Evaluation

Almost all of this term’s students have sent in their self-evaluations, and their evaluations of their mentors. Overall, people seem to have enjoyed working on things that are actually going to be used, and getting to know their peers and their industry mentors. There are a few things we need to do better next time—clearer goals for some projects, some grades midway through term so that people know where they stand, etc.—but I think we all deserve an ‘A’ for what we accomplished.

Best of luck with exams (for those of you who still have them); I hope to have the chance to work with you again some day.

Thunderbird Status Updates: April 02

This week is another productive week for Thunderbird Team in that most of us have finished most of their work!

Wei Xian has resolved his bug (restore session) and his patch has been pushed to comm-central. Also, he is going to prepare a “quick start guide” for future students who are going to work on Thunderbird. For myself, I have posted my revised patch and get the review from Blake. Now I have submitted a secondary review request and hopefully everything is going all right.  Evan is working on his own RFC 2425 parser to provide (de-)serialization of RFC 2425 directory entries into a data structure designed to support simple lookups on types and parameters. Now he is waiting for his patches to be reviewed. Zach is working on applying his patch and running mozmill test on his machine. There are still some issues for me to handle with the testing. Lindauson is still working on the menu items and seeking suggestions.

Thunderbird Status Updates: March 26

Apologies this is coming late, I didn’t notice I was set as the blog poster for this week!

It seems like several of us are having difficulties with unit tests, with myself and Zach having trouble getting working unit tests off the ground, and Wei Xian adding some polish to his previous unit tests.

Also, Tim and I are feeling the crunch of other courses so haven’t been productive over the last week.

Many of us, including Kefu, Tim, Evan, and Wei Xian have been working hard with Mozilla reviewers to make changes to their code. It’s nice to see that the project as a whole places such emphasis on code quality and correctness, and we’re all learning a lot from what they are telling us to do!

And of course, while working on tests and getting past code reviews, some of us are trucking along working on other tasks – Lindauson is hard at work trying to get menu items to behave the way he wants them to, Wei Xian is working on standalone message window behaviour, and I am working on listening to folder compacting events so that they properly display themselves in the activity manager.

Productively Lost

From Greg DeKoenigsburg:

We are delighted to announce the release of version 0.8 of our textbook, “Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How to be Productively Lost, the Open Source Way”.

The URL for the wiki release: http://teachingopensource.com/index.php/Textbook_Release_0.8

We are already working on the 0.9 release. The work continues here: http://teachingopensource.com/index.php/Textbook_Roadmap

My heartfelt thanks to my fellow contributors, who helped over the last weeks and months, and especially over the last few days: Karsten Wade, Max Spevack, Chris Tyler, Mel Chua, Jeff Sheltren, and Matt Jadud.

This week in Pony-Build…

During our last conference call we talked about where everybody was and what problems we were facing. Here are the notes from the last conversation.

pony-build conference call notes / from, mar15, 2010; updated mar 22, 2010;

Khushboo:

- build-nose is still in a very old master that is incompatible with mine; could you copy just that file over to a clean checkout of my master, add/commit,

push back to github, and let me know where?

- .pony-build cachedir creation?

- mechanize?

http://kshakyaz.wordpress.com/

Max:

- has been “chipping away at small things”.  working on create_cache_dir, pip failure, letc.

- testing timeouts; switch to using signal.alarm?

http://docs.python.org/library/signal.html <– Rose will look at this

Most signal methods not available under windows. :/ (rose)

- will look at adding failure flag to context, and modifying ‘do’ to be context-failure-aware for e.g. pip

failure

http://mlaite.blogspot.com/

Fatima:

- working with mercurial branches; status update?

http://cherkf.wordpress.com/

Jack:

- response? status update?  continuing work with pony-client rework, going off Titus’ latest suggestions, continuing work tomorrow

http://jackcarlson.wordpress.com/

Pony-Build Spring Break Update

This Monday instead of our regular conference call over Skype, we decided to not to have a conference call. We did not have much to talk about. So we decided to take a break and just send our weekly updates in the mailing list. Here is the part of the email.

Jack:

“I’ve still been working on the parser for new build scripts, want to do a bit of cleanup on it tomorrow and then try integrating it into the pony-client script itself in the next few days.  What I’ve been working on so far is all checked in under my pony-client_rework branch:

http://github.com/JackCarlson/pony-build/tree/pony-client_rework

My work is mostly in the added file “clients/testConfigAndBuildParser.py”–those functions form the core of what I’m currently planning on integrating into pony-client.py.  I have two other files added–pony-client.config, which stores default information (such as build servers, etc), and quixote.pb, my test Quixote build script.  quixote.pb is ugly for a reason at the moment, was testing various error conditions, but the gist of it is all there.”

Max:

“What I have been working on…..

Been messing around with the timeout stuff, have to test the code now.
See my subprocess branch for the changes I made to _run_command.

“What I want to work on…..”

This week I am going to go back and work on pip failure again, now that you have gone through and refactored a lot of things.
I am all so eying one of the other issues to work on, or maybe I will look over IDEAS/projectlets and see if anything catches my fancy. Will update list next day or so with what I decide.”

Fatima:

“For the build-mock I have made the changes made on mock.py to fix the magicMethod that was failing for me , but was still getting the same error. I then contacted Micheal Foord who explained that test wasn’t fixed and that he will try to include it in the next release of Mock 0.7.0.
On the other hand , I have created a bickbucket account and forked your Pony-build-test-hg repo to start experimenting with branches.
Using non-default branches is not typical as Augie explained earlier , but wanted to experiment with the named branches.”

Khushboo:

“I have not much to report because I have not been able to do much since I was/am out of state. But I will be online in skype though. This week I have been working on getting my mechanize package to run. But I trying to fetch Titus’s repo but I am getting the denied permission.Also regarding the nose package, I need fetch some branches which I am trying to fix. Thats it so far.”

An Interesting Alternative

I posted a short note at Third Bit about the student projects that KSplice ran this winter. It’s an interesting alternative to the UCOSP model; I’m curious to hear what students think of it.

Mercurial Status Update

This week in mercurial we all continued to make progress on our various  bfiles features.  I will let our Weekly status report on our wiki speak for itself.

In our meeting we discussed:

• How Anton, Wendy and I will release  auto* features to the mailing list:  In three seperate patches, after we have verified that they work together and don’t explode too badly when merged
• Alex discussed some of the details of  how to implement hg serve
• Paul discussed how to approach bfilesify
• Benjamin will be on vacation next week, so we won’t have a meet, but Benjamin expects to return to great progress on bfiles

The transcript  of the meeting can be found here

How This Program Has Grown

I did some stats on this program last night, and since we started in September 2008, 95 students have done projects with us (and 9 of those have taken part twice).  25% of participants have been women; the growth over time has been:

and the spread across participating schools has been:

Basie Status Summary

Well, Basie is back in full swing after a little dip from reading break and midterm season. After today’s meeting it seems like everyone is on track for the 0.7 release.

Here are the team’s status reports for this week:

Veronica
Jackie
Chad
Nikita
Chris
Francois
Guillaume
Alex