About

Trever Fischer is a junior at The University of Akron with a strong enthusiasm towards coding, writing, photography, and above all: oranges. This is his site. Specifically, this is his "About" box. He is also a full-time hacker who tinkers with Amarok, Plasma, various KDE bits, and PHP. [FSF Associate Member]

Archives

Meta

Links

Friends

Places to find me

#482
29
April
09

Almost Summertime

My last major communication with the FLOSS universe was almost a month ago, so I figure its time that I tore myself away from school here and wrote something.

Its currently the last week of classes, and next week is finals week. Naturally, that means every teacher wants to cram in those last few major projects. And with 19 credit hours this semester, that leaves very little time for me to do much of anything. So in these last three weeks, I’ve been slammed with two rather big projects.

The first one is a rewrite of a lot of obfuscated C that tries to implement a parallel fast fourier transform algorithm (theoretically faster than FFTW, but we’ll see…). For an example of the original code, its on the class’ github repository. Its not pretty, especially considering how the math professor behind this project seems reluctant to teach us how his algorithm actually works. We’re really flying blind here.

The second project is a rewrite of the guest tracking system we use on campus for student dorms. The current system apparently never had any user feedback during development. Somehow, simple tasks such as checking in people takes way more steps than just “scan the barcodes”, yet checking out entries (as long as it is one of the 5 ‘random’ entries in the sidebar) is one click with AJAX. In fact, the job training to use the system actually includes “Use ctrl+f to search a page to find if they are checked in. If its not there, go to the next page and try again.” Its not uncommon to have 10 pages of entries.

The last two projects are actually pretty simple. The third project is a kind of mapquest involving distributed computing and graphs. The other is bolting on a quick menu system to our previous midterm project.

PROTIP: If you take CS classes here at UA, Dr. O’Neil and Dr. Chan make the projects in the rush weeks painless. Highly recommended.

The big personal project for this semester was a presentation I gave as a Fedora Ambassador. Last friday I gave a presentation explaining “Open source software: what it is, why its important, and how to get involved”. In reality, it was mostly about free software. For a startlingly pro-microsoft campus, a gentle introduction to the difference between the two seemed like it’d be a good, popular presentation. Only 10 or so people showed up. Can’t blame them though, since it /is/ almost finals week. I’ll be uploading my slides someday soon.

Finally, there was some relatively important news I’d like to announce here. Last Wednesday, I was elected president of the student chapter of the ACM. Neat. My term officially starts on the 6th of March, so I won’t be able to do a ton yet, but I’m already thinking up some good ideas for this coming year.

So, if you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been coming to any Fedora ambassador meetings or why I haven’t already joined the KDE-SIG, or done any commits in KDE, this is why. Apologies for not carrying out duties or whatnot (if any were really even given to me). It also really doesn’t help that our campus network is still randomly blocking PING/PONG messages on unencrypted IRC due to “security concerns”.

Leave a Reply