User:Rmezei

Revision as of 21:09, 17 May 2014

Razvan Alex Mezei

Razvan Alex Mezei is an Assistant Professor in the Donald & Helen Schort School of Mathematics & Computing Science at Lenoir-Rhyne University. [LRU webpage]

Dr. Mezei holds:

• a PhD in Mathematics (2011), from the University of Memphis, USA
• a MS in Statistics (2011), from the University of Memphis, USA
• a MS in Mathematics (2008), from the University of Memphis, USA
• a MS in Computer Science (2007), from the University of Oradea, Romania, and
• a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science (2005), from the University of Oradea, Romania.

His research interests in Mathematics are in the area of Approximation theory, as well as in Numerical Analysis, and in Inequalities. In Computer Science, his interests are related to Programming Languages, Data Structures and Algorithms.

In his spare time, Dr. Mezei enjoys taking pictures, lots of pictures. His personal collection of pictures exceeds 100k.

Introduction to IRC - SAHANA-EDEN

The activities on #sahana-eden were quite limited. The group seems to be more active on https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sahana-eden --Rmezei 23:44, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

SAHANA EDEN Project

As part of POSSE 2014, I would like to work with the SAHANA - EDEN HFOSS project. I will post some of my findings on my blog. [1] --Rmezei 17:07, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

FOSS Field Trip

Please also find this info on my blog [2] --Rmezei 02:34, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

——————– SourceForge.net ——————–

On http://sourceforge.net/ I searched for Mathematics projects and found 749 projects corresponding to the category of Mathematics. There were at least 15 different programming languages used for writing those software projects.

The most common programming languages used were: C++ (206), Java (155), C (111), Python (78), Matlab (31), C# (30), S/R (26), JavaScript (19), Fortran (16), Lazarus (11), VB .Net (11), Delphi/Kylix (10), Basic (9), Perl (9), Tcl (7) .

The most popular project for the Mathematics category was: “gnuplot development” ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot/?source=directory ). It had scored 11883 weekly downloads. The software does 2D and 3D plotting, and supports a “huge number of output formats” as well as “interactive input or script-driven”. I believe this project will most likely be used by scientists who want to express their work/ideas using 2D or 3D images. The primary programming language was C and the most recent change was made on February 23rd, 2014 (Gnuplot Version 4.6.5).

According to http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnuplot the project has 4 contributors in the last 30 days. Although I would love to get involved into developing this project, I wouldn’t necessarily use it on a daily basis. The main reason behind this statement is the fact that the user interface is not really updated to today’s standards.

——————– Ohloh.net ——————–

Mifos project was mostly written in Java (33%) and Php (21%). It has 2.677 million (Apr 2014) lines of code. The locations for some of the contributors include:

• Collegeville, Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Minneapolis, MN, USA
• Bangalore, India
• Lausanne, Switzerland
• Helsinki, Finland

There are about 19 programming languages used for Mifos, including: Java, XML, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, SQL, CSS, Python,… The language with:

• the second highest number of lines of code was XML (515,397).
• the highest comment ratio was Perl (28%)

In the last 12 months, the project had:

• about 10 contributors (0 since last October)
• 162 commits

The top three contributors to the project have been involved with Mifos for about 1 year, 1-2 years, and about 1 year respectively.

MIFOS Project Evaluation / Activity

• My Evaluation for the Mifos Projext: Media:Mifos_Evaluation.xlsx
• My Evaluation for the SAHANA-EDEN Projext: Media:Sahana_EDEN_Evaluation.xlsx

Special thanks for <flavour>, on IRC #sahana-eden channel, for his support. He did the work to update the stats found on ohloh.net for SAHANA-EDEN.

FOSS In Courses Activity

I have several ideas where I could include FOSS.

• In "CSC 120 - Survey of Computing" course, I plan to:

• give our students an introduction to FOSS.
• use http://www.sourceforge.net/ for an overview of different languages used in Software Development. In particular, students should be able to see how different Software Categories will use certain programming languages more often than others.
• use http://www.ohloh.net/ for an overview of particular projects (such as Chromium (Google Chrome), and Mozilla Firefox). There are several interesting metrics to show students, in particular: Lines of Code, Programming Languages used, recent activity on the project

• In "CSC 150 - Computer Science I" course, I plan to:

• Look at several projects' source code to:

• identify "bad" vs "good" coding style, including code layout styles, variable names, etc.
• identify the importance of writing good comments
• use the available debugging tools to study an unfamiliar code

• In "CSC 250 - Computer Science II" course, I plan to:

• Look at several projects' source code to:

• identify data structures used in some source files
• develop UML diagrams for a specific project

• Ideally, I should get some students involved into 1-year-long projects where students can:

• study one project
• start with including more comments and updating existing test cases
• get to fix existing bugs
• develop new source code/adding new features
• stay involved with the project even after the end of the 1-semester-long project.