Wrapping it up

Its been a while since my last blog but I've been really busy trying to finish up projects for other classes. I switched my focus from documenting the code to creating a presentation for the project. James and Ashley are rounding up all of our contributions and combining the work. Then they are gonna send a pull request to add our work to the OpenKinect project. I think that we are going to have a solid presentation at the end of the semester, but only the future can tell.

slow and steady wins the race... hopefully

Last time our whole group met together we decided it was time to start preparing a little for our end of the semester presentation. We also tried to clarify what exactly we meant when we talked about documenting the project. We decided to try to document a huge file called cameras.c because it is in the worst condition. The code is about 800 lines long and id say there is only a dozen or so comments that are actually meaningful. Thursday a few of us were able to document a few functions and write down questions for a bunch of functions. So the plan today is hopefully James won't be plagued with another unfortunate event that prevents him from coming to school and we will be able to collaborate and knock out a some more functions. If we stay on this course I think we will be able to meet our documenting goals and I have full faith in the other members to finish their implementation of the auto-exposure and maybe some other features.

Free open source gaming and documentation

After going to POSSCON, which I had a great time at, I went home and looked into some free open source games. Before this conference I didn't even know that there were open source games, especially  ones that you can contribute to. I found a HUGE list on wiki of open source games and thought I would share a few of them. One that I found really interesting is Gang Garrison 2, which is a 2d version of the game Team Fortress 2. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find the source code for this game so I looked around for another interesting game, but one that had the source code easily available. I soon found one called FreeSpace 2 . I know that I don't have a lot of time right now to spend working on a game that isn't school related but I plan on finding/contributing to a game this summer when I have a lot more free time. I went to some other talks at POSSCON, like one about security by Chris Hinkley, another talk I attended was about encouraging Open Source in education by Corey Donohoe. They were very interesting but I can't really do too much with the information that was passed along. The Open Source gaming talk was just right down my alley.


Now on to school related topics.... I've spent some time with one of my group members (Tony) talking about what we need to try to document in the source code. The code isn't really organized at all and there are limited to no comments so we have our work cut out for us, but I really want to be able to submit something that they think is valuable.
 

POSSCON!

So when looking at the schedule of POSSCON I have realized how excited I am to go! I had no idea that there were gonna be talks on gaming. There is also a workshop on open source gaming and all aspects of it. This is perfect for me because getting involved in this should help me when applying to a game company. The speaker for the seminar and workshop is John Diamond. The other talk that I am really interested in is the one about open source trends in the government. I'm still working on some questions for the speakers but I can't wait to talk to John Diamond and flood him with some questions.

Back to the grind....

Well I had a nice break from school the past week. With saying that I really haven't worked much on our project because I was out of town, but I did respond to an email about POSSCON so I wouldn't lose my spot. I also met with one of my group mates and we talked about doing some documentation for the project because we are still learning C from our other teammates. Hopefully the documenting will also help us understand a little more of what the code is doing.

Not too far behind

One of our assignments for our project (openKinect), we were supposed to find a bug and fix it. There weren't really any bugs so we tried to implement a feature request.  I don't really know how to write a function that writes to a register and their write register function wasn't working for what we need it for so James has been working on a new one that we can use. I was getting worried about keeping up with our assignments for our class but there was another feature request that Ashley discovered. It is way easier to implement so after looking at his new functions, I am getting a better idea of what we need to do for the other feature request. And I think our time line gives us a good basic idea of what pace we need to be working at. Now the fun part with TOSS ch 8 is going to be writing a biography without talking and/or writing it ourselves.

And the lightbulb goes off

    So yesterday I was finally able to download all the requirements for OpenKinect. Its been a painfully slow process of making space then downloading then making space and so on. Anyway I was able to use James' Kinect on my mac. It worked for a little bit but of course it froze my computer after it had been losing too many packets of information. Anyway James and I spend some time on looking at the code and while looking at it a light bulb went off. Even though it was kind of a small one, id say about 5 watts, it was still a new discovery. We found the register that is dealing with the exposure and the value to turn off the automatic feature. Also there is a function that allows you to input a value to a certain register. This is a nice discovery even though it doesn't solve our problem it is a step in the right direction because I think we might be able to edit that function to help us with our problem.

     I also did our assignment for TOSS chapter 7, which had to do with applying a patch. A really useful command is diff -u. This puts the differences into a patch format so it is easier to read what the differences are. Hopefully we will be able to put this skill to use soon but while talking to my group we realized that we might have to write a new driver and I have no experience in that. But I can't wait to learn how to!

Uses of OpenKinect

I've downloaded and built the source code for OpenKinect on linux but since I am the only one in the group with a mac I am also trying to get it built on OSx. So far it is a slow process of downloading the required parts for mac, so while I have been waiting I've browsed some OpenKinect videos. Here are a few that I found interesting. There is one with Mario Kart on Nintendo and there is one with Windows 7. I think both are very fascinating and you should check them out if you have any interest. Anyway I'm still trying to get it built on Mac but I'm running out of HD room...... 

