Category Archives: FGM ASD Blogs

Phil 6.14.2010

7:30 – 10:30, 2:30 – 4:00 VISIBILITY

  • Swung by the site to check on things. All is running. Deleted some unused tables and checked on usage
  • Work with Dong today to finalize PPM for Wednesday demo
  • Switched all my passwords everywhere. Here’s hoping things will still be working tomorrow…
  • Discussing our need for a server with Rick Hally

10:30 – 2:30 FP

  • Built a linkage to have reaction motions work independently from the input forces
  • And that works. What this means is that for the system to work, there needs to be a “perceptual(?)” reference that the opposing motion can move relative to. So the prototype with the holes in it for actuators is actually close to what it should be.
  • Important thing to note – the kf motor should be connected to the reference structure so that the forces coming back from the kf device aren’t modifying the input forces. The test setup is adding these kind of artifacts.
  • Ordered threaded rod (93250A026), nuts (94804A325), and rod ends (60645K441) from mcmaster ($58.34)
  • Ordered two 12v/2A power supplies, a Servo Motor Controller and two 30mm linear actuators from Phidgets ($341.50 CAD)

Mike 6.11.10

The following has been completed on the NetworkWidget

  • Resolved resizing issues
  • Resolved creation issues when within an accordion or whenever not immediately visible
  • Added a data field to SmartShapes so original data may be referenced
  • Added a selectedItem and selectionChange events to SmartShapeContainer
  • Redid how icons are used in the network widget, they are now added by both url and title to better fit with how icons are used in the visibility app
  • Added a method for finding all nodes n hops from the currently selected node
  • Have the basic NetworkWidget functionality working in a running AdvancedQueryWidget

To Do:

  • Add some sort way for viewing nodes n from currently selected node
  • Allow users to query off the n hop nodes
  • Add multiple selection to NetworkMap and n hops from multiple nodes

Phil 6.11.2010

7:30 – 10:00 VISIBILITY

  • Deployed VISIBILITY with fixed slideshow and resolution check
  • Going to make the resolution check a method in EdgeUtils.Utils – Done
  • Updated vis2, IngestManager, and VisibilityScripting with the warning. AccountManagers doesn’t need it.

10:00 – 2:00 FP

  • Went looking for a 3D math library and found this: http://cmldev.net. Giving it a shot. Took a bit of time to find out where the properties are set to include an external library. If you right-click on the project and select properties, it’s in “Configuration Properties->C/C++->General”. Click on the “Additional Include Directories” In the case of cml, you need to point to the cml folder to get the paths working correctly in the code (i.e. <cml/cml.h>) Nope, the documentation sucks.
  • Rolled my own simple vector functions. Collision detect now works. Next, collision response.

Phil 6.10.2010

7:30 – 1:30 VISIBILITY

  • Pat still isn’t pleased with VISIBILITY. Too much resizing of things. We reset her display from 1024×768 to 1280×1024. We’ll see if this helps
  • Found some bugs with slideshows
    • This isn’t really a bug, but the individual and group dashboard windows should be labled
    • If you delete the only dashboard, you can’t drag new items into the target, and you get an exception
    • If you delete one of two dashboards, you get the same behavior, but no errors.
    • Mike has fixed all. Bringing in a new version, also with a screen resolution alert
  • Showed JW and AG the slideshow capability. Anne, liked it quite a bit.

1:30 – 4:30 FP

  • Added a PhysicsController
  • Added PointMass objects
  • Changed the graphics so we have colored balls, which will more match the PointMass objects
  • Got the graphics following the strain gauge input on both paddles
  • Next, calculate collision, and use that to set the motor offsets.

Phil 6.9.2010

7:30 -10:30 (VISIBILITY)

  • Checked out status of VISIBILITY. all seems to be working well
  • Quick status with JM
  • Set up a meeting with Anne to show here the new slideshow capability for tomorrow. She thinks we might have funding for a new project?
  • Viz-n is ungodly slow today and is not allowing ssh connections. Starting the process of setting up a VPS on steadfast.net. Asking for the “Nickel – Debian 5” package (25 GB of Disk Space, 400 GB of Monthly Data Transfer, Fair Share CPU, 384 MB – Guaranteed RAM, Fully Managed, $44.95 per month | FREE Setup)

10:30 – 4:00

  • Starting some actual kinetic feedback algorithms!
  • No, I’m not. The DataDictionary is based around char* for the key. If the pointer goes out of scope, the content is lost. Fixing it so that it works with string.
  • Got the dictionary fixed. Working on integrating with the graphics. Need to build a physics controller

