Week 5 7/21/08 - 7/25/08
On Monday, I made the tables of events in Notifier able to be refreshed. I also started working on getting the properties lists in Scenic be populated dynamically instead of being hardcoded. I had to get Garret to help me because the dropdown lists would be rendered before the data got back from the DB. I ended up writing a listener interface and having a method fire a ThingListChanged event when it was done populating from the DB. That approach involves quite a bit of code but it appears to work reliably, which is the important thing.
On Tuesday, I realized that there was no purpose in having Recurring or Active properties associated with events in Scenic because within Scenic it changes nothing whether something is active or recurring or not so I moved those fields and buttons over to Notifier.
On Wednesday, I got my program to save the event details for events to be notified by email or SMS. I also figured out how to cause cascading deletes in MS Server 2005. It actually only requires checking one box when assigning a foreign key constraint.
Evan was back and I showed him my progress. Karl was there and suggested that I use WebAnywhere which is some program that is being developed here that helps blind people view web pages without needing to install anything, not even browser plugins.
We also got accounts for the WordPress blogging software and I spent a while getting that set up and transferring over my previously written journal entries.
On Thursday, I spent almost the whole day at an FTC (Federal Trade Commission) workshop called “Pay on the Go: Consumers & Contactless Payment.” I will be putting up my notes and observations from listening to the panels.
On Friday, I typed up my notes from the FTC conference. Magda wasn’t here for our weekly meeting so we talked to Evan instead. He had us dowload Latex/Miktex plugin for Eclipse that is used to create formal writing papers. It allows multiple people to be working on separate parts (intro, abstract, etc) and the program will automatically put the parts together and format it all nicely. It also handles properly formatting the bibliography and citations, which is nice.