Developers – April 18, 2014

Present:    Judy, Jenny, Nik, Vir, Kirsten, Dani, Kendra.

  • undergrad students update:
    Kendra: has made great progress on her visualization in WebGL of Christoph’s data.  She now has a solid visualization in 3D of wind profiles Primet and McRae at HJA, hard coding data from 1 reading.  Her next steps are to reading in data from multiple days or a particular day (which would in principle enable animation), and get in touch with Christoph for feedback on the image.   See Kendra’s thesis site for images (click on thesis, then scroll down in Project log to Week 10 entry).
    Dani: has been working on volume extrusion – Vir answered some technical questions for her, and she is looking for a simple data example to show its value (Kirsten will help with that).  Later, she will use either VELMA or ENVISION data.  We discussed whether to integrate the code into VISTAS;   pros:  she could use the data plug-ins, but cons are that
    Justin (moving but sent email with dev update):  currently about halfway done with two features;  improved Project Defaults and camera control modes in the UI. His only blocking issue is that for camera controls we should really update to wxwidgets 3.0, this gives us “toggle bitmap buttons”.  At the meeting, we briefly discussed this, and Nik sees no reason why we can’t do that relatively soon.
  • Short update from Vir and Nik (directly or indirectly) about status on their development:  Nik has been busy with a recent CBI rollout, so not much to report.
    Vir has been converting his ENVISION plugin for synchronous processing, which was doing asynchronous processing for VISTAS because we have an event loop. In ENVISION we have no event loop so everything must be done synchronously.  He also refactored some code, and added unit tests.
    – most recently he’s been implementing a “POSTRUN graph” for ENVISION, using the ENVISION DELTAS to track changes over a period of time, which now only does a “RUNTIME graph”.
  • Some strategizing about May 8-9 meetings in Corvallis.  see revised Agenda.
  • Set Topic/Agenda for next meeting – May 2
    – Prep for May 9 meetings?
    – Kirsten has something to present, maybe May 8/9, or the following meeting
  • Looked at upcoming meeting dates (new feature of project web site!)
  • there wasn’t much time, but we briefly looked at:
    – Critique a visualization over time – Cosmic Slurpblack holes swallowing stars
    (we think VISTAS could do better!)
  • Critique NIH/NLM on line journal format (thanks to Kirsten for forwarding this)