Week 12

Open Source, How Far Can You Go

Summary of In-class Activities

  • On Thursday, November 14, we’ve discussed about the importance of an Open source firmware.

  • On Monday, November 18, we had a time to find out software projects that meet a social need - Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS).

    Two classes continued to show the open source community’s impact on real life.

   

Translating a document

  • I am stil translting the same document since last time and hope to finish this one in this week.

   

Assignments

  • Did all of the exercises from the slide Exercises 1 in the Linux Tutorial by November 18

  1. To solve the first question, I had to install coreutils first in my Mac OS system to use bash command because of the Error #1. -bash: shuf: command not found. Then I loocked up the Shuf Command Tutorial for Begginers.

  2. In the beggining, I couldn’t sure about the absolute path, so I referenced below:

    • “An absolute path is defined as the specifying the location of a file or directory from the root directory(/).”
      from Absolute and Relative Pathnames in UNIX

    • “The name of a user’s home directory is by default identical to that of the user. Thus, for example, a user with a user name of mary would typically have a home directory named mary. It would have an absolute pathname of /home/mary. An absolute pathname is the location of a directory or file relative to the root directory, and it always starts with the root directory (i.e., with a forward slash).”
      from Home Directory Definition

  3. Saw other’s answers, and it produced same result with mine with much simpler code: ls | head -10 *.

 

  • Read Election fraud: Is there an open source solution? by November 20

    The article points out that the old machines can malfunction, but rather, the trivial problems of software that seem to be unconnected are entangled together like a chain of chains, made impossible to acheive the fair election. And the author believe that open-source technologies can solve this problem.

    I remember the experiment of observing how the paper became stronger when it became 10 and more sheets. A piece of paper was torn easily, but it got harder even with five sheets and the experiment was ended by building a paper bridge to proof how it could be stronger. Individual people may not have much influence, but when a group of people with good intentions come together, the world can be changed, and that would be the power of the open-source community.

    Humanity is not perfect. We do make mistakes. Technology is made by humans; that is why there are flaws. I can see how open-source is beneficial, but I guess there will be always another problem. An important thing is ordinary people like us try to make a better world together will not be stopped.

 

Written before or on November 20, 2019