Planet SoC -

what I’ve been up to lately

Paul — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:25:53 +0200

Google IO
I spent Wednesday and Thursday of last week at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I had a great time, and particularly enjoyed the “URLs are people too” presentation (all the videos should be available on the google code website soon).
Slicehost
I’m done with shared hosting. 1and1 is ok for simple websites, but they’ve been having an unacceptable amount of downtime recently (enough that I notice it and it bothers me). I’ve decided to get a slicehost account, even though it’s a bit more expensive. I’ll be moving this page over there as soon as I’ve got the webserver running and stable. Now I’m paying for 3 different webhosting accounts… I’m planning to drop the 1and1 hosting plan (but keep them as my domain registrar), as well as possibly dropping the dreamhost account. Dreamhost isn’t bad, but their servers are slow, and slicehost is better. I may keep dreamhost around for storing data on.
I’ve been fantastically pleased by my experience so far with slicehost - their service is exemplified by the signup experience: 2 emails, one to notify me of the billing, the other to tell my slice was ready. No bullshit, no overly long explanation emails of how to use ftp and ssh, simply an IP, a username, and a temporary password. These people assume you know what you’re doing, which is exactly what I want.
It’s actually very handy having a few extra domains around that aren’t in general use. I pointed one of the idle ones at my new server, and have been using the domain for access rather than having to remember and type out the IP address every time I need to connect. I may redirect it elsewhere later, but it’s been working well for now.
GSOC
My Google Summer of Code project is progressing. I decided to call it DBGraphNav, and registered a googlecode project. Now I’m in the process of writing out the design document. I’m not going for a completely formal document, I but need something that will guide me in programming each portion. It’s available on the wiki.
My most recent accomplishment has been figuring out how to allow users to flexibly specify how to retrieve interconnected data. Each node on my graph will have a specified type, with a user defined SQL query that retrieves it’s connected nodes. Then each of those will have it’s connected nodes queried, and so on. This should allow users to build very flexible queries that include various types of nodes (e.g. authors, papers, research groups).
One very nice thing about googlecode is that you can use subversion to check out the wiki files, and then edit them offline in your favorite text editor. It’s extremely nice to edit things in emacs rather than messing with an interactive web editor. It helps me stay focused.

what I’ve been up to lately

Paul — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:25:53 +0200

Google IO
I spent Wednesday and Thursday of last week at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I had a great time, and particularly enjoyed the “URLs are people too” presentation (all the videos should be available on the google code website soon).
Slicehost
I’m done with shared hosting. 1and1 is ok for simple websites, but they’ve been having an unacceptable amount of downtime recently (enough that I notice it and it bothers me). I’ve decided to get a slicehost account, even though it’s a bit more expensive. I’ll be moving this page over there as soon as I’ve got the webserver running and stable. Now I’m paying for 3 different webhosting accounts… I’m planning to drop the 1and1 hosting plan (but keep them as my domain registrar), as well as possibly dropping the dreamhost account. Dreamhost isn’t bad, but their servers are slow, and slicehost is better. I may keep dreamhost around for storing data on.
I’ve been fantastically pleased by my experience so far with slicehost - their service is exemplified by the signup experience: 2 emails, one to notify me of the billing, the other to tell my slice was ready. No bullshit, no overly long explanation emails of how to use ftp and ssh, simply an IP, a username, and a temporary password. These people assume you know what you’re doing, which is exactly what I want.
It’s actually very handy having a few extra domains around that aren’t in general use. I pointed one of the idle ones at my new server, and have been using the domain for access rather than having to remember and type out the IP address every time I need to connect. I may redirect it elsewhere later, but it’s been working well for now.
GSOC
My Google Summer of Code project is progressing. I decided to call it DBGraphNav, and registered a googlecode project. Now I’m in the process of writing out the design document. I’m not going for a completely formal document, I but need something that will guide me in programming each portion. It’s available on the wiki.
My most recent accomplishment has been figuring out how to allow users to flexibly specify how to retrieve interconnected data. Each node on my graph will have a specified type, with a user defined SQL query that retrieves its connected nodes. Then each of those will have its connected nodes queried, and so on. This should allow users to build very flexible queries that include various types of nodes (e.g. authors, papers, research groups).
One very nice thing about googlecode is that you can use subversion to check out the wiki files, and then edit them offline in your favorite text editor. It’s extremely nice to edit things in emacs rather than messing with an interactive web editor. It helps me stay focused.

