Start Time: 17:00
End Time: 18:00
Elapsed Time: 1:00
Team Members Present: Myself, JD, Corey, Andy
Context: Status Update

Note: I had a much longer, verbose entry which I lost when OS X crashed. My apologies

There was a lot of talk about the project report. I don’t have a whole lot to add, other than what is in the minutes (http://jade.msoe.edu/tag/files/20060515_StatusUpdateMeeting.htm).

Dr. Welch likes the poster, which is good.

Senior Design show, we all have to interact with a guest in front of Dr. Welch. He suggests a scripted demo of some kind that can be cycled. I already gave my idea of using post-it notes to show ‘tagging in action’.

I ask if we can license the software we have written independently (specifically the php command line tool and the tag conduit) under the GPL on Sourceforge. Dr. Welch doesn’t see any problems with that. The discussion then moves into why we can’t release the whole package, and the bottleneck is the libraries we are using which were found on The Code Project website. Also, since we are using a version of Visual Studio .NET which has a non-commercial license, we are limited in that respect.

Start Time: 19:00
End Time: 21:00
Elapsed Time: 2:00
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey (online)
Context: Documentation

Need to finish up the status section and make sure I’ve addressed all the main points.

I should stop following the grading rubric point by point. I’m going to go back and add some information to previous sections that doesn’t follow in order of the rubric as this is reading really stiff right now.

What is our business case? How would we fit into a buisness model? When I dreamed up this project, my goal was for it to be free software. I guess we could sell it? I’m going to ask Corey.

Talking with Corey, I ask him a question and he spends twenty minutes talking about my question before he decides to agree with the reasons I had for asking the question, WITHOUT ACTUALLY ANSWERING IT.

There, I reformed my question with a potential solution (I think they call this “leading the witness”) and he agreed. I should write that we intended it to be free, but it could be sold as a product. Still the goal was to create software we wanted to use, and make it such that anyone could use it. I think we achieved that to some degree (so long as you use windows).

Start Time: 17:00
End Time: 19:00
Elapsed Time: 2:00
Team Members Present: Myself
Context: Documentation

I am re-writing my canned description of the project again, this time for the final report. I don’t know if this will work any better this time around than the last (few) time(s) I’ve used it, but hopefully.

In summarizing the goals of the project, am I just rehashing the requirements? I will try to write about the product as I originally envisioned it, even though the requirements we came up with (looking at the SRS now) differ. Still, given the fact that we’ve built the product I originally envisioned (for the most part) and since I am one of the stakeholders, I think this will be all right.

Now trying to summarize where the project stands today. I guess this is like the executive summary for the whole report? I’m not sure how technical I should be getting at this point, as this is meant to be the introductory section and the later technical details will be described afterwards. Still, I suppose this is probably (assuming we don’t write an executive summary) the part of the report that will be the most read, so I suppose having some technical info would be appropriate.

Start Time: 12:00
End Time: 12:40
Elapsed Time: 0:40
Team Members Present: Myself, JD, Corey, Andy
Context: Poster

Corey and JD are arguing about the poster. Frankly it doesn’t matter to me too much. Andy knows what he is doing in regards to graphic design, but they are haggling over small details.

Corey wants it to show what we’re doing ‘conceptually’ but not what we’re doing ‘literally’. I don’t quite understand what he means by this, as if showing the GUI components (which is basically, I figure, all we want to highlight) is bad.

How much text? I think the least amount of text the best. One sentence maximum. I don’t see why we need more than that to explain the project. I think if we start getting into bullet points, we’re going to go over the level of understanding that most people viewing the poster will get.

Man, my head hurts.

I love how Corey talks about spending “all day” putting the report together like it’s a death sentence, but every time I ask him if he wants help he refuses. Is he trying to make me feel guilty for not working on it after I write my sections?

Start Time: 17:00
End Time: 17:45
Elapsed Time: 0:45
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey, JD, Andy
Context: Status Update

Corey mentions that we have given up hope on the “Paste with Tags” in the same directory, as we have Explorer crashing on us and we cannot prevent it. We figure we can document around it.

