SBR600:Reflection

Semester's over!!Yayy!!And so is my time at Seneca College!This last semester of mine at the college was really interesting as I had some really easy courses and some really hard courses.SBR600 falls right in between.Not too hard, but at the same time, not super easy as well.

I learned some really interesting things in the course, such as specfiles which help with building packages,what they do, and what are the required commands and prerequisites for the package.That, I found really interesting. But the best thing I learned in this course is git, a version control software.  It allowed me to experiment with my files and system without having the worry about messing up too badly. Once I had a stable piece of code which i liked, I'd save it as my initial file and then if i wanted to make some ill-advised changes I would run it and then revert back to the stable version.

One thing I did not expect to learn was python. I'm not a big fan of programming. I used to be in the CPA program but got so sick of C after the first semester, that i decided to change to networking. And python unfortunately is a programming language. It wasn't too hard to figure out the basics but i really didn't like learning it.

SBR600 is a relatively new course, so the prerequisites for the different aspects in this course haven't been strictly implemented. For one, people taking this course should be given a little bit of introduction to python, but that also wouldn't be feasible as it is not a major part of the networking stream.

In my opinion, SBR600 is a really hands-on course, and should be taken by people who really are into working on project-based courses. I had a good time in this course during the semester and I wish the best of luck everyone who took it with me in their future endeavors.

SBR600 Project "fedpkg Test Suite" -- release 0.3

For stage 0.3 we were supposed to finalize our projects for submission.
My group partner uploaded it on his account on the chile.proximity.on.ca server
you can get the details from his blog on http://zwang98.blogspot.com/2010/12/sbr600-project-fedpkg-test-suite.html

This was a tough one to get through as we didn't have much exposure to python but we got as much done as possible on it.Hopefully the people who take it over from us will be able to understand what we have done and can implement it in a useful manner.

Fedpkg Test Suite: release 0.2

SBR600 Project "fedpkg Test Suite" -- release 0.2

For release 0.2 i wrote 2 tests. They were quite simple and nothing that complex. As compared to the fedpkg repo, which i saw, they're quite trivial. The code for some of the tests in it is really complex and far beyond the scope of what i've learned in this course.I would need a lot more exposure and practice for python to understand it completely. For my next release, 0.3, i'll be improving on the code and hopefully get it approved for the repository.

SBR600 Project "fedpkg Test Suite" -- release 0.1

For our 0.1 release of our project, we were supposed to run a few test scripts using nose and python.
I made a script and ran 3 tests on it on the iraq.proximity.on.ca
First thing i had to do was
1 wget somethingaboutorange.com/mrl/projects/nose/nose-0.11.2.tar.gz
2 tar xvf nose-0.11.2.tar.gz
3 cd nose-0.11.2
4 ./install-rpm.sh
6 cd unit_tests
5  vi nosetest.py
7 chmod 755 nosetest.py
8 ./nosetest.py
All those three tests ran successfully

Building an RPM

First things i did was downloaded the source file of what i wanted to build.

yumdownloader --source PACKAGENAME

Afterwards:

rpm -i PACKAGENAME

Then i went to the specfiles to look at it and find some information of the package

~/rpmbuild/SPECS

Now the only thing left to do is build the package! and the command to do that is:

build -ba PACKAGENAME.spec

That's about it.Simple steps!

compiling NLED and Mozilla firefox 4.0 Beta 6

We had to build two packages from source code, one of which was NLED(Neat Little EDitor) and the other could be any of our choice.First, I will outline the steps i took to compile NLED from its source code:

1. wget http://cdot.senecac.on.ca/software/nled/nled_2_52_src.tgz 
2. tar -xvz nled_2_52_src.tgz
   Afterwards, I had to compile and install it, the steps to do that were:
3. make
4. make install

That happened succesfully without any incidents of mishaps. Next i downloaded and installed firefox 6.0 Beta on my laptop which had 64-bit windows 7 professional installed on it. The steps were quite simple:

1. went to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
2. Downloaded English(US) version 4.0b6
3. Once it was downloaded, ran the file with typical settings
4. Now typing this blog post on version 4.0b6 of firefox

contact details

Blog for SBR http://saad-husain.blogspot.com/
Seneca Wiki http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/User:SaadHusain
Fedora Wiki https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Saadhusain
IRC name: saadhusain

My conversation on Chatzilla

<saadhusain>    hey michael <michaelhanson>    hello <michaelhanson>    ah! You're at Seneca? <saadhusain>    yes <michaelhanson>    Excellent. Sorry, had to contextualize for a moment there. <michaelhanson>    To answer you, no, I've been using and contributing to open source for about 18 years now. I did recently spend a couple years inside a big company (following an acquisition) and missed out on a couple years of version-control progress, which was unfortunate. <michaelhanson>    So I'm a bit of a newbie where git is concerned, for example, which means some of my methodologies are rusty. <saadhusain>    that's understandable <saadhusain>    furthermore, I would like to know about what projects are you involved with in the open source community, if you don't mind me asking <michaelhanson>    sure... once upon a time, I was reasonably active in the libxml and libcurl library world. not for quite some years now. <michaelhanson>    my main focus for the last year has been on Mozilla Labs projects, where I have worked on Sync (I wrote the unit testing framework and implemented many of the tests), Contacts (I was the lead developer; hg.mozilla.org/labs/people) and some new projects that haven't made it out the door yet. <saadhusain>    i see, any advice for a noobie like me as to how i could contribute to the open source other than the project work we will be conducting shortly for our class? <michaelhanson>    in my experience, the best way to get involved with open source is to be passionate about an application, and to learn how to use existing technology to make that application. <michaelhanson>    then let your passion steer you -- if it means you end up making a library, do that. if you end up fixing bugs in somebody else's work do that. <michaelhanson>    you may even find that you really like improving the quality of an existing application or library, and write tests and documentation for it. <saadhusain>    hopefully i'll get to see my part to the opensource community take effect as well <michaelhanson>    good luck. :) <saadhusain>    thank you michael and thank you for your time

HEEEYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

This is my first blogpost!I'm sitting in my SBR600 class and we're discussing open source packages we can build!