November 15, 2008

GitHub and Git: Sharing Your Code, for What It’s Worth, Without a Begging Entry into Open Source Communities

SourceForge is about projects. GitHub is about people. It is a very git-oriented world view. A world of programmers forking, hacking and experimenting. There is merging, but only if people agree to do so, by other channels.

This is a pivot of the traditional open source project website. A pivot from project to programmer.

I love the pivot.

GitHub gives me my own place to play. It lets me share my code the way I share photos on Flickr, the same way I share bookmarks on del.icio.us. Here’s something I found useful, for what it’s worth.

Naming a project is simple. I can give my project a name of my choosing. It is not a tedious affair akin to choosing a domain name, a dozen little stabs of disappointment, to land upon some hyphenated moniker.

Best of all, I’m not told that, before I start my project, I should go look for a similar project to join, before I set out on my own. I’ve always loathed this particular bit of pedantry.

I’ve got an idea, I’d like to try it out. As I work on it, I’d like to share it, to see if anyone is interested. I’d like to offer it to you, for what it’s worth.

Moreover, I’m sharing my code, for what it’s worth to me to share my code.

I am sharing my code. I am not launching an open source project. I am not beginning a search for like minded developers to avoid duplication of efforts. I am not showing up at someone else’s door hat in hand, asking for commit access. I am not looking to do battle with Brook’s Law at the outset of my brainstorm.

GitHub is code sharing with out the obligition of politicking born of centralized repository access.

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May 16, 2007

B-Tree

An oak at The University of South Carolina-Columbia by David.

I’m implementing a B-Tree in Java. The project is called Strata. You can view the source, is is in the strata subdirectory of my subversion repository. There is a lot of cruft from an earlier attempt.

I’ve yet to choose a license.

This tree is the first indexing option in Momento, which is a large file XML database that I wrote last year, when I was in Ann Arbor.

Strata will index the normalized text of a specific node. The only query supported at the outset is equality.

Then I can use Lucene to do full text indexing. In order for Lucene to be effective, you see, it must be a simple matter to retrieve the document. Indexing unique atom identifers, would give a key to fetch the document resulting from a Lucene query.

My research B-Tree implemetnations can be tracked with my del.icio.us account, under the tag strata.

I’ve written a description of the tree structure at my user page on the New Orleans Wiki, under a Software Development page.

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September 12, 2006

Getting Volutneer Work Done

My days are falling apart without structure. I’m not able to create quite what I wish to create. At this moment, I’d like to call Karen and plan to run out and spend time at NENA, which is something that is very important to me. When we do, we miss Patricia, and nothing gets done. I don’t seem to be able to find the time to do this. Myself, I need a way to get things done, a project planning tool for volunteer projects. It would probably resemble a trouble ticket system in a software application.

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August 27, 2006

Hobbiest Programmer

Once agian, it must be noted that I do not program professionally. I am hobbiest programmer. The computer programs that I write are little hobby programs. They are not professional. I program in my spare time, when I get a chance. Sometimes there are little ideas in them. I may fancy a patent someday, for which I’ll reach into my own pocket. But do keep in mind, that I do not do this professionally, this programming. It is a lark.

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April 28, 2006

Netgear WG511 on Linux

I’ve installed a Netgear WG511 Wifi card on my old Sony VAIO’s Fedora Core 4 Linux partition. I used the Linuxant DriverLoader and followed the instructions
on Ramsus’ Toys Page. Then I fired off the commands, iwconfig eth1 mode Managed, iwconfig eth1 essid "Coffee Shop", dhclient eth1 to get connected. There is a $20.00 license for Linuxant. There is a native Prism 54 driver, also.

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