IRC and GNOME Mailing list

modularframe — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 01:03:52 +0000

Next assignment was to observe an IRC(Internet Relay Chat) channel for 24 hours and look at some GNOME mailing list that I might like to join. Man was this tricky to do. The mailing list, easy; watch IRC for 24 hours, hard. Rather then leave my laptop on for 24 hours nonstop, I broke up the time I would watch the IRC down to a few hour each day. The first few days, nothing. There were people in the IRC channel, but no one was talking. It was like this up till the second day when some one was asking for help on some python. The person didn’t get a response for a very long time. I was around 17 hours into the IRC on my 4th day when all of a sudden an explosion of chatter. Most of the early parts of the IRC that day was on GTK, but the rest was on bugs from Bugzilla. I noticed that Orca and Nautilus were mentioned, so I looked them up to discover that Orca is a screen reader and Nautilus is a filing system. Oh ya, back to what I was observing. There was a small window of time where no one was talking at all. I assumed they were getting lunch or looking at something else for a while as some people added dinner as part of their nicks. I was done at this point, being at 24 hours, but decide to leave it on for a little longer to see what would happen next.

Well after a long day of looking at my lucky day on IRC, I figure that am actually getting the hang of understand what is going on. People from different FOSS projects jump in and out asking questions. Some from the same FOSS community and others from different ones wishing to get help. I’m still lost as to whats going on, but I’m getting the idea of how IRC is used and how it can help me later in my software engineering class. I observed the IRC channel in GNOME a11y for about 27 hours and 10 minutes. The time was well worth it in the end to see how people actual use IRC. I might jump into the GNOME game IRC and lurk there to get a better understanding in an area that I wish to work in.

The other part of the assignment was to look at the GNOME mailing list. I took a quick look for anything that would be interesting for me to sign up and try my hand at getting into a community. I was able to find three which two of them being game related. One was about Python AT-SPI bindings, but I thought that might be a little out of my skill level to get into at the moment. The second one was games on GNOME. This one I joined right away knowing it was for the development of games. The third was wiican which is about getting the wii remote to work in GNOME. I find it interesting, but I lack the extra wii remote and free time to try this out at the moment.

Now that this assignment is over am going to go and find the GNOME game IRC channel and lurk there form time to time.

Blog about Cheese vs. Ekiga

modularframe — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 23:33:50 +0000

Before Tuesday’s class, one of the FOSS(Free Open Source Software) community members, Mel, who we meet in class today using IRC(Internet Relay Chat), wrote a blog about our observations on Cheese and Ekiga. It was interesting to have some one besides the professor give us feed back on what we learned. As I read it and saw the things other student in the class notice that I didn’t; it made me think as to how we all came up with different findings. Did I go about it the right way in looking into both Cheese and Ekiga?

As I continued to read I was learning that there is far more to both GNOME Cheese and Ekiga then I realized. I knew I didn’t find everything on the assignment, but there is so much more. It is actual far more interesting to me now that I think about it. I spent so much time on getting Cheese to work on my VM(Virtual Machine), that I didn’t take the time to look into its history more deeply. Ekiga on the other hand is fare more then what I originally thought. Ekiga being about 10 years old for a FOSS project did not occur to me as being very old.

Overall, I guess what I learned from reading Mel’s blog is that there is a lot more to the FOSS community and it takes time to get use to it all. Looks like I got a long way to go till working in FOSS start to become second nature to me.

Here is a link to Mel’s blog if you wish to find out more on the subject: http://blog.melchua.com/2011/09/12/cheese-vs-ekiga-for-software-engineering-class-responses-to-student-notes/

modularframe » TOS

IRC and GNOME Mailing list

Blog about Cheese vs. Ekiga