Adding, Editing or Deleting a NewsFlash

Here’s a PDF that descries how to add, delete, or edit a newsflash on our prototype site.

addinganewsflash.pdf

 

Another potential KAVI replacement

Web hosting solution designed for professional organizations:

http://www.wildapricot.com/professional-associations.aspx

Example websites at the bottom of the site above.

Check it out –jeff

Prototype Web Site

Check out our new prototype website.

http://www.tedkubaska.com

I know it’s my name … I’ve made my own site into an IEEE Oregon prototype. It’ll keep this name for a month or so. Every day or so I update it sleghtly with a new or tweaked feature. Hopefully some other ExecComm members may also make some modifications.

Robotics SIG — one might start up in Portland

There’s some talk about a local Microsoft Robotics SIG starting up.

Here’s a quote from Lee WIlliamson of PADNUG

<start quote>

If you’re not familiar with Microsoft Robotics Studio and are interested in robotics you should check it out.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/default.aspx
You don’t even need a robot to use it. It comes with a virtual environment
where you can program a virtual robot. There’s even a virtual Mindstorms robot.

Personally, I was envisioning something that would be less presentation
oriented and more “hands on”. Bring a laptop and make a robot do stuff,
or if more than one robot was available maybe have competitions after an
introductory meeting or two.

<end quote>

For more information check out the padnug mailing list on yahoogroups.com

Web Site Statistics Since Last Meeting

Here are web site statistics for since our last ExecComm meeting.

• Session: A series of Hits to your site over a specific period of time by one visitor.
• Pageview: A request to the web server by a visitor’s browser for any web page; this excludes images, javascript, and other generally embedded file types.
• Hit: Any successful request to a webserver from a visitor’s browser.
• Bytes: The quantity of network bandwidth used by the files requested during the selected Date Range.

Here are the blog hits.

Jim Shore’s Agile Talk

The talk was mostly non-technical , but interesting nonetheless. Jim has a book out with O”Reilly and this talk seems like part of a book tour.

He started off saying that contrary to what you might expect, increased testing results in more bugs. So you got to look at the data and not go with you feelings. How is this seeming contradiction explained? Well, if you have a very strong testing group and a lot of pressure on developers, the developers tend then to get fast but sloppy, believing that the testing group will find their errors. This is no the way to run a team.

Rather he believes testers should work with developers to come up with methods that minimize the occurrence of bugs.

Qestions form the audience on who management views this. Why do developers always seem to think management is benighted? Oh, if we have no bugs or fewer bugs, our managers will lay off testers. Yes, the benighted ones will. They’re probably the same people that cancel their home insurance when they go a year or two without a fire.

Diana said that one should think of the team as a team that works together. The balance is right so don’t mess with it. Agile people talk about self-organizing. This does maake it difficult to maintain competition among co-workers and team members. Yes, there are organizations where team members compete angainst other team members. Think of a sports team as an analogy.

Interesting concept called technical debt was discussed. This concept is due to Ward Cunningham. You know, you’re in a hurry, so you do something that is quick but you know is not the right way to do it. You say you’ll go back and fix it. The more you do this the more you have to go back and fix. Not that you should’t have any technical debt, but it’s something to watch.

A good talk, good pizza, a chance to touch base with the technical community.

Proposed new IEEE floating point standard

Anyone interested in going over the new IEEE P754 Floating Point Standard? I’m on the ballot committe and the votes are due 11/10/07.

If you’re not on the Draft Committee (that is, the group that put together the draft), it’s OK to discuss it. The people who wrote it are cautioned not to lobby for a particular viewpoint, but if you’re not one of the writers, then it’s certainly OK to discuss its good (or bad) points. It’s a really nice new standard with lots of new stuff … the standard for computer representation of decimal numbers is neat.

Web Statistics for Last Month

Now, I’m trying to understand what these statistics mean, so please feel free to jump in and correct what I’m saying.

Note that the range I chose was from our last Executive Committee meeting.

We have 656 sessions. What does that mean? A session is defined as hits by a single user. We got 53 174 hits. So I think this means that we got 656 visitors with a total of 53 174 hits, meaning that each visitor averaged about 80 hits. This is a lot for one user. I’m administering the web site and I’m not sure I hit it more 80 times/month. So are we interpreting these statistics correctly.

And here are statistics for our blog. These statistics do not include my (tkubaska) accesses. Clearly, we don’t have a lot of activity here.

Using Word to Post Blog Entries

I usually just log into the blog and use the wordpress facilities to post. But for the last post I tried out Microsoft Word 2007. You can use its blog post feature. From within Word, you register your blog (it’s interesting that the registration form refers to a PHP program!). Then you type the entry and select Publish from a dropdown menu.

One unfortunate thing is that when you publish, you get a message that says your username and password may be visible on the net. I’m not sure what that means in terms of security. Does anyone know?

Executive Committee Meeting

Tuesday, October 9, 2007.
6PM
PSU, 4^th Ave Building