Mentoring
There are some folks in this course who have a huge amount of experience in open source and unix, and some who are really just being exposed to these ideas for the first time. One of the ideas I would like to explore in this course is how to achieve mentoring of the former for the latter.
Here is one approach. In the following you can leave questions, either signed or unsigned. Hopefully others in the class will then respond, giving hints on how to proceed.
I remember that when I took CS381 that I liked using Python so I looked for availible projects that use it. This site said they had projects but I don't get what the projects actually are? Would you mind taking a look at it and explaining this or give suggestions on elsewhere to go to find a python project. Thank you. http://divmod.org/trac
As for the divmod.org site, the projects are listed on the front page. For example, go to tools, then Shtoom (here's the direct URL: http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/ShtoomProject), which is a Python-based VoIP package with the basic phone, answering machine, conference server, etc. They have a description of the project, info about the mailinglist, the IRC channel, and an svn command for downloading the source code.
That's just one project. Just find whatever interests you. You should also try Sourceforge, according to the demo we had in class. Go to sourceforge.net, then at the top use the Projects drop down menu. Select a category that interests you, the in the results page click "filter", then filter by programming language and choose python. There's lots of stuff available.
good luck!
I'm as plagued with the same indecision and terror of the open source world and all of it's choices as anyone else. Not because I fear the philosophy, I just have no confidence in my coding skills. Anyway, I decided to ease in, the best way would be with the kerneljanitor site. Since I'm using C for a lot of classes lately anyway, I should be a little more confident here, and I should stay interested because I've been running Linux for a few months now, and do get a nice feeling of accomplishment and power anytime I learn something new about it.
If anyone is looking for a great project to get started, that not only gives a great boost to your experience, but makes you feel pink and fuzzy on the inside, you should try the OLPC project. Most projects would be with python, but there are numerous other things to work on, including documentation(not as boring as one may think). If you are interested, please talk to me Justin Gallardo, email me at justin.gallardo@gmail.com, or shoot the OSEL an email at osel@lists.oregonstate.edu.