status (meeting?)

[Luka <luka@MIT.EDU>]

not sure if we're having a regular tuesday meeting, b/c of siggraph,
so here's a quick status report from me below.  mic and i met up
monday, so unless someone else speaks up i might optimize the tuesday
trip to cambridge out of my schedule and work from home.  let me know
if we are meeting.  otherwise/regardless, cool developments.....

1. i have the remote wk database server/client working in most avail
  configurations (irix/linux, local/remote), and intend to debug the
  remaining failure cases i've seen pretty soon.  this is new: this
  stuff hasn't run since the last time rick worked on it i think. :)
  getting it to go was not too hard tho.

2. i have the multiuser code working on linux, local and remote.
  again, this is new, as above.  plus i have it failing horribly but
  in a way i at least abstractly understand on irix, and think i can
  fix within a few more days.

  note, this is a sim plugin, and one that really exercises quite a
  lot of the generic threaded/server/client code layer.  as such it
  is an incredibly good regression testbed to work with.  it is also
  complicated enough i had to go through no less than 7 layers of
  thread spawning (maybe 9 now that i'm counting) to get down to where
  the bugs i'm seeing were... after i realized it was threading at
  all!  and not even threading grauitously!  well maybe a little, i
  talked to mic about it, and rwb may have gone overboardhyperactive a
  bit but in the end everything he put in the framework is actually
  useful (even indispensible) in the grand scheme.  if we do end up
  extending this further (like we hope to) it will be absolutely
  necessary to have that machinery there.

3. i think i have a pretty good idea of how all the ndb stuff goes
  together, and related stuff from there.  read bukowski's phd thesis
  if you ever want to get a start on it yourself, copy cached in
  graphics:/home/luka/Papers/rwb-iwes.pdf.  while that doc is not
  half the story it's really one of the most well-written informative
  theses i've seen in a while, and i'm working on getting the
  remaining folklore into written form myself now.  progressing well.

  [must say: very few serious code hacks have been needed in this
  latest development phase, mostly just figuring out how to pilot the
  beast.  i'm turning that "piloting/folklore" into docs now.  plus
  there are in fact a few needed patches.  but on the whole, this is
  some amazingly sophisticated and well-done code.  rick bukowski
  deserves some mad respect.]

4. i purified.  i got scared and ran away.  there's gonna be a lot of
  cleanup to do before i can call this a stable system but at least
  there's a precise way to assess what needs help once again now.
  we're definitely not in any untenable position, and could still make
  walkthru into a very nice stable high-quality package within a month
  now i think.  just keep the caffeine flowing.

5. i've done little else for the week that's demonstrable at this point.
  but there are other things in the works of course.  notably, some of
  the above accomplishments clear dependencies in my table for dealing
  with higher-level things.  (e.g. once i have a regression case for
  sims [via MU] i can attempt to depollute the sim support code, and
  likewise the vis code that got too intimate with it via tapestry, and
  then work on a sane vis codebase.)

all for now.  i'm sure i'll have more in another hour as always.  --pl