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| Lumiere | hi th1a | 16:26 |
|---|---|---|
| yvl | hi guys | 16:26 |
| * yvl runs off to brew some coffee | 16:27 | |
| * Lumiere sucks on a colder caffiene source (Diet Coke) | 16:29 | |
| Lumiere | 9 am here | 16:29 |
| Lumiere | already 85F outside | 16:30 |
| Lumiere | (30C) | 16:30 |
| th1a | good morning yvl, menesis, aelkner, Lumiere, moquist. | 16:32 |
| aelkner | morning | 16:33 |
| menesis | hello | 16:33 |
| menesis | 20C here at 4PM :( | 16:33 |
| th1a | It is a lovely 70F here. | 16:34 |
| th1a | Nothing but blue sky. | 16:34 |
| th1a | It seems like the release went smoothly. | 16:34 |
| th1a | Good work everyone, esp. yvl and menesis. | 16:35 |
| * yvl seconds - thank you all for a great release! | 16:36 | |
| th1a | One interesting piece of news here, I've got a meeting next Friday with http://wirelessgeneration.com/ in New York. | 16:37 |
| th1a | I think they mostly invited me down to talk about their open source strategy -- they're about the only US ed tech company that has one. | 16:37 |
| Lumiere | ihu all :) it is gonna be a really nasty day here :) | 16:37 |
| th1a | And they also use Python. | 16:37 |
| th1a | But I am going to get to give them a SchoolTool pitch. | 16:38 |
| th1a | Basically, they collect a lot of assessment and testing data from schools, but they also need to collect a lot of other data, like demographic data. | 16:38 |
| th1a | That would come from an SIS. | 16:38 |
| th1a | So if they still have schools trying to give them that stuff on spreadsheets or worse, a free SIS to distribute with their products would save them a lot of data cleanup costs. | 16:39 |
| th1a | I'm sure that's less and less of an issue in the US, though. | 16:40 |
| th1a | It is about as good a lead as we're going to get with a US software vendor at this point though. | 16:40 |
| yvl | hmm, interesting. | 16:40 |
| aelkner | good luck with your pitch! | 16:41 |
| th1a | Generally vendors who do data warehousing type of things are most likely to be interested in SchoolTool. | 16:41 |
| th1a | A million idiosyncratic SIS's costs them money. | 16:41 |
| Lumiere | th1a: especially if we get SIF or some other information sharing format going | 16:42 |
| th1a | They actually quietly let/assigned a developer to help me with TinyZIS years ago. | 16:42 |
| th1a | Wireless Generation did. | 16:42 |
| Lumiere | cool | 16:43 |
| th1a | So they know what is going on. | 16:43 |
| th1a | Which is more than I can say about... just about any other ed tech vendor. | 16:43 |
| th1a | OK... yvl? | 16:43 |
| yvl | ok... | 16:44 |
| yvl | not much to say here | 16:44 |
| yvl | I tried to figure out how to... hum | 16:44 |
| yvl | well, do the security thingie | 16:44 |
| yvl | that's still in progress | 16:45 |
| th1a | Yes, the security thingie. | 16:45 |
| yvl | from where I stand now, it seems that we can come up with something usable | 16:45 |
| yvl | main requirements, from my point of view, being | 16:45 |
| th1a | I was thinking the first thing to do would be to figure out what a report of the security settings of a group look like. | 16:45 |
| th1a | How you'd display it. | 16:45 |
| yvl | yes, that's one end of it | 16:46 |
| yvl | I looked at the way Moodel does this | 16:46 |
| yvl | (somewhere on Youtube) | 16:46 |
| th1a | Ah, good. | 16:46 |
| yvl | it seems quite reasonable | 16:46 |
| yvl | though there will be differences | 16:47 |
| yvl | and I want to keep crowds | 16:47 |
| yvl | they give a lot of customization power to the developer | 16:47 |
| th1a | Yes, absolutely. | 16:47 |
| yvl | (and pain to understand them, of course) | 16:47 |
| th1a | We need them though, definitely. | 16:47 |
| yvl | as for groups... | 16:48 |
| yvl | well, I think we can collect some (or all) of the data required automatically | 16:48 |
| yvl | but, shaping it into something human-readable is another thing | 16:48 |
| yvl | I'm still thinking about it | 16:48 |
| th1a | It does not seem easy. | 16:49 |
| yvl | hope to come up with a prototype this week | 16:49 |
| th1a | I was thinking about the sophistication of the user in this case. | 16:49 |
| yvl | It certainly does not look easy :| | 16:49 |
