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

Final Dates

The last dates on which work can be submitted for grading are:

• Minnesota State University: April 30
• Simon Fraser University: April 22
• University of Alberta: April 12
• University of British Columbia: April 15
• University of Toronto: April 1
• University of the Virgin Islands: April 30
• University of Waterloo: April 5

RailsConf ’10

For those who are interested, RailsConf ’10 has been announced. With the merge with Herb and the release of Rails 3 (now in beta), this year’s RailsConf is going to be awesome. You can save $100 by registering before April. IN ADDITION to that, full time students can receive a 65% off discount using the promo code “rc10fts”.

(I’d love to be there this year, but I’ll need to ask for permission from my employer. We’ll see how that goes…)

Summary of Greg’s PyCon Talk

I’ve posted a summary of my PyCon talk that some of you may find interesting.

François Fournier midterm update

Hi everyone,

this is my midterm report for Basie project.

The first part of the project was to fix bugs to have a good representation for PyCon. Version 0.6 is now released and we can now work on 0.7 release.

I’m working with Guillaume Simard for 0.7, our goal is to add front-end test for the entire application. To do that, we will use Selenium. The setup to use Selenium is praticaly completed and we have 7 weeks left  to write tests for every apps in Basie.

Working on this kind of project is, for now, a great experience and it is also great to work with people from other universities.

Thank you UCOSP for this opportunity.

Midterm Status Updates

Please let me know if I missed yours. And if you haven’t posted one yet, please do so.

Mentors

Titus Brown	MichState	Pony-Build
Dwight Deugo	Carleton	IDE4Edu
Benjamin Pollack	Fog Creek	Mercurial
Karen Reid	Toronto	MarkUs
Matthew Vandenbussche	IBM	FlightSim
Greg Wilson	Toronto	Basie
Blake Winton	Mozilla	Thunderbird

Students

Miles Billsman	Toronto	IDE4Edu
Robert Burke	Waterloo	MarkUs
Godfrey Chan	SFU	FlightSim
Fatima Cherkaoui	MinnState	Pony-Build
Henry Chow	UBC	Ingres
Zach Church	MichState	Thunderbird
Chad Cogar	Toronto	Basie
Sara Danaher	UVI	Ingres
François Fournier	Laval	Basie
Lim Goh	Waterloo	Ingres
Marcel Guzman	SFU	Thunderbird
Lenny Han	Toronto	FlightSim
Lindauson Hazell	UVI	Thunderbird
Jackie Huynh	UBC	Basie
Farah Juma	Toronto	MarkUs
Max Laite	UVI	Pony-Build
Jean Lalande	Laval	FlightSim
Paul Lambert	UBC	Mercurial
Alex Le	UBC	Basie
Xiaoxiao Li	Waterloo	Ingres
Michael Man	SFU	FlightSim
Anton Markov	Waterloo	Mercurial
Joseph Maté	Waterloo	MarkUs
Cory Matheson	Alberta	IDE4EDU
Anthony McCallum	UBC	Ingres
Tim Miller	MichState	Thunderbird
Victoria Mui	Toronto	MarkUs
Nikita Pchelin	Toronto	Basie
Sylvain Petitclerc	Laval	FlightSim
Brenda Sadoway	Alberta	IDE4EDU
Khushboo Shakya	MinnState	Pony-Build
Bryan Shen	SFU	MarkUs
Guillaume Simard	Laval	Basie
Tessa Starkey	Waterloo	Mercurial
Evan Stratford	Waterloo	Thunderbird
Diane Tam	Toronto	FlightSim
Alex Totolici	UBC	Mercurial
Chris Van Wiermeesch	MichState	Basie
Eva Wong	Toronto	Ingres
Veronica Wong	Toronto	Basie
Wei Xian Woo	Waterloo	Thunderbird
Brian Xu	SFU	MarkUs
Wendy Yang	Waterloo	Mercurial
Kefu Zhao	SFU	Thunderbird

Sylvain’s midway update

Here is my midterm report for the Data Center Flight Simulator project.

At first we were not sure about what we had to do and what IBM was waiting from us. Fortunately it became clearer by the end of the first week with the help of Matthew, from IBM.

