Making progress

I helped Matt submit his bug for approval after our meeting on Tuesday. The good news is that we finally have some bug fixes getting approved and implemented in the main build. I have the next bug to fix. I have not started on it yet but should get going on it later tonight and also get working on our picture issue.  The new problem in fixing this bug is building the code to make sure that we can test the fix since the original poster seems to not be following the bug anymore. I feel if we can not make any head way in the next week that we need to ditch this bug and find another one.

POSSCON Aftermath

Well I'm bummed my letter to win a Samsung Tab didn't make it to them in time. It got sent back with a return to sender stamped on it. I'm also going to
Go back to the privilege post and add peoples names. I did get to talk to mad dog and he was really an approachable Guy with great stories. He talked about a program he was working with that he needed to optimize and he was able to do that by replacing one card in a stack. That one card change shaved off 6 hours of computer time. He also seemed to be one of the few presenters that seemed to really know what they were talking about. Many of the other presenters sound kinda like me and my fellow classmates when presenting our projects. We know enough about what were doing to get the job done but don't really know what's going on under the hood. I also talked to Jim McCracken about 3d fabrication nothing to interesting to add on top of the presentation. The last person I talked to was John Diamond. It sounds like he has taken on a huge task rewritting the game engine and also doing the art work. That also seems to be the down fall of the project it seems that if he could get some more people involved he might end up with a better product but he would lose some of his control.

Live blog POSSCON

For POSSCON I'm going to try and do a live blog from my phone through out the day.

7:00 am
     I woke up and started getting ready for the day and headed out to pick up Ash in the way out of town. Wasn't quite sure what to ware so I went with regular school attire.

8:34 am
     Well I finally made it to Ash's so if you see a yellow streak on 26 that's us.

10:32 am
     Just arrived so it looks like we missed opening comments but we got to talk to the 3D printing guy (Jim McCracken) and the open source gaming guy (John Diamond) before the seminars.

11:40 am
     Decided to change up from seeing "mad dog" and see the 3d printing presentation.

12:02 am
    The 3d printing was pretty cool. I might end up making one for my dad for car projects. For lunch ended up eating with the sugar guy (John Mertic) but turns out that he's not the same sugar guy that the other groups are talking too. It turned out to be SugarCRM that he was representing. So I kinda ended up looking like an ass talking about too different systems and neither of us really understanding why the conversation wasn't making too much sense.

2:00 pm
     Skipped the talk after lunch but decided to go to the big data talk. So far not as interesting as I thought it would be. The presenter (Nathan Marz) somehow figured out how to give a generalized speech about hoodunk with specifics and the audience still walked away wondering what they had just listened too.

3:00 pm
     Went to the starting a new business with open source (David Duggins) and it is pretty informative by not getting bogged down with specific tech babble. The down side to this approach is that people in the crowd saw it as weakness and start asking questions about software that would be used to show how much smarter they were then the speaker.

5:03 pm
    The lady (Mel Chua) that talked about sugar labs had a really different and cool way of realizing how confusing jumping into open source. From the beginning she tried to make things confusing by moving people around and rearrange people based on their skill set. I like this approach when she first started it my first reaction was to run away from the madness but in the end I realized how close it was to the real first experience of jumping into the open source project.

8:04 pm
    Finally back home. Time to clean this post up and then enjoy new phone Thursday.

POSSCON speakers

Our assignment for POSSCON is to chase down several speakers and ask them some questions and see what they have to say. This will actuall be one of the hardest assignment in this class for me. I'm not much of a meet and greet kind of guy. So I will definatly have to come out of my comfort zone to talk to these speakers



Jon 'maddog' Hall is going to be one of the people that I chase down to talk to. From the description from the website sounds like he has done a little bit of everything. I think he would be a good person to ask "So where do I go from here" meaning now that I have a degree what are the next steps that I need to take.

Corey Atmos Donohoe is another speaker that looks like he has an interesting side life to his programing life. He also works with github and I would like to better understand how that system works.

Jehiah Czebotar is the lead engineer for bit.ly. I would be interested to see if that whole idea of shortening url's started out as a fix for a problem that him and friends were having then decided to turn it into a business or if it was a I know how to make money idea.




As a side note I would like to say that I'm pretty proud of my self for being able to solder a transiter back on my mother board after trying to install a gigantor video card went bad.

Spring Break Fun

Over spring break I installed Ubuntu on a stand alone machine to try and get our project running in an Linux environment.  I also wanted to be able to help Perry with his build. The experience of installing this in a windows environment compared to Linux is night and day. The major difference is the use of cmake. In windows it plainly asks you what is the source folder, what is the destination folder and what options you want to change. Which made this part very easy to get going on coding. The Linux version of cmake and its CMakeLists.txt files all assumes that you know all the inter-workings of what you are dealing with. It mentions library output paths and cmake preinstall directorys and other things that sort of sound like they might be good things to change to get it working but it doesn't seem to work like that. Following what instructions that they have on the wiki don't help either. The crazy thing about it is the group that created cmake is the same group that created VTK. You would think that would make this process straight forward.

I messed with it some more thinking I had found some step by step guide but the libraries are still not linked properly for the test project to fully compile. I'll have to talk to Perry to see what he has done and maybe we can  combine are methods and get one good working example.

Getting everybody caught up

Our team got together to get everyone caught up on how to get the active repository, make changes and then submit them for review. Andrew made a fix to one of the source files and has submitted it for review.  I haven't heard back from him yet on how the bug submission went but I'm guessing it should be accepted. We also came up with a timeline to get all of our bugs submitted. On a side note my bug is still in limbo.