| Lumiere | it isn't... but it is important | 16:49 |
| th1a | This isn't something where we're shooting for a display we'd expect a casual user to easily grok. | 16:49 |
| Lumiere | th1a: btw.. SMART has a linux version of their notebook software ;) | 16:49 |
| yvl | th1a, I agree completely | 16:50 |
| Lumiere | it is somethink I expect to require documentation | 16:50 |
| yvl | I lean towards Gnome rather KDE | 16:50 |
| yvl | less settings, less text | 16:50 |
| th1a | It is for when a serious sys admin is ready to dig in and make sure this does what it is supposed to. | 16:50 |
| yvl | just most important things presented to you | 16:51 |
| th1a | Yes. | 16:51 |
| Lumiere | yvl: gnome runs 2 layers of settings | 16:51 |
| Lumiere | the menus and their settings view | 16:51 |
| Lumiere | then the full gconf editor | 16:51 |
| Lumiere | which lets you touch everything | 16:52 |
| yvl | yes | 16:52 |
| th1a | My goal in the first pass is "audit" not "customize." | 16:52 |
| yvl | yes, th1a. But we need to think ahead. | 16:52 |
| th1a | Sure. | 16:52 |
| yvl | I certainly don't want to spend time rewriting something I've just written | 16:52 |
| yvl | we don't have this kind of a budget ;) | 16:53 |
| yvl | Lumiere - here we have the code, and then... well we need to build the second part now. | 16:53 |
| Lumiere | yvl: yep | 16:54 |
| yvl | well, another thing I worked on this week, was adding plugin initialization and startup order control | 16:54 |
| yvl | it's in trunk, but without examples | 16:54 |
| yvl | for now it will be useful for CanDo | 16:55 |
| yvl | as their demographics should be configured after the SchoolTool | 16:55 |
| yvl | not in a random order | 16:55 |
| ignas | yvl: you probably will want to look at reusing the same principle with evolution scripts some time in the future by the way | 16:55 |
| ignas | yvl: the plugin ordering thing | 16:55 |
| yvl | oh yes | 16:55 |
| th1a | Ah. | 16:55 |
| th1a | Hi ignas. | 16:55 |
| ignas | th1a: hi | 16:55 |
| yvl | it's a beginning of my hidden agenda :) | 16:55 |
| yvl | well, not that hidden :) | 16:56 |
| yvl | just that plugins will be a headache some time in the future | 16:56 |
| th1a | Agendas aren't hard to hide from 8 time zones away. | 16:56 |
| yvl | my apologies | 16:57 |
| yvl | I'm really not trying to hide anything | 16:57 |
| yvl | just that I didn't spend enough time to write it all down :| | 16:57 |
| th1a | I'm just kidding. ;-) | 16:58 |
| yvl | phew... :) | 16:58 |
| aelkner | yeah, you got to watch that dry hoffman wit :) | 16:58 |
| th1a | It's not hard to miss a joke from 8 time zones away. | 16:58 |
| yvl | I'm not that good at communicating via... any kind of writing, sadly. | 16:58 |
| th1a | Actually, most people can't tell if I'm joking when I'm in the same room. | 16:58 |
| th1a | It is one of my defining characteristics. | 16:59 |
| yvl | makes me smile every Monday :) | 16:59 |
| th1a | Actually, the funny thing is that I've gotten in the habit of winking a lot on chat and mail, but I NEVER wink in real life. | 16:59 |
| th1a | ;-) | 17:00 |
| th1a | Anyhow, looks like yvl has plenty to keep him busy the rest of the month. | 17:00 |
| th1a | aelkner? | 17:00 |
| aelkner | ok, first a small matter | 17:00 |
| aelkner | i fixed the bug about not highlighting error values on return | 17:01 |
| aelkner | but i didn't change the status yet becuase i wanted to discuss something | 17:01 |
| aelkner | all along, the gradebook would abort processing on first error which you uncovered as a bad idea | 17:01 |
| aelkner | so i fixed that last week | 17:02 |
| aelkner | the errors then were listed out | 17:02 |
| aelkner | grade G for activity foo is invalid | 17:02 |
| aelkner | grade H for activity foo is invalid | 17:02 |
| aelkner | etc. | 17:02 |
| aelkner | but then you pointed out how the error colors were not there, which i fixed | 17:03 |
| aelkner | now i'm thinking, instead of listing the errors, i could now take advantage of the red higlighting | 17:03 |
| th1a | That's probably sufficient. | 17:03 |
| aelkner | and just say "Invalid scores (marked in red) were not saved' | 17:03 |
| aelkner | and then, if the user had many red scores and wasn't careful abotu saving | 17:04 |