Phil 6.8.2010

8:00 – 2:30

  • Meeting with S14
    • General
      • Make it so that the panel titles are not editable.
      • There should be no minimum character checks in string validators
      • Logging out should close all windows
      • What is “Create Project Form”?
      • Exec Summaries need to save more data. Can be several pages long
      • Eliminate redundant checks on budget center names, if that’s how we’re doing it. There will be things like “A123 – salary”, “A123 – travel”, where travel and salary will be a funding transaction name/type/something???
      • Vertical Scroll layout will work well. Will need the maximize button, though.
    • User
      • Need to add mailing address
    • Create Project
      • Add exec summary and description to project (It is different from the summary and description in funding)
      • Adding a Budget Center line needs to become a single dialog
      • Comboboxes in grid hive odd behaviors: They don’t always close right, they are too easy to switch back to “Add New”, and there is an interaction that causes new rows to be added when clicking elsewhere on the grid.
      • Clicking on add funding will delete the data in an already open funding panel
      • Budget centers may change over the life of the project. This needs to ripple through to the financial entry, but not sure about old funding requests (I think we should leave then alone?).
      • New “Add Budget Center” dialog:
        • Budget Center Name (Addable List)
        • Budget Center Number (text field – Addable List?)
        • Funding Transaction Name(text field- Addable List?)
        • Funding Transaction Number (text Field- Addable List?)
        • Funding Transaction Type (Addable List)
        • Capability (Addable List)
        • Expenditure Center (Addable List)
        • Investment Portfolio (Addable List)
        • Appropriation (Addable List)
        • Type (Addable List)
        • Save button then populates grid. The only editable components are then the numeric values.
    • Create Funding
      • Add an “Edit/Update” Funding
      • User information should be copied over from project
      • Funding Request should copy names from project
      • Mailing Address in funding is broken. No user address?
      • Appropriation should be a dropdown
      • Budget column should have “$0” at the start.
      • Budget should be totaled (Funding Total) and compared to the “Funding Value” entered above the grid on save. If they do not agree, there needs to be an alert
      • “Project Type” to “Funding Type”
      • No “Add” or “Remove” buttons for Budget Center grid.
  • Financial Entry
    • Obligation rows should be above outlay rows
    • Title for a grid will need to have more of the Financial Transaction text in it to uniquely specify
  • Waited for conference call from WPAFB

2:30 – 4:00 (FP)

  • Flailed for a while, then got the sensors reading the new paddles. Turns out that the sensor board closest to one paddle is actually the sensor for the *other* paddle.
  • Templated the bounding box class so I can use it with floats.
  • Worked out the first tests I want to try:
    • Opposing motion on input stick
    • Opposing force on other stick. (I’m starting to think that this may be more effective, since the motion will be relative to some sort of ground)

Possible Bug and Interface Improvements

When making a tutorial to show the user how to group related questions when they save them I ran into a possible bug.  The problem is when I select the create charts after selecting the main category for all of the questions, the select * appears with all the others.  It only seems to happen when I select a main category that has an empty subcategory.  The following are the steps I took:

How To Group Multiple Questions into a drop down
This sections will explain how to group your saved queries so that you can differentiate yours from others and group up questions that have commonality with each other. This section will ask you to do things that were covered in previous sections. Although the steps for these techniques will not be explictly laid out, links to relevant sections will be provided in case you need a refresher on how to do something.
1. In the questions tab reveal the question editor, by clicking and dragging on the the three lines below create chart up.
2. Select example_cars from the list of tables.
3. In the Question Name field type in your user name.
4. Click add with the query field empty
5. Click on the new question that you just created
6. In the Question Name field type in Chevys
7. Click add child.
8. In the questions area note that the question with you username now has an arrow next it. Clicking on the arrow with expand it revealing the Chevys questions group. This process can be repeated over and over to make subgroups as needed.
9. Use the basic query builder to Create a chart with all cars
10. In the Query Panel select the make column using the Column Selector
11. Click on the Chevy bar on the chart and click the New Widget button.
12. Change the name of this new panel to All Chevys
13. Click on the Questions Tab select the example_cars chart and select the subcatergory you made for Cheveys
14. Type All Chevys in the Questions Name.
15. In the, All Chevys Query Panel, select Set Query Builder from the drop down in the lower right and click Go.
17. Click Add Child
18. Now select the Color Column from the All Chevys panel. Click the bar for Red on the chart and click New Widget
19. Change the name of the new Panel to Red Chevys
20. Make sure you still have example_cars and you user name->Chevys question group selected.
21. Type Red Chevys in the question editors name field and use the set Query builder button.
22. Click add child in the Question Editor
23. Close all the query panels that are open so that only the query builder is open
24. With the example_cars table selected, select your user name from the questions list by checking the check box
25.Click Create Charts

Instead of creating two charts it creates three, one being the select * which does not appear in any of the saved questions.  Some other improvements to simplify things for the users would be if when you click set query builder it automatically makes the name whatever the title of the Panel is.  Also when you create a panel the question name should appear as the panel name.  Currently there is a lot of bouncing back and forth between the panel and the query builder.

