Wednesday 10 December 2014

Remove a page they said...

Hey everyone!

I've took it upon me to try and fix a bug in Webmaker with the login screen where a page was redundant and they thought it should be removed. I eventually found the hidden page, but when I asked if they would like the page to be removed, I found out that the issue lie in the webmaker_login_ux. 

From there it I tried to find the source of the bug, there's an area in Webmaker that has a boolean value which when set to false, it should not show the page, it was set to false, but alas the page still reared it's ugly head. 

After checking and trying different 'fixes' I wasn't able to solve the problem, but I wont stop believing that I can do it. Hopefully after I'm done exams I can finish this bug and keep contributing to the Open Source community, it's been fun! 

Cheers, 

James Laverty

Monday 8 December 2014

Android in Webmaker!

Hey everyone,

I just added source maps to Browserify. It was a very challenging process, because I talked to several different sources in the industry and the majority that I talked to had no idea what I was talking about. It was interesting because I ended up going out to lunch with people that were professionals in Java/Android, web development and PaaS. It was a fantastic experience, but it ended up in me being made fun of for asking question about Source maps and maybe I'm confused about my College lingo.

I find Open Source development very exciting, but to contrast it, I find doing it within a timeline terrifying, unless you have contacts within whatever you are trying develop.

This course, and my professor David Humphrey, have taught me a lot. Lets keep it going,

Cheers,

James Laverty

Friday 5 December 2014

Attempting to install Chromium

Imagine waking up to a knocking at your door <knock knock> <knock knock> . You get up, dress yourself and approach half sleeping, pull the door open and look with your eyes half open, see a soldier marked UPS. After a shake of your head you realize it's just a deliveryman and get excited with the remembrance of the laptop you ordered two weeks ago!

Start it up, share a moment of unbridled joy as it starts instantaneously, then weep as the hard drive dies like a car accident gone terribly wrong. <knock knock> The laptops been replaced!

Now to where I was two weeks ago, I was with my new computer and a newbie guide to Open Source, I had eyes bright and spirits high. Like a land slide my hopes started to fade, I had error after error, but kept on going.

I attempted to install it for approximately 5-7 hours. After that I left it running overnight, it probably did not take to long, but it failed. When I woke up I tried it again, it failed again.Eventually I ended up in the land of rebase and I felt defeated. I was worried about starting over again as well as to rebase.

I decided on attempting to install Lynx, and things went far smoother,          

Cheers ,

James Laverty

Monday 10 November 2014

A change in environment

Hey everyone,

Just a quick update as to my progress/happenings. I just bought a new computer, a nice sleek Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, pretty exciting! I'm setting it up as a dual boot running Windows 8.1 and Linux, I've decided to do this because hacking is easier in NOT-Windows.

I'm also fixing a little bug in App-Maker, it's a bit of a challenge, but hopefully working with Linux will make it all a bit easier.

As an aside, I've switched from Eclipse to Android Studio an so far, I couldn't be happier. I'm working on an android app and we put it up on GitHub, the integration was so easy I think I'm in love.

I'll give another update later this week!

Cheers,

James Laverty

Wednesday 29 October 2014

A video bawse at FSOSS

Hey Everyone,

I volunteered as a videographer at FSOSS recently and it was a wonderful experience. I feel pretty happy that I was able to be a part of it and that I got to meet some 'big wigs' in the industry.

Apart from that I also video taped three presentations and watched five. The first one I watched was given by the founder of Red Hat Linux named Bob Young. His talk was really interesting to listen, I really enjoyed the way he spoke and his use of body language. He repeatedly labelled himself as just a typewriter salesman, but in essence is much, much more.

The next talk I watched was of a classmate name Kieran Sedgewick who talked about Webmaker's Tech: The Future of Web Development. He did an excellent job and his presentation was nice to watch, he also handled the questions well.

After that, lunch happened and I had a man named Dan Hodge a senior solutions architect middleware at Redhat. It was a fun and inspiring chat that went well.

After lunch the next speaker was Chris Aniszczyk presented Friday Keynote Presentation. His talk was quite insightful and gave me a better understanding of the people inside the machine. I also found his description of the fail whale during the 2010 world cup quite humorous. 

After that I watched two more presentations then I got a free t-shirt! How Exciting!

Cheers,

James Laverty

Friday 17 October 2014

A 'bug' story: Part II

Hey everyone,

The Webmaker bug was a success! The biggest problem I encountered was definitely setting up the dev environment. I ran into several errors on different computers, most of the time it was with the npm install to get gulp up and running. After I overcame those obstacles, I ran into a weird one (another bug perhaps?) where after logging into the localized version of my project it would not log me in aka the gulp dev. I tried it on Chrome, then moved onto Nightly, both to no avail. I eventually created a new log in and BAM, success.

After that I talked to a few people and got some help on where to begin, xmatthewx on github suggested that I use the how to template to help put it together and a few other sources put me on the right track. I learned a little bit about JSON and eventually got a template put together.If you want, you can take a look at my pull request! This is my initial request, I plan on getting a little feedback and updating my patch after.

This is a fun process and I get to have communication with professionals, how exciting!

IRC was also an interesting experience, for the most part it's petty quiet, but it seems useful if you ask the right questions.

That's all for today,

Cheers,

James Laverty


Monday 6 October 2014

A 'Bug' Story

Hey everyone,

Bug Tackling!

