Well I received an email Tuesday night from the planners of the Posscon convention letting me know that they would have Friday's schedule finalized by sometime Wednesday...and they were true to their word. In fact, it looks like they've changed many of their workshops around. From what I'm seeing now, it looks like I'll be attending the 9:45 workshop with David Both on "The Great Open-Office Challenge" and the 1:15 workshop with David Duggins on "Starting a Business on the Cheap Using Open Source." I'll plan on coming up with some questions over spring break for these two speakers and probably 2 others (in case I am not able to chat with both of them) and list those questions in an upcoming blog.
My team and I are excited about focusing on Sugar Lab's Lemonade Stand for the remaining portion of the semester. Each of us were able to build this add-on yesterday, but all of us are having an issue with getting it to execute. There is a workaround that Jamie mentioned on Tuesday that she had found with her group's Sugar Lab's add-on experience, and we'll ask her about it in class today (and test it if time permits) to ensure we all have it working. Being able to open the individual add-on without using Sugar Labs OS will be beneficial with our workspace, testing and possible conflicts (like Browse) that have already taken up enough of our time.
Reading over chapter 8, I thought it would be yet another brow beating rendition of the importance of documentation; while it did have lots to say on the importance and proper ways of documentation, I learned of several new tools that I never heard of before. First, Beautiful Soup is a parser that is totally new to me. From what I gathered from that portion of the reading, it can be used to parse digital files such as documents and web pages. It is slower than other parsers, but can be customized and even set to parse only a part of the file if desired. It is well worth another look and some playing around with later. The rest of 8.1 really focused on documentation...as I expected. There were suggestions and examples pointing to the importance of clear documentation.
8.2 is going to be an interesting assignment and I thought that I'd spend some time looking at the wiki and IRC functions that will be a bit clunky at first. In hindsight, I probably should have installed the IRC feature on my box--seeing as I can't use my laptop at work, and we can't install anything on government computers. I did spend some time with wiki just to make sure that I could create a new wiki, create new pages and link to them from the main page in a timely fashion--since we will only have about an hour for the project today. While I am still not sure how the best way to go about working this project in class, if I have no problems getting the IRC to work then I think that I'll be fine.
8.3 through 8.8 dealt with documentation, technical writing and ways to use documentation and technical writing to gain a positive reputation in the FOSS community. (I did think it funny that in 8.6 they used the "waterfall method" to creating documentation--which is probably an acceptable use of this method, but over the past 2 semesters we have seen how it is not the best method to use in designing a system)
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