POSSCON

Last Thursday (24th) I attended POSSCON.  I rode up with Tony to keep him company, but ended up sleeping the whole way >.>


The building that POSSCON was being hosted in was spectacular.  I loved how open it was, and felt that the organization of the event was nice.  Before attending any of the lectures, I grabbed a muffin and stopped stopped by a few of the interesting booths including Oracle, HSSC, MakerBot, and Linode.  At each of the booths, I engaged in conversation with the representatives.  The 3d printer, MakerBot, was pretty fascinating, although I had heard of them prior to POSSCON.  The plastic models were cruder than I expected them to be, but I see it's value for prototyping.


The rest of the day, I bounced back and forth between the Education and Healthcare sessions.


First, I attended Education seminar by Allen Tucker about FOSS projects and using them for educational purposes.


For the 2nd session, I attended Healthcare to learn about models in Healthcare Information Systems, but was disappointed when the spokesperson didn't show.  Instead they ended up holding a panel of individuals who discussed opensource in healthcare and were available to answer questions.


During lunch I was introduced to Ian Sanderson, the head organizer of the Healthcare sessions.  We talked about HSSC (Health Sciences of SC) and Bioinformedical Informatic Services.  I explained my interest in data mining, machine learning algorithms, and my past experience doing research at the Department of Bioinformatics, Biostatisticics and Epidemiology over at MUSC.  He seemed to be impressed, and introduced me to a man named Randall Alexander.


I then spoke to Randal Alexander, who is the Program Manager at MUSC in Biomedical Informatics Services.  I mentioned that I was considering grad school in the future, and he asked me to send him an e-mail with my resume for a potential internship opportunity.


After lunch, I attended Walter Bender's presentation on Sugar Labs and was very impressed.  I have always been interested in his work, and it was really nice to hear him talk about his goals and ideas firsthand.  I really wanted to talk with him after the lecture about future educational methods (since progressive education is one of my interests), but he was swarmed with people, and I thought it best to try him another time.


The next session I went to was on Education by Corey Donohoe.  I found what he had to say about higher education and open source interesting.  At this point, I remember feeling appreciative that we have an open source program in our cs path at CofC.


After that I went to the Healthcare lecture by Dr. Dan Russler.  To be honest, I wasn't too interested in this lecture, and zoned out hardcore.


I ended up leaving a little early with Carlynn and Alex.  To my dismay, upon returning to Charleston, I found out that my name had been called at the raffle to win a book on iPad Programming.  I was disappointed because not only do I never win ANYTHING, but also I've been looking to get into mobile app development. qq.


Overall, POSSCON was a great experience, and I'm glad that we were 'forced' to attend.

Pushing my Bug

As I stated in my last post, I was able to make the changes to the source code to correct my bug, and all that remained was to commit my change.  Last week during our team meeting I finished the process by pushing my branch of the code using git.  Now I just have to wait for feedback.

Planning for POSSCON and Sqwashing Another Bug

During our group meeting yesterday, I tackled a small bug (0011257) found in VTK/Utilities/octree/octree_curser.cxx.  The bug itself was very simple; One of the conditional statements "if ( axis < 0 || axis >= (1<<d_) )" had to be changed to "if ( axis < 0 || axis >= d_) )".  The way it was before, if the class was already loaded elsewhere, then it would cause an error.

I made the change to the file in my branch of the code, and then went through the steps to commit my code.  I did run into a small problem of not remembering my keyring password, so I did not complete the git commit, but I should be able to get that submitted soon.

As far as POSSCON planning goes, I read through the list of speakers that will be there.  There are a few individuals that I'd enjoy having a conversation with.  Below are the individuals that are most interesting imo:

• Dr. Jihad S. Obeid - CoEE Endowed Chair in Biomedical Informatics at the MUSC
• Dr. Dan Russler - VP Clinical Informatics, Oracle Health Sciences Strategy
• Walter Bender - Founder & Exec. Dir. - Sugar Labs, Co-founder One Laptop per Child
• Sebastian Dziallas - Engineering Manager, Sugar on a Stick (SoaS)
• David Nalley - Community Manager, CloudStack
• Mel Chua - Hacker, Red Hat Community Leadership Team

Spring Break

Over Spring Break, I tried to think as little about school work as possible.  That being said, I did make sure to read the daily VTK digest via the mailing list to keep up to date with the current VTK news.

Last night, I started to play with the code a bit.  There are a few bugs from the timeline that I think I could work on personally.  Next time the group meets, we should be able to get another bug finished and submitted.  I'm hoping that I will be able to use my branch of the project to commit the changes.

Creating a Timeline and Getting into Git

Our group met on Sunday evening to create a timeline for us to adhere to for the remainder of the semester.  This involved finalising our selection of bugs, deciding how much time to allocate to each bug based on severity and complexity, and roughly choosing an order in which to tackle them.

Out of the bugs we chose, one of them seems difficult, and will be worked on steadily for the rest of the semester.  For the remaining bugs, we are anticipating being able to squash and submit one bug per week.

In addition to creating a timeline, I also created my own branch of the project on the project's version tracker site.  Up until now, my project was built using the distributed source make files.  For us to submit our first bug, we were using Glen's machine, because he had already  set up Git.

To do this, I first had to set up an account on the project's version manager site.  Then I installed Git on my machine and linked it to my account on the project's site.  Finally, I create my own branch, which I named "bugSquashing".  Now, I can work with my own copy of the project, and commit my version after changes have been made.