We went and looked at the posters. I’ve been trying to avoid butting heads with other team members so I didn’t say much. I agree with pretty much everything Dr. Welch said, and frankly I don’t like the way most of the posters in the hallway are designed. I just think they all have too much text and if we want to be effective we should have minimal text.

Start Time: 20:15
End Time: 23:30
Elapsed Time: 3:15
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey
Context: Documentation

The installer is done, I guess. We can’t launch programs or check if the user has the .NET 1.1 framework installed. I say we should just state on the website that our software requires the framework, but I guess Andy wants to include the installer too. My argument against this lies in the fact that the .NET Framework installer is about 30 megabytes, while our project is less than three, and by bundling the two we are requiring a very large download which some people may not even require.

The ‘Paste with Tags’ problems are still evident. I suggest that we should just allow the first “paste with tags” operation, prevent any subsequent operations (which would crash explorer unexplicably) and just document that this doesn’t work. I think Corey wants to fix it, but we’re running out of time and I believe this use case (or user story, not that we had one for it) is extremely trivial. I mean I use computers a lot, but I can’t remember the time I created more than one copy of a file in the same directory.

Why is the program installation package in the doc module? That makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

Paste with Tags is still not working. Although on Tuesday, Jon claimed that it worked just fine on his system so I think maybe Corey’s laptop is not a clean environment, and think maybe we should try testing this on another machine.

The PHP version is working just fine, but doing it via the context menu is causing no tags to be copied. Thirty minutes later and no progress. An hour later and we have nothing still. I am going to work on documentation as Corey continues to try to bang his head against the wall.

I wrote a fair amount of documentation. I tried to write it in easy to read language (assuming you have some knowledge of computers) but my bias is strong. I hope it turns out okay. We still need sections on the file monitor and searching tool, and then to format it in HTML.

Start Time: 12:00
End Time: 12:50
Elapsed Time: 0:50
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey, Andy, JD
Context: Status update

Corey is trying to install the package onto the lab desktop computer.

We’re going to split documentation and installation. I suggest we work in the teams we have been working in, because it’s easier to facilitiate working together that way. I also suggest that Corey and I do the documentation.

Corey doesn’t seem to be having much luck. I wonder if it’s because he’s manually entering registry keys and such instead of using the exported ones he gave to JD and Andy. He’s frustrated, so asking him this will not be a good idea right now.

Start Time: 17:00
End Time: 17:25
Elapsed Time: 0:25
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey, Andy, JD
Context: Status Update

Did the acceptance tests pass?
All tests passed for CLUI (all but one passed and we implemented a fix)
Two tests failed due SQLite, but have been fixed

What else are we testing, if everything passed?
Testing on a non development computer
Testing the installation package

Cycle report for a two-week cycle?
Well for the final cycle we have to do the very, very big project report.

What happens to the report after we turn it in?
Welch grades it.
Senior design reports establish that we have learned the goals of the ABET criteria
Must meet all capital letters of final report rubric (http://people.msoe.edu/~durant/courses/sendes/FinalReportRubric.shtml)
Must have economic analysis

Start Time: 17:00
End Time: 21:00
Elapsed Time: 4:00
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey
Context: Testing

Note: As I was working with Corey at the time, I did not keep a log of my activities as basically we worked together the whole time. This is being written in retrospect, although please refer to Corey’s log entry for this session as well.

There are a lot of directory problems. At first we don’t realize this, but through some debugging we realize that the different pieces are getting their current working directories from different places. This is solved by saving the correct working directory in the registry (upon installation) and having the tag conduit access it and set to whatever the registry key is set to before any other operations.

I will be executing the command line acceptance tests as Corey reads them off to me, and we can mark if they pass or fail. All tests except for Copy passed correctly.

We looked at the problems with Copy file, and it turned out to be that if the old file existed, we assumed the new file (where tags were being copied to) did not exist. In cases where it did exist, it would error out on the INSERT sql query and not insert relations for the copied tags from the old file onto the new file. This is easily solved, and in cases where the “new file” in a copy operation is already in the db, new tags are just appended onto the file (and do not blow away old tags on the new file).

