Meeting Notes for 21 January 2008

Present: Mihael, Liz, Phong, TomJ, Bob, Eric
Absent: TomL

Weekly Report

Marge wants each entry in our week's progress report to contain the following information and be less than three lines. She is not ready to use wikis or forums for this.

• Task Number (from ... ?)
• Task Name
• Percent Completion
• Number of Hours
• Priority
• Comments

Mihael says that the task numbers might change, since they're generated by his Gantt chart tool.

Action Item: Mihael will look into how to control the task numbers in the Gantt chart tool.

Eric mentioned another method called the Critical Path Method (CPM). It takes the tasks from a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and arranges them in a flow diagram, similar to the workflow diagrams we've seen for Grid analysis. There is a description in Wikipedia

Task Leader

The task leader isn't responsible for doing all the work in that task.

Milestones

We need to establish some milestones so we can show progress before the "ready for beta" period. Some milestones may be generated out of tomorrow's meeting with Marge.

Updates

• Bugs have been prioritized, task list updated to notify developer that P1/P2 bugs are the ones that need to be resolved for this push.
• Eric has added a feature to the forums where the person who starts a help desk request gets subscribed to that forum thread, so that if a new response appears all persons in the thread are notified. We discussed opening up access to the full internet, which would let outsiders read the discussions, and spiders like Googlebot could index it. We are concerned about e-mail addresses and student names appearing. Eric will try to mask those. Bob has some concerns over the functionality; he wants it simple.
• Phong went to Adler to discuss user-interface issues (will be listed)
• Phong is working on learning how to stand-up a local build and an independent mirror.
• The updated technology LO will be reflected in the rubric (currently checked into SVN).
• Eric is proposing putting the LOs into the wiki and then having a mashup so when we need to edit a lot of this static content, we don't have to push more stuff out into SVN and redeploy.
• Phong has identified the Apache ClientHttp library, which can do HTTP POST, imitating a browser. This is similar to the functionality Eric uses from PHP's pecl_http extension, which is how he implemented saving images from Bluestone to the e-Lab, and how he intends to launch an analysis on Swift. It could be useful for the forum-elab bridge (e.g. Bob creates a teacher account, the system builds a forum account automagically) or other interfaces. Eric suggests testing it by having a JSP page post to the helpdesk forum, just as a warm-up exercise.

Misc.

• Liz will not attend next week's meeting.

-- Main.PhongNguyen - 21 Jan 2009
-- Main.EricMyers - 22 Jan 2009