pcplantdb

[Bear Kaufmann <bear@ursine-design.com>]

Hi all,

Thanks for the update Scott.

Chad writes:

> I'm a little hesitant to say that we should use the funding money to
> get hardware for ourselves.
Yeah, perhaps I shouldn't have phrased it that way. I'd be taking the 
money for my time put in on the project to go towards a laptop. So 
really, that's my own accounting.

> I've been telling you for sometime to bill for your design work.  Your
> work is certainly worth it.
Thanks. So I've been rather lax with my hourly accounting on this 
project. I feel $1000 @ $25/hr (40 hrs) would cover my development time 
up to this point. I've probably put in a good deal more, but that was 
also voluntary.
If people feel comfortable with this, I can submit a bill to Scott.

> Sounds cool, got links to [unix] Actionscript stuff?
Almost. I assume you mean a compiled SWF (Flash file). Perhaps we could 
also set it up on CVS, if others wanted to see and contribute.
I've currently got very simple GBI up and running. Including a form of 
Elastic Interval Geometry (elastic connections, nodes repel each other). 
Newly selected nodes add a node to the network (to test the event 
messaging).
There's no data loading yet, though I'm hoping to get it interfacing 
with Chad's API soon. I'm dealing with optimizing performance. Using the 
brute force method, the repulsion functions require n^2 operations, 
where n is the number of nodes. I've optimized it by changing the 
behavior a bit (no influence/force calculations past x radius), which 
cuts the processing down a lot. There are other ways to improve 
performance too. I'll try to get something up soon.

Once we get that up, I'm wonder if we can figure out a very simple but 
useful use for it, and make it public sooner then later. (Release beta). 
It might help give a sense where we're heading to the public at large.

> I would really really like it if you would do more design work on
> dev.  I would feel comfortable with budgeting 100 hours or so to get
> you to work more magic on things like making the forms more
> friendly/consistent, better UI stuff (it's all mostly my mess right
> now), more consistent layout/css between static pages, search results,
> and plant reports.
OK. Could we discuss what's wanted at this point and put it into the 
tracker? Set up a set of deliverables for the 0.3 release, and I'll work 
on them.
Personally, whole site wise, I'd like to get the wiki more well 
integrated into the site. It feels pretty data rich, I think Rich(?) put 
in a good deal of time organizing it, so it looks quite presentable. 
It'd make us look more active then the static HTML/PHP which generally 
is slower to receive up dates. BTW, the link to Chad's API isn't on 
there, from what I can tell. Had to search the archives for it.

Also note I'll be back in academia soon myself, so it may be a bit 
before I get resettled into the schedule.

> I think it's great that you (and Rich)
> are staying in touch with all the hot meta-data technologies and I
> certainly expect to add OWL, RDF, RSS, whatever... but not right now.
Right. I forget our feature time line, but RDF is still out a ways. But 
I was really inspired there to give a shot building an ontology with it. 
I think this will provide a better sense of the issues once we reach 
that point. And it is really cool. But I can now speak a bit better to 
the performance issues, etc.

OK, enough for now.

Good to hear from you too Stephenie. I'll be in touch.

Cheers,
Bear