In my project release 0.4, I still worked on the webmaker app project. I
was working on the issue#569, which are the UI adjustments on Sign In. The code
that I fixed is in webmaker-login-ux, which webmaker app uses for log in. My
pull request is here.
And the screenshot after fixing is as follows:
Monday, 8 December 2014
Friday, 5 December 2014
Changes in Open Source in Last 3 Months
In this semester, I had the opportunity to take
David Humphrey’s OSD600. In this course, I learned the culture of open source
community and how to involve in the development of an open source project. Open
source model becomes more and more popular. And a lot of companies have
open-sourced the software. Although, it’s been only three months since I
started learning open source development. The changes in the open source
community are large and obvious.
In this October, the 13th FSOSS
conference was held in Seneca@York campus. I participated as a volunteer. There
were more than 200 registered audience, nearly a hundred more than the number
in last year. From the number of FSOSS participants, we can see there are more
and more people interested in the open source.
Moreover, the biggest news in open source
community during last three month was that Microsoft announced that it made the
full .NET server core stack open source for cross-platform Nov. 12, 2014. Developers
can begin engaging with breadth of .NET open source project at Github. It uses MIT License, which is one of most popular license in open source
projects, instead of its own open source license in the dotnet project. That was the big step for Microsoft in the open
source community. It is also a big sign that open source is getting widely
recognized and adopted as an efficiency development model and in the software
development industry since Microsoft, the top company leads the development
model in the industry always, starts moving steps into the open source
community. It is anticipant that there will be more and more companies and
developers will participate the open source community.
Source:
Wednesday, 26 November 2014
Building Open Source Browser – Firefox on Windows
I followed the instruction to build Firefox in my laptop, which is x64 system, using OS
Windows8.1.
First of all, check the prerequisites.
Check if all of windows build prerequisites are installed in the computer. At this point, I have to install
MozillaBuild package. I downloaded and installed the latest version of
MozillaBuild in fold c:\mozilla-build.
Second, get the source code.
Mozillar use Mercurial repository to hold the source code.
To get the source code, I have to have Mercurial installed in my laptop.
I downloaded and installed TortoiseHg, which a Windows shell
extension and a series of applications for the Mercurial distributed revision control system, similar with
TortoiseGit and TortoiseSVN. It saves from getting lost in the instruction of
Windows Install on mercurial website.
Next, start the building environment.
In folder c:\mozilla-build, type start-shell-msvc2013.bat
to setup building environment because I have install visual studio 2013 installed
in laptop. Then it enters a linux mode in window power shell.
Running start-shell-msvc2013-x64.bat generated the error in building
(4:21.90 configure: error: You are targeting i386 but using the 64-bit compiler).
Following, build the project.
cd into mozilla-central subdirectory
in above powder shell, and run command ./mach build. It will take some time to
build the project. It takes 3 to 4 hours to build the project. In the end, it will show a success message if the build finishes and succeeds as follows:
Finally, run the project
Run command ./mach run in the same fold as above. Firefox Nightly
browser will be started as follows:
Friday, 21 November 2014
Grunt vs. Gulp
Grunt and Gulp are the popular task runner in Node.js projects. In release
0.1, I have used Grunt in Filer project. And webmaker project uses Gulp indead.
I did some research on their similarities and differences.
Both Grunt and Gulp are to build the process in Node.js base. But they
have different mechanism. Grunt has longer history and Gulp is new.
Plug-ins:
Both Grunt and Gulp relies on the plug-ins to build tasks. They have
large plug-in base. Developers rarely need to developer own building tasks. Grunt
has better community support than Gulp since it has longer history. Grunt
plug-ins often perform multiple tasks; Gulp plug-ins are designed to do one
thing only.
Mechanism in building process:
Grunt needs to generate intermediary files (.tmp/) to disk during the building
process. It uses declarative approach to build tasks. When the build flow is large,
it will be hard to figure out the task execution order. Also, the development
team needs to write the maintenance code.
Gulp is a streaming building system. Streams is the most important
concept of Gulp, which means that you input your files into a pipe from one end
and generate the output file from the other end without any interruptions in
the middle of the process. It makes your task definitions a bit easier to ready.
And it does not have the disk I/O issues since it does not have the
intermediary file written to the disk. However, Gulp requires developers know
Node well to deal with streams, pipes and asynchronous code.
Gruntfile.js vs. Gulpfile.js
Grunt uses JSON-like data configuration files. And Gulp use Javascript
code. There are examples getting from Filer project and Webmaker project.
