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Showing posts from September, 2017

Lab 4 - Finding my first Open Source bug

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For this specific lab, I sort of got started before the lab was even issued. As a people's person, I wasn't intimidated by the fact that we needed to communicate with someone we didn't know in order to offer my help. The task in specific for this lab was to find a bug we were interested in to work over the next month as our first assignment. As such, looking at the suggestions list provided by our professor, Thimble seemed to have a couple of bugs that I could tackle. Our professor recommended we look using specific tags such as "good first bug", as to not overwhelm ourselves with a task we possibly wouldn't be able to complete. I did just that, and came across a bug that no one had claimed: The task did not seem too complicated, and I figured this would be a good chance for me to do some more web work. I left a comment showing I was interested in helping: To my surprise, our professor's attentive eye lead him my way! A few short minutes after,

Lab 3 - Mastering your Code Editor: Sublime Text 3 and Atom

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Note to reader: For this lab we were tasked with working with 2 different editors. I chose Sublime Text 3  as something that I have but don't use too often and Atom , an editor I never used before. Feel free to download both as they are great editors, and feel free to take them for a spin if what you are about to read interests you! Test Driving I began by downloading the source to  the Best Resume Ever . After quickly unzipping what I had downloaded, I saw these folders and files: We were tasked with trying out two editors and performing common tasks among them, to ultimately decide which one we prefer. Below you can see the project opened in  Sublime (something done very easily, by simply going to File > Open Folder) : I did the same in Atom ( File > Open Folder): After performing some of the common tasks outlined in the lab (splitting the screen, finding strings, etc) I decided to pick Atom , since as I mentioned earlier, this editor was new to me. I

3 Things I Learned About the MIT License

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The task was simple. We had to first read the MIT License , followed by  The MIT License, Line by Line by Kyle E. Mitchell  and talk about what we learned or thought was interesting. One of the very first things that I learned and my main take away from this reading was to not simply trust or believe that there isn't much to a license if its writing is less than 200 words. I was impressed by just how much depth there was to the 171 word text. Secondly, I learned that the MIT License isn't one, but many (a family as a matter of fact) of licenses. And lastly, I learned that the MIT License has outlasted most of the software licensed under it.

Lab 2 - Building Firefox for Desktop from source on Windows 10

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Not a pretty sight if I can say so myself. After hours of waiting, seeing "Error 2" and not knowing where to go or what to do can be frustrating. But how did I get here? Relatively speaking, when following the instructions posted on  Building Firefox for Windows , everything went smoothly. Windows 10 is up to date? Check. Visual Studio 2017 is installed? Check. Rust and MozillaBuild are all installed as well? Check and check. Getting the source with Mercurial was a process that took quite a while, but that too went without any hitches. The problem came on attempting to build the code. Everything went well until we got to the image that you can see above. A Unicode error stops the building process from going ahead. When attempting to change the file "config.data", by substituting the single backslash with a double backslash on line 238, the issue still persists since the file gets rewritten every time one attempts to build. Thus far I have not found a way to

Lab 1 - GIMP

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What is it called? The name of the project is GNU Image Manipulation, shortened to GIMP. What is the project about? What problem does it solve? GIMP is an image editing software available on many platforms, some of which are GNU/Linux, OS X and Windows. It is a free software, which means it allows for changes to its source code, as well as its distribution. This tool provides sophisticated tools for graphic design, photography and illustration  with many customization options   for free. How old is it? When did it start? GIMP dates back to 1996 with their first release, namely 0.54. It wasn't until 1998 that version 1.0 was released. What language(s) is it written in? Gimp has multi-language support with languages such as C, C++, Perl, Python and Scheme. How many open Issues does it have? Currently there are  811 open bugs . How many people have contributed to the code? Amongst the hundreds that have helped up until today,  thi