My work in this week mainly contains finish my final proposal, create my project's branch("serialization")  and begin to code.

    For this weeky, i haven't new questions, most questions have been resolved in communication with Ben throught email:-)

In the first discussion with my mentor (Justin). the following were discussed and decisions were made:

• The need of migrating the current scheduler service to a module.
• To integrate the current scheduler service to a module in the following weeks.
  
• How to keep track of the project progress.
• Documenting.

Wesak being one of the most important days for Buddhists, my friends and I had a coffee Alms giving (dansala) for the 7th consecative year. We offered free coffee to travelers who were on their way to watch the Wesak glory in the city. Usually it rains every Wesak day. Drinking a hot coffee made everyone fresh and warm to make there way to see the pandols.

After finishing the Alms giving process. We too went into the city too see Wesak at its glory. We walked for 5.32miles on foot. The route we took is shown here. We were so full when we arrived home after attending to other Alms Giving places put together by other Buddhists.

The Problem
Save yourself a few days of headache ... don't do it! More details to come.

So Mike (mseaton) and I recently upgraded to Eclipse 3.4.2 because of some messed up issues with JSP/XML Validation within Eclipse 3.4. We also both installed Subclipse 1.6 thinking it would bring us joy. Three days later, with lots of back-and-forth collaboration on a project that we have sitting in Subversion, we've experienced nothing but headaches. When he's committed code to the repository, I'll update my working copy only to find that the only changes that come through are ones that are non-conflicting. So when I then try to commit my changes, I get warnings that my working copy is not up-to-date. I think the problem might be the fact that the new "SVN Update to HEAD" feature does not do a --force (but that's just a hunch). I just finished reverting my Eclipse upgrade to Subclipse 1.6 and have successfully reinstalled Subclipse 1.4.7.

Now the issue is that Subclipse 1.6 (which uses Subversion 1.6 wc format) has upgraded all of my working copy metadata to Subversion 1.6. Installing Subclipse 1.4.7 (which uses Subversion 1.4 wc format) means that I cannot use Subclipse on my currently checked out code. Since I have about 30+ projects checked out, this is kind of a problem. I can't waste hours

Here's the error you'll get when

root@jmiranda-laptop:~/Workspace/module-birtreport# svn diff
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'. You need
to get a newer Subversion client, or to downgrade this working copy.
See http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#working-copy-format-change
for details.


So thankfully, the subversion folks have a downgrade script:

http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#working-copy-format-change


Download the script and run the following command:

root@jmiranda-laptop:~/Workspace# python change-svn-wc-format.py module-birtreport --force --verbose 1.5
Converted WC at 'module-birtreport' into format 9 for Subversion 1.5


Now, at least, I can run svn commands on that directory.

root@jmiranda-laptop:~/Workspace/module-birtreport# svn diff
Index: .project
===================================================================
--- .project (revision 7566)
+++ .project (working copy)
@@ -1,18 +1,18 @@
...

However, when I open Eclipse I can no longer see the very helpful icon overlays on top of files that are "unchanged" or "dirty". I just get unadorned, naked file icons.

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix it?

"Taste my sad, Michael" -G.O.B Bluth

Update:
So the "icon overlay" was looking more and more like an Eclipse issue, so I decided to start Eclipse with the "-clean" option.

/usr/lib/eclipse3.4.2/eclipse -clean


That fixed it. And still a few hours short of what it would have taken to reinstall Eclipse, plugins, and re-download all source code.

"Taste the happy, Michael" -G.O.B Bluth

Update:
It's still broken. Only the top-level folders were successfully restored after the -clean restart. After a few restarts and rebuilds, none of the files or folders have the icon overlay. So we're back to square one.

Following Ben's advice, I tried to install Subversive, but this did not help either. This seems to be a problem with Eclipse. It's as if Eclipse is blocking the icon overlay feature of any plugin (except the core plugins that mark files with "build errors". Checking the properties of any of the files definitely shows that they are "managed" and should have at least the "managed" icon.

One last thing (check the error logs again) and then I'm going to re-install Eclipse.

Last Update:
Ok, so some combination of the above instructions, as well as closing all projects and dealing with them one at a time, while drinking coffee, and threatening to reinstall Eclipse while shaking your fist at your computer, on top of the Celtics winning Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals has seemed to fix the problem.

I can't explain it folks. Just keep playing around until it works. The one project at a time helped me focus on what I was doing.

(1) Run the script to convert from svn 1.6 to svn 1.5
(2) Clean project
(3) Build project
(4) If that fails to work, close Eclipse and restart with the (-clean) option.

The last thing I was going to try was to create a brand new workspace and move one project over at a time (running the svn convert script). It didn't come to that thankfully.

As I mentioned earlier, the last resort option would have been to reinstall Eclipse and download all of my project source code. Given that half of my day was spent troubleshooting this, I would recommend going that route when you're confronted with this issue and can't get it resolved within an hour.

Lets say there was a scenario where you have a registration process which has sevaral pages. And you want to expire a page if the user clicks the browsers back button in the middle of the registration process. This issue came because firefox saved webpage data in its browser cache. So whenever the user hits the back button, data will be loaded from the browser cache instead of getting it directly from the server-side.

It seems to be true that “dev people”, spending most of their time on coding, debugging, …, do not have a lot of time for “blogging” but when you work on open-source projects, it should be almost a requirement to write blogs and let the world know what you are working on .