| aelkner | they would at least not get many lines of red text | 17:04 |
| aelkner | one for each error | 17:04 |
| yvl | sounds great | 17:04 |
| aelkner | i figured it would be cleaner that way | 17:04 |
| aelkner | th1a: does my error message sound right | 17:05 |
| aelkner | ? | 17:05 |
| th1a | That sounds ok. | 17:05 |
| th1a | I think in a perfect world we'd actually save them but not use them in any calculations. | 17:05 |
| th1a | And keep them red. | 17:05 |
| th1a | I'm not saying it is necessarily worth doing now, | 17:06 |
| th1a | but I don't like that the scores show up after you hit save without being saved. | 17:06 |
| aelkner | we could discuss that in the near future, but for now I'll make the one message only change | 17:06 |
| th1a | That's fine. Thanks. | 17:06 |
| aelkner | ok, onto bigger things | 17:06 |
| aelkner | i didn't respond to your note about the gradebook summary becuase i wated to turn my attention to SLA | 17:07 |
| aelkner | i did a study of the remaining intervention issues as you requested | 17:07 |
| aelkner | and wrote the migration script for moving narratives to gradebook report activities | 17:08 |
| aelkner | one thing that i needed to decide was to make the activity for 'Overal Grade' a comment activity like the other two | 17:09 |
| aelkner | this means that the gradebook will give it a fckeditor widget as well | 17:09 |
| aelkner | this is a departure from the current narrative edit view which has just a TextLine widget for 'Overall Grade' | 17:10 |
| aelkner | we don't have a second type of Comment scoresytem for free comments that use TextLine rather than fckeditor | 17:11 |
| aelkner | i'm not saying this is a problem, just that SLA users will notice the change | 17:11 |
| aelkner | you see, they don't just put A+ in that field | 17:11 |
| aelkner | some teachers put 85 | 17:11 |
| aelkner | other's all kinds of stuff | 17:11 |
| aelkner | so now score system other than comments would work | 17:12 |
| th1a | Right. | 17:12 |
| aelkner | ok, so that should be no problem | 17:12 |
| aelkner | so the goal is to get rid of narrative reports from the intervention package, of course | 17:12 |
| aelkner | so migrating the data was a first step | 17:13 |
| aelkner | getting rid of the appearance of narrative report cards from the intervention views is the next step | 17:13 |
| aelkner | there are two views in question | 17:13 |
| aelkner | one, the student intervention center has goals, messages, and narratives on it | 17:14 |
| aelkner | the second, the section intervention view, also has links for viewing goals and messages as well as edting narratives | 17:15 |
| aelkner | i would need to get rid of the links there, too, for narratives | 17:15 |
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| aelkner | Lehman may not be thrilled with losing those links in those two views | 17:15 |
| th1a | Why do you need to get rid of them? | 17:16 |
| aelkner | if the intervention package doesn't know about SLA specific narrative report sheets | 17:16 |
| aelkner | it can't have a provision for displaying links to them | 17:17 |
| th1a | Can it display links to all report sheets? | 17:17 |
| th1a | Shouldn't it? | 17:17 |
| aelkner | maybe | 17:18 |
| aelkner | that's your call | 17:18 |
| aelkner | if you want me to do that, i could | 17:18 |
| yvl | maybe you can add a viewlet there? | 17:18 |
| th1a | It seems to me that it should. | 17:18 |
| aelkner | yeah, i was thinking about that | 17:18 |
| th1a | But I'm not looking at it. | 17:18 |
| th1a | Note that I'm ok with making gradebook a hard dependency for interventions. | 17:19 |
| aelkner | th1a: that helps to know | 17:19 |
| aelkner | so i was thinking of the viewlet idea like yvl just suggested | 17:20 |
| th1a | We don't have cripple its functionality or tie ourselves in knots to make it work without the gradebook. | 17:20 |
| th1a | Sounds good. | 17:20 |
| aelkner | but i would ot bother with the viewlet idea if i know the dependency on gradebook | 17:20 |
| th1a | It just depends on how much work it would be. | 17:20 |
| th1a | It could always be refactored later, I guess. | 17:21 |
| aelkner | and the assumption that links to the report card activities would suffice | 17:21 |
