Reflections on my Progress

     So far this semester has been slow. Sometimes I feel like I can be a little more critical on myself than is necessary, but I feel like our group has not accomplished much compared to the others. We've contributed to the Audacity wiki, and built the source code on all the operating systems as well as put the source code up on a Github repository, but have yet to do much else. The group also seems to be a little divided as far as vision for the project. There seems to be too many ambitions among us all. Some just want to fix a few bugs and keep it plain, some have thrown the idea out of writing a nyquist plugin, and another idea came up recently of writing an online textbook (much like the one we've been reading this semester) that uses nyquist as a gateway language to teach non-programmers how to program. Nyquist is a functional language that you can use to basically generate sounds and manipulate them. Apparently, even though Audacity is written in C++, it actually handles all of the audio code with nyquist - the C++ is mostly the interface and file managing. One of the challenging things I find about this project is that because Audacity is cross platform, some of the bugs are only specific to one operating system. This means that when I'm reading a bug on the BugZilla and trying to reproduce it in Linux, I find one behavior and I think I know how to approach it, but then I check the same bug on Windows and find something unexpected and I am no longer sure of my strategy, or if a fix that I apply might break it on the OS in which is was originally working.

     The group has decided on a couple of bugs to focus on, thankfully, which we hope to have figured out by the end of the break - one involving a frequency scale that does not accept a value below 20 Hz, and another more interface related one that deals with button shading so that it's more obvious to the user what is selected. Also, I'd like to catch up on my blog posts (needless to say...) not only for the grade aspect of it, but blogging also helps me to gather my thoughts about the project, the group, and everything else that's going on. It helps me reset my perspective, which in turn makes me think more clearly about the project and gives me a little boost in confidence - not to be taken lightly!