Missed me??!!

Wow! It has been a while since I have been here. Sorry for not updating more frequently but I have been REAL busy. Just because I have not been on here much does not mean I have not been working away at this project, I have been very active! Let me bring you up to speed on our project.

Our team's moral is high right now. Our project is moving along nicely and we have not had any major hang ups yet. I didn't really expect any but you never know, and it sounds like others are having some troubles. Hope it continues this way until the end of the semester, my fingers are crossed. Our team has meshed nicely. No major issues between us to report and everyone gets along and works well together. That is a big plus! We do have a few members that are dong a little more than others but we have met on this topic and addressed the issue and feel we have it under control. We are excited by our success so far in this endeavor and are ready to close out strong with an interesting addition to the Banshee project.

We are leaning towards a Facebook extension for Banshee. The lead developers mentioned this would be nice to have so we thought maybe we could tackle another project they were trying to throw our way, much like the bug fix they recommended. It may be a bit much to try to finish in the short time we have left in the semester but we are not for sure. Jesse is checking with the developers right now to see how big of a project they feel this will be. Although even if we cannot wrap this extension up by the end of the semester, we can establish a solid foundation and some main functioning that will give others a platform to build off of. We may become involved enough to see this thing through even after graduation.

While Jesse is doing that I am doing my part by looking through the code of some of the other available extensions to see if I can get an estimate of the complexity based on these other modules. I will report back on this later after I have some more time to look through the code.

So what else...

Well, our team made a solid contribution to the Banshee project recently. You can read all about it here. We made many changes to filenames and code to reference 'banshee' instead of 'banshee-1'. It may have been a little grunt work, but it was much needed grunt work as the 2.0 release of Banshee is schedule for April. We are satisfied with our work and the developers are thankful towards us for tackling this for the project.

My last blog posting left off with the Chapter 6 homework. Well I completed Chapter 7's tasks earlier so I might as well add my thoughts on those exercises.

7.2.2

This was a very simple exercise. It just had us experimnet with the 'diff' command. The command without the '-u' flag prints only the line or lines in the file that were changed. With the '-u' flag there is much more information shown on the screen. The number line of the code plus the surrounding code for reference is some of the information that is displayed. This is very helpful for locating the changes in the files. I know because I had to find locations of changes in our project based on these files .

As I was saying, I was already familiar with the patch file before this exercise. I was using a diff file to implement our fix and had no idea. There were many similar changes that were previously tracked so I used these tracked changes to make my own changes. Wish I would of jumped ahead and read this chapter first, it would have made interpreting the patch file a whole lot easier in the begining.

7.8

Was not really successful with this exercise. I was unsure of what they mean by comparing dev/null. I tried to diff this file with the 'foo' file but it returns the message 'diff: dev/null: No such file or directory'. I was not sure about this question so I moved on and will ask the professor about this one later.

7.9

The last exercise was more straightforward than the last. There was a tutorial with the needed commands listed. I downloaded the source code, changed the specified file and created the patch. Very simple process. We just did this process when submitting our own patch to the Banshee project. We used a git patch though.

Well I guess I will finish up with our plans for the upcoming week before Spring Break. We are waiting to hear back from the developers with their thoughts on us taking on this project with a only a couple of months to finish. As I said earlier, Jesse has been in contact with them regarding this subject. In the meantime, I am scouring the massive bug list for other possibilities in case something does not work out with the Facebook extension. I have asked the others to do the same and bring couple options to class on Thursday. After we make a choice on a final project we will hash out a reasonable time-line for reaching our goals.

Well that's it for now. Going to do some actual work on this project now instead of just talking about it. Cheers!!!