So here I get time to talk about few points and the main issue I am asking myself is about Open-Source and Africa . Few days ago I was accepted to work with OpenMRS , an open source project which is deployed in Africa to fight against HIV/AIDS mainly . This my second time to work on the project through the Google Summer of Code ™ program . So, I started counting how many African students were involved in the Google Summer of Code(tm) since its birth Date in 2005 and I don’t find 20 yet in “Africa” (I mean the sub-saharan/black one).

I don’t know what people in “The West” think of “Africa”, but I am sure some think it’s place for wars, diseases and still counting bad things; and they don’t expect much stuff like technology in Africa . It’s also sad to see people in Africa not benefiting from the open-technology which is all around . Internet itself is not perfectly open but it’ an open world of all kind of information .

Last year I got an opportunity to attend the Intego Awards which is the Rwandan Annual Award for the best companies in the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) business there . There is a man who said that Africa was sleep when The West was revolutionizing the machinery and mechanization industry and that Africa should not be sleep again with this new revolution in ICT . This is really a great thinking but there still much a lot to change for achieving this kind of dream .It’s true that people can benefit from much information available on the internet now for free and especially when they use well that information .The only problem is when people try to exaggerate using that information, I am afraid that Internet couldn’t replace the typical classic learning methodologies; a very sad example I knew is about a college teacher who was trying to “google” the title of the subject he was assigned to and the first PDF to come in the google results would be his textbook . It sounds really funny for these students to learn by this kind of FIFO methodology .But behind this information accessible on the Internet, there are really much more things that people can benefit from : That is FLOSS . I am not sure you can be heard when you tell that kind of teacher : “Hello teacher, I am writing open-source code, can we spread it and benefit from it ?” – ” That’s not my business ? ” should be the most probable answer.This really sucks .

I always believe that open-source can save Africa in the sectors like education or health care but a lot of new understanding should be adopted . When I asked someone why people don’t care about open-source , he said “it’s because we don’t even feel the proprietary guy’s pressure, here you can download anything you are able to access, no body will come from The West to say that the video , PDF book or cracked software I downloaded from rapidshare is illegal “;  “An other thing is that we download this digital stuff because we can’t download food or beer”, he added .This not the definitive answer but I should keep you updated when I get new reasons .

Anyway I should keep to interest my classmates about open-source , I want them to migrate from IE to FireFox, from Windows Media Player to VLC, from XP to Ubuntu, from the proprietary chains to THE WORLD OF OPENNESS AND FREEDOM !

If you feel like there is a concern in this post, please leave me a comment .

Antoine

Today’s interesting thing I found : Bridge2Rwanda

1. Things which I have done this week
        (1) Read the source code about all domain classes and some code about the report module.
        (2) Read the document about unit test framework used in OpenMRS.

2. Things which I am doing now
        (1) Reading the API doc of XStream and some specific source code about those classes which will be used in this project.

3. Question List
        (1) The form of writing the unit test for Serialization
        As i see the document and some codes about unit test in Openmrs.  I have a problem,  i think if i should write a new Testcase for every domain object?  or i can just write a new method with "@should" in the class "SerializatoinServiceTest" for every domain object?
        Ben,  can you tell me which test class i can refer to?

        (2) About implementing the feature of "@Element(data=true)"
        I think if i extends some classes of XStream and override methods in them in order to implement the feature "@Element(data=true)",  then I don't know this manner whether will break some licences in XStream?

        (3) The form through which I will do my project
        Some projects will be done in a branch or module.  And I want to know if I can directly code for my project in current core codes in Openmrs,  Or also need make a new branch for my project?

This is actually an article I got from today’s The New Times .

My thinking is that I believe open-source is the most profitable technology solution for Africa especially in the areas of Education and Health Care . So I am hanging up my eyes to se what open-source should play in that or how Rwandan technologists will have a chance to be involv ed in it .

This is the article :

Saturday, 2nd May 2009
Gov’t adopts phones for health initiative
Health Minister Richard Sezibera (R) consults with MTN COO Andrew Rugege during the meeting at Prime Holdings on Thursday. (Photo J Mbanda).
BY SAM NKURUNZIZA
KIGALI - The Ministry of Health has unveiled a new technology of using mobile phones to support public health, starting with support for Community Health Workers in mother and child health interventions. The Phones for Health initiative is a unique public-private partnership which uses computers and mobile phones to establish a national electronic reporting system that eases delivery of public health care at the village level. All health workers subscribed to this technology will be able to send monthly reports and emergency calls at no cost as a national method of harmonising health services. Speaking at a one day workshop to discuss and provide input on the architectural plan and integration of mobile enabled applications in Rwanda’s National Health Information system, Health Minister Dr Richard Sezibera commended the development. “This will help meet the broader information needs of the country’s health sector by improving coordination and communication. It’s an effective force multiplier against communicable and non communicable diseases,” he said Thursday, at his offices at Prime Holdings. Sezibera admitted that combining biology and engineering will turn the health business into a communication institution which renders medication and healthcare delivery timely, precise, portable and personal. He revealed that in most cases all that Community Health Workers demand during consultative meetings is transport and communication and that the initiative could never have come at a better time. “We will do everything in our reach to avail computers and any other services where we operate,” Sezibera pledged. Phones for Health partners include leading mobile phone operators like the MTN group, Accenture, Motorola and Voxiva. Andrew Rugege, the Chief Operations Officer of MTN Rwanda challenged the public to quickly adapt to this new way of improving the working conditions of health workers across the country. “As MTN we shall also go as far as it is necessary to build human capacity in Rwanda to make these strategies possible and successful because our best customer is a healthy one,” Rugege said. Ends