So during Software Freedom day I began hacking on the BeagleBone Black and a small stepper motor. Are only goal was to gain familiarity with the BeagleBone by controlling the stepper motor with Python code that is FOSS. For the hardware setup I utilized the 28BYJ-48 Stepper Motor, the L293D Driver Chip, a breadboard, some wire ...

Saturday was Software Freedom Day! The weather was terrible but the day was awesome! We started off with a 'My first Kernal Hack' talk in which we actually edited the kernel to fix a simple bug. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the actual submission email to work so we never submitted the fix, but it was a nice start to kernel hacking. Plus Matthew Whitehead may be coming to RIT more as a mentor of sorts so I may have the opportunity to learn some more from h ...

So Tuesday was RocPy and I have only just gotten around to blogging about it. It was the first time for most of the HFOSS class to go to RocPy and it was really neat to see so many people there! The talk was way over my head (and over the heads of most people there, I think!) I am always amazed just how much Threebean (Ralph Bean) knows about Python! He wasn't the speaker but he knew a lot about the talk, and even though he learned some he also ...

Today in class we had a brief quiz on Weber's Eight Principles and the Five Pillars of Open Source. Here is my quiz: What are the titles of each Pillar? Open exchange Participation Rapid prototyping Meritocracy Community What are the titles of each General Principle? Make it interesting and make sure it happens Scratch an itch Minimize how many times you have t ...

So as a part of the HFOSS course we were assigned to read Chapter 3 of Steve Weber's 'The Success of Open Source'. This is just a brief rundown of the chapter and my thoughts. Information Author: Steve Weber Title: The Success of Open Source, Ch. 3 What is Open Source and How Does it Work? URL: http://hfoss-fossrit.rhcloud.com/static/books/Weber- SuccessofOpenSource-... Publish Date: 2004 The Gist This c ...

Tomorrow evening marks the first day of Rosh Hashanah (Happy New Year!) and the middle of the second week of classes so I thought should probably write a blog post to talk about the classes of the new year.... This is a pretty exciting semsester (my first college semester) because almost all of my classes are academically relevant to my major. Other than a Chemistry course I am taking, every class is a computer related course: Applied Programming, C ...

This week Gourciferous paper GUI Templates were mocked up, I contacted Upstream about presenting them to the Gource community, began working on short videos to send to Red Hat as examples, and I updated avatar_generator to work without log_generator. Currently, there are two different paper mock ups for Gourciferous. One takes a the approach of a few tabs with lots of options and the other takes the approach of a lot of tabs with few options in each. I am not sure which one will be used, howeve ...

Now that the paper mock-ups have been made for Gourciferous I am starting to port some of them to Glade to get an idea of how they will look once built. I am also starting to look for feedback from Gource users so that we can create the most intuitive GUI possible. I have looked into the Gource Google Code page and Github page and there is no real forum or for general discussion. I would really like feedback from the Gour ...

This week has been pretty crazy between lmaken being here for some hacking, a shorten week due to the 4th of July, and lots of traveling. I have made some paper mock-ups for Gourciferous and will begin creating some prototypes in Glade (fingers crossed nothing crashes). I may try to attach photos of the mock-ups soon, but I don't currently have a way to do that. The only real struggle with the GUI mock-ups is where to sort ...

Amazing Turtle has really been growing as a project thanks to the amazing Tim Duffy. Amazing Turtle has expanded from just a small set of lessons for students to learn Python using Turtle to a full website that with a simulated Python environment with limited functionality. Eventually the site will allow logins so that students can complete lessons, share their work, and most importantly learn some coding! Organizations ...