Since the beginning of this project we have mostly investigated how to detect and create saturations from different part of the system using the DB2 database. Our goals was to explore the system tables to get interesting values to monitor those problems. In addition, we were asked to develop dials, graphical indicators, to monitor those value in real time from a centralize dashboard where database administrator can use it to know where the problems come from.

The IBM team has been really great and always ready to help us since the beginning. This as been a good help in our work in that project because, like every other projects, we are short in time to accomplished it. They give us the right information we need to get the things done quickly and correctly.

We are sure to provide something great to IBM by the end of this project. We already have two scenarios in progress and we are in process to polish those two scenarios and create a tutorial on how to create new ones. At first meeting with IBM, we were asking to deliver something 100% complete and not a lot of incomplete stuff. We will look for that for the next few weeks.

Sylvain

Kefu Zhao — Midterm Update

My Goal and Expectation

My work at Thunderbird is mainly to fix a bug regarding to the “Reply To List” feature. By working on this bug, I am expecting to get myself further exposed to real industrialized products based on my computing science knowledge gained from previous school and work experience.

What I have done so far and What have I learned

First of all, I have to say that my ability to analyze problems is greatly enhanced through working on Thunderbird, which is a complicated software comprising million lines of code. Before I start coding, I have to fully understand what the bug is and decide the scope in which the bug is located. Also, I need to know how relative code works and see why it’s going wrong. Then, I can propose an enhancement suggestion and start adding my code fix to existing structure. During this process, I need to talk to people through IRC and try to find materials to solve my problems. All in all, this is a really valuable experience.

Secondly, my ability to debug is improved. Before I work on Thunderbird, I used to debug while I am programming simultaneously. There are two reasons for me to do this:

1)      There are convenient debugging tools such as eclipse and Visual Studio.

2)      The compile time is relatively fast (almost instantly).

Given these two reasons, I wasn’t used to considering the problem thoroughly before I start debugging. However, things are different in Thunderbird because on one hand, Venkman (JavaScript debugger for Thunderbird) is not totally reliable at all the times. On the other hand, it usually takes a relatively long time to compile my changes. As a result, I need to thoroughly consider my problem to every detail before I start compiling. Without any doubt, this is an absolute good habit for programmer.

Last but not least, I learned some new technologies and my programming ability is greatly enhanced. Thunderbird uses XPCOM that is a cross platform component object model. It brings multiple languages support as well as a set of unified API for us to call. Despite the lack of documentations, we can still get well use of these API by viewing relative idl files.

What’s Next

In the rest of this semester, I will finish up my patch for the bug and write some test for it. Hopefully I can successfully deliver my patch to the products.

Good luck to all of us,

Kefu

Jean’s Midway Update for FlightSim

Hi all,

The first few weeks has been simply non-productive since we had to find a way to install everything on our machines. No useful documentation was available for us to make this quick so we had to tweak files to make everything works. What’s nice about that is that now, documentation exists because we took the time to write some detailed tutorials for every OS (Windows/Linux/Mac). It’s always nice of being able to work on his favorite OS and not having to reboot to do so.

Of course, the time spent on that haven’t been use to work on the project itself so we had to push back deliverables a bit. It isn’t a bad thing since everything we do on this project, including the documentation written on the wiki, count somehow as a deliverable.

By the end of this project, I think we won’t have any problems to complete what is planned. We’re currently working on 2 scenarios/tutorials and we could probably work on another one if no technical problem occurs. But we still keep in mind that what IBM wants in the FlightSim project is quality and not quantity. We’ll then focus on that for the next couple of weeks.

Fatima’s Midway Update (Pony-Build)

Few months ago,when I first joined Pony-build, I was excited and eager to learn more about this project in particular and open-source in general. I knew my limited experience might make my progress slower than expected but I was determined to learn more no matter what.
I couldn’t join the UCOSP community for the “Code Sprint” in Canada; however, I started to communicate with the project lead Titus C. Brown and the rest of the group via Skype to make the initial system set ups. I encountered many problems throughout the process, but Titus was always patient and very helpful.
Getting familiar with Git and the already written code  took me more than a while. My first build fully worked after few weeks , but when I have started my second one, it took me few hours to get it build and compile which shows the big progress I’m making.
I have also learned how to ask for help from the rest of the group, who have been ready to lend a hand when needed.
Today, my enthusiasm remains the same and I’m ready to learn more.