Overall

This year I learned a tremendous amount. My little python GUI doesn't look like much, but I had never worked with Python or GUI's before at all. I spent most of my time learning python, pygtk, and gtk. In addition to this, I also learned about Java GUIs from the Java class offered here. The theory behind both of these is very similar and helped a bit. The other time I spent editing wiki's for clarity, learning about packaging in arch, learning to work with and compile and use CVS, and trying to interface with the gedit menu system. It is relatively clear in C, but I already have a working prototype in python and gedit is looking for python plugins.

As contributions to the lab, I came to many workdays in the beginning of the year, but got bogged down a bit near the end. At these, I would ask if there was anything I could work on for the lab build. Mostly, I got to break things and report them. I did this quite a few times, many of which were specific to a certain computer. I also started to burn a lab build CD, but the instructions weren't very clear. It involved mounting ISOs and I was going to contribute more towards making the instructions clearer, but that project was done when I came back to it. I worked on figuring out the 2.6 kernel on the Sparcs at one workday.

I had lab hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11am-12pm. This was the time that I met with my "mentee", Tabor. We didn't meet very many times, but I did show him some of the command line tools and how the file system structure is arranged. I also got into a bit about permissions, showing him how secure things can be in Linux compared to Windows when thinking about a multi-user system. We also met after a few meetings to go over some things. Mostly, I helped Aaron Fetterman, who wasn't my "mentee", but he lives on my floor. So I help him go through an install, and answered questions as they came up. He was also there for a couple of my command line explanations when I was meeting with Tabor.

Accomplishments breakdown:

Results - 1st Half


I have learned a lot about getting code from CVS and modifying/adding things to it. I have learned about my package management system and software. I have installed and am running Arch Linux currently. I have made progress towards contributing to gedit.

Results - 2nd Half


I could not interface with gedit using Python. As I mentioned earlier, it would be better to write it in C and then try to figure out what changes needed to be made to get python working. I do have working code for a GUI latex compiler in python. I was going to add some extra functionality specific to gedit once it got to that point, but it didn't. So I will display the "prototype" as the code I wrote. As a related note because it took up some of my time that I can consider COSI related, I took second in the HIMSS student article competition mentioned in my status reports. I'll post a copy of the article that I wrote for it.

Code/completions