26 October 2006 by Tam.

One of the things I have a problem with in projects (school, work, or personal) is when they morph into a stack data structure. For instance, if you’re thinking about something you need to do, but to do that, you first have to do another thing, and to do that other thing, you first have to do some other thing - that’s what I mean. Once the third or fourth things gets piled on top I tend to say “to heck with it” and go do something else. (Yeah, that’s not a very productive strategy, I admit.) It feels hopeless getting to the bottom.

Fortunately, one thing we do in our meetings with Dr. Paul is turn the impossible stack back into a queue - a list where it’s obvious what needs to be done next. (It’s really more of a perspective shift than anything.)

(Of course, our project is really like a tree or maybe a digraph - we could go in all kinds of directions at once. But that’s equally tricky to navigate.)

So, our next stage right now is to design the database to store our patient data. We talked with Dr. Paul about object-oriented databases but I think that might be more than we want to get into at this moment (projects within projects).

Oops, did I say database? I should have said “data model.” But as with so many things, I’ve mainly designed data models by designing databases (kind of like I’ve usually designed objects in Java by coding them first, though I can sometimes manage it the other way around).

Anyway, Olga and I are going to work on our ideas about that and then meet to hammer something out.

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20 October 2006 by Tam.

“Subversion” sounds more interesting than it is - it’s just another cvs type of thing.

Anyway, Olga got us set up with a subversion repository on CVSDude. It looks like it’s going to be free (I don’t think we’ll need their premium services) and it seems pretty easy to use, so I think that’s going to be just great. Olga is a champ. She did that sometime this week and we worked with at her house earlier.

In one of those heart-stopping moments that sometimes happen around computers, Olga deleted some whole directory by mistake when I was at her house and for a moment it looked like we lost everything.  But it had already been uploaded to the website so we were able to recover it (as is usually but not always the case with those heart-stopping computer moments).  Whew.

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15 October 2006 by Tam.

CVS (”Concurrent Versions System” - who knew) is a way of managing having different people work on a project at the same time.

Anyway, I forgot to post last week, but that’s what we talked about with Dr. Paul. It’s possible we could get something set up through the school, but it seems like trouble.  (I know all of this work is necessary, but it seems like some of this technical stuff pulls us away from the work we’d rather be doing on the “real” part of the project.)  We’re going to look into what our options may be through 1 & 1 (our hosting company here).  Since all of this stuff is on the web, if we could get it set up on their servers, that would be the simplest thing.

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7 October 2006 by Tam.

Yesterday Olga and I did a ton of work on the website at her house. When I took CS3 for Dr. Paul, he talked about pair programming. I have my doubts about it - I have to wonder if some of the productivity gain isn’t just from people not being able to goof off with someone else there (of course, that’s nothing to sniff at if it works).

But it worked pretty well with Olga. I learned some CSS just watching her type, and it was a way easier way to collaborate on what we wanted than any other approach would have been. Of course, you then have to put up with someone constantly pointing out your typos and stuff. (Bu that is better than putting up with the typos themselves.)

Anyway, go check out what we came up with. It’s just a prototype but I feel really good about it. You can click through the several screens. The final product will be way more complex and have way more options and information, but at least part of the kind of flow of it is there.

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