Foss Experiences and Reflections

     So today's assignment was to install a new FOSS program and fiddle with it some as well as read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and blog about both. As for the FOSS program, I chose Audacity, naturally. I can justify this choice, as even though it was our group's chosen project to work on, I have never really used it before, so it is indeed new to me! I think actually, at some point I have downloaded it - probably back in '07 and '08 when I ran Ubuntu as my main OS, but I didn't really do much with it. My initial findings with the program is that for one, it is not very aesthetically appealing. All of the buttons and menu selections look like pre-Windows XP styled options. Of course, this isn't really that big of a deal as long as it works, but why not make it look pretty? One of the other things that I noticed in my short little tinker session is that when you import an audio file (I used an mp3 song) and increase the playback speed, the pitch of the sounds also goes up, much like old keyboards with pre-recorded songs and a tempo increase button. I found this a bit odd, as from my understanding, it is much more preferable to keep the pitch unchanged from the original, regardless of playback speed. I supposed there are situations for justifying it, like wanting to sound like a chipmunk, but there should at least be an option for enabling/disabling the pitch change effect. It also may be that there actually is some option to achieve this effect that I simply haven't yet discovered, because it really seems outdated if there isn't - just like an old keyboard.

     The second half of the blog will be about the read, which I found delightful. It was a great contrast to the Mythical Man Month, which we read last semester. Just reading about open-source development makes me want to switch back to Ubuntu and get my hands dirty again. I used to use exclusively open-source programs and for those that I couldn't, I would use a Windows emulator (which is probably obsolete now, with virtual machines being all the rage) called WINE (WINdows Emulator) to run the programs that were Windows-exclusive which I still needed. Ubuntu blew my mind at the time, with things like multiple desktop workspaces, a ton of keyboard shortcuts, and seemingly endless addons to customize your desktop, which I loved. Anyhow, that is a little off topic from the reading. I overall enjoyed reading it very much, especially the author's experience in dealing with a (relatively) large base of contributors to his "fetchmail" program. The open-source methodology is so contradictory to what seems intuitive. Lots of developers working on the same project with high turnover seems like it would be a total disaster, but in reality, it is the opposite. Learning how debugging can be solved with a parallel approach was especially epitomic. Multiple developers investigating several different error traces to find the bug and when one will invariably find it, the others can stop tracing. The debugging time scales (logarithmically) with the amount of people debugging! Amazing!