Brandon Philips - http://ifup.org

This is assignment zero, a brief biography, written for Dr. Budd’s CS419 and CS480. Enjoy!

Part of my decision for coming to Oregon State was that my Debian install had automatically chosen ftp.oregonstate.edu as the fastest mirror available. The message this sent me as a high school student was that OSU, our at least a few people on campus, cared about Free Open Source Software. It didn’t hurt that OSU had an engineering program that is well known for creating quality graduates either.

During the fall term of my freshman year I meet up with the ftp.oregonstate.edu admin, Scott Kveton. At the time he was forming the Open Source Lab and was looking to hire students to write open source software. I had been using Linux for a couple of years and could hardly contain my excitement; I was going to be paid to write open source software as a freshman! And at the time I had no idea that this job was going to open up crazy amazing opportunities for me and all of the other students at the Open Source Lab.

Every successful project I have ever worked on has had a few components: an interesting problem, an experienced mentor and hands off management. At the Open Source Lab I had all of these components for three years and I grew a lot as a developer and person. The OSL and FOSS are great opportunities for students to work on interesting and large projects even as they are still developing their skills in the classroom.

The software I find the most interesting is behind the scenes: the system software. Kernels, device drivers and networking protocols are all things that most users don’t have to think about but are nonetheless very important. There are a few interesting properties about this level of software. First, it must be extremely well thought out and written; if this software goes bad then the user is going to have a very bad day. Second, the code is usually rich with interesting data structures and programming tricks to squeeze out as much performance from the hardware as possible. And finally a lot of smart and interesting people work in system software and I like working with those types of people.

I decided I wanted to be a computer scientist after working for two high school robotics project. The patience and guidance of my mentor, Ron Jackson, helped improve my programming abilities a great deal. Despite the tight deadlines involved in creating full scale humanoid robots in under 6 months during both years the software was written and working before the competition. It was a huge confidence boost to have that responsibility and trust invested in me and in the end come through with a working solution. I had found something I was good at and had a really fun time doing. Perfect.

After college I would like to work as a Linux Kernel developer. This decision is partly influenced by the great experience I had working on a genetic algorithm for the CPU scheduler while working at IBM in Austin. It is also a result of the number of great interactions I have had with members of Kernel community including: Val Henson, Greg KH, Jake Moilanen, the entire OzLabs crew and many others that I have probably forgotten. Plus, I like penguins- that helps.

/me runs off to Australia for a bit.

Today I stayed home but wanted to do some work on the Registry. However, I don’t have a workstation at home with the specs to run IntelliJ with any reasonable speed. Furthermore, I was hoping that dumping the ultra slick IDE will help me learn a bit more about the Java environment.

Eclipse Integration in Vim (Eclim) was the first promising lead I found. However, I had a tough time getting the Registry to run properly under Eclipse and Eclipse is as resource hungry to run as IntelliJ.

I couldn’t turn up any other good Vim tools so I started searching for Emacs tools. Although I am not a huge fan of Emacs I was very impressed with the SLIME environment when I did my towers of hanoi assignment in LISP. And it turned out a very slick Java environment for Emacs is available tool

A quick search for emacs java lead me to the Java Development Environment for Emacs (JDE) which offered a reasonable level of integration including:

• Debugger Integration
• Syntax Higlighting
• Ant Integration
• Code Templates

However, it was a beast to configure. My primary problem was that the Debian jde packages in unstable are broken. After uninstalling this package and doing a manual install I had JDE running like a champ.

The next task was to write a prj.el that would contain all of the information for JDE including: source location, classpath, default file headers, and build configuration. With some help from an example prj.el I wrote one for use with the Registry (here). Although, this file looks daunting the IntelliJ project files are unreadable by comparison.

This screenshot shows Emacs and JDE after an unsuccesful compile of the Registry. Clicking on the ant error loaded the proper file making it quite clear that I had an unfinished line.

Another standard IDE feature that JDE supports is method completion using the compact keystroke [sic] C-c C-v C-.. This brings up a dialog that lists all methods that can be called on this object.

After some digging it turns out debugging the application while it is running in Tomcat is a straightforward affair also. After deploying the application into the $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps directory running $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/catalina.sh jpda start starts Tomcat with remote debugging via JPDA on port 8000. Because the prj.el I wrote has this port set in jde-db-option-connect-socket using the menu Jdb->External Process->Attach via socket enables the debugger. Using this mode common debugging tools such as breakpoints and variable inspection are available.

Overall I am very impressed and excited to start using JDE. Only one thing is holding me up: JSP debugging. Anyone have a solution?

UPDATE: Demo offline permanently

UPDATE: I moved my development site to a workstation here at home. It is a slow old box so be gentle, it is serving a little under 10req/s, but it works.

Over the last few weeks I have been seeing what I can do with Ruby on Rails. My conclusion? In the future I want to use RoR for web applications: PHP just isn’t as fun after you have worked with RoR.

At the Open Source Lab I work on a project written in PHP/MySQL called Maintain (demo), it is a DHCP/DNS management tool that is used by Oregon State, the Open Source Lab, math.ku.edu, and several others. It is a really great package, and one that many people are getting joy out of using. And given its size and complexity and my familiarity with its code, it made a great canidate for me testing out RoR.

Last night I decided to add LiveSearch support into my little pet project that is exploring how I would implement some of Maintains features in RoR. The first thing that needed to be done was add search methods to my models. Browsing around Tobias’ typo source tree I figured out how I wanted to implement searching for one of my domain class and came up with this:


# This search defaults to searching for all strings that match with no
# restriction on beginning or end. Also it will OR together statements in
# the query with a space in them.
def self.search(query)
if query
tokens = query.split.collect {|c| "%#{c.downcase}%"}
r = find_by_sql(["SELECT * from domains WHERE #{ (["LOWER(name) like ?"] * tokens.size).join(” OR “) }”, *tokens])
s = Array.new
r.each {|domain| domain.children.each{|child| r.push child}}
return r.uniq # No need for duplicate entries
end
end


The line with r = find_by_sql( is something that is just amazing to me, and would have required a whole looping structure and some if statements to implement in PHP, but in Ruby I was able to use prepared statements, Array#join, and the * operator on the array to quickly build a restraint on the domains; all in one line.

After implementing the search methods, and looking at the Typo code the rest was a breeze, I created a couple of partials for live search results, and now with two lines of code I can add new objects to the LiveSearch sidebar. Very cool.

If you want to take a look at it in action click here (site down permanently, code available here). The handshake starts with a testguy and ends with a testt. Oh, and this is a limited time offer, the site is running on my laptop.

And speaking of the OSL Scott Kveton has made a great post about OSU’s College of EECS strategy to take on the big research schools and focus less on undergraduate education. Its pretty clear that they should be focusing on open source software and education especially given the current climate around the state but I guess they would rather Go Big than think smart.