No way I'll make milestone 0.1

When I first took on ticket 559, the slideshow plugin, I assumed after reading the posts on lighthouse that it would be a fairly simple plugin to do.  Just a conventional slideshow the flips through a series of images either manually after the user clicks a key or automatically after set intervals.   Maybe add in a feature to let it play the slides to music.    A fairly simple task that shouldn't take long to do

After I talked with Dave Siefried today though, it turns out that the slideshow is going to be a lot more complex than originally anticipated.   Basically it is meant be more similar to a powerpoint slideshow, letting the user flip through slides containing both images, video and text.   The type of slideshow he is talking about would be similar to this


http://www.slideshare.net/remy.sharp/html5-friend-or-foe-to-flash

The slideshow plugin will be working with baseplayer which is going to emulate the base functionality of an html5 video element. 

So I'm facing  the issue of not only having a work unit that is going to be alot more complex than I originally anticipated but will require quite a bit more of a learning curve than I thought (I was originally thinking my work would be focused on javascript though it looks like I'll be looking at HTML 5 as well).  There's also the issue regarding the availability of baseplayer which has not been released yet (Dave said that it would, hopefully, be staged today)

Don't get me wrong, I am still looking forward at the chance at working on this slideshow plugin, I am quite interested in it and the learning curve required to work on it is something I know I can handle but given the amount of time between now and the Sept 29 due date for milestone 0.1 there's no way I'll be able to make the deadline.

I'll be updating ticket 559 in a few minutes to add in some notes of the features and information for the slideshow that Dave and I talked about.  I've got a fairly packed day of classes tomorrow so I'll try and catch Dave Siefried on Friday or Monday and try to hammer out some more details on how to tackle this slideshow player so I'll be ready for release 0.2

First attempt at ticket 559

Tried working on ticket 559 but wasn't sure on what I need to do, I've cloned the repo to my hard drive and spent some time navigating through the directory structures trying to look for the slideshow player plugin but couldn't find it.  My impression from the posts at lighthouse is that this application is to be coded from scratch and from looking at the cloned repository this looks to be the case.   I'll try and get some clarification from Dave Siefried if I can catch him on IRC tomorrow as well as get some suggestions on examples that I can take a look at to get an idea on what I need to do.

Finally my blog

     Three (or is it two?) weeks late but better late than never.  I've finally gotten my blog setup for the DPS909 course.  Sort of kicking myself in the ass for not having done this sooner and spent the rest of that time trying to get PHP to run on my machine to use wordpress when all that time I could have used blogger.com which turns out to be so much more easier to use but whatever .  

    Anyways quite a bit has happened since the start of this course up to now.   I managed to get in touch with Chris De Cairos and get the details on what I need to get involved with the Popcorn.js project a couple of weeks ago.  I've setup my account in Lighthouse, IRC and Github and I managed to fork off a copy of the project from Anna.   A few days later, I hesitantly got on IRC in an attempt to get a ticket to work on.  I got a chance to get in touch with both Dave Seifried and Anna who sent me my invite to the Popcorn.js project at lighthouse and walked me through choosing my ticket.   I managed to get assigned to ticket 559 which deals with handling a bug in the slideshow player.  

   Admittedly, besides looking at the ticket details when I assigned myself the ticket on Wednesday last week I haven't had a chance to look into the details on what needs to be done as I had to deal with an assignment due that Friday in another course.  I do however plan on spending the rest of this week focusing on and working on this bug I've been assigned.    I've spent quite a bit of time on modding forums and talking with the open source team on IRC doesn't seem to be much different and is something I am comfortable with though I am apprehensive of the level of skill and knowledge required to work on this bug.