Six Weeks and Counting

Today is the end of week 6 for our summer students. In three weeks’ time, on July 13, we’ll be deciding which of the things they’ve been building are going into the end-of-summer releases of their projects, and which are going to be pushed back until December. So far, things are looking pretty good:

• The DrProject dashboard is finished and merged.
• The port of DrProject to SQLAlchemy is almost complete (except for the mail subsystem)—we should be merging it into the trunk starting next week.
• The model for the new ticketing system is working, and Jeff and DC are prototyping a UI. Meawhile, Alex has started work on over-the-web self-registration, which keeps moving up the importance list.
• There have been a host of bug fixes and performance improvements to OLM, and thanks to Jay Goldman at Radiant Core, the team has a pile of good, feasible UI fixes queued up.
• The Eclipse interface for OLM is making steady progress: Florian has a command-line Java client that can push and pull data, and will start building the GUI plugin soon.
• After a few false starts, Xiaoyang is on track with his Mylyn (formerly Mylar) work—you should be able to preview wiki text edits in Eclipse shortly.
• UTest is up and running after many "adventure" getting the virtual machine configured; Pardis is tidying up the UI, and will then work on filtering error messages more exactly.
• Tony's first white paper (on gender equity in computing) is in review, and the second one (on patents) should be in early next week. After that, it's censorship, then surveillance, or vice versa.
• My first major grant application is aaaaaaalmost finished—one more form, a few minor tidy-ups, some signatures, and it'll be on its way to Ottawa. No idea what the odds of acceptance are, but the seven letters of support I received from local companies will help a lot.

Going meta for a moment, this is the fourth year that Karen Reid, Jennifer Campbell, and I have hired a bunch of students, and I think it’s gone very well from a management point of view: everyone has somewhere to do their work, and knows what they’re supposed to be working on, and everyone is getting paid on time. I’m very pleased, and also very impressed.