Weekly Planning Meeting, 7/10

[Marc Stiegler <marcs>]

Highlights 7/10:

The big congratulations this week go to paul, rick, and ravi. 
Paul has the class system working that is needed to make Montage 
object-oriented; rick tells me it is a lot of fun to use. Rick 
himself has linked all of scheran, so now Montage can make all 
the interesting Xanadu calls in scheme that we can make in smalltalk and 
C++. 

Meanwhile ravi did performance engineering this week (required 
because the system was, aahhh, running so slow we couldn't even 
stand it for our own testing, once dean and markm had gotten 
done improving everything so much :-) The result is that the 
server runs 65% faster than it did a week earlier. This is particularly 
amazing because it's running faster even though the permissions 
system is now turned on, whereas it hadn't been before--so the 
real improvement had to be significantly greater, to compensate 
for the extra permissions checking overhead (I should note in 
passing that markm and dean, whom I so offhandedly credit for 
slowing the system down, probably had something to do with figuring 
out what ravi should change to speed the system up :-). (I should 
probably also note that we still need a couple of orders 
of magnitude speedup before we have something we can call a 
product. Performance engineering will be a major effort 
once the functionality is in place; on the other hand, 
we have a lot of ideas for how to get that 
performance increase when the time comes).

Congratulations also go to michael and roger. Michael has snarf 
transceivers written, though they aren't quite working yet. Roger 
has scrolls bars working in dervish, which is a big step towards 
having them work in Tapestry. 

This week's moose hunting award goes to markm and dean. They 
unearthed a really huge moose that has been hiding under 
the rug for a long time: it turns out that it is a LOT more 
difficult to figure 
out if you can flush data that has been sent to disk than any 
of us realized. The good news is that, as regular readers here 
will know, this is the first moose hunting award we've given 
out this year.

The big welcome this week goes to 2 people: Andy Beals, the newest 
member of rick's Montage team (whom I am a week late in welcoming, 
I'm afraid), and Mark Le Brun, the new Director of Advanced Projects, 
responsible for Montage and Cyberspace and various
other advanced projects. 

Meetings:  Bill, hill, talk about garbage collector. Markm, dean, 
ravi, optimization of canopy. Roger, dean, decrement garbage 
collector. Markm, dean, does not propagating unreadable clubs 
optimization overlap delayed installation in ent? Ravi, marcs, 
discuss next task. Markm, roger, michael, overoading member functions, 
send/receive. Ravi, roger, markm, hill, initializers and 2 and 
pattern matching. Dean, ravi, roger, hugh, fm stuff. Marcs, chip, 
4.1 on Victoria. Michael, dean, markm, LRU on RAM objects (snarfs, 
flocks, etc). Markm, dean,  discuss booting. 


Anyway, this week's task list is as follows:

A.       dean

x    7/10/90     nonpurgable items
     7/17/90     flush RAM
     8/17/90     berts & stamps gc

B.       hill

     7/17/90     matching * in C++ initializer
     7/17/90     find and kill garbage collection usage bug!
     8/10/90     enhance translator with ixx

C.       hugh

x    7/10/90     system dependent structs in smalltalk code
     7/17/90     doing image (2)
     7/17/90     implement warp (4)
     7/17/90     run compositors (2)

D.       markm

x    7/03/90     figure out how to shrink stubble output
x    7/03/90     merge
     7/17/90     write C++ 2.1 report
     7/17/90     permission system tester
     7/17/90     update canopies
     7/24/90     club members (10)

E.       marcs

x    7/10/90     circulate security opportunity draft
x    7/10/90     ensure completion of ravi's visa paperwork
     7/17/90     collect sqa notes
     8/24/90     start second round of patenting work
     8/30/89     figure out whether links are standalone objects

F.       michael

x    7/10/90     snarf transceiver written
     7/17/90     snarf transceiver working
     7/24/90     discover size and construct ram object (6)
     7/30/90     write Shepherd Stub recipe (4)
     7/30/90     teach stubble to shephard stubs, shepherd recipe (2)
     8/07/90     chameleon stubs (12)

G.       ravi

x    7/10/90     figure out performance enhancements
     7/17/90     fix up fm for building user views of permissions

H.       bobp

     7/24/90     review issues in SXI
     7/24/90     implement SXI
I.       roger

x    7/10/90     scroll bars in dervish
     7/17/90     make fonts work
     7/17/90     xanatext in xwindows

J.       roland

x    7/10/90     mail formic to rick
     7/17/90     run xlint over all of xanadu
     7/17/90     xlint check for assign to a parameter variable and assignment to "this"
     7/26/90     fix stubble for 1-way connections for dean
     7/26/90     xlint look for missing redundant curlies
     7/30/90     write grammar for formic

K.       Bill

     7/17/90     make garbage collector work across lan
     7/17/90     figure proxy level protocol
     7/17/90     figure out dependencies 

L.       Joel


M.       Jacque

     7/10/90     new flat view scroll bars

N.       Rick

x    7/10/90     wrap in scheme
x    7/10/90     local model working
     7/17/90     ditch old oops based minibrowser, replace with Moose
     7/17/90     models for manipulators

O.       Paul

x    7/10/90     class system working
     7/17/90     fix binding instance variables

P.       Andy

x    7/10/90     come up to speed
     7/17/90     figure out how to port elk to OS/2
     8/17/90     port elk to OS/2

L.       Small Tasks List
    Cleanup region code
    Sequence # in smalltalk, dean & michael versions
    Test files

L.       Deferred Meetings:

     Bill, michael, NEWS versions. 
     Roger, hugh, reproducible Tapestry tests. 
     discuss stubble for ADI with autodesk
     Bobp, joel, marcs, discuss Apple and smalltalk. 
     Marcs, dean, joel, parc place strategy. 
     Dean, michael, structured debug on the ent. 
     Michael, dean, break up the ent for the disk on Tuesday. 
 
     Michael, dean, markm, ravi, efficiency of internsets.
     Roger,, hugh, dean, ravi discuss system independent attributes 
           for the frontends  after fm does paragraphs.
     Roland, dean, discuss xlint commands in smalltalk. 
     Markm, hill, discuss explicit deletion of orgls & refcount deletion. 
     Markm, hill, discuss exception handling on sensors between comm handlers.
     Dean, roger, michael, markm, discuss sequence numbers of size 4 billion. 
     Dean, markm, discuss intersecting backfollow ideas. 
     joel, marcs, discuss terminology in X++ for developer release 
                 (particularly necromancers and related tools)
     Ravi, roger, discuss common view.

M.       Unassigned

     merge contact databases
     scenario documents (markm, dean
     tutorial for users on the frontend
     reference manual for users on the frontend
     test scaffolding, code exercisers

--marcs