Started @ CDOT

This fall, I am a "Student Research Assistant" at CDOT. It's a wikkid title because it sounds like it belongs to a university student. However, as one of the administrators explained it, we are not researching for the sake of knowledge--we are researching for the sake of a final product.

The first thing I did was set up my workstation. Sounds easy enough, but when you throw in a MAC OS (which I'd never worked with before), it's new*2.

Some things I learned:

sudo su

1) I should've set up my account on this computer under the admin account in the first place.

2) I utilized the sudo su command while setting up my github account (as outlined in Anna's blog). (github is a version control system.) sudo is a command that lets you execute commands as a super user.

Since everything was done at the command line, as user donna, I was prompted for a password every now and then and then inevitably told that "donna is not a sudoer" (or something like that). The fix was to beat the cl to the punch and just type in sudo su and then type in the admin password, and off I went.

(Must mention that even while under Admin account, I had to sudo su in order to access other user's accounts).

github

As I already said, github is a version control system. In one of my classes, OOP344, I used Tortoise SVN, and that was fine because it had GUI. Since Anna's instructions were on the command line, that's how I worked, too. It was frustrating =\

After cloning the repos that I was going to be working with, I created a local and a remote branch (again, instructions are in Anna's blog), but I stumbled a bit. Things I learned:

1) When branching, make sure you are in the directory that contains the cloned repo. So when you clone popcorn (one of the repos I will be working with) like this:

git clone git://github.com/mozilla/popcorn-js.git popcornDonna

follow with cd popcornDonna, then create the branch (git branch firstBranch).

2) As Anna says in her blog, some errors that result in creating a remote branch (using the git push command) are fixable by editing the config file. She is referring to the .git/config file.

How to find the file: make sure you are in the folder that contains the repo you cloned (in my example, the folder is popcornDonna). Then type ls -a . One of the results should be .git. Change directory to .git (cd .git). Type ls and you should see the config file. Edit it.

So far so good, tho. Just going to be reading up on Popcorn and learning some JS for the time being.