Data Server Flight Simulator meeting minutes for Feb 09, 2010

Time:

Feb 09, 2010 1pm EST

Attendance

Sylvain, Michael, Godfrey, Lenny, Jean, Diane ,Matthew

Absence:

General Update

• Next deliverable is delayed by a week
• Please create your tickets for Sprint 2
• Godfrey and Mike will be working on locklist scenario
• Jean and Sylvain will work on IO scenario
• Please set your ticket status to ‘pending’ for the tickets you are working on, so other people will know where you are at
• Conference information
• Tuesday: Skype only
• Thursday: by phone:
• Conference ID: 4450146
  Local Dial-in number: 416-343-2610
  Toll-free Dial-in number: 1 866-251-2605
  International Toll-free Dial-in number: 800-4444-9000

What we did

Matthew:

• Server delivered, waiting for system to be built out. Estimated setup completion in 8 business days. Ticket 2935130

Godfrey & Michael:

• Closed Ticket 2946095: Investigate potential variables we need to watch
• Closed Ticket 2946102: locate sql commands to get the parameters
• Closed Ticket 2946099: rerun locklist scenario with monitored parameters
• Closed Ticket 2946104: Define interface for graphical indicator

Jean & Sylvain

• Will work on Jean’s IO Scenario
• Please read Michael/Godfrey’s tickets to get an idea of what you might need to do

Diane & Lenny:

• met up with Matthew yesterday and working on integrating the ‘dial’
• work more on details of the graphical interface, work out the input definition, due Feb 16^th(this is important for the whole team, please try your best!)

What we need to do:

1. 1. Create the next series of tickets in sourceforge

Next Deliverable:

Feb 25 – Video of scenario from start to finish with graphical indicators

Mar. 11th 2010 – Videos of scenario tutorials

Build panels to make it easier to diagnose problems:

Mar. 11th 2010 – Draft available for feed back

Mar. 12th 2010 – Outline of documentation on how to add new scenarios

Geotools Status Report

The Geotools team had been working on mostly getting oriented to Geospatial concepts, determining action items, etc.

We are now ready to create a new unsupported jdbc-ingres module into Geotools. In the coming weeks, you will see rapid additions of new code in the Geotools source.

Report week 01-25-10 to 01-30-10

This week I checked the documentation where ingres is testing the SEP test cases. Also, I went to this specific files src/tst  but i am still not clear of how this files are working with Ingres, hope today meeting 01-02-10 I can get some answers from Ingres community..

Summary of the Week

We had a meeting today at 2:00 PM Eastern Time.

Present: Cory and Brenda

Not Present: Miles (his computer broke)

Here’s what’s been going on:

Brenda

- Discussed possibilities in regards to hiding packages from the user.

- Looked into different ways of showing/hiding packages and posted another patch for Bug 299965 for use in comparing the alternatives.

Cory

- Discussed possibilities in regards to hiding packages from the user.

- Tried his first year assignments in Java Lite and sent an email to the mailing list on February 3, 2010 with results and suggestions regarding:

• Importing existing projects into the workspace
• Java Applets
• Connecting multiple files for compilation
• “Add main method” checkbox in the New Class Wizard
• No use for source folders or packages at all

Miles

- Discussed possibilities in regards to hiding packages from the user.

- His computer broke during the week.

Hiding Packages

- We’re leaning towards hiding all references to packages based on personal experience in first year Java courses.

- Bug 299965 has two patches posted, one of which hides all packages, package buttons and the src folder.  The second only hides the default package and src folder (explicitly-made packages are visible).

- The idea of making packages visible after the user has gained some experience (ie, through making their own classes), was also brought up.  It was thought that this would be likely to cause confusion.

- Showing the “create a package” buttons might also cause confusion if default packages are hidden.

MarkUs Status Update – Feb. 5th, 2010

The MarkUs team’s status punchlines for this week can be found here.

Mercurial: Public Announcements

All of us on the Mercurial team have submitted extensions and patches to the devel mailing list this week:

• Anton’s cache annotations extension (list announcement)
• Paul’s cedit configuration editor extension (list announcement)
• Tessa’s convert patch, to support glob excludes (list announcement)
• Alexandru’s caseguard case-fold collision prevention extension (list announcement | blog post)
• Wendy’s tagmerge extension for merging .hgtags (list announcement)

The feedback’s been great so far, as have the bug reports (which means at least a few people tried out what we made). We’re planning on moving on to new things in the coming weeks, though of course we’ll have to maintain our extensions from now until forever. It was a good week in the Mercurial camp.

