Fall 2007

1. We split up into smallish groups to help with planning and development - the idea was to have a good GUI mockup of different parts by Monday. I was put into a group with Rae, Jee Yun, and Yuan. Together, we developed some ideas as to how to make searching and navigating more intuitive - (we went with a more question-based system like ask.com), and drew up some diagrams (notes here).
2. We split up into still smaller groups - I am part of the searching and navigation team as well as the advanced research team.
3. The Advanced Research Team met after class on Monday, and then on Tuesday: we explored a little bit about Silverlight and Jquery. I believe we decided that JQuery is very viable, and Silverlight might have some compatibility issues so going with Flash might be a better alternative (though Silverlight would be a very nice addendum). We need to see about getting a Silverlight dev kit to help with this - and we need to gain access to a Flash dev kit as well most likely (e-mail already sent to Dr. Wong about this). We looked, played around, and figured out source control in Visual Studio, and each of us should be able to help our respective teams with this aspect of Visual Studio. Beyond this week, I am to look into jQuery along with Yuan.
4. The searching team had a quick meet on Wednesday during class (the delay was due to the team leaders not having met until Tuesday late at night). The essential thing was to get some information compiled and understand how searching is done in other applications before the meeting on Thursday. I researched on Ebay - found that most likely they're using some sort of rdf indexing to aid when doing larger searches (for example searching description as well). I did some background research on RDF and RDDL and sent the info to Rae to compile.
5. We conducted our second customer meeting with Luke Scanlon (minutes located here. This meeting seemed to go a lot better because we were able to demonstrate that we had direction, ideas, and some GUI mockups. There were some hiccups and things that we did not fully address, as well as other items that Luke (I'm pretty sure that's what he wanted us to call him) wanted us to address if not that meeting then the meeting next. These are detailed in the next section.
6. Tablet laptops for everyone! (Which I am writing this on now)

1. When presenting on Monday for our smaller "development" groups, I feel like the presentations were a bit rushed due to a lack of time. Of course that's to be expected as not everyone can stay past, we didn't decide to meet earlier, etc. We didn't have a prepared presentation so our material came out very hashed and jumbled to the rest of the group.
2. We need either Flash or Silverlight (definitely one if not the other at some point in the project). As said before, an e-mail was sent out about this, so not a huge problem.
3. Meeting structure could use some more um...reinforcement, but this is better suited for the development section.
4. When we met with Luke Scanlon, he was fond of our GUI (as far as I could tell), but was afraid of two things (strictly interface-wise) - That the interface was very dry and stale, and that we're not bringing anything entirely innovative. Well for the first part, we only have mockups so it's too early to assess that fully (although a good note to keep in mind is that we do want to make using the system fun and entertaining), but for the second part he wanted some focus on our more innovative graph-like design for navigating between related and suggested articles. Proposed solution below.
5. Encountered a problem installing Visual Studio on new tablet
   
   -The installer complained that Rmt9x.mst was unable to be copied
   IF YOU GET THIS PROBLEM, SOLUTION IS BELOW
6. It's hard to get used to the nub mouse meh
7. Dr. Wong wants to know if we like the carrying cases for the laptops. I find that it's functional...but I don't like it.

1. I had advised Rae to, when she talked with Brad, advise him that the meeting would be (with three different groups presenting a lot of info at least) either very long, or very crammed unless we officially decided to run over. Whether or not that was done I'm not entirely sure, and given that we were to present the following day, this is understandable for nothing to happen at such short notice. However, this still falls in line with our shortcomings on meetings in general - but as said before this should (and will) be detailed in the development process section.
2. If Mr. Scanlon wants more detail on innovative navigation, then we should do it by all means. It would be great if we could show a tech demo in flash or silverlight even of such a thing - it would serve to accomplish at least two things:
   1. We would consecrate what our navigation idea is (in terms of what needs to be displayed and how to display it.
   2. We could better impress and sell Mr. Scanlon our idea
   There may be more, it's hard to tell really, but so far that's something at least, and it wouldn't be all that much difficult since we don't have to construct actual pages, just a representation of how such a system might work.
3. Rmt9x.mst SOLUTION To work around this, simply explore the contents of the CD, go into {drive directory}:\Setup and run the Setup executable in there as an administrator - that should hopefully override the problem. I also had this issue. I solved it by switching to a different iso mounting software (daemon tools).- brad

• Our customer meetings seem to be more focused and better prepared. This is 100% to do with the general fact that they are. I get the feeling that in our first meeting we really didn't know what we were trying to accomplish and it was difficult getting hold of a base from where we could work initially. This meeting (and further meetings) had more of a model of "Here is our idea, do you like it?", and our presentations, agendas, all completely organized. Excellent
• Working in smaller groups is definitely the way to go right now - we saw a lot more get accomplished in the warm-up project, and just the breaking up of a singular daunting task into smaller managable tasks makes everything easier. Also, getting a good time to meet with everyone in the group, when the group is only 2 or 3 people is a lot easier. Very true.

• My only concern currently, and I suppose the only thing that I'm going to write about here is the way that class meetings have been organized. It's great that we started off with organization on Monday, but Wednesday and Friday seemed much less so. I understand that the whole laptops-coming in thing kind of messed up a lot of stuff, but in the future we need to better plan our class meetings, and better utilize them. Proposals for change below.

• With regards to utilizing our class meetings better, I feel we really just need to sit down and plan them better, or have set schedules for each day. We need to make use of the time Czar very well, and if something runs over then we shouldn't be afraid to schedule meetings during lunch (when we all can make it), even if it's a decision made the night before (we do have a class contacts list, but of course such decisions made as early as possible would be best). I know, of course, that it's easier said than done. I've had experience through the Scouts planning and running meetings before, and I know that it is not an easy task to do this on such a consistant basis. But it is necessary, and from experience I can say that we should not just plan for customer meetings as our "big meeting" of the week, but rather treat every meeting as a big meeting with equal importance. With such a big project, we cannot afford to lose time. I saw that it's been mentioned that Lucas Scanlon wants us to speak up more as a group (I don't know if this is entirely validated since we are giving a presentation and have pre-decided members who speak with authority and representation of the group as a whole) but it was also mentioned that this might be due to individual members not knowing the whole picture or what's entirely going on. Well I know that Wednesdays are supposed to be our "oh-crap" days after the milestones are due, but maybe it wouldn't hurt if we used some of the time to go through a dry run of our presentations for Scanlon on Thursday. That way we can better prepare our presentations, as well as help imbue knowledge of what exactly is going on to all group members.

These are good ideas, but an important consideration is how to most efficiently implement your solutions.  Keep in mind that as the programming workload increases, you may find yourselves unwilling/unable to spend a huge amount of time working on meetings.  How can you get them to flow naturally?  --Chelsea

• This doesn't have anything to do with any issues currently, but I think we should maybe start working on a written spec. Maybe a nice ginormous pdf file to compile all information into in a comprehensible, searchable, table-of-contents-filled manner (LaTeX would be nice here). Thoughts?

Let me ask this: Without a written spec, how does anyone know what they are building?   -- SW