Well good news at last! I have my Ubuntu system back up and running; the project is even all setup. This is great news because now I can get to playing with some code. I believe all other members of our group have the project setup as well so our project should start moving forward again. Most had a slight hang up setting up the Banshee extensions project.
POSSCON is coming up shortly, tomorrow actually. I am excited to go to this conference. This should be a cool experience. I have found two workshops that I am interested in on Friday, the 3D printing and cheap business startup workshops. I am also interested in meeting David Trask. Below are some questions I have to start off our conversation.
Jim McCracken - 3D printing
I read an article the other day regarding 3D printing. The article was about a 3D printer that could replicate itself, a fully functional copy. I thought this was amazing! I had no idea there were printers out there that could manufacture electronics. The article went on to say that in the future they predict each household will have a 3D printer. If a part breaks on one of your household goods, just print out a replacement, a fully functional replacement! Wow! So I plan to ask Jim about his familiarity with such hardware, because I am really interested to learn more. If he is, how far off does he believe this technology is from being available for household use?
David Duggins - Starting a business for cheap
My father owns a networking and computer repair business. This is where I had some of my first experiences with computers and that is what got me interested. I wanted to give some back. He does strictly networking and repair, he used to program but has lost it because of not using it nor keeping up with the changing technologies. Therefore he does all his ticketing by hand. Tickets are very expensive and the process of manually entering tickets is time consuming. So I began programming a ticketing system for his business. I have the database built and am working on the interface and functionality. I am able to add and remove info from the DB through decent looking web pages. I have also begun to incorporate some reports but I still need to do much more before it can replace his current system. Unfortunately I do not have a lot of time to dedicate to this task right now and I have been working on it here and there. I would like to know if there is some sort of open source framework for something like this out there available for modification. If so, can he recommend one or several to look into?
David Trask - Open Source tools for teaching
I have a nine year old daughter who loves to play around on her laptop and catches on to things I show her very quickly. I would like to get interested in programming. Just to introduce her to the field of computer science at an early age. I would like to ask what open source software he would recommend for this situation?
Well, off to bed now. I must get up early to make it downtown by 7:15, it is a 45 minute drive. I’m picking up Brittany in the morning and we are riding to the conference together. Should be a fun and informative trip!!! Night all!
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
HDD isuues
So I am kind of upset right now considering the fact that I am reloading Ubuntu right now on my laptop. I was very close to finishing the initial setup of our project when my computer just shut down. When I powered it back on my second HDD, the one Ubuntu is loaded on, would not show up in the boot manager. I removed my primary HDD and replaced it with my secondary, forcing my machine to boot to it. Ubuntu came up but immediately shut down again. Again I pulled the HDD out and noticed it was abnormally hot. Figured it was a bad HDD. I let it sit for a bit to cool down then replaced in the machine and booted again. The OS came up but acted funny. I could not connect to the Internet but the Internet works fine on other machines in my house.
I don’t know much about troubleshooting Ubuntu network problems but I suspect the HDD anyways. I have a spare HDD so I slapped it in real quick and began the reinstall process. After the install finishes it is back to square one with setting up our project. I am very familiar with the setup by now though so hopefully this will not be too big of a set back. This is still frustrating, I have a ton to do right now!!
My machine is coming back up right now. Back to work…
I don’t know much about troubleshooting Ubuntu network problems but I suspect the HDD anyways. I have a spare HDD so I slapped it in real quick and began the reinstall process. After the install finishes it is back to square one with setting up our project. I am very familiar with the setup by now though so hopefully this will not be too big of a set back. This is still frustrating, I have a ton to do right now!!
My machine is coming back up right now. Back to work…
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Return from break... :-(
Well we are back from Spring Break…ugh! The break was very enjoyable though, spent much needed time with my little one! The break is over though SO……time to get to back to work!
Even though we were officially on ‘break’, I could not resist working on our project just a bit. My main concentration over break was to finish up our initial bug fix. There were a few locations in the code which the developers preferred we did not change, these name changes were causing issues elsewhere since we did not create the ‘migration path’. I was working on making the necessary changes back to ‘banshee-1’ but was running into troubles getting the project to build after making the requested changes.