Start Time: 12:10
End Time: 12:15
Elapsed Time: 0:05
Team Members Present: Myself, JD, Corey
Context: Status Update

There was a five minute meeting. Yeah. We agreed to split up testing to the components we all developed. Woo.

Cycle report was all right

UML is terrible for architecture

What did we do over break?
Me? Nothing.

What are we doing this cycle?
Acceptance Tests, Installation Package

Presentation
Three profs had us about above average, one horribly below average
Group balance was low
Background and context explanation poor
Good explanation of background
Can we measure the increase in productivity as a result of tagging?
Is that possible? How do you measure it?
AB zone as a group.

Start Time: 12:00
End Time: 13:45
Elapsed Time: 1:45
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey, Andy and JD
Context: Presentations

My apologies. Did not fall asleep last night (haven’t slept in a day) so notes may be brief.

TELS team

I wish I had the money to afford EVDO networked PDAs.
They seem to be doing very well.
I’m surprised the PDA version of IE has xmlhttprequest

Team House lights turning on off

Why RPC? It seems like that method of online communications has had more security holes than SOAP or REST.
“A lot of setbacks” < - why not talk about them?
Sounds like a lot of excuses

KMS Team Beta

“Web delivered java application” - Why Java web start? Why not just a standalone application?

GPS Car II

They had their stuff together considerably further than last time.

JCI Team

Didn’t write anything down during the presentation, have no thoughts on it now.

Man at Work Team

Okay you just got your equipment last week. Have you done anything prior to that?

Start Time: 22:00
End Time: 23:36
Elapsed Time: 1:15
Team Members Present: Myself
Context: Documentation

I am working on my sections of the cycle report. I cannot take screen shots (as I have none of our software installed [as I’m using a mac to write this] ) which is a bit annoying. I hope my portions are long enough, I am trying to write a technical review of the things we have done but worry I’m not being in-depth enough.

I don’t have a whole lot more to add.

And now I’m done. That took a lot longer than I expected but I think it’s comprehensive. Still if Corey wants more, I have no problem writing more.

Start Time: 12:00
End Time: 12:40
Elapsed Time: 0:40
Team Members Present: Myself, JD, Corey
Context: Presentations

Team Jump

Making a DDR Pad
Using a PIC board, gave up matrix keypad
Are the other people going to talk?
Nice use of powerpoint
Doesn’t sound like they’re doing very well, not very good planning initially.

Team Blackbox

Flight data recorder for the SAE Aero team.
Blame it on the other team.
“simple protocol, quick flowchart” barely fits on screen, not readable.
VB.NET application to Excel, very useful.
Wow, final box is tiny.
They seem like they are doing extremely well, already completed.

Team Car Alarm to Cell

Using powerpoint weatherman style, very nice.
What if the car goes into roaming?
They can do bluetooth but the other group could not?
Good reasons for choosing phones/providers
Very cool video demo.
Possible security concerns.
Please stop using our side of the cubicle!

Start Time: 17:00
End Time: 17:25
Elapsed Time: 0:25
Team Members Present: Myself, JD, Andy
Context: Status Update

Over-budget on planning, where’s the cycle report?
Do it this week.

If Welch doesn’t see it, he can’t review a draft.
Hopefully have draft to him by Tuesday.

Does the front end and the back end work together?
Yes. Tag conduit is done. Tag modification is done.

Have we test a move or copy via the command line?
Not yet. Maybe?

Documentation for the DLL so others can use it?
Will be present.

Hashing was doomed from the beginning. What if we have a large file, will the monitor hang?
We haven’t tested this.

Shortcuts?
Probably not.

Demo of browsing tool
Welch has some comments
Advanced search? We have operators

Start Time: 16:15
End Time: 18:45
Elapsed Time: 2:30
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey
Context: Development

JD and Andy suggested some changes to the namespaces and design of the Tag Conduit, so we’re working on that first.

That was done. We changed all function in the Tag Conduit to static per their suggestion.

Now we’re working on the tag modification tool. It was saving correctly last night, but now it does not seem to be saving changes to the database. It doesn’t seem to be a problem with the tag modification tool itself, but with the tag conduit.