WEEKLY STATUS MEETING

During our regularly scheduled weekly meeting, we decided to engage with the Mercurial community at large, so we moved from our regular place on #ucosp-mercurial to the main Mercurial IRC channel, #mercurial (both on Freenode, details on our Communications page). The discussion revolved mostly around bfiles, an extension all of us are working on currently. Bfiles allows Mercurial users to store their large binary files in remote locations, and as we’re improving the existing code-base, certain decisions need to be made before development can move forward. The complete IRC log for the meeting is available as usual, and a more detailed breakdown of what everyone’s working on can be found on our weekly journal page.

Flight simulator meeting minutes Feb 04,2010

Thanks everyone for your great work! Our project is so far still in healthy state, keep the passion and we will succeed in the end!

Time:

Feb 04, 2010 1pm EST

Attendance

Sylvain, Michael, Godfrey, Lenny, Jean, Diane ,Matthew

Absence:

General Update

• Michael and Godfrey’s presentation http://280slides.com/Viewer/?user=35124&name=Locklist%20Scenario&fullscreen
• Sylvain’s presentation http://www.slideshare.net/tensorus/data-center-flight-simulator-user-problem-3071642
• All videos have been uploaded to https://sourceforge.net/projects/db2mc/files/
• Please set your ticket status to ‘pending’ for the tickets you are working on, so other people will know where you are at
• Conference information

Conference ID: 4450146
Local Dial-in number: 416-343-2610
Toll-free Dial-in number: 1 866-251-2605
International Toll-free Dial-in number: 800-4444-9000

What we did

Matthew:

• Server delivered, waiting for system to be built out. Estimated setup completion in 8 business days. Ticket 2935130

Michael:

Worked on

• Deliver a powerpoint slide show by Thursday of the memory problem closed Ticket 2944773

Godfrey:

• WMD fixed
• Met Michael on campus, talked about the presentation
• CPU scenario is ready to be created upon request
• tickets 2939779, 293978 and 22945102 closed

Jean:

• video will be ready by the end of day today
• scenario ready
• tickets to be uploaded

Sylvain:

• closed Ticket 2938815 and 2938819
• video scenario created

Diane & Lenny:

• closed tickets

2933860 (First draft of graphical indicator)

2933861 (Proposal of first draft of graphical indicator)

• updated ticket

2933858 (TE investigation) – javascript integration into TE still needs to be thoroughly investigated

Next step is to try to integrate into TE more

What we need to do:

1. Create the next series of tickets in sourceforge
2. Diane and Lenny will polish the graphical indicator in the next 7 days, it will be fully ready by next Thursday
3. Two teams will investigate what values they need to show on the graphical indicator, and how to get the values(SQL statements)
4. We have decided to keep the Thursday meeting as is, but Tuesday meeting on Skype only. Everyone is still expected to report your status on Tuesday

Next Deliverable:

Feb 11 Interface definition report from two teams(one from Vancouver, one from Quebec)

Feb 18 – Video of scenario from start to finish with graphical indicators

Status Reports: Feb 1, 2010

Brenda

Status

• Submitted a patch for Bug 299965 so that projects made outside the Lite perspective will also hide packages (and the source folder).
• Explored and discussed other possibilities with respect to this bug (hiding all packages versus select ones, and making beginner, intermediate and advanced levels of Java Lite which determine whether or not packages are shown).

Next Steps

• Try another angle for Bug 299965 based on Wayne’s comments in the conference call and on the bug page. I think possible solutions for this bug need to be explored further to come to a conclusion.

Roadblocks

• None

---

Cory

Status

• Changed focus slightly and started working on some of the smaller issues. (Converted the wizard action class to use our own file, fixed 3 bugs)
• Fixed a few more warnings
• Did a more "user centric" focused usage of the program. Found some new user issues that I will be pointing out shortly.

Next Steps

• Continue doing small tasks from the bug list.
• Continue looking into potential user issues.

Roadblocks

• None.

---

Miles

Status

• Did some more work on the Java class constructor and wizard.
• Added more checks for the current status of the constructor.
• Wrote some unit tests for the additional functionality.
• Added more appropriate message display to the wizard. Now info and warnings can be displayed with appropriate icons and effects on the
  ability to finish the class creation.

Next Steps

• I’ve been thinking about some possibilities for the class creation wizard and will explore implementing them.
  – Allowing the user to create Java programs (classes with main methods) vs. classes (object oriented programming) I think would be an good thing
  to make easy and clear for students.
  – Maybe even allow creation without using wizards at all in the ‘beginner’ mode.