Gruntfile.js
Both of them have advantages and disadvantages. Developers would consider them to choose the best suitable one. As a beginner in open source community, it is good to learn both of them to help understand the system I am working on.
Source:
Thursday, 20 November 2014
Release 0.3
I chose to stay in webmaker project for my
release 0.3 project since I have worked on this before and am interested in
this project. I picked up the issue #498 and then worked on it for several
days. I noticed that this project uses page.js to direct routing. It took me
some time to understand how page.js works, but finally found out page.js does
not have the functionality to refresh the page. Then I used location.reload()
to do so. After doing release 0.3, I got to know more about webmaker My pull request is here.
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Strategies benefiting from open source communities
On OSD600 class on this Monday, we had a discussion on how to build a
software production pipeline that can strategically benefit from a vibrant open
source community from many aspects, such as big corporations, small shops,
students and so on.
We had a lot of ideas, which can be categorized into following aspects:
- Face to face gatherings: since the open source developers are from all of the world, it’s important and excited for them to have chances to gather together and have the face to face communication, such conferences, workshops and so on. They can increase participants’ enthusiasm to the open source community.
- Standards: good standards make participants easy to understand and follow, and keep workflow organized in open source communities.
- Technology: using programming languages that is newly developed.
- Onboarding: making it easier to understand for non-developer.
- Time management: making miles stones.
- Project planning: doing marketing research to find users and localization staff, use feedback to improve the project.
- Funding: big companies would sponsor for events held in open source community; hiring contributors.
- Partner : encouraging partnerships with business and educational organization, partnering with educational organization to have more targeting users and participants for the project
- Building open community: encouraging social media, use permissive license; putting on version control system, such as github or subvision; recognizing contributors, mentoring the community.
- Documentation: creating good guide and documentations for new developers, making video/audio guide for different learners.
Monday, 10 November 2014
Less.js – a CSS preprocessor
Today, Jordan Theriault introduced Less.js in the OSD600 class. Less.js
gets popular recently. It is a CSS framework working with Javascript in
client-side. I started to learn and use it when I worked Mobile Webmaker
project.
Less.js have some advantages:
- Improve performance. The purpose of Less.js is to speed up development of CSS. So using Less.js can improve performance in ways that can’t be done in normal CSS.
- Significantly reduce sizes of style sheet files by well grouping things. Using Less.js, .css files can be well grouped and be separated into smaller and more meaningful .less files.
- Easiness to operate. Less.js has following features:
·
Ability to define variables,
·
Operations and functions (Mathematical functions
and operational functions)
·
Mixins, embedding all the properties of a class
into another class
·
Nesting
·
Joining of multiple files.
Those features of Less.js make it easy to operate
to group things and generate CSS files. Moreover, the developers are easy to
modify .less files with those features by reducing the redundancy of the code.
In the future, I will dig deeper into Less.js with continuously working
in Mobile Webmaker project.
Source:
Monday, 3 November 2014
Presentation Script – NodeJS
This presentation contains following content:
´ What is Node.js?
´ Popularity
´ License
´ History
´ Community
´ Main idea of Node.js
´ How to start
What is Node.js?
In nodejs.org, Node.js is described as follows:
Node.js® is a platform built on Chrome’s
JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network
applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes
it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications
that run across distributed devices.
This is what is Node.js on Wikipedia:
Node.js is a cross-platform runtime environment
for server-side and networking applications. Node.js applications are written
in JavaScript, and can be run within the Node.js runtime on OS X, Microsoft
Windows and Linux with no changes.
Popularity
Node.js is release under the MIT license and
bundles other liberally licensed OSS components, such as V8’s license,
OpenSSL’s license, HTTP Parser’s license, npm’s license and other licenses for
some modules / tools.
License
History
Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl (github: https://github.com/ry),
starting in 2009.
Its development and maintenance was sponsored by
Joyent, the firm where Dahl worked.
Dahl stepped aside in 2012. And Timothy J
Fontaine (twitter: https://twitter.com/tjfontaine, github: https://github.com/tjfontaine) is Node.js’
current project lead
Community
Developer site: http://github.com/joyent/node
Contribution Guide (http://nodejs.org/documentation/contributing/). It contains the
instruction on reporting an issue and contributing a feature or fix, such as
how to fork, branch, commit, test, push and so on.
nodejs.org in multiple language: http://nodejs.org/documentation/localization/
Main Idea of NodeJS
Use non-blocking, event-driven I/O
to remain lightweight and efficient in the face of data-intensive real-time
applications that run across distributed devices.
