During the summer of 2009, I had the good fortune of taking part in the Red Hat POSSE programme, meeting a bunch of excellent open source peeps, and getting a sense for how I might introduce more of my students to the world of open source contribution. This last spring, my colleague and I introduced 40 first-year students to the Fedora project. This semester, I’d like to introduce y’all to a few more.
This semester I will be leading eight intrepid students in an exploration of interface design and development at Allegheny College. Your open source project (or a small part of a larger project) could benefit greatly from these students, if you’re interested.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
I want developers/managers from “projects” that have a GUI. I say “projects” because you might be the lead on, say, a network settings dialog box that is part of Fedora. You need to be of the mindset that your GUI could always be better, but you never seem to have the time to sit down and do heuristic evaluations, sit users and do interaction testing, and so on. If we work with you, you also have to commit to being timely in responding to the students—most likely on your developer mailing lists—because we can’t wait for two weeks to go by in a 14-week semester while we’re waiting to hear back from you. (I’m not talking about 5-minute response times, but if you can’t reply to email from people trying to make your project better within 24-48 hours, please don’t respond.)
Basically, we ask that your community be reasonably responsive, and we’ll be doing all the work.
WHAT WE WILL DO FOR YOU
Small teams of students will, throughout the semester, engage one or more of these projects as budding interface designers. They have no prior experience in this regard, but will be engaging material on lo-fi prototyping, usability, the psychology of interface design, and so on. We will be discussing this material (which we will try and do in as open a manner as possible) and directly applying what we learn to the interfaces that are part of your project.
The students will work within your community, using your tools (mailing lists, wikis, etc.). I do not expect them to implement their designs, although some of them may be capable of doing so, and they might even do it. This, however, will not be a requirement of the course. (Not everyone in the course is capable.) If their work is good, and you like what you see, we only ask that you give their efforts serious consideration for implementation… we’re working with you because we don’t want to be doing interface design and testing in the abstract, but instead we want to add value to real projects through our efforts.
SOUND GOOD TO YOU?
If it does, please drop me an email (mjadud at allegheny dot edu). If you’d like to talk to me on the phone, I’m happy to chat—92JADUDM92 is my Google Voice number, which… well, it’s new to me, so we’ll see what happens.
I’ll have to write a longer post later, but I thought I’d just mention that OSCON is a great conference. Our presentation went well, and we’ve had a lot of great conversations with people about all kinds of things in the open source world.
More later… for now, it’s time to head out the door.
(Related, our parallel programming environment for the Arduino is now available on Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac. Hooray for packaging! And, I need someone to help me work through how to do proper source packages for some of the complexities I’m facing on the Fedora/Ubuntu side. Packaging compilers is not a lot of fun…)
This past week, Radu and Drew worked through the details of setting up PWM-based servo control on the Arduino. This gives us robust control over servos from our occam-pi based programming environment without having to interrupt our execution every 20ms to update a servo.
Here, the Science Dinosaur demonstrates how things work.
Radu and Drew’s work is “foundational,” in that it lays foundations for other projects. (We’re excited about moving on to some more interesting explorations shortly.) The servo control is absolutely necessary for another summer project we have going: the <a href=”http://rockalypse.org/blogs/flyinggator/”>Flying Gator UAV</a>. This flying robot (an “unmanned aerial vehicle”) is being custom built by Ian, and Ian and Anthony are developing the control system in occam-pi on the ArduPilot Mega. This combination gives us a lot of real-time safety, which we hope translates to “no surprises” when we are actually executing our code on a functioning UAV.
The nice thing about the ArduPilot is that is has a built-in hardware override, so that even if your code goes wrong, you can take control over your aircraft with a radio.
Here, you can see Ian taking the fuselage (that means “body” in airplane-speak) out for a test spin. Our aircraft is incredibly overpowered, it turns out.
