Mid-April Montreal & Alberta Parallel Hackfest

This hackfest will occur in parallel in two locations: in Montreal and in Alberta. Both will last from April 22nd to April 24th, with Alberta adding an extra day on the 25th. The focus of this hackfest will be to complete a first version of the workbench that can be practically used, with special attention on use cases from Sara and Kristen.

Details for the Montreal Group

• dates: April 22nd (early start) to April 24th (late)
• location: Hotel Le Relais Lyonnais, Montréal

For ground transportation to/from the airport, you can take a shuttle directly to downtown (a couple of blocks from the hotel) for $14 or a taxi for a flat rate of $34.

Arrival Departure Information

Amit: Arrival 3:40 pm Monday 21st -Departure 6:35 pm Thursday 24th.
Andrew: Arrival 7:00 pm Monday 21st -Departure 7:50 pm Thursday 24th.
Sara: Arrival 8:18 pm Monday 21st - Departure 5:57 pm Thursday 24th.
Catherine: Arrival 11:10 pm (i.e. LATE) Monday 21st - Departure 8:00 pm Wednesday 23th
Stéfan: Arrival 8:13am Tuesday 22nd - Departure 7:50pm Thursday 24th.
Matt P: Arrival 6:15pm Monday 21st - Departure 6:15pm Thursday 24th.

Work in progress at Montreal

MOVED TO SEPARATE PAGE hackfestmontrealprogress

Work completed in Alberta

Present: Carlos, Milena, Matt B, Mike P, Alejandro, Stan

Accomplishments for the week

For this satellite hackfest, we agreed to aim for actual completion of smaller tasks rather than less-visible movement forward on larger ones.

With the exception of the new design work and the new documentation we added to the wiki, these items should now be visible in the online workbench.

Workbench

• Matt installed a workbench home page that looks like the sketches.
• Matt made incremental CSS progress.
• Mike and Milena have produced and installed custom icons for tools and toolsets.

Tools

• Mike and Milena have been working on a configuration tool for the Simple Charts toolset.
• Matt B and Milena have been working on a configuration tool for the Advanced Charts toolset.
• Alejandro has a draft of a new tool for collection browsing by grouping, although the grouping functionality isn't there yet. What it can do is show the user a set of one text tile per work, and the user can dynamically add or subtract the items showing on the tile.

Toolsets

• Mike and Amit added a new toolset called Simple Charts.

Design

• We want to introduce the idea of a small set of Master tools that will allow choices between tools that do the same job in different ways. The alternative is to have a default tool, but a default is a strong statement that we feel one alternative is superior, and we'd prefer to make that statement in the context of the alternatives being as ready to hand as possible.
• With an eye to the recent discussions with Martin, Carlos has been working on a set of designs for ways to show comparisons between: one document and a baseline from the collection; and between several documents (see Magic Circle attachment).
• Milena designed custom icons for each of our existing MONK collections.
• Carlos has also been working on a small information glyph (see Repetition sketches attachment) to show prospect on search results, based on earlier work by Piotr. Once we have the prospect idea in place, then we add the "richness" by creating tools for interacting with the display.

Documentation

• Alejandro described the simple search tool that is part of the workbench. It produces an event that each tool needs to handle in its own way. Many of the tools will probably use the proxy call GetWorksContainingFeature.
  https://apps.lis.uiuc.edu/wiki/display/MONK/SearchComponent
• Mike added how to create a new toolset.
  https://apps.lis.uiuc.edu/wiki/display/MONK/Component+Creation+Guide
• Mike added how to change the icons for the tools and toolsets.
• Matt updated the spec for how tools should be created.

Notes from planning call, April 16, 2006

• who's where:
  • in Montréal: Amit, Matt Patey, Stéfan, Catherine, Sara, Andrew - ready at 9am Eastern on the 22nd
  • in Alberta: Stan, Mike, Matt B., Carlos, Milena, Alejandro - ready at 11am Eastern on the 22nd
• interface walk-through
  • we couldn't get past the first step (collections browser stayed on "working..."), then, later, it worked
  • want to have Sara's ratings available through new interface
  • "get text features" didn't start properly
  • Sara's texts are available but not Kristen's
  • Alberta:
    • Matt B: styling more like design sketches
    • Alejandro: collections browser - more prospect-based; update search functionality
    • Mike: prototoypes of google charts and other external tools
  • Montreal:
    • improve speed of collections browser
    • full console logging (through browser, firebug)
    • add additional options in analysis tools
    • stats-based component: show me what you know about this collection
    • Matt P: mandala and other external tools

lerelais.png (image/png)
ej1.jpg (image/jpeg)
Carlos repetition prospect sketches.pdf (application/pdf)
Carlos magic-circle.pdf (application/pdf)
CIMG3824.JPG (image/jpeg)
CIMG3822.JPG (image/jpeg)
CIMG3818.JPG (image/jpeg)
CIMG3816.JPG (image/jpeg)
CIMG3815.JPG (image/jpeg)