Weekly Blog 1

This week was my first week of classes as a Junior in college.  I got a brief introduction to what my classes are going to be like, and I have a general idea of which classes I will probably struggle in.

So far, I think my special topics film history class is my most interesting, as I am really interested in cinema.  My Data Structures and Algorithms 2 class seems like it is going to be the most difficult because my professor assigns a lot of work.  I do hope to increase my knowledge and skills at programming this semester so I think this class will help me do that.

I was assigned a decent amount of work this first week and I have certainly been busy completing all of it.  For the DSA2 class mentioned above, I had to complete surveys and submit my results to show what type of learner I am.  I also had to read various articles and then convey what I learned from each of them.  For my Rich Media and Web Application Development class, I had to complete in class exercises using the <canvas> tag for html5 with Javascript.  I am excited for this class as I would like to expand on my knowledge and skills in web development.

The other assignment I worked on for this week was completing my First Flight for my Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software course.  For more information on this, see my last blog post :)

Overall, this week was a lot of work, but it was also very fun.  I have high hopes for this semester even though I feel like I am going to be quite busy.  I hope I can get some good projects made this year to show how I have progressed in my major of Game Design and Development.

First Flight

I went through several steps to complete my First Flight assignment for HFOSS today.

First, I installed mIRC IRC client, only to be bothered by payment requests.  Upon seeing these payment requests, I decided to switch to HexChat.  I set HexChat to connect me to the #rit-foss channel on freenode.

In the IRC channel, I used the msg command to send a hello message to my friend, and then I introduced myself and registered my nickname with /msg NickServ <password> <email>

Next, I created the blog that is housing this very post that you are reading.  I chose BlogSpot because I have read a lot of blogs on this site and it seemed like a good choice.  I also learned that BlogSpot links to your google+ account, which was convenient since I could just use my RIT gmail.

Then, I created an account on GitHub - this was pretty simple.

Last but certainly not least, I patched the course project.  I forked the repository for my own clone.  I used the example yaml files and created my own to submit as a pull request.  The only parts of this that confused me a bit were the RSS feed part, and the "forge" piece of the yaml file.  The RSS feed I was eventually able to figure out just by searching around online, but the forge piece I am still a little unclear about.

Overall, I enjoyed this assignment because I know I am set up better for what is to come in this class, and I learned a lot about GitHub, Blogging, and IRC.