Last night we had an episode of “Boardbook Hospital.” Honestly, I couldn’t come up with anything funny to say while working on a number of Matthew’s books. (I came up with a number of things that bombed, but really, book-repair is pretty spineless!)
We did have fun remembering the Muppet Show, though.
I work on a software project that helps make an interesting, parallel language with a long history run on lots of tiny computers. More details can be foundonline.
Specifically, we run code that used to run on a processor called the Transputer. It was developed by a company called INMOS. Today, there is a company called XMOS, and it has some of the same people involved who used to be involved in INMOS. However, the world is a different place today, and I think XMOS is the right idea at the right time for a lot of very interesting applications.
In this forum post, one of the XMOS peeps a member of the XMOS community was wondering aloud about the state of their language, XC the native language of the XCore line, XC. They have realized at XMOS that more people now use their tools externally than internally. (This is a very good thing… users kinda matter.) So, a few questions were asked. I quote:
1) Releasing the current roadmap for XC – showing bugs, features and plans for future development with some timescales. This will enable developers – customers – to feedback on what is important to them and also plan for future improvements to the language. In particular, any plans for typed channels or protocols, process mobility, relocatable, dynamically-loaded code and modules (a reserved word), are very important to members of this community, as recent discussions have shown.
2) Releasing the current implementation of XC – the compiler and tools – so that the community can develop, improve, and learn from the implementation and the language, as well as be equally invested in its future.
Regarding number one: a language will not survive without community. And, while a community will invest in what it cannot control (eg. Twitter), this is a different kind of community. For XC to grow and be useful as a language, the users must have input. This does not mean that language design decisions should be made by people who have no idea how to design languages—but, that said, the people who use the language know what would, and would not, be useful to them.
Regarding number two: there is no doubt that the compiler should be open source. It is one thing to invest in a hardware platform that is closed: we do that every day. But I do not want to build software with tools that might be taken away from me at any time, or modified in ways that destroy my business. If I buy an XS1-L1, I want to know that code written with compiler version 1.3.2 will be able to be built and compiled for the rest of time. I want the option of never updating the compiler, if I need to.
But, more importantly, an open compiler framework would make it much easier to port occam-pi to the XMOS platform. Again, though… I have no desire to do work on a platform that is locked away from me. If XMOS were to move their compiler into a git repository, I could check it out, explore, and contribute.
There is no universe in which opening the compiler can damage XMOS. If their language is ported to another hardware platform, it means more people using XC—meaning, more potential users of their hardware. If new languages are ported to the XC, it means more potential users of their hardware. If someone decides XC is ugly, and designs a new front-end that is friendlier and more expressive, it means more potential users of their hardware. Have I made my point?
Last summer, I had the good fortune of taking part in Red Hat’s 2009 POSSE. It was an absolutely excellent experience, and many of the things we did and talked about have required much reflection and continued conversation for the ideas to take root. It also took some hutzpah: along with a colleague (and super-ninja support from Mel), we dove off a cliff this past term along with 40 of our students, introducing them to the Fedora project as seen through the eyes of the Marketing and Design teams.
I thought I would share a highlight from the day, though, that goes back to when Christian and I were at RH last summer. We shared with the group work we had been doing on making parallel programming more approachable. Specifically, we had recently completed a port of our virtual machine to the Arduino, thus bringing the venerable language occam to this popular embedded platform. (If you don’t know what an Arduino is, please… crawl out from underneath your IBM Model M keyboard, go to SparkFun or NKC Electronics, and buy one.)
An Arduino in its native habitat.
We thought our tools needed more work before we released. Our POSSE mentors were floored that we hadn’t released already! We realized that “release early, release often” really does mean getting your software out before it is fully baked. In our case, we were worried that the 70+ pages of book (incomplete) and only having installer support for one platform (Mac) wasn’t far enough along… this, apparently, is around version 3.8-RC2 for most projects.
