Category Archives: catalyst

Open source project contributions

Posted on by
Reply

Unless I want to add a news item to the web site of the company I work for, Catalyst IT, I do not visit the site. That was already the same for the universities where I worked because such sites are usually geared towards the general public, but not the people working there. Thus, I sometimes stumble upon hidden gems or am reminded of cool pages.

Recently, I was reminded of the page where all our open source project contributions are listed. Currently, this list has 142 open source projects listed to which current Catalystas have contributed in the past or presently. This can be small 1-5 person projects or big ones like Koha or Moodle, projects that were created for a very specific purpose and are now defunct or projects that are continuously maintained.

That’s an impressive number of projects and may actually not be all because we pull the projects and contributors from Ohloh. If a project is not registered there, our site won’t know about it and also if developers have not added their Ohloh username to our internal wiki, our web site cannot pick it up.

With more people joining the company, this list will hopefully grow more.

 

Hot off the Internet: Mahara 1.5

Posted on by
4

A little over 10 months of work on many fronts:

resulted in the release of the open source ePortfolio system Mahara 1.5 this nice New Zealand evening. You can view some highlights from new features and bug fixes as well as contributors and sponsors of this release in the release notes.

It was great working on this release at Catalyst IT. This is the first Mahara release in which I have commits: 3.4% in the grand scheme of the release. I helped out correcting language strings. Not everybody needs to be a developer to be able to contribute to a software project.

But actually, these commits were my smallest contribution. The product that I’m most proud of is the updated user documentation for Mahara 1.4 and the documentation for 1.5. Thus, when we released Mahara 1.5 today we also had a full documentation available. :-)

Although I say “full documentation”, I will update it infrequently correcting things, adding small bits and pieces that are missing, hopefully also putting references to online videos etc. I hope we’ll also figure out how to translate the documentation. The text itself shouldn’t be the issue as Sphinx allows for that, but the screenshots might be trickier.

But right now, I am just happy.

The world in our office

Posted on by
Reply

Wellington is quite far away from many other places and thus knowing the correct time where our colleagues are, when we can reach clients or when we can schedule a server outage is a necessity.

With today’s new fangled technology viewing predefined time zones is just a mouse click away. But it doesn’t look as cool as actual clocks on the wall as in a news room, does it?

Some of the times are not your standard locations, but they are of importance to us in the E-Learning team at Catalyst IT.

Time zone clocks

Time zone clocks

Students hooked on open source

Posted on by
Reply

By now already some time ago, to be precise from January 9 to 20, 2012, we ran the second instalment of the Catalyst Open Source Academy. This is a summer program for high school students in New Zealand in which they can learn about open source and related topics as well as participate in the further development of open source projects.

During the first week, the students had a lot of input in the form of introductions and workshops to open source concepts, programming languages and tools. In the second week, they chose a project to work on more closely and were mentored by developers who work within that project on a frequent if not daily basis.

As the coordinator went on a conference during the second week, I was lucky to replace him in “overseeing” the Academy. That gave me the chance to get a better idea of what the students were doing and how they progressed. It was great to see that they could show off first results already on the first day and didn’t have to wait until the end of their time in the project to see results.

Some open source software projects the students worked on were:

One student started to contribute to Mahara and has been doing so since then which I find very awesome being involved in the project myself and like to see bugs fixed and new features developed. :-)

One of the very tangible results of the Academy is that the code students contribute to an open source project can be used around the world by any user of the software. The bug fixes and features the students have worked on are to a large degree directly visible to users of the software (instead of being code fixes on the backend). Thus, they can show their family, friends and teachers exactly what they have been working on and how they have improved software.

Last year, we had 17 students from Wellington participate in the Academy. This year it was already 23, and some of them were out-of-towners. I am looking forward to the Open Source Academy 2013 and also the preparation for it as we will take the feedback from the students into account to make some changes and improvements.

You are among geeks when…

Posted on by
Reply

One of our developers is going to be a dad real soon. His waiting stirred the creative juices among the other developers. Brett came up with the following “from conception to birth” scenario à la version control system (used with permission):

mkdir baby
cd baby
git init .
awk 'BEGIN { s="ACGT"; genes=""; srand(); for (i=1;i<=1024;i++) {genes
= genes""substr(s,int(rand()*4)+1,1)} print genes}' > seed
git add seed
git commit -m 'conception'
git remote add mother mother
git push -u mother baby
sleep 23667694.5
git pull mother baby

git is a very popular open source version control system that we use for I guess all our proejcts. I also started using it for reviewing Mahara code and for writing the Mahara user manual.