Todd+Binger

11//22/10 Much like the last post, my feelings haven't changed much. It's still a mixed bag of emotions for me in the OSS environment. I started using linux more on my home machine, so I've grown more accustomed to it, but there are still many things I dislike. The environment we've been working in has been helpful this far. Mel Chua came to visit WNEC to help us and she gave some new insight into OSS, Fedora, and Caribou. She talked a lot about how the OSS world works as opposed to the commercial world. I still feel like the commercial world is more perfected though.

While commercially, it's more perfected, it also isn't free. Thats another good side of OSS. The majority of it is entirely free. Which is amazing to tech heads. Thus far in the semester we've been working on Caribou and started to develop our additions to it. Our group has added the forward slash key, and a keyboard which simulates a physical keyboard more in appearance, making it easier to use and understand. The keyboard takes up a lot more screen real estate though, so this is kind of an issue. With these additions, we hope to be putting them up for contributions the Caribou program.

We've just started getting into the test specifications, which looks complicated, but simple at the same time. There is a lot going on with it, but its very repetitive. All in all, I feel that the class has been a good addition to my course load. It has taught me more of what any development environment will be like, as opposed to the rest of our major classes, which have been about language concepts and coding. It's document heavy, but that's what the world is like outside of classes.

10/19/10 So far this semester has been a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, I really like the idea of linux and the whole open source software movement, but on the other hand, I absolutely hate linux. There are many bugs within the system, which is understandable considering most of the developers are developing linux in their free time. However, for an OS with so much popularity amongst developers, you would think that it would be more usable. Caribou is the same way as linux, except however linux already has a fully working on screen keyboard. I know Caribou isn't as big as a project as the main GOK, but it should at least be fully functional if the developers actually want people to use it. There are many flaws with it. The biggest one (which took a while for anyone to notice it) is the fact that the keyboard doesn't even have a forward slash key. WHAT? How can you expect anyone to use an on screen keyboard that is missing such an important key. Divide this number, go to this website. You would expect it to at least be fully functional...

In the other aspect of things. Software Engineering has been a little better than the OSS world has been to me. The semester thus far has been a little boring as we haven't actually worked on any code, but that looks like it is going to change soon. We've been doing documentation on Caribou thus far and it hasn't been that intriguing or involving. First of all, the documentation we've been doign has been leaving out many pieces that any normal documentation would include, granted this is fair as it is only a class, but for this class, Software Engineering, it is supposed to be the pinpoint for our degrees to actually get us ready to get a full time job as developers and coders... so you would expect the class to have more detail and emphasis on what we would actually be doing. On the other hand, the documentation we've been doing is the most important of all the documentation that we would have to be doing in the future.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm right, I don't really know, but I guess I just expected this class to go a little differently than it has so far. However, since it looks like we'll be getting into coding real soon, maybe my opinions will change.

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