Developers – 9/20/2013

Nik, Vir, Mike and Judy met for the first developers’ meeting of the 2013-14 academic year.  Vir returned the night before from his internship at Rack??? and will tell us about that at our next developers’ meeting….

Mike and Judy updated Vir and Nik on VISTAS retreat plans, and we talked about whether the vistas developers’ prefer to include the CSAB in the retreat (or not).  we decided we’d prefer NOT to dilute the focus on our collaborators and setting a clear ‘path forward’ and hence will meet separately with the CSAB. Judy will contact them to start talking about how to launch those sessions.

Since Jenny can’t make it on Friday afternoons, we’ll try for Thursdays 3-4.  As before (assuming this works for others), we’ll do :

  1. all hands 1st week of each month,
  2. developers 2nd and 4th (mike can only make it the 4th).
  3. reading group 3rd week

Nik updated us on and demo’d his work with VISTAS’ VELMA support:  visualization of the (rather large – 6 gig!) blue river HJA file. it works beautifully! vir, this weekend, will create an exe for us all to download…. here are the things he’s been working on:

  1.  fixes to the terrain vis and VELMA plugins (e.g., file name issues)
  2. stats now run much faster and work correctly (as far as we can tell – you are the ‘acid’ test, though!)
  3. started supprt for 2D vis (graphs)
  4. made some small fixes and tweaks to the UI.
  5. when he’s done with the graphs, he will start working on being able to save the project state…, and thinks that will go pretty quickly.

we hope to meet next week with Bob to demo these fixes, and to get him started on becoming facile with VISTAS.

i’ll get in touch john to see if he needs help re-orienting himself to VISTAS, and what his current priorities are.   AND, i will also connect with our 3 collaborators concerning details of what we plan for the retreat.