Chris also introduced us (I’m wiping the dust off of what little I know/remember) to the suite of development tools that we will be using for the start of the deep dive on Wednesday, git commands and some other relevant scripting commands. I was just able to follow the barest thread of what he was doing. I understood conceptually, but I have no experience with the details/specifics–a condition I am trying to remedy today and tomorrow.

BUT when I went to setup my MacBook, I realized that the fact that my Tiger OS is no longer supported was going to be a significant barrier to doing development on that machine. We are going to hack on an old Firefox bug. None of the tools support Tiger at this point. So Chris got a server online at Seneca (College) where I could work remotely. However, when I got home, I remembered that I had a netbook for which I was ready to do an install of an Ubuntu stack called Easypeasy. Got Easypeasy installed, but then could not get the new OS to talk to the wireless–likely a driver issue, and that was as far as I got. By that point it was nearly 10PM and I was thrashed. So I’m up early today (Wednesday) and I’m hoping to be working on my environment this morning. I’m going to cart my new Linux machine with me to see if I can find a gearhead at the CSI (Center for Innovation) to get me talking to the internets. : ))

What followed was fascinating, not the least of which because Chris seemed to be answering all questions that I have been wondering about since I became involved in Open Source. He discussed the range and distinctions between OS licences (of which there are over a hundred approved by the Open Source Initiative)by marking out the ends and the middle of the spectrum.

Chris then went on to lay out the time line of events that led up to and included Open Source in far greater detail than I had previously ever seen it done. When he was finished, he brought up the issue of CS academic programs recently having problems recruiting and retaining new students and that one explanation for this seemed to be because the current crop of new undergraduates are the first to have no experience with programmable devices, computers with command lines having disappeared nearly 20 years ago. He then went on to talk about raspberrypi, an effort from the UK to develop an inexpensive ($25) programmable device that would bring back that ability to tinker in a computing device that inspired the current CS establishment some two and three and four decades ago.

All in all, a fascinating day.

1.  A concise description of the project/goals you are trying to accomplish.

2.  A description of the specific nature of how you are stuck.

3.  How long you have been working on the project, how often, and how much time you plan to dedicate to it ongoing.  (this information is included to help the potential helpers decide whether to help you.

4.  How you can be contacted, email, IRC (including when you are reachable, with time zone).

5.  What else?

Now having said that, I am making progress in communication, which is after all the point.  Got my Wiki started; got my blog here connected to the POSSE planet.  So I’m stylin’ in a manner of speaking.  Basically I’m getting the communications end going, but not so much the packaging/code pipeline stuff.  I understand the latter in abstract, but I’m not anything like close to feeling like I can manage the actual operations.

To make matters worse I had to leave POSSE early to get my kids home from school, so I’m now looking at new deliverables for this evening which all involve packaging.  The only “non-coding” option seems to be to make a Fedora remix–again something which I understand in abstract, but which I lack depth of understanding to execute.  So, I’m going to try to go as far as I can, following the instructions I have, and put this post up on the planet with the hope that some kind soul can offer me some answers to the following questions:

Okay, thanks to Gary in POSSE, I know understand that I don’t have to create the remix solo, but merely have to select one of the projects that I’d like to work on and write about it here.  Easy enough.  PHEW!  See now my Open Source communications links are working.  I hooked up with Gary on the Teachingopensource channel on IRC.  WOOT!

So now my thought is to stick with the Fedora Remix so that I can see how the various elements of an operating system work together.  I have no clear idea which elements are core/essential and which others might be considered optional.  I have never thought of an OS in terms of components.  I am in fact still wrapping my head around the day to day of working with software that is not based on magic, black boxes.  I do not think this way about automobiles or just about anything else.  Everywhere else in my life I pop the hood and apply common sense.  I fix just about everything in my life from cars and motorcycles, to masonry (building & repointing brick & stone) and sewing (fixing shirts, making sails for my RC boats), I pride myself on being able to at least know how to fix just about everything.  I never thought I’d ever consider this approach to computing.  It’s been just too daunting.  Too large a knowledge base to learn, too frustrating to just hack around in. I wrote HTML web pages for awhile and tried to maintain a concurrent database back end, but I loathed the work because I felt like I was working in an utter vacuum.  When I was stuck, I was really stuck.  I had no one to ask for help, or to answer my questions.

So this is different.

I still do not like the feeling of being stuck, but that is ameliorated somewhat by the less unpleasant feeling of going to ask for help.  It is no small irony that I take comfort in the existence of the latter unpleasantness.  Access to expertise, to help, makes me think–for the first time–that I could actually get into working with software “under the hood.”

It’s a weird feeling.  It’s as if I’ve been told that I could talk to trees if I wanted to.

Well, I got onto our assigned server and channel fairly easily with all three.  IRCle took me the longest because it has a separate window for servers and channels, and when I opened it up, it was in a weird default and lay only partially within the bounds of my screen.  I dragged it into the center when I saw it–after I had tried to figure out how to enter the server info for ten minutes.  “OH!  Duh!” there it is. . .  I suppose that IRCle might be my last choice, for this reason and because it’s not clear if it is continuing to be updated and supported.  The last post as to  it was almost a year ago, and the current version was made for Tiger, there is an Alpha for Leopard, but I don’t have time for that junk ATM.

Comparing the chat displays for the three, Colloquy is my clear favorite.  IRCle and X-Chat have that Unix style ascii scrolling text that makes me feel like ants are nesting in my frontal lobe.  Colloquy automatically highlights links and applies different colors to text and user attributions, making reading entries much more brain and eye friendly.

So I suppose I have made a choice, however arbitrary it may be.