| yvl | are goals, messages and narratives gradebook specific, or SLA specific? | 17:21 |
| aelkner | goals and messages are intevention general | 17:21 |
| aelkner | narratives are SLA specific | 17:21 |
| aelkner | th1a had the vision for moving the narratives to report activities which is gradebook general | 17:22 |
| th1a | I mean, I'm not sure of all the moving parts. If there is only a few places where there would be a dependency, and a few hours work would clear that up, then do it. | 17:22 |
| aelkner | is intervention depends on gradebook, i can put links to the report sheets in the intervention package | 17:22 |
| aelkner | then i don't need the viewlet | 17:22 |
| th1a | There will be nothing SLA specific when aelkner is done. | 17:22 |
| aelkner | right | 17:22 |
| yvl | sounds ok then | 17:23 |
| yvl | add the links to report sheets | 17:23 |
| yvl | and see what happens... | 17:23 |
| aelkner | th1a: so the decision is to put links to any and all report sheets in those two views | 17:23 |
| aelkner | ? | 17:23 |
| yvl | it shouldn't be hard to refactor if we want to separate | 17:23 |
| th1a | Any report sheets related to the student. | 17:23 |
| th1a | Report sheets are by their nature, relevant here. | 17:23 |
| aelkner | ok, so i'll handle it that way | 17:24 |
| aelkner | next | 17:24 |
| yvl | I guess the only thing I'd like to see is that you could disable the intervetntion package and the gradebook would still work | 17:24 |
| aelkner | the dependency only would go the one way | 17:25 |
| aelkner | so yes | 17:25 |
| yvl | cool | 17:25 |
| aelkner | i will need to migrate the narrative pdf reports to the gradebook package | 17:25 |
| aelkner | but that would require discussion about how to request them, the action links and all | 17:26 |
| th1a | Can you send me one? | 17:26 |
| th1a | A copy? | 17:26 |
| aelkner | one action link? | 17:26 |
| th1a | Of the report. | 17:26 |
| aelkner | ok | 17:27 |
| aelkner | after the meeting i'll send a sreenshot | 17:27 |
| th1a | These are essentially the report cards? | 17:27 |
| aelkner | yes | 17:27 |
| aelkner | the action links are the important question here | 17:27 |
| th1a | Probably we need to enhance the report card layout to let you reproduce them. | 17:27 |
| aelkner | right, so you and i should discuss this soon | 17:28 |
| aelkner | but i'd like to table that for week or so | 17:28 |
| th1a | Perfect. | 17:28 |
| aelkner | what i'd like to do this week is get SLA converted over to the new intervention package | 17:28 |
| aelkner | with all the migration and everything | 17:29 |
| aelkner | so that i can get that behind me | 17:29 |
| aelkner | there is one last issue related to that | 17:29 |
| aelkner | i investigated tying intervention school years to schooltool school years | 17:30 |
| aelkner | i'm mostly done with the code, but i need to do some more migration there | 17:30 |
| aelkner | the change to the code is as follows | 17:30 |
| aelkner | i added link to the school year view called 'Interventions' | 17:30 |
| aelkner | this will be how the user gets to last year's interventions | 17:31 |
| th1a | Well... | 17:31 |
| aelkner | i could also add a drop-down to the intervention search view and also the student intervention center | 17:31 |
| aelkner | but the view istelf had to change to have the intervention school year onject as context | 17:32 |
| aelkner | object | 17:32 |
| th1a | That's the kind of think where you generally do want to see multi-year data in the same place. | 17:32 |
| aelkner | and the Intervention tab had to change to use traversal adapter from app to current intervention school year | 17:32 |
| th1a | I mean, interventions from last year are *extremely* relevant to this year. | 17:32 |
| th1a | Did you discuss this with Chris at any point? | 17:33 |
| th1a | (multiple years in general?) | 17:33 |
| aelkner | yeah, so that's why i figured a drop-down with previous school years would help | 17:33 |
| aelkner | yeah, he was fine with the data being separated by school year | 17:33 |
| th1a | OK. | 17:33 |
| aelkner | just as long as there was a drop-down to go between years | 17:34 |
| aelkner | so i'll do that | 17:34 |
| th1a | If you've discussed it with him. | 17:34 |
