BOF session: Teaching Open Source

Presenters: Heidi Ellis, Sebastian Dziallas, Mel Chua, Karl Wurst

The session is on how to involve students from a wide range of backgrounds in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. The notes of discussion can be found at

http://openetherpad.org/tos-bof-sigcse-2012


Teaching open source link (POSSE):
http://teachingopensource.org

Open source projects can be found at the following links:
http://xcitegroup.org/
http://hfoss.org/
www.ohloh.net
www.sourceforge.net

50 ways to be a FOSSer
http://xcitegroup.org/softhum/doku.php?id=f:50ways

Online Collaboration: Classroom Salon

I found this paper very  interesting. The presentation was done by John Barr, Ithaca College and Ananda Gunawardena, Carnegie Mellon. Classroom Salon is an on-line social collaboration tool that allows instructors to create, manage, and analyze social networks (called Salons) to enhance student learning. Students in a Salon can cooperatively create, comment on, and modify documents. Classroom Salon provides tools that allow the instructor to monitor the social networks and gauge both student participation and individual effectiveness.
It is very similar to Facebook, but it has analytic components to allow instructor to see how many comments has been posted by each student.
Link to create your own salon.

http://www.classroomsalon.org/

SIGCSE 2012: Lunch at The Pit Barbecue

I joined Maureen Biggers (Indiana University), Monika Witoslawski (Michigan State), Chunbo Chu (Franklin University) on lunch at The Pit Authentic Barbecue , close to convention center. Surprisingly, I could find many vegetarian entrees. I ordered their barbecue tofu with fried okra and sweet potato fried, enjoyed eating them. It was a lot of food, I could not have finished this whole plate myself. Interestingly, when the plate arrived, tofu looked like chicken, but I was told that it was made out of raw soya, hence texture looked like chicken.
Website of the restaurant:

http://www.thepit-raleigh.com/

SIGCSE Supporter session by Microsoft

I am at SIGCSE in Raleigh for next 3 days. Right now, I am sitting is a session on Empowering Students: Teaching Software Development with Windows Phone, being presented by Rob Miles from University of Hull, UK. This is a very interesting session. His website is www.robmiles.com . He has published books on Java, C# and Windows Phone programming. They are available for download from
http://www.csharpcourse.com/
Microsoft has presentations setup at their booth on the following:
TouchDevelop
Pex4fun
Project Hawaii
Kinect for Windows
Try F#
.NET Gadgeteer
XNA Game Studio 4.0
Kodu
Windows Phone
Windows 8
Imagine Cup
Academic Search
Windows Azure
DreamSpark

I will try to find about all these products and how I can use them in my courses. As educator, you can join Microsoft portal for educators at
www.microsoft.com/faculty

Microsoft has another session Creative Uses for Kinect in Teaching.
- Kinect has 4 microphones.
- You can write Kinect applications from C++ or .NET code.
- Kinect can be used from WPF, XNA also.

Cloud Computing

As per NIST’s draft definition:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.”

Cloud Computing is different for different people. For a non-technical user, it is about storing your data on an external source, which is accessible from anywhere, but from a technical perspective, it can be viewed from service models:

Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS): Use of applications running on a cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS): Deploy consumer-created applications on a cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications.

What are the essential characteristics of Cloud Computing?

·         On-demand self-service

·         Broad network success

·         Resource pooling

·         Rapid Elasticity

·         Measured Service

What are the deployment models?

·         Private cloud

·         Community cloud

·         Public Cloud

·         Hybrid Cloud

Cloud Computing has evolved from several different technologies and business approaches over a period of time. Some of them are Utility Computing, Grid Computing, Autonomic Computing, Platform Virtualization, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and such.

Cloud Service Examples:

Salesforce.com

Amazon Web services

EC2 commercial services offered by Amazon to small companies

Microsoft Azure

VMware

Google

Open-source Cloud Platforms:

Eucalyptus: http://open.eucalyptus.com/

Nimbus: http://www.nimbusproject.org/

Enomaly: http://www.enomaly.com/

Abiquo: http://abiquo.com/

Xen: http://www.xen.org/

For more information:

http://csrc.nist.gov

Cloud Security: A comprehensive guide to Secure Cloud Computing, Ronald Krutz, Russell Vines, Wiley.

Snap Circuits: Electronics kits for kids

I spent a lot of time this summer to find some kind of electronic kits for my eight year old. Finally, I found Snap Circuits made by Elenco Electronics. I bought Snap Circuits Jr. 100 Experiments (Model: SC100, $23 on amazon). This model has only 30 parts, but it is possible to build over 100 projects. What I like the most about this kit is that there is nothing to solder, all the components/wires have snap buttons at the end. It is very easy to connect components together for kids. All parts are mounted on plastic modules. Absolutely, no tools are required. The kit also comes with a manual.

Once all the experiments are completed, there are upgrade kits available. I upgraded SC100 to SC 300 using upgrade kit UC30; this makes it possible to complete another 100 experiments.  You can upgrade it to SC750, which allows up to 750 experiments.  Elenco also manufactures stand-alone kits for musical recorder, FM radio, motion detector, flying saucer, water clock etc. The kits have been priced very reasonably.

Links:

Snap Circuits: http://www.snapcircuits.net/
For complete list of products: http://www.elenco.com/

 

Comparison: SAN vs NAS

According to Executive Chairman of Google Eric Schmidt, every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. It is approximately 5 Exabytes (1 Exabyte = 1024 Petabytes, 1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabytes). Every human being, who has any digital device, is essentially a content creator. Data center managers are facing this arduous task of providing low-cost, high-performance information management solution.

Storage area network (SAN) carries data between servers and storage devices through fibre channel switches. It enables storage consolidation and allows storage to be shared across multiple servers, which are spread geographically. Network attached storage (NAS) is an IP-based single storage device attached to a local area network. Let us compare these two technologies side-by-side:

SAN	NAS
Server class devices that are equipped with SCSI Fibre Channel adapters connect to a SAN.	Almost any machine that connects to a LAN.
Protocols: Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), which is implementation of serial SCSI-3 over FC.	NAS solutions use TCP/IP and NFS/CIFS/HTTP based networks
A SAN addresses the data by logical block numbers, and transfers the data in (raw) disk blocks.	A NAS identifies the data by file name and byte offset, transfers file data or metadata, and handles security, user authentication, file locking.
File Sharing is operating system dependent, and may not exist for all operating systems that are being used.	A NAS allows greater sharing of information, especially among different operating systems.
The SAN servers manage the file system.	File system is managed by the NAS head unit.
Backups and mirrors require a block by block copy operation. A mirrored system has to be either identical, or greater in capacity (compared to the source).	Backups and mirrors are generated on files, not blocks (this may save bandwidth and time).
SAN uses single-mode or multi-mode fiber cabling depending on the environment.	NAS uses existing IP networks like Gigabit Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, ATM, and Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI).
Connectivity options: point-to-point, FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated loop), FC-SW (Fibre Channel Switched Fabric).	Gateway NAS, Integrated NAS.
Benefits: Availability, reliability, scalability, performance, manageability, return on information management.	Supports comprehensive access to information, improved efficiency, improved flexibility, centralized storage, simplified management, scalability, high availability, security.

For more information:

• How much data is that:  http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/how_big.htm

• SAN and NAS Solutions - Introduction, Topology, and Terminology: http://www.fortuitous.com/docs/primers/SAN_NAS_Intro.pdf

• Information Storage and Management: Storage, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information. EMC Education Services, Wiley, ISBN: 978-0-470-29421-5

• Technical Committee responsible for fibre channel interfaces: http://www.t11.org/index.html