Or, not. But their point was made. So, we released. I put the tools into use in my classroom (things worked just fine), and we decided we’d just keep pushing and promoting. As a result, we will be presenting at OSCON later this summer (very exciting), and we have two contributors from the world at large who are exploring the use of our tools in their own projects. We’ve created a “community” space in our repository and given them commit access, as well as a branch (in one case) so they can add new low-level features without worrying about leaving trunk in a broken state.
More than anything else, having the new contributors is what makes it fun. People poking at what we’ve done, asking questions, and trying new things… that’s a blast. Today, we got picked up by Slashdot, and my sincere hope is that we’ll pick up a few more explorers before the week is out.
If anyone is interested, I now have a (very gross) binary Debian package that you can explore — join the users mailing list and inquire if you want to try it out. We’ll get our IDE for Windows done soon, and put the polish on the site as we head off to share the fruits of our efforts at OSCON.
So, remember: radical transparency and release early, release often.
I’ve taken the plunge, and am giving a new hosting provider a try. Things will be moving over the summer.
This is a big jump; I’ve been hosting my own shiznit for years now. That said, I can do most of what I need with a shared hosting provider… so I’ll see if I can get by.
I went with DreamHost, and we’ll see what happens. The most important thing is that I am able to run duplicity to back things up to Amazon’s S3 service. So, even if things go bad, I can (at least) recover anything and everything I had on the shared host.
Now, to move all of my research pages from baseplate.org to rockalypse.org… I think it’s time to downsize a domain…
I’m a bit behind on a number of posts (as well as a few things in the Real World). I still need to post a few more pictures from the westward travel, for example. I came back and have been moving fast ever since getting students bootstrapped on summer research. I’ll have to point to their work in another post—I’m very excited about all of the projects they’re working on.
In the meantime, I can relate a bizarre experience I had while on my travels. While headed east, I was asked if I could give a talk as part of the opensource.com Open Your World forum. “That’s cool,” I thought, but I wasn’t about to cancel my travel. As it turns out, it was a webinar, and that meant I could “phone in” my talk.
Because I was traveling, I didn’t have time to give a presentation in my typical highly visual style. Instead, I had one content slide (an outline), which (given the travel) was about all I could put together. On the day of the talk series, I got up early (I was on mountain time), dialed in, and gave my talk. Personally, I thought it was a hoot, and was proud to have been included in the webinar series. Many thanks to John, Max, and the others at Red Hat who made it possible.
This has been quite the drive. When we last left off, we were somewhere in Chicago, I think. Or somewhere West of Chicago. It doesn’t matter… we were somewhere on I90. It was a lot like I90 everywhere east of Chicago.
After Chicago, we drove across South Dakota. We saw sheep chutes.
After we saw sheep chutes, we saw Wall Drug. It’s a tourist trap, but by the time you get to western South Dakota, you don’t care. (Robin did — he was bitter about the whole exercise — but I insisted on a bumper sticker.)
While there, he made friends with a bison.
After that, it rained. And hailed. And in Rapid City, we saw every kind of weather warning you could get. Yes, tornados were flying around somewhere near us. We didn’t see one, but we were prepared to chase one if we saw it.
After we nearly died (we didn’t…), we went to Mount Rushmore. I tried to take a picture, but Robin got in the way.
Sadly, I ran out of film, and couldn’t take another. After reloading more digital film, I tried to take a nice picture of a statue at the monument. Robin was in the way again.
The guy’s name was Gutzon Borglum. That, clearly, was made up. I think his name was probably Jeff, and just changed his name to Gutzon because he wanted people to think he was cool. Clearly, it worked… he got a statue at a national monument.
Using the last of my digital film, I took this picture. I’m going to enter it into photo contests and win millions.
I have more pictures involving mountains, and my amazing climb to the awe-inspiring height of 12,750 feet. Those will have to be in another post, though, as I’m out of space on my blog. There are too few electronics left in the universe for me to write anything else at this time. That, and I’m going to have some breakfast.
PS. .dc., the discs are awesome. More on that in a later post.