| aelkner | i definitely did | 17:34 |
| th1a | Fine then. | 17:34 |
| aelkner | so that's my report. i'll get with SLA to do the migration this week | 17:35 |
| th1a | OK. | 17:36 |
| th1a | Lumiere: How's CanDo packaging coming? | 17:36 |
| th1a | moquist: Any news? | 17:40 |
| th1a | ... | 17:41 |
| th1a | OK then. | 17:42 |
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| th1a | Have a great week gentlemen! | 17:43 |
| * th1a drops the bag of gravel. | 17:43 | |
| th1a | ignas: Did you hear U'K *almost* took over Immensea? | 17:43 |
| ignas | th1a: nope, haven't been keeping up to date last few weeks | 17:44 |
| ignas | th1a: why *almost*? | 17:44 |
| th1a | Well, AGGRO kind of fell apart, leaving an empty space within Atlas and AAA's sphere of influence. | 17:46 |
| th1a | So I guess we got tentative approval to move in, which we started to do, | 17:46 |
| th1a | and then they decided that it would be better to give the space to someone who needed some inducement to be friendly, as opposed to someone already friendly. | 17:47 |
| th1a | Diplomacy! | 17:47 |
| Lumiere | th1a: sorry... busy | 17:47 |
| Lumiere | this last few weeks has been... bad | 17:47 |
| th1a | I've heard, Lumiere. | 17:47 |
| Lumiere | today is the day I kick everyone out | 17:47 |
| th1a | Of? | 17:47 |
| Lumiere | my life at the job | 17:48 |
| Lumiere | and do this | 17:48 |
| Lumiere | menesis: can you send me documentation on the packaging system? | 17:48 |
| Lumiere | menesis: or do I just need to ask you to make something? | 17:48 |
| th1a | Ah. | 17:49 |
| Lumiere | th1a: this afternoon I work with jelkner | 17:49 |
| Lumiere | I teach 2:30-4:30 | 17:49 |
| Lumiere | but 4:30-8 | 17:49 |
| Lumiere | I have to me | 17:49 |
| menesis | Lumiere: I don't have much documentation, just some scattered notes. | 17:52 |
| menesis | And there's not that much to do | 17:52 |
| menesis | Lumiere: what you want to package? | 17:52 |
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| Lumiere | menesis: cando itself | 18:11 |
| Lumiere | (I apologize for slow responses... the itc office at mckinley is moving | 18:11 |
| Lumiere | and I am dragging equips around) | 18:11 |
| menesis | :) | 18:11 |
| menesis | Lumiere: I would rather package that myself | 18:12 |
| menesis | because I'm not sure what will be needed and explaining takes time | 18:13 |
| th1a | That's fine with me menesis. | 18:20 |
| Lumiere | menesis: works for me | 18:54 |
| Lumiere | menesis: do you need anything from me | 18:54 |
| Lumiere | to make a test package? | 18:54 |
| Lumiere | menesis: what I need... is a code package (that is the egg) and a schooltool-cando instance package | 18:55 |
| Lumiere | running on a separate port from schooltool itself | 18:55 |
| Lumiere | (so presumably someone could run a schooltool instance and a cando instance | 18:55 |
| Lumiere | with separate data.fs and start/stop scripts | 18:56 |
| menesis | Lumiere: where do I get the source from? | 18:56 |
| Lumiere | menesis: currently svn trunk on schooltool.org | 18:56 |
| menesis | trunk, ok | 18:56 |
| Lumiere | menesis: I can put off bzr conversion if that helps | 18:56 |
| menesis | Does not matter | 18:57 |
| menesis | svn will do | 18:57 |
| menesis | ok I understand what is needed | 18:57 |
| menesis | there is a schooltool-common package to help with instance packages | 18:58 |
| Lumiere | I want to convert to bzr... but if it is easier for me to leave it in svn I can do that | 18:58 |
| Lumiere | right | 18:58 |
| Lumiere | brb | 18:58 |
| menesis | Lumiere: I will work on that tomorrow | 18:58 |
| menesis | I'm leaving already | 18:58 |
| menesis | Lumiere: also please review the dependencies, description, long description in setup.py | 19:00 |
| menesis | so that I can copy them to the deb | 19:00 |
| menesis | authors, too | 19:00 |
| Lumiere | menesis: in schooltool-common? | 19:01 |
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| moquist | th1a: no news from this week. I just got done with a major project at work, so I'll be focusing on this again starting Wed. or so. | 22:26 |
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| th1a | moquist: Thanks. | 22:47 |
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