Project Update 10/21/13

     We haven't had a group chat in a while and the fact that I've missed some classes recently doesn't help either, but last time we spoke, I mentioned that I'd work on the script and webpage for the groups test results. It turns out, the only thing I had to write in the script (at least for a Windows command line script) was

    start groupwebpage.html

This automatically starts whatever default browser is set on the clients computer, and loads the specified html file. Of course, the file has to be local for this to work, but you could do it with any website as well. E.g.

    start http://www.google.com

This works the same way. I think it recognizes the http tag and automatically starts whatever program is associated with the protocol, or at least this is what I have read online. So after realizing that the script itself was very easy, I decided to go ahead and work on the webpage. I don't have much yet, but I'm going to be using css styling and hopefully some cool HTML 5 elements as well. We'll see what I can incorporate. I'm thinking something like, if all test cases are successful, display some silly .gif and play victory music in the background or something.

Homework #15 - 10/8 - Deliverable 2 Reflections

     Well here I am at 6:15am writing a post about my night of fun. It started out simple enough. I was just going to continue where I left off after building the project in Ubuntu. I was going to run it, see how SugarLabs looked, try and find the source code, etc. I decided, however, that running a VM inside of Windows 7 to run Ubuntu, then building a whole OS (SugarLabs) and running that inside of Ubuntu was just a little too much abstraction and my poor 3gb laptop was struggling to say the least. So Tan suggested that I just install Mint alongside Windows 7 and go from there, which I thought was a good idea. Well, hours later, after battling with my boot options trying to figure out why my computer refused to boot from any usb device, I had to break down and go to wal-mart and buy some blank discs. At about 3am I had finally finished burning an install disc and it worked like a charm. So I finish installing Mint and do all the things that I had done in Ubuntu to download Sugar and build it. Yay, success!
     Running Sugar is interesting, the mouse pointer is gigantic and the buttons are massive as well, but it is surprisingly smooth and modern, for a kids OS. When you move the pointer to any of the screen corners, it brings up borders with options, just like a Mac does - pretty nifty. The navigation and interface of SugarLabs, though, could really use some more focus on design - it's not very intuitive, and things aren't given very meaningful names. For example, I could not find the list of Activities (SugarLabs version of programs, or apps) anywhere because they were ended up being in a directory called "Pippy" with a big snake icon. I guess that's kind of fun and interesting for kids, but man is it confusing.
     Thank god for my teammates on this one, Tan was well ahead of us finding the code, etc, and Andrew was able to put together a very good looking deliverable, and although I wish I had been able to get some sleep, the night was not wasted as I learned a lot, got even more acclimated to linux and the command line, and was able to play around in our target project a little, and as a result, I feel a lot more prepared for our future endeavors.

Homework #14 - 10/3

      The article we were to read for today was all about legacy systems and how to go about transferring from their use to a new system. Some of the reasons for transferring include being able to take advantage of new technologies that the legacy system cannot incorporate, high costs of maintaining the legacy system, and investing in the business. This whole article has much familiarity in my life. The reason being, one of my jobs is being a pizza driver, and the system we use to take orders is incredibly old. I'm not talking windows 95 old, I'm talking green-screen-monitor-and-tower-combined-with-only-keyboard-input old. This consistently blows me away, why are we stuck in the 80s? Don't ask me how they replace these dinosaurs, because they have broken before and we end up getting "new" ones, which are the exact same model. It's also strange, because this isn't some local small business either, this is an international chain corporation! That being said, the store I work for is franchise-owned, and so it may be possible that only the franchise has yet to update its technology, and the corporate stores already have. Either way, the franchise isn't that small either, so you'd think they could benefit from upgrading.
     I've often thought about how I would program a new system to take orders for our store, and what kinds of things I would do differently and/or inherit from the old system. Upgrading the legacy system for me, seems like an easy enough task, but then when you read this article and actually imagine everything involved with the legacy system and all of its different components, it quickly becomes a daunting task and I can now understand why the pizza joint has yet to upgrade. I was trying to imagine how I would go about doing it if somehow they ended up hiring me to do the job, and I would definitely prefer to use the butterfly method discussed in the article rather than the chicken little method. All the extra complexity of writing components to make the new and legacy systems able to interact just doesn't seem worth it. I wonder, though, if there are other methods not discussed in this article as it was published in 1999. They speak toward the end of the paper about the research field of migrating legacy systems and I find myself curious if there has been any and what the results of it were.