Bugs in openKinect

Now that we have decided to switch projects, from Empathy to OpenKinect,  I was able to download and build the project within a few minutes. Unlike the last project where it required an unreleased version of ubuntu and other packages.

First I just want to say that the bug tracker for OpenKinect isn't very good at all, but Empathy uses bugzilla which is great for tracking and organizing bugs. The oldest and only two labeled bugs were created 2 months ago. One of the bugs broke OpenKinect for mac OSx. It was resolved but some people still run into this problem. To get past their problem they just comment on the bug their problem and someone else usually responds with what might help to fix it. Creating an account for github was too easy, I'm just glad when I was signing up I noticed the free open source account. I was looking into trying to reproduce one of the bugs but I can't get anywhere without the kinect. Some I'm going to wait on Ashley and work with him on it. Sadly I can't do the last part of the TOSS chapter because we don't have any "new" bugs to triage. Anyway we just need a kinect to jumpstart this project. And I can't wait to try it out!

Freeciv

Freeciv is a turn based strategy game, and while learning more about open source projects we had to download the source code for this game and build it. It had simple directions to follow but of course I had the hardest time doing it. I spent a very very long time trying to build it but kept running into problems that they didn't document. After spending hours trying to build it I found out that josh posted a command on his blog that downloads and installs all of the packages needed in one swift motion. After running this command I was able to finish it easily and play the game for a little bit.

Subversion and building problems

Last week I spent a while on subversion, I was able to figure out how to grab files from the repository but I couldn't load things onto it. I got some help from classmates and after a couple hours of looking through a tutorial was able to upload to the server. Once I got that to work, I tried to build empathy but I keep running into this problem of packages that aren't available yet or I can't get the most recent version but they are required to build it. I feel like once we are working on it together as a group we will be able to break through this problem or agree on scrapping the project. One good thing is that I was able to sign up for their bug monitoring system(bugzilla). I haven't chosen which bug we are gonna work on as a group, but I have been able to narrow it down to some very simple bugs. It is a good start for us because none of us really know the language C.

Gnome and all its glory!

When roaming the gnome empathy site I found some interesting things. I couldn't really find anything on history about the project but when I looked at the team wiki, some of my teammates had already been searching around for history so I decided to go another route. I found that there was an Outreach Program for Women. It was a chance for women to apply to help contribute to the gnome project and work with an experienced mentor. They were accepting women that could contribute in any aspect of the project. They also get paid a stipend of $4500, which I thought was crazy for 3 months of working with someone directing you most of the time! Anyway, this page led me to another one which had a list of all projects related to the Gnome desktop and mentors for each. They encourage people to contact and get some direction which I thought was a really good to lure people into helping with the project. I am excited to hopefully get some pointers on the easy things we can do to contribute to the project. But first we are gonna try to decide on which bugs to work on fixing.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

So we were supposed to read this article called The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It is about a man named Eric Steven Raymond and his experiences when he first discovers and dabbles into the open source world. One thing he said I think is really important, "too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the Linux world—which may explain why the average quality of software originated in the Linux community is so high." This definitely shows that open source software is a good place to learn/help with coding. He also has about 20 rules that he threw into his article and each one is an amazing tip to keep in mind while diving into the open source world. 

I also signed up for the mailing list and the IRC for Gnome Empathy. This took exponentially less time than reading the article.  

Choosing our projects...

So last class we got together in our groups and searched around some sites with lists of humanitarian free open source software (HFOSS). Each one of us selected a couple of projects and presented them to each other. We narrowed our selections(mainly tony's) to three. Our top three were GNOME Empathy, OpenRemote, and OpenKinect. GNOME empathy which is a messaging project that supports voice, video chat and some other features. It definitely seems to be the most developed and has a ton of help links that will help us along the way. Our next selection is called OpenRemote, it is used for developing touch-driven control panels. This project has some documentation but not a lot along the lines of a mailing list but they do have a chat room. Our third choice is called OpenKinect, this project focuses on using the xbox's new kinect and modifying to do several different things and so you can use it on the computer. We haven't decided yet on what our final choice is but we are going to decide before our next class. So until next time....

First Day

This is my first time blogging, so we will see how this goes....It's kind of nice starting class back up but of course it is bitter sweet. I didn't want the nice long break to end but it has to some time. So for the first day of class we were talking about what we did all we would do in the class and we got into groups. I am really excited to see what all we are going to add to an open source project of our choice. My group seems like a solid one, the other group members are James G, Tony A,  and Ashley K. Also I just signed up for POSSCON '11 and I am really excited to go and hear all the speakers.