We debugged the application, and it seems to work fine (which is kinda messed up) but when we build it and run it via the context menu, it doesn’t work. I think it is a problem with the current working directory, as we could set that in debug but when we are running it via the context menu.

We output the current working directory in the tag conduit, and as I thought, the current directory is something not even remotely close to what we need it to be.

Corey changed the way the context menu accesses the tag modification tool, and seems to work. Now.

TODO: Remove all message boxes and windows forms references in the tag conduit

Okay, there was a bug in the command line tool that I fixed which caused the edit tags functionality to not work. I had
if(sqlite_num_rows($result) > 0){
instead of
if(sqlite_num_rows($result) == 0){
which was causing the new tag to never be added to the db. I commited these changes.

We’re now working on fixing the context menu option ‘paste with tags’ to make sure it does not crash when you copy a file from a directory to the same directory.

This is really frustrating. Things work, then they stop working for some unknown reason.

Corey reregistered everything and now it appears to be working! Yay!

Start Time: 16:15
End Time: 19:45
Elapsed Time: 3:15
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey
Context: Development

We decided to change how the functions in the tag conduit work. They will parse the output despite what we had said before. It would’ve been harder had we been parsing through multiple files for adding/editing/removing tags for each function, but instead we changed the model to one file per function call.

I wasn’t sure if we would need to declare that our functions throw exceptions. I know you have to do this in Java, otherwise the compiler will complain that you have an exception that is never being caught, but I guess that isn’t the case with C#.

I hope the stream that captures standard output from the command line tool behaves the way we are expecting it to (in a C++ like manner). We’re doing:
OutputReader.readLine(); and OutputReader.readToEnd() and we’re hoping they will handle newlines accordingly.

When I was writing the cleanup command, I forgot that '\n' does not work, the escaped newline must be in double quotes (weird PHP caveat).

We are having trouble getting the DLL to load correctly and have it be accessible from the tag modification tool. Corey is looking things up, but there’s not much i can do to help other than research o my own (which has yielded nothing useful so far).

It wasn’t trouble with the DLL, it was something completely and utterly stupid. We added process.StartInfo.redirectStandardInput = true and despite the fact that we never actually use StandardInput in the tag conduit, this line of code caused StandardOutput to work correctly. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. BUT HOLY CRAP IT WORKS.

Or it doesn’t. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem to be saving changes to the php tool any more, and listTags has never worked.

Start Time: 12:00
End Time: 13:15
Elapsed Time: 1:15
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey, JD, Andy
Context: Presentations

WASTE

A lot of text on introduction slide
“That’s the way we have to go”
Later slides are better
Explanation of strings being passed was a bit confusing
One character password?
Demo was a lot more appropriate
Answered question about pH probe well.

Team S-Link

Has made significant progress since last update
USB Firmware (very cool, no more serial)
Modified jUSB chain (very impressive)
Installation
MSI
PCB
Wow, their circuit board is tiny.
GUI
Remote Control, online cd lookup, local db storage
Seriously, this is the coolest presentation ever. They totally have their stuff together. Excellent use of powerpoint. Excellent demo.

Team Splosion

Reading off the slides
“Crazy Eddie’s GUI Toolkit”
Lots of technical terms being used, don’t understand most of it
What is a ‘mesh’ anyway?
Donating changes back to the OGRE project
Pneumatics
Only mentioned as an aside
The game reminds me of a lot of worms.

Team VIS

Description of project was kind of bland.
Completely gave up Bluetooth idea
Flow chart hard to read
Kind of short

Project Snowstorm

This is the worst software analogy ever. They’re just talking about GUI based software.
Isn’t this a three quarter project? Shouldn’t they be farther than this?
…

Start Time: 12:00
End Time: 12:30
Elapsed Time: 0:30
Team Members Present: Myself, JD, Corey, Andy
Context: Presentations

Business Accounting Package

The asides William keep making do not seem very professional.
DB Model is very hard to read, disorganized
Examples are very unprofessional. “It’s liquid sunshine”
Report Generation section much easier to understand
Demo is very, very under-whelming.
Not sure how long cycle 4 is, a bit aggressive in the planning

Start Time: 20:30
End Time: 22:30
Elapsed Time: 2:00
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey
Context: Development

In the course of writing C#, we managed to crash Corey’s computer. This is excellent.