I've decided to try and tackle a bug in the Webmaker app! It seems cool and fantastic.
The bug I'll be doing is to make a template for a blog(Blogger, he's lookin at you kid). Me and my friend Rafid are gonna be helping each other out with our separate bugs trying to en capture the essence of Open Source development.

Aside from that, life's getting fun! Learning about +Twitter ,and +FireFox, developing an Android app and many other things!

It seems upon initial inspection that fixing bugs is a daunting task, it's like climbing Mount Everest after only doing indoor climbing. The basic techniques are there, but looking up, the challenge seems way bigger than you (I'm an avid indoor rock climber).

This will be challenging, frightening,  and I'm sure, super rewarding!

You can follow me on twitter @0neSanctum (I'll get better I promise)

Cheers.

James Laverty

Friday 26 September 2014

Release 0.1

Implementing the du into Filer was a challenging learning experience.

It all started with,

NPM

It was a beautiful day outside, the birds were chirping, the sun was shining, and I was in a room with no windows.


Oh, no big deal, I'll just go download it and install it. BOOM, second error. After that, I decided to talk to a friend of mine who is also taking the course, he said he had no problems and that everything installed very easily. I threw a keyboard.

I eventually got it installed and then tried to run the npm install command to get grunt. BOOM, no folder called npm in the user/<user name>/App Data/Roaming/npm folder... WHAT?! Windows installer bug. Bought new keyboard, threw it out.

I then created an npm folder, ran it again, got a page full of errors, but at least something happened. By now, a few hours had passed, so I decided I needed some sun and took a walk.

Grunt

By now, several hours had passed and I was feeling rather successful; NPM was installed(kinda) and Node.JS was installed. Next I thought to tackle Grunt, how hard could that be? Two commands, install, then install globally the cli, easy right? Absolutely not. I spent the next hour intensely pounding on my laptop getting only errors after errors, ready the manuals, and then getting more errors. I eventually decided to switch environments and use SSH to connect to my school.

I'd prefer not to talk about this dark time in my life that was filled with passion, regret, and sadness. Needless to say, I eventually went back to windows and used my new found knowledge to properly install everything.

Filer

This seemed a daunting task, but using the top down method I broke everything down starting with the documentation, then moving onto the test cases, and finally moving on to the implementation. It was the easiest part, even though I've never really used JavaScript before. I cloned it from git hub, pushed my changes and now need to pull request to the Teacher!

I called this a roller coaster of success.

Cheers,

James Laverty

Tuesday 16 September 2014

(Cr)eating Chromium; an introduction.

Hey everyone!

Today I've decided to take a peak at the open source project Chromium from www.chromium.org.

Essentially Chromium is Chrome before it gets built, packaged, and distributed by Google. It is an open source web browser for those of us that don't trust Google enough to want to use their prepackaged build and want to be part of the building process.

Chromium can be used on:

  • Windows
  • OS X
  • Linux
  • Chrome OS
  • Android 
  • iOS
It's actually a lot lighter than chrome on resources which I like a lot. I've only used it a little bit so far, but I'm excited at the prospect. 

More to come soon!

Cheers, 

James Laverty

Monday 8 September 2014

To read the EULA or not to read the EULA

I decided to read the ITunes EULA and the MIT License today.

The first thing that struck me was the differences and similarities in length and style of writing. The length of the two documents is vastly different, ITunes being very long and the MIT License being very short. I believe the purpose in a long length is to diminish the customers desire to read the EULA, where as the shorter version is more clear, concise and to the point. the The writing style is similar, a mix of lower case and upper case, as well as a lot of legal diction, but the EULA is filled with some very odd stipulations where as the MIT License is straight to the point.

An example of this is,

"The Application Provider, and its licensors, reserve the right to change, suspend, remove, or disable access to any Services at any time without notice"

ITunes essentially says that they take away your use of the product for no reason, even after paying for it. As well as to change the license without any notice. This leaves the customer very vulnerable and very, very ridiculous.

Another part that caught my eye was,

" Location data provided by any Services is for basic navigational purposes only and is not intended to be relied upon in situations where precise location information is needed or where erroneous, inaccurate or incomplete location data may lead to death, personal injury, property or environmental damage."

This one is interesting, there is a possibility you could die by using this service. How crazy is that? This makes me worried about what could possibly be in other EULA's that I was never aware of.

The one if I found the most ludicrous is this,

" By using the Licensed Application, you represent and warrant that you are not located in any such country or on any such list. You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons."

Step one, this is trying to impose US law on the entire world (not so different, I know) through a software agreement.
Step two, nuclear weapons(WHAT?!), just incase I wanted to create nuclear weapons with ITunes, I should be worried that they might cancel my service.

As well as reading through this EULA, I scanned a few others and found they had equally funny/crazy stipulations thrown in. Whether these will hold up in court is another matter, but I'm sure in a few years someone will try and own our entire life through the use of their software and we'll find out.

As a contrast, here is the entire MIT License,

"The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE."
That's it; no bombs, no deaths, no financial advise. Enjoy, share, learn,

Cheers,

James Laverty


Wednesday 3 September 2014

Intro to James 101

This is my first blog. I am writing to you to say hello and that I am very excited. My blogs will get a little more technical after this, but for now I'm keeping it as a simple hello.