Project Planning

Paul — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:34:28 +0200

Now that I’m finished with finals, I’m focusing on my summer of code project.
The first challenge is coming up with a name. The best so far is phpDBviz. If nothing better comes up, I’ll register a google code project for it tomorrow. This brings up the secondary question: what version control system to use? Google code provides a subversion repository, and although more modern systems like git are tempting, I’ll probably stick with gcode for the moment since it provides so much more than just the version control (a wiki, a bug tracker, an easy system for bringing other devs onto the project).
What license? I’m leaning towards a BSD style license for simplicity. I doubt that I need to worry greatly about some external force taking the code and not giving it back, and I feel like users will be more comfortable with fewer requirements.
I’ve put together a google doc with various items of interest for me to work on, though I’ll probably move at least some of the info to the project wiki once I get that set up. It’s available here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddq9nrb4_109gw6fsnfk
Although not listed in that doc, my goals for this week generally involve getting everything set up to allow me to make real progress next week. I want to

Set up google code project
Create and sketch in all the main sections for the Design Document
Begin integration documentation
Write short README style description of the project
Create “Deliverable” document describing end result
Write detailed schedule for next 3 weeks
Begin working on the setup steps listed for week1

This is going to be a lot of work, but I feel like the mentors and NESCent have the management experience to help me keep this project on track. As I break it down into smaller pieces, things start to look more manageable.

Project Planning

Paul — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:34:28 +0200

Now that I’m finished with finals, I’m focusing on my summer of code project.
The first challenge is coming up with a name. The best so far is phpDBviz. If nothing better comes up, I’ll register a google code project for it tomorrow. This brings up the secondary question: what version control system to use? Google code provides a subversion repository, and although more modern systems like git are tempting, I’ll probably stick with gcode for the moment since it provides so much more than just the version control (a wiki, a bug tracker, an easy system for bringing other devs onto the project).
What license? I’m leaning towards a BSD style license for simplicity. I doubt that I need to worry greatly about some external force taking the code and not giving it back, and I feel like users will be more comfortable with fewer legal requirements.
I’ve put together a google doc with various items of interest for me to work on, though I’ll probably move at least some of the info to the project wiki once I get that set up. It’s available here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddq9nrb4_109gw6fsnfk
Although not listed in that doc, my goals for this week generally involve getting everything set up to allow me to make real progress next week. I want to

Set up google code project
Create and sketch in all the main sections for the Design Document
Begin integration documentation
Write short README style description of the project
Create “Deliverable” document describing end result
Write detailed schedule for next 3 weeks
Begin working on the setup steps listed for week1

GSOC08 - I got in!

Paul — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:55:29 +0200

I’m pleased to announce that I have been accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2008. You can view the abstract for my submission, or learn more about NESCent, my sponsoring organization.
In a nutshell, I’ll be writing a PHP application to facilitate the visual browsing of relational databases using Graphviz to generate a clickable image map of the selected data. More information is in the abstract, and I’ll probably post a link to the design document once I’ve got that sketched out.
I’ll try and post regular progress updates here as I work on the project.

GSOC08 - I got in!

Paul — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:55:29 +0200

I’m pleased to announce that I have been accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2008. You can view the abstract for my submission, or learn more about NESCent, my sponsoring organization or Brian O’Meara, my mentor for this project.
In a nutshell, I’ll be writing a PHP application to facilitate the visual browsing of relational databases using Graphviz to generate a clickable image map of the selected data. More information is in the abstract, and I’ll probably post a link to the design document once I’ve got that sketched out.
I’ll try and post regular progress updates here as I work on the project.