Let me say for the record that I do not like C# and the way it does things. It just seems backwards.

Neither Corey nor I are any good at designing UI, but hopefully the Tag Modification tool will be usable. I suppose having Dr. Welch use it will be the real test. It’s a bit inconvenient that I do not have a copy of VS.NET on my MSOE laptop (and I’ve been using my apple ibook lately as my primary machine), but we are making do.

We had to look up a lot of small intricacies that were different in C# from Java or C++. Again, everything seems backwards.

Development went forward fairly well. We did not test actual integration with the tag conduit, as I still have to do some fixing up of stuff with the command line tool. The hardest part will most likely be the “save” button which we will have to sort through all the lists of tags accumulated as the user interacts with the program, and then send them to the tag conduit. Should be fun.

I will work on the integration tests for the context menu, tag modification tool and tag conduit.

Start Time: 13:25
End Time: 14:30
Elapsed Time: 1:00
Team Members Present: Myself
Context: Presentation

Working on my slides for the presentation. Here are the things I have to cover:

• The Google Desktop search missing functionality (and how we will do it)
• Command line tool development
• Context menu development
• Tag conduit
• Tag modification tool

Start Time: 19:45
End Time: 20:45
Elapsed Time: 1:00
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey
Context: Development

Corey asked if we need to create a command pattern design structure and I said it wasn’t necessary as we are writing a library, so just writing one class with functions seems more appropriate to me.

TODO: Fix bug in command line tool, if comma is found within quotes, it should be ignored.

TODO: Figure out why adding a second tag to a file is not returning any message. Probably need to debug this with some echo statements to see, I’ll bet we have the “save ourself from entering the same tag twice” logic wrong.

TODO: Clean is ugly and doesn’t appear to be working.

TODO: Look into why there is a newline at the end of every status message.

So just looking at the command line tool, I see we have a lot of bugs we still need to fix. I guess we didn’t do enough testing after all.

I am still getting confused by the architecture of this project’s GUI components.

TODO: The help function in the UpdateFile and CopyFile classes has the wrong command in the example, the help message in CopyFile is completely messed up.

We’re waiting to do the search functionality in the tool because we need to see what would be useful to the GUI in terms of arguments and stuff.

Start Time: 12:30
End Time: 12:50
Elapsed Time: 0:20
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey, Andy, JD
Context: Status update

We’re having a meeting, talking about scheduling

When are we going to practice the presentation? Monday night?

Corey is making an outline of things we are going to talk about for the presentation, and now we’re going to split it up.

that’s done, and we have to go to class. Meeting over.

Start Time: 17:00
End Time: 17:30
Elapsed Time: 0:30
Team Members Present: Myself, Andy, JD, Corey
Context: Status Update

Corey demoed our context-menus

They crashed explorer, we’re probably missing error conditions still.
Otherwise it works.

What happened to overlay icons

Andy says it can take an hour
Dr. Welch wants to say if it takes priority over other applications
Maybe we can do it, it was a non-critical feature

Presentations

We’re first, because we didn’t say anything.

File Monitoring

Why does windows fire a delete and then copy on a move operation?
We have no idea.
The moving solution isn’t exactly great.
Potential side effects

Tagging folders - Modify with tags on folders

Why would you want to tag directories?
What are the repercussions if we do allow you to modify tags on directories?
Let’s just not do it.

Start Time: 17:00
End Time: 17:35
Elapsed Time: 0:35
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey, JD, Andy
Context: Status Update

Dr. Welch says it looks like we’re doing a poor job because all our tasks are marked as not complete. We say they’re all two week tasks.

Comments regarding tag cleanup
return all ghosts
Option to blow away all ghosts as well

Did anything happen with overlay icons? No.

