Looking forward (and enjoying it)
This Friday we're starting the Desktop/Mobile module on the Free Software Master. One of the reasons that brought me here was that one: I wanted to jump into GTK and Qt development, learn new programming languages, and, specifically, learn to develop for mobile devices. What I think now, which really gets me motivated, is the idea that considering how much I've enjoyed the previous modules which in advance didn't look so great (to me), this one will be incredible.
But there's also another point: more than a half of the course is over, now. Summarizing, we've gone through Introduction to Libre Software, where we learnt the most important people in this movement, learnt about Business Models or Licensing stuff among other things; Dynamics of Libre Software Communities, where we analyzed and studied several important communities and learnt the process to apply those analysis to other ones; and now, just before Easter Holidays, we've got Systems Integration with Libre Software. In this last module, even if it almost shares the name with a 5º course subject in Ingeniería Informática at UDC, we didn't learn Web Technologies (there's a module for that!): we've done security, systems administration, scripting, servers configuration and management, version control with git...
And, at this point, I'd like to share with you some of the things we've been doing here. Fortunately, my mates and I -as previous editions' students did- are using a subversion repository hosted at Morfeo's Forge, where all the practices and assignments were developed (in the open, as the master's philosophy would suggest), so it's very interesting to share all of this work with anyone interested.
I'm grouping them by subject -I won't link my mates' works, but they can do it in this post's comments-. I'll point out those mistakes I found after I handed out the works, and also all known limitations, some possible improvements or even things which are already outdated. Here it goes:
Introduction to Libre Software:
- Business Model: I presented a business model focused on service-oriented apps for mobile devices. Accounting numbers aren't that accurate, but sources and references should be very handful just in case you're interested. About the ideas (licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike unless otherwise stated), I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, but joining and mixing existing technologies so I would get something attractive.
- Mobile Operating Systems Review: I wanted to give a look at current OSs in mobile devices world, around Christmas 2010. However, less than a month later, Maemo and Moblin merged, Symbian accelerated its transition to Libre Software, Samsung focused more clearly on Bada... Maybe this is the most outdated work, but will be funny to check out after a year time.
Dynamics of Libre Software Communities
- Eye Of Gnome Mini-Review: This work was intended for training us with the use of Libresoft Tools. Source code repository and mailing list were used, so we could identify the most important contributors to the project.
- WebKit Project Review: My original idea was quite ambitious, as I wanted to compare WebKit and Gecko, but soon I focused on WebKit. While this work is really interesting, the conclusions I reached are quite biased: my main measure to evaluate code collaboration was the committer id, while WebKit project stores the real author of a commit in the ChangeLog, which I ignored. The good thing here is that, provided that a ChangeLog parser is done, my scripts, tools and procedures can be used to get a very nice report. Besides, being Igalia a company so involved in WebKit development (specially in WebKitGtk+), this work has a lot of potential.
Systems Integration with Libre Software
- (Bash) Scripting: We went through some common problems in systems' administration: daemons, regular expressions, using find, sed...
- Perl development: With the "Learning by doing" moto, we got introduced to Perl. It was a brief and interesting tutorial which meant, at least for me, meeting a language with a very bad reputation, but really powerful. I really enjoyed the last two exercises, when we played a while with Last.fm's API.
- Networking: Some networking stuff. It was nice, as I already knew some things, but haven't heard at all of others. I'd say that, rather than building complex networks and all that, we had to really understand how they work.
Of course, I'm missing lots of things. So if you want further info, you can browse the full repository to get my mates' works or other years', you can check the moodle for the theory, read the planet for other comments... Enjoy, and Happy Hacking!