Roadblocks

• My computer broke. I have to get a new one.
• Need to learn more about SWT to have better control over the wizard design.

---

FlightSim meeting minutes: Feb 02,2010

Time:

Feb 02, 2010 1pm EST

Attendance

Sylvain, Michael, Godfrey, Lenny, Matthew

Absence: Jean, Diane

General Update

• Please set your ticket status to ‘pending’ for the tickets you are working on, so other people will know where you are at
• Please vote the video scenario once they’re ready, Ticket 2933853
• Conference information

Conference ID: 4450146
Local Dial-in number: 416-343-2610
Toll-free Dial-in number: 1 866-251-2605
International Toll-free Dial-in number: 800-4444-9000

What we did

Matthew:

• Server to be delivered, Ticket 2935130

Michael:

Worked on

• closed ticket 2935222 – not need to write workload scenario
• closed Ticket  2935223, video uploaded to sourceforge

TODO:

• Deliver a powerpoint slide show by Thursday of the memory problem, Ticket 2944773
• Meet Godfrey on campus to talk about the presentation

Godfrey:

Work on

• Worked on recursive queries , Ticket 2939775 closed

TODO:

• Working on his Scenario, Ticket 2939779
• WMD to be fixed
• Meet Michael on campus to talk about the presentation

Jean:
Worked on

• Worked with Diane to setup her machine
• Tickets created for current deliverable
• have the data required to trigger an IO saturation of the system and got some queries to provoke it

TODO

• Update wiki page about date.timezone bug in PHP
• create a complete workload profile to use in the screencast
• work with Sylvain tonight
• video is expected to be ready by Thursday
• please close/report/update your status for Ticket 2941747, 2941750 and 2941755,

Sylvain:

Worked on:

• know how to recreate the too many users problem, Ticket 2938813
• know how to identify the too many users problem, Ticket 2938815

TODO:

• work with Jean tonight, video is expected to be ready by Thursday, Ticket 2938815 and 2938819

Diane:

Worked on:

• Draft JavaScript ready. Ticket 2933860

TODO:

• Please update Ticket  2933858
• Integrate the indicator to TE.

Lenny:

Worked on:

• Met with Danie on indicator

TODO:

• Meeting with Diane tomorrow

Issues:

• TE does not return sql error in WMD, Matthew is working on that, and the actual scenario will not have that information either.

Next Deliverable:

Feb 4 – Present the deliverable (Two powerpoint presentations)

Feb 18 – Video of scenario from start to finish with graphical indicators

I Guess I’m Unrealistic

I posted a link last week to Evan Robinson’s article explaining why crunch mode doesn’t work. Coincidentally, Ruben Ortega’s latest post on the ACM site asks, Why Do Software Developers Tolerate “Crunch Time”? His answer is “progress”, or at least, developers’ need to feel like they’re making progress. A couple of paragraphs later, though, he says:

It is unrealistic to deliver any project without going through some “Crunch time.”

I personally think that is the root of the problem. If you believe broken builds are inevitable, you’re not going to work very hard to make sure that code always compiles. If you believe that users are dumb, you’re not going to put much effort into fixing your user interface. And if you believe that it’s unrealistic to deliver code without all-nighters, guess what? You’re going to wind up pulling all-nighters.

So here’s my data. I haven’t stayed up to see the sunrise since the night my daughter was born, and you’d have to go back at least 15 years before that to my previous all-nighter. Despite that—no, because of that—I get a fair bit done on time and on spec. My algorithm is pretty simple:

1. List the things that need to be done.
2. Figure out which ones really matter, and which ones don’t.
3. Estimate how long each one is going to take.
4. Sort.
5. Start work.

For every thing I do, there’s a dozen that I set aside. I always feel a pang of regret (sometimes two), but trying to do everything is a good way to accomplish nothing. And while it took me twenty years to learn how, I’m not pretty good at abandoning things that are half done if it turns out that they’re not as important, or as doable, as I thought they were. (“I’ve started so I’ll finish” sounds macho, but it’s lousy project management.)

I’ve also learned to ask people, “Is this a good idea?” before I put too much work into it. This one was hard too; I’ve always enjoyed walking into a room and saying, “Ta da, look what I’ve done!” These days, though, I’ll ask my wife or a fellow prof or a student what they think before I start writing or coding. As my dad used to say, “A week of hard work can sometimes save you an hour of thought.”

So: what’s your strategy for getting things done? How well does it work? And do you think you’re getting better at it?