentation teaching some aspect of using Linux and the other hour spent as an open forum for its members.

The subject of today's meeting was installing and compiling the Linux Kernel on the member's laptops. I would have joined in if I wasn't afraid of straight bricking my laptop. Not exactly the best idea with work to do later. Regardless, the presentation itself was a fairly interesting one even if I wasn't able o follow everything exactly. I feel like this probably wasn't the best initial introduction to the group for an inexperienced user like myself.

The presenter was very knowledgeable about the subject and presented from a slideshow, but the presentation itself was rather lacking overall. I don't know if this is just usual fair for the group, but of the eight regulars there, many were jumping in and either adding to what was being said or commenting on what was going on. This would be fine for a different activity, but doing something as complex as compiling a kernel, it was very distracting to the entire process.

Overall, I felt like I learned something, even if it isn't enough information to do something with. I could see myself coming back here in the future if only to see if I can't learn something new. I will try to come back in the future.

Commarch Team Proposal - Monogame

It is time for a Commarch project:

Members

1. Daniel Shumway (drs7453@rit.edu)
2. Liam Middlebrook (ljm2906@rit.edu)
3. Brian Escriche (bke2759@rit.edu)

Project

As stated, we will be working on analyzing the Monogame project. Monogame is an opensource framework for C# that is replicating the XNA Framework. The main reason for this is the abandoning of support for the framework by Microsoft.

Roles

At current, we have yet to decide roles for the group because we have yet to sit down and have a full meeting. It will probably happen fairly soon.

Source

Monogame is hosted on Github here

Mentors

While Monogame does have an IRC, it is fairly inactive and as such we will probably be looking more at their Github contributions. Of note is an Ethan Lee

The Easy

• Monogame is fairly active overall
• There is a large community

The Hard

• They haven't had a large update in a while
• There may be a communication issue as time goes on

Overcoming our obstacles

We have a fairly resourceful group and I am used to scrounging around for information and contacts

Career Fair and Company Talks

So this last week was Career fair at RIT. As per normal, every dresses to the 7's and prints off their resumes and business cards in the hopes they will stand out from everyone else doing the exact same thing. On the converse, the recruiters have set up shop trying to present themselves to be the best white collar pencil pushing station for the aspiring students. A big game of cat and mouse really. On a side note, I'm not sure why we still are required to have class on either day, it just makes things stressful for everyone trying to make time for everything or skipping out on class.

The other festivities of course include some of companies giving talks to about their companies to people to raise interest and awareness of what they do. Of particular note is the company Hudl which not only presented a talk in the GCCIS building as well as our HFOSS class. I much prefer things like these as it switches the focus from both sides trying to peddle themselves off. The talk itself was rather interesting, I hadn't actually heard of the company before. All in all, I more enjoyed listening to people giving advice about the career fair.

This Week in HFOSS - 2/10/14

Outside of today not having class, HFOSS has been rather interesting. We spent much of last week going over discussion on a chapter from Steve Weber's book The Success of Open Source. I personally found the reading rather dry, but it did capture some of the more interesting elements of open source development rather well. It could have stood to broaden its horizons a bit, but otherwise a decent read. You can find a slightly more in-depth analysis of the chapter as a whole here.

We also spent a bit of time talking about the local meet up for the ROC.py meet-up tomorrow. Mostly centered around who would be doing the driving and who would be going with who. I won't be in attendance due to some prior engagements which means I have to miss the talk on introducing python to people. I personally have only done very minor work in python, only when helping a friend with their CS homework in my freshman year. I hope that as the semester goes on, I will be able to catch up with those that did go in terms of experience. Till next time...

Article Follow-up: The Success of Open Source

The "article" as written by Steve Weber had a few interesting tidbits concerning certain pillars and principals. I think it would be worth it to look into them a little bit more

1. What are the 5 Pillars of the "Open Source Way"?

-Open Exchange

-Participation

-Rapid Prototyping

-Meritocracy

-Community

2. What are the 8 General Principals that Weber lists?

-Make it Interesting and make it happen

-Scratch an Itch

-Minimize how often you have to reinvent the wheel

-Solve problems through parallel work processes wherever possible

-Leverage the Law of Large Numbers

-Document what you do

-Release Early and Release Often

-Talk a lot

3. How are the 5 Pillars and Weber's General Principals similar?

Namely, the pillars and principals share the same idea of what people within the open source community to be doing. Communicate and work together with one another. This is most apparent between the Open Exchange Pillar and not reinventing the wheel and leverage of law of large numbers principals. 

4. How are they different?

Weber chooses to go much more in depth with each point than any of the general principals do. This puts more focus on specific elements like working together which is not quite as strongly represented in the pillars. The pillars also put forward meritocracy which isn't really brought up by Weber.

Bonus:

In Weber's analysis, he draws heavily on Eric S. Raymond's text "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which can be found here 

What is Open Source? - Article Overview

Who: Steve Weber

What: What is Open Source and How does it work?

When: 2004

Where: Here

Gist: This is the who, what, where, and why of open source, detailing the many facets that go into creating open source software. This ranges from creation to maintaining


The Good:
-Showing the origins of what is probably the largest open-source project in the world
-Explaining the various solutions people have come up with to the variety of problems open source developers
- Help explain the reasoning behind why people go into making open source software.

The Bad:
- Fairly dense which makes it a little tiring to read in a single sitting
- Spends a large amount of time on points which could be spent better on furthering the point
- A little too in depth for just an introduction

Questions:
- Why is open source referred to as a bazaar if it really isn't?
- Who are some of the other big names in Open Source development?
- What are some of the other big open source projects?

In The End:
The "article" was on the whole fine and provided a fairly good summary of the history and process behind open source development. That said, it was fair bit longer than it needed to be, mostly due to going back to the same points over and over. While I found it a decent read, I can't really recommend it for anyone who isn't already interested in open source development. I give it 3/5 commits.

HFOSS: Week 2

This was a fairly slow week as it mostly focused on us learning how to use both the IRC Client that we are going to be using for the remainder of the class and working with Git. The only thing about this is that I already had to go through the process before due to a different class. That in mind it was a nice refresher to the information and allowed me to actually understand more about how to uses Github. I had some issues using Github in the other class, mostly due to an issue with our network drives and not fully understanding how to work it.

I am hopeful looking into the coming weeks as we should be able to get into some material that I haven't gone over yet. I really want to get into the things we talked about in the first day. I've only worked very little in python and think it would be fun to work in more. We'll see as things go on.

My foray into HFOSS begins!

Well, I didn't think that I would be doing an open source software class when I started this blog, but here we are. I have been exposed to FOSS before. Specifically back when I was in 6th grade or so when my father gave me an old laptop of his for me to use. It had recently been wiped completely clean and had Unix installed on it. Admittedly, I wasn't much of a programmer or anything when I was 12, so some of the subtleties were lost on me.

Either way, I am interested in seeing what I can do with this little adventure into learning about open-source software more and some of thing things I will be able to do with it. Off we go!