Stuff about iterations

What are we worried about?
Installation script
Integrations of all components without an overall low-level design - Me
But I think we can overcome obstacles as they come.
Making the file pane in the browse tool have more explorer-like features

Start Time: 13:45
End Time: 15:30
Elapsed Time: 1:45
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey
Context: Development

Working with Corey some more, going to implement the actions that fire when you click on our context menu items now that we have them appearing.

First we’re creating a dummy application to act as our file modification tool for now. It will accept command line arguments and output them to the screen in lieu of a real tool that does something with the files.

Installing our context menu items were breaking the other items in Corey’s menu, so he tried to debug that. I tried to help by finding information online but wasn’t able to, he figured it out anyway by looking at example code again.

Implementing the Modify Tags command line invokeCommand function took about five minutes. Paste With Tags will be significantly harder though.

We used the API that Corey found, and actually writing the code wasn’t very hard. It took us about 45 minutes.

My times for this week are really short, but I don’t have any other tasks to work on so there’s not much I can do about it.

Start Time: 21:25
End Time: 22:30
Elapsed Time: 1:05
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey
Context: Development

I’m working with Corey on finishing the context menu stuff. We worked with Andy today to figure out what was wrong with our code (we were using the wrong function to insert it into the menu) and now we need to finish developing the action that fires when you click on our menu item. This entry will probably be brief because I have been working for six hours prior to this on work for my job, and my brain is a bit fried from too much PHP.

Corey didn’t bookmark the API he wants us to use, so I’m waiting as he tries to find it. But he found it, so that’s good. I think I might fall asleep (not due to watching Corey look for something though).

I guess we can use this library such that the copy/move operation is only one function call after setting some flags. That seems extremely simple.

We have the shell integration completed, which is a godsend after the last session when we couldn’t get anything working at all.

Start Time: 12:30
End Time: 15:00
Elapsed Time: 2:00
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey, Andy, JD
Context: Code Review

Engineering Log, stardate 49567

Andy is looking at the code that Corey and I wrote. We still have no idea why it doesn’t work.

We found it. Thank god. Seriously, I was totally out of ideas, but at least the item shows up in our menu.

TODO: Flesh out this entry more.

Start Time: 17:05
End Time: 17:30
Elapsed Time: 0:25
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey, JD, Andy
Context: Status Update

The proof of concept works, our code does not work
We don’t know why. Maybe it’s the registry, who knows.

When did this happen? Sunday night.
This was my fault, that we couldn’t get together.

We’re supposed to close out iteration one this week, but now we’re behind schedule. What happens if we don’t complete iteration one?
Jon and Andy can continue moving forward, without us.

The file conduit is done, which is good. Jon is demoing it for Dr. Welch.

We decided to stick with the 6-2-3 schedule
The poster will take longer than we expect.

Start Time: 20:20
End Time: 02:00
Elapsed Time: 4:25
Team Members Present: Myself, Corey
Context: Development

Corey and I are working on creating the context menu items for the tag modification tool, and the “paste with tags” option.

We have a lot of work ahead of us. I had thought this was going to be relatively fast based on what Corey and Andy said during the meetings, but Corey is pretty much doing this from the ground up. The example code that Andy provided has very little to no comments such that both Corey and I looking at it are still confused. We’re poring over the MSDN which is helping a bit, but otherwise this is going to take a lot longer than the two hours we had planned for this.

Windows programming is the devil. Seriously, I hope I never have to do this again. The documentation is cryptic, there are way too many enums being used and it all seems very, very low level (when I don’t know that it would have to be).

Inserting a key into the registry to get the context menu to show up was kind of painful. Corey is restarting explorer right now to see if it works. It didn’t show up. We’re going to go over the registry again. Our keys look exactly the same as the ones that Tortoise CVS uses, so he’s restarting his computer.

We have not been able to figure out why our context menu item has not shown up. It seems adding an item to all files must be harder than just one file type (even though this is what we want). My battery is about to die so I will finish this entry later.

Okay, about an hour and a half later and we still have no progress. We believe our code is correct, because it builds and we find no difference between it and example code available online, but it does not show up. Perhaps it has something to do with the way we’re entering it into the registry that it cannot find the DLL or something, we aren’t sure.