Non-blocking / callback means that the code does
not need to wait the completion of the action to continuously execute the next
line.
Event-driven means that Node.js uses even loop to
handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections instead of multiple threads.
How to Start
Tutorials
Find more, please visit http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2353818/how-do-i-get-started-with-node-js
Source:
Real Time Web with Node.js (http://node.codeschool.com/levels/1)
Understanding the node.js event loop (http://blog.mixu.net/2011/02/01/understanding-the-node-js-event-loop/)
FSOSS in Oct 23-24, 2014
This year’s FSOSS at Seneca College, Toronto was the thirteen iteration. Three keynote speakers
were invited to this year’s conference. . They are David Humphrey (CDOT
Researcher for Mozilla Foundation), Bob Young (Red Hat, Inc. Co-Founder) and
Chris Aniszczyk (Head of Open Source at Twitter). And thirty-five speaker have
presented at the conference. I participated this event as a volunteer. Fortunately,
I listened two keynote speakers’ presentation and the Kieran Sedgwick’s
presentation besides my duty shift.
All of the three presentations expressed speakers’ enthusiasm to the
open source. Mr. Young generally introduced how open source work with business
from the entrepreneur aspect. Mr. Chris talked more details on open source on technical
side. With more experience and profound understanding on open source, He
clearly shows the craft and culture of open source and presents how open source
works in a large scale a company (Twitter). He explicitly expresses he loves
open source and gets a lot of advantages from it. Moreover, he hopes there are
more and more people joining open source development.
Mr. Kieren is an intermediate open source developer, who works in CDOT, an
open source organization. In his presentation, he did not explicitly mention
his view point on open source. But from his words, audience can strongly
receive the message that he has a very positive opinion on open source. He
starts his career at an open source organization with the open source projects.
He learns cutting edge technologies and grows rapidly in the open source
environment. He gets many benefits from open source community. In his
presentation, he uses an open source project to illustrate how the mentioned
technologies work. It is inevitably showing audience how open source works in a
small scale - a project from some aspect.
I am glad I did contribution to the big event held by CDOT at Seneca College. And I had deeper understanding on open source from this conference.
Friday, 17 October 2014
OSD600: Release 0.2
I took issue#319 in Webmaker for this release. I already completed it. Please find it here.
This issue is about the UI, to align the line on the homepage with the text instead of centralize it.
Now it looks as following:
This issue is about the UI, to align the line on the homepage with the text instead of centralize it.
Now it looks as following:
Wednesday, 15 October 2014
OSD600: Release 0.2 – Webmaker – issue#319
In project release 0.2, I would like to take the
issue #319 in webmaker. And I already left a message on github to ask and am
still waiting for the response. This issue is about the UI, making the line to
align with the text in the homepage. It is a small bug and easy to fix.
However, it will a good start for me to go through the whole project and get
the ideas about how it works. Whenever I get confirmed, I will send the pull
request to make my first contribution on a real open source project.
I have been hesitating in taking bugs for a while. Inspired by David's article "Minimum Viable Product" in Oct. 8, I decide to start with small bugs. Taking a small bug makes me feel more confident on open source development. And I am willing to take more bugs.
Monday, 6 October 2014
OSD600: Project for Release 0.2
Kate Hudson introduced Mobile Webmaker project in last Wednesday. It is a mobile application providing users the framework to create the mobile apps. In other words, it is a software being used to create software. She also showed some examples and gave the links of how to start. This is a cool project, which also have the clear information to start.
Moreover, I have some friend who are going to work on this project as well. Thus, I can discuss with them. And we may help each other although we work on different issues.
I need to look at the issues in detail and then decide which one to take. I will do so no later than this Wednesday, and will post which issue I would like to take.
Moreover, I have some friend who are going to work on this project as well. Thus, I can discuss with them. And we may help each other although we work on different issues.
I need to look at the issues in detail and then decide which one to take. I will do so no later than this Wednesday, and will post which issue I would like to take.
SPO600: Lab3 - Loop in Assembly
In lab3, we were asked to write the assembly programs in
both x86_64 and aarch64 to display number 0-29 in a loop.
This was my first assembly code. And it took me one night
and 2 whole days to get them work. Now the loop is working to display the
numbers. But I still have the problem for the newlines. My outputs do not have
the newlines as I expect. In other
words, my output is on one line. I spent some time on this issue, but have not
found the solution.
One frustrating thing in assembly is that different platform
requires different syntax. The code I run in one platform without problems could
not smoothly transform to the other platform. I still need to spend amount of
time to recode it even though both programs have the same logic and same
output.
