My Current COSI Status
Week of Nov. 28
It has been two weeks since reporting. I haven't made much progress towards interfacing with gedit, but I have a working
GUI program in python that compiles LaTeX files. This could essentially be its own little project. I do have something
to show that I've been working on LaTeX and PyGTK and learned some things even if I didn't accomplish my exact goals.
Week of Nov. 7
I spent most of my time working on writing and cleaning up an essay on health information exchange. The idea is to use
new technology to communicate nationally or even internationally between doctors and physicians very quickly and
efficiently. This eliminates a lot of confusion and possibly mistakes in the ER. The paper is appropriate to mention
here because I mention Linux in it and some good security features. It is also very technically based on how such a
system could be set up here in the U.S. I submitted it to the HIMSS contest:
himss contest For an article on a smaller version of health information
exchange chech here: US News This gives
a good flavor of what I talked about in the essay. I can post it after the competition is over but probably should
refrain until then.
Week of Oct. 31
OOO...scary...Halloween. The other scary thing is that I now maintain the
lacheck package for Arch Linux. It is all nice and neat and installs the way
it should. Check it out here:
lacheck(arch)
Week of Oct. 24
Didn't make any progress on my main project, but I learned a lot and accomplished a lot. I was exploring a tool used
often in latex: lacheck. It checks to make sure that everything is written in TeX stylistically correctly and
syntactically. Most of the syntax is caught by the latex compiler anyway, but a lot of small nuances can be found
using this tool. It wasn't available for Arch linux, which is what I am running, so I created my own package for it.
It involved writing a PKGBUILD file to build an actual Arch package for pacman (the package management tool). This
mostly describes everything about the package and then specifies how to make the package. It is in the lacheck.install
file where most of the scripting occurs. I had to patch up the MAKEFILE to install the program into a different directory/
Arch doesn't use /usr/local/bin which is where the default is for lacheck. So I moved it to /usr/bin/. I will be submitting
this package to the repositories early this weekend. Everything about it seems to be working fine and up to the packaging
standards currently. We'll see how it works out.
Week of Oct. 17
Everything compiles correctly and is up and running. I've got my plugin to appear in the list of available plugins, but
I now am having trouble figuring out how to access and add menu items. There entire GUI interface is done in C and GTK
whereas I am using python. I've been communicating with some of the developers at gedit, and they say that hopefully all
plugins will be done in python soon. So this is the future, I just happen to be pioneering it. It is hard to figure out
syntax because there is no existing code to exam that already does something similar to what I want to do. Even if I look
at their .h files to figure out different things I can do with a certain class, they are all C functions with pointers
and things foreign to python.
Week of Oct. 10
I've been learning python and pygtk and experimenting with compiling gedit from CVS. In doing this I have deconstructed
and learned how my package management system works: pacman. I then rolled my own package trying to get python support
enabled when the configuration file is ran. My progress is pretty significant on the actual plugin in that I think I know
exactly how to do it. I just can't test it until I can compile with python support. Also, I've been updating and editing
the arch linux wiki how-tos. I was trying to make things clearer or tack on some extra info that I would have found useful
while figuring stuff out. Some things were just misspelled or had an extra character. I figured I would clean up the things
that I was reading as I read them. Obviously I didn't make any major changes because I was just learning the stuff, but
I think it became a little nicer for anyone after me to use.
Week of Oct. 3
I have decided to write a plugin for gedit to parse latex files. Eventually it should have features that make typesetting
in latex easier as well. My zoo project died already too, since someone else chose the same distro as me and installed it.
I spent most of the week learning pyGTK and working with it. There are some problems compiling gedit with python support
though. This is a huge wall since I can't do anything specific to the plugin until that works. Until then, I can continue
to work on python and get that figured out.
Week of Sept. 26
I haven't been able to pin down what I am doing yet. This will probably be a lot more of a learning semester than much
else. I've spent the majority of my time going through the pages recommended at:
GnomeLove (and then creating this site). I guess I really don't know the whole process of contributing to an existing
open source project yet. I learned a bit about cvs and downloaded gedit from source and compiled and ran it without too much trouble.
Week of Sept. 19
I've been doing small things around the lab since before the beginning of school. I helped get some of the new machines
partitioned and installed. I messed around with the 2.6 kernel on the Solaris machines. I've been mentoring off and on.
I've found a project; now I just need to settle into the details of what I'm doing and start working.