The Project Begins…

The time has come to announce the project I will be doing for my OSD600 class.  I will be working with the dsp.js library which handles digital signal processing (basically, realtime audio stuff).  I’m not entirely sure yet what I will be doing, but it looks like I will creating new features and functionality for this library.

I’m still not completely sure who I’ll be working with, but I know they can be found in here on IRC.

For starters, I’ve been reviewing a bunch of resource material and demos (some of which are quite neat) that were given to me

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API

http://weare.buildingsky.net/processing/dsp.js/examples/fft.html

http://audioscene.org/?p=171

http://audioscene.org/?p=255

I’ve always had a casual interest in audio technology, so I’m really looking forward to getting going on this project.  During my initial contact with some of the people involved, there were a number of terms that were thrown out at me that I’m not familiar with.  There will also be a lot of math involved in this project which I expect will be refreshing once I get the hang of it again.  To follow this project, check my wiki page.

Performance Testing Minefield

As a first chance to dive into the open source community, I got to participate in comparing pre-release versions of Firefox’s performance against Chrome.  To measure the performance, the plan was to use Chrome Experiments. I was very excited to get in on this, as it was a more meaningful first task than I thought I’d get.  After having grabbed the latest nightly build of Minefield (both 32 and 64 bit windows versions) and Chromium, I set out to see which browser could better handle the Chrome Experiments.

With an instance of Minefield, and an instance of Chromium open, I went through each test running both of them separately, then at the same time.  Since I also run BOINC, I turned that on from time to time just to see how each browser did under a little extra pressure.  I stuck mostly to the 32 bit version of Minefield, but for the tests that were less than impressive, I tried running them on the 64-bit version.  Generally there was no difference between the two though…

In the end, I was slightly disappointed with how Minefield handled itself.  Of the ten experiments I tested with, Minefield only outperformed Chromium twice.  Furthermore, a handful of the other tests very heavily favored Chromium.  One of them didn’t even run properly on Minefield at all (I expect the next step will be to file a bug report about that one…)  I must say though that I had a lot of fun doing this, and look forward to the next task.

Entering into the OpenSource

Hello World, my name is Stephen Bologna.  I am in my final year of CPA at Seneca College taking a course in OpenSource development (aka OSD600).  I’ll be using this blog to document my adventures in this course and describe the stuff I’ll be working on as it happens.

The task for the first week of this course is to read the suggested reading and then discuss them.  The first one I read was an essay called “Cathedral and Bazaar” by Eric Raymond.  In it, Eric Raymond discusses the difference in methodologies between OpenSource and closed source software development.  He then puts the OpenSource practices to the test in a software development project he is working on.  He is skeptical at first, but is pleasantly astounded with the results.  I could understand some of his skepticism.  For me, the first sort of ‘open’ activity I worked with didn’t really lend itself very well to the kind of open collaboration that was required, and it tainted my view of OpenSource development in general.  Still, I understand that the popularity of this stuff speaks volumes of its viability and practicality.

Next, I watched a video about the history of how OpenSource began.  The hour and a half long film titled “Revolution OS” featured interviews with many of the forefathers of OpenSource including Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds.  This was really interesting for me since I admittedly didn’t really know a whole lot about the history of things like Linux beforehand.  I think I can honestly say that watching this film will be be the final kick in the pants I need to motivate me to install Fedora.

Finally, I read an article from the New York Times entitled “For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs get Tricky“.  The article describes the success of Mozilla’s Firefox and finishes with their newly created rivalry with Google.  This was something I had never really stopped to think about before.  I knew that Google had been supporting Mozilla prior to the release of Chrome, but it never really clicked that Chrome would make the two companies rivals.  Thankfully, the rivalry doesn’t seem to be nasty and the two are trying to co-exist peacefully.