Here is the code on X86_64 in GAS syntax.
.text
.globl _start
start = 0
max = 30
_start:
mov $start,%r15 /* starting value for the loop index*/
loop:
/*showing digit*/
mov $'0',%r14
mov $10,%r13
mov $0,%rdx
mov %r15,%rax
div %r13
cmp $0,%rax
je singledigit
mov %rax,%r13 /*store the second digit from right*/
add %r14,%r13
mov %r13,msg+5
singledigit:
mov %rdx,%r12
add %r14,%r12
mov %r12,msg+6
/*showing loop in front of digit*/
mov $len,%rdx
mov $msg,%rsi
mov $1,%rdi
mov $1,%rax
syscall
inc %r15 /* increment index*/
cmp $max,%r15 /* see if we're done */
jne loop /* loop if we're not */
movq $0,%rdi /* exit status */
movq $60,%rax /* syscall sys_exit */
syscall
.data
msg: .ascii "loop: '\n'"
.set len, . - msg
And ARM assembly in aarch64:
.text
.global _start
_start:
start = 0
max = 30
mov x15,start /*starting value for the loop index*/
loop:
mov x28,0
mov x27,10
adr x12,msg /*loading the message*/
udiv x10,x15,x27 /*getting the quotient*/
msub x9,x10,x27,x15 /*getting the reminder*/
cmp x10,0 /*if quotient equals 0, then go to execute single digit*/
beq singledigit
add x14,x10,0x30 /*display quotient - second digit from right*/
str x14,[x12,6]
singledigit:
add x11,x9,0x30 /*display reminder - first digit from right*/
str x11,[x12,7]
/*system call write*/
mov x1,x12
mov x2,len
mov x0,1
mov x8,64
svc 0
/*loop*/
add x15,x15,1
cmp x15,max
blt loop
/*system exit*/
mov x0,0
mov x8,93
svc 0
.data
msg: .ascii "loop: ##\n\r"
len= . - msg
Through the practice in this lab, I got the basic idea how
assembly works with memory and register, how to do the system call and how loop
works.
In the end, I would like to ask if anyone has any good
tutorials in assembly for beginners or suggestions, please comment it because I
could not find one good for beginners. I highly appreciate.
Thursday, 25 September 2014
OSD600: Release 0.1
I have done the project 0.1 release and send
David the pull request (https://github.com/humphd/filer/pull/5)
today. Project 0.1 release was to add
the du command to filer project. Following project instruction, I did not have
much difficulties to finish it.
First of all, I got the code and had my github
ready by forking filer to my github account and coloning it to my local
computer.
Then I installed the node.js in order to have npm
package installer in my computer.
Next, following the instruction to install the
grunt both locally in project (filer) folder and globally in my computer. At
this step, I had the trouble to install grunt locally with the errors during
the installation. After discuss with the classmate, I found out that I need use
Linux command line instead of Windows command line to run the command “npm
install”. Then I used git bash to run this command, and it turned out that
installation was successful eventually.
Following, I run “grunt test” to test the code. I
met the problems as well here. After asking David, it was resolved by updating to
the latest code. The problem I met was just solved and updated quite recently,
and I had not updated my code yet.
At this point, I had all the required
environment ready. Then I started to write the code. I reviewed the code for
cat command and ls command because du command has the similarity with these two
commands. Both du and cat commands have two parameters – data and callback. And
both du and ls commands need to return deep content of a directory tree, and
have the file size, file path and file content. Having the reference to these
two blocks of code, I built du command without much difficulties. There were 5
files that needed to be modified and/or added. They were:
- MODIFY: /README.md
- MODIFY: /test/index.js
- MODIFY: /src/shell/shell.js
- MODIFY: /dist/filer.js
- ADD: /test/spec/shell/du.spec.js
At last, it passed the test with no error.
Tuesday, 23 September 2014
SPO600: Static linking vs. Dynamic linking
Linker
as a system program takes relocatable object files and command line arguments
in order to generate an executable object file. The linker is responsible
for locating individual parts of the object files in the executable image,
ensuring that all the required code and data is available to the image and any
addresses required are handled correctly.
Static
and dynamic linking are two processes of collecting and combining multiple
object files in order to create a single executable.
Static
linking is the process of copying all library modules used in the program into
the final executable image. This is performed by the linker and it is done as
the last step of the compilation process.
During dynamic linking the
name of the shared library is placed in the final executable file while the
actual linking takes place at run time when both executable file and library
are placed in the memory.