After some back and forth with the developers on this topic, I guess one of them decided it would be easier if they made the needed tweaks. So he did so and thanked us for all of our work. I am not disappointed at all about his help because it allows us to fully concentrate on our Facebook extension, which will be a bit more exciting of a task.
Before break I mentioned that Jesse sent out an email to the developers announcing our project selection. We received very positive feedback from this email. We received replies from some excited contributors as well as an offer for assistance, which we gracefully accepted.
One of the main developers offered to do the initial setup of the extension for us. I was really stoked about this because this allows us to focus our efforts solely on the functionality of the project and not worry about setting up the extension within Banshee. All this is taken care of already. We have a base extension setup that looks for C# bindings and the gwibber library on the startup of Banshee. This is a very nice jump start!!!
We also have a rudimentary timeline established for our project. We listed some main functionality and associated them with dates to serve as a base guideline. This may need to be tweaked just a bit but it is a solid start.
The next order of business is to establish our backlog. Once we have this established we can assign jobs and get into our sprints. We have decided to make our sprints only a week long instead of a month, which is the suggested amount of time specified by the SCRUM guidelines.
Besides all of that, team stand-ups are going well. I have found these to be very effective. It is a nice way to keep track of what everybody is working on and there upcoming plans. Also, you can tell when someone has been slacking because they have nothing to talk about when it comes there turn to speak. Basically, these stand-ups force people to do something before for the meeting so they have something to talk about, even if it is just a little, as well as have a plan for what they will be working on. I like that!
One more bit of good news. We already have a gwibber window that posts updates to your desired social network. So we can bring up a window, outside of Banshee, type a message then send it to Facebook. Of course we need to figure out how to do this while interfacing with Banshee but we are very much on our way in this project!
Even though we were officially on ‘break’, I could not resist working on our project just a bit. My main concentration over break was to finish up our initial bug fix. There were a few locations in the code which the developers preferred we did not change, these name changes were causing issues elsewhere since we did not create the ‘migration path’. I was working on making the necessary changes back to ‘banshee-1’ but was running into troubles getting the project to build after making the requested changes.
After some back and forth with the developers on this topic, I guess one of them decided it would be easier if they made the needed tweaks. So he did so and thanked us for all of our work. I am not disappointed at all about his help because it allows us to fully concentrate on our Facebook extension, which will be a bit more exciting of a task.
Before break I mentioned that Jesse sent out an email to the developers announcing our project selection. We received very positive feedback from this email. We received replies from some excited contributors as well as an offer for assistance, which we gracefully accepted.
One of the main developers offered to do the initial setup of the extension for us. I was really stoked about this because this allows us to focus our efforts solely on the functionality of the project and not worry about setting up the extension within Banshee. All this is taken care of already. We have a base extension setup that looks for C# bindings and the gwibber library on the startup of Banshee. This is a very nice jump start!!!
We also have a rudimentary timeline established for our project. We listed some main functionality and associated them with dates to serve as a base guideline. This may need to be tweaked just a bit but it is a solid start.
The next order of business is to establish our backlog. Once we have this established we can assign jobs and get into our sprints. We have decided to make our sprints only a week long instead of a month, which is the suggested amount of time specified by the SCRUM guidelines.
Besides all of that, team stand-ups are going well. I have found these to be very effective. It is a nice way to keep track of what everybody is working on and there upcoming plans. Also, you can tell when someone has been slacking because they have nothing to talk about when it comes there turn to speak. Basically, these stand-ups force people to do something before for the meeting so they have something to talk about, even if it is just a little, as well as have a plan for what they will be working on. I like that!
One more bit of good news. We already have a gwibber window that posts updates to your desired social network. So we can bring up a window, outside of Banshee, type a message then send it to Facebook. Of course we need to figure out how to do this while interfacing with Banshee but we are very much on our way in this project!
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