Differences between Static linking and Dynamic linking:
Static
linking
|
Dynamic
linking
|
|
Sharing
external program
|
External
called program cannot be shared. It requires duplicate copies of programs in
memory.
|
Dynamic
linking lets several programs use a single copy of an executable module.
|
File size
|
Statically
linked files are significantly larger in size because external programs are
built into the executable files.
|
Dynamic
linking significantly reduces the size of executable programs because it uses
only one copy of shared library
|
Easiness
to update
|
In static
linking if any of the external programs has changed then they have to be
recompiled and re-linked again else the changes won't reflect in existing
executable file.
|
In dynamic
linking individual shared modules and bug fixes can be updated and
recompiled.
|
Speed
|
Programs
that use statically-linked libraries are usually faster than those that use
shared libraries.
|
Programs
that use shared libraries are usually slower than those that use
statically-linked libraries.
|
Compati-bility
|
In
statically-linked programs, all code is contained in a single executable
module. Therefore, they never run into compatibility issues.
|
Dynamically
linked programs are dependent on having a compatible library. If a library is
changed, applications might have to be reworked to be made compatible with
the new version of the library.
|
Advantages:
Static
linking
|
Dynamic
linking
|
•
Static linking is efficient at run time.
•
It has less system calls.
•
Static linking can make binaries easier to distribute to diverse user
environment.
•
It let the code run in very limited environments.
|
•
Dynamic linking is more flexible.
•
It is more efficient in resource utilization, taking less memory space,
cache space and disk space.
•
It is easy to update and fix the bugs.
|
Static linking
|
Dynamic linking
|
|
Source:
|
Friday, 19 September 2014
SPO600: Lab2
Brief description:
Wrote a simple c program to display “Hello World!”, and compiled it using command “gcc –g –O0 –
fno-builtin”. Then using command “objdump” with options –f, -d, -s, --source to
display the information of the output file.
And then do the following changes to see the changes and
difference in the results.
5) Move the
printf()
call to a separate function named output()
, and call that function from main().
Original output file: a.out
Output file after change: hello_all5.out
Before change:
After change
It shows following:
6) Remove
-O0
and add -O3
to the gcc options. Note and explain the
difference in the compiled code.
-O3 is to optimize more
for code size and execution time. It reduces the execution time, but increase
the memory usage and compile time.
Output file before change:
hello_all5.out
Output file after change:
hello_all6.out
I use “time” command to
check the execution time of above files, and get following result.
hello_all6.out is complied with the option –O3. It supposes
to have less execution time. However, it takes much longer in real time than
the previous one. Well, it does take less time in sys time.
I also compared the sizes of the output files with –O0 and
–O3. The hello_all5.out, which is compiled with –O0, has smaller size than
hell0_all6.out, being compiled with –O3. Apparently, compiling file with option
–O3 does not reduce the file size. Instead, it increases the file size.
Following sreenshots are the result by running “objdump
–source” command for both of the files.
Comparing the two results, I found:
1 --- The sequences of <main> section and
<output> section in both results are different. For the output file
hello_all5.out, being compiled with –O0 option, <main> section appears
after <frame-dummy> section. And <output> section is after
<main> section. By contrast, for the output file hello_all6.out, being
compiled with –O3 option, <main> section appears right after the line “
Disassembly of section .text”. And <output> section still appears after
<frame-dummy> section.
2 ---The contents of <main> section and
<output> section are different for both results. For the output file
hello_all6.out, the contents of both <main> section and <output>
section are shorter than those in the result of hello_all5.out. It has 6
actions in <main> section of hello_all5.out and 9 actions in
<output> section of hello_all5.out. By contrast, there are only 3 actions
in <main> section of hello_all6.out and 4 actions in <output>
section of hello_all6.out.
When I ran “objdump –s” for both files, I found more
differences.
Contents of section .debug_line and contents of section
.debug_str are shorter than the result of hello_all6.out. Moreover, the result
generate by hello_all6.out has one more section – contents of section
.debug_ranges.
Contents of section. debug_str generated by hello_all5.out
It is good to know that using different compiling options,
the compiler compiles the program in different ways. Each option serves the
different purposes. Accordingly, the assembler contents of each object files
are different as well.
Using “objdump” command, it is good to see the assembler
contents of the object file. It’s a good start to learn the assembly language.
However, I still don’t fully understand what the assembler contents stand for.
With learning more assembly language, I think it won’t be a problem for me
anymore.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)