Phil 6.7.2010

7:30 – 2:30 (VISIBILITY)

  • Deployed new Vis and VSS. The query logging is set up and running
  • Dropped by JM. Full walkthrough is set for tomorrow
  • Telecon with WPAFB? Nope – postponed till tomorrow.
  • Walked through PPM with Dong – found a few bugs. Iterating.
  • Burned a disk to try tomorrow.

2:30- 3:30 (FP)

  • Added normalized sensor values. Spent a while figuring out a good way to have a center value that offsets the results

Mike 6.4.2010

  • Mavenized the NetworkWidget project
  • Started rolling the NetworkWidget in to the AdvQW accordion and came across a few problems:
    • Creating a MsdContainer within an accordion throws a bitmapdata exception because the initial height/width are zero, probably going to have add something which delays the initialization until the network widget becomes visible and also pauses rendering when it is not visible
    • Resizing the MsdContainer causes the background to go black and all link lines to vanish, also sometimes the SmartShapes do not appear

So this may take a bit longer than I initially thought.

Mike 6.1.2010

Finally back home to the internets.

  • Connected the scale bar to the slides, works exactly the same as it does for the work area
  • Added a tip about slide shows to the tip panel
  • fixed an annoying issue where when saving a slideshow, the dropdown menu would refresh and possible select a different slideshow
  • Tested all layout managers with slide shows and they seem to all be working
  • Played a great deal with transitions and found some cool open source ones available but integrating them would be a great deal of work and probably not worth it right now.  For now three basic transitions are available and look pretty good:
    • Dissolve (like fade but also fades text)
    • Wipe
    • Zoom (looks pretty cool actually)

Will start looking at the network widget.

Mike 5.25.2010

The blog is so fast!

May not have a reliable internet connection for the next few days but I’ll be working on the following:

  • Testing all layout managers with the slideshow and loading widgets in various states
  • Trying to connect the scale bar to the slideshow
  • Improving transitions

Mike 5.4.2010

  • Connected to new SVN, checked out and built everything after a little bit of work.  Haven’t tried committing anything yet.
  • Started working on slide shows:
    • Mapped out methods to save slide shows to database but haven’t decided on a table structure yet, probably going to add 2 new tables: one with all the slide show details similar to the dashboard table and a second containing several foreign keys (a slideshowID, dashboardID) and an int holding the order.  So there’d be one entry in the first table per slide show and an entry in the second table for every view in every slide show.
    • Started working on a slide show creation/edit screen.  It’s going to have a list of available views on the left which can be dragged to a list of included views on the right.  The order can then be changed by dragging as well.
    • Finally I’ve only started thinking about the slide show controls. It’s obviously going to need a next and previous button as well as some kind of timed auto next and probably a “jump to” drop-down since going from view to view will not be nearly as fast as say a powerpoint presentation.  It will also need to be compact and draggable (unless I put in in the empty space along the top near the logo).

Open to suggestions on any of this stuff.

Dong Shin Visibility Status – Sep '09

Week of 09/28

  • IE chokes when URL (endpoint) is not set up with full path; ***.***.com or IP address
  • Fixed tables returning from server not role/user based
  • Added publish status, changed mode to Overwrite to IngestConfirm window
  • Changed date in the table names to return YYYY-MM-DD format
  • Bug found in AutoIngestor
    • found that files with no ext (.xml, .xls, etc.) fails to return columns
    • input validation added to RemoteFileWindow and RoleSelectinCanvas
  • Added dataTips to AutoIngest DataGrid
  • Rearranged New and Remote File buttons in AutoIngestConfig
  • Extending File class to HTTPFile to use remote files
  • Adding HTTPS and HTTP capabilities to other types of files
  • All changes uploaded and downloaded.

Week of 09/21

  • Administrators can now delete any tables from the IngestManager
    • isUserAdmin() methods added to both client and server
  • Changed displaying ID of the user to Names of the Users in IngestPanel and IngestedDataConfiguration
    • TablesInfoObject.java
    • Database Query to join TABLE_USERS and TABLE_DATA tables
    • StyleFunction for the AdvancedDataGrid
  • AutoIngest now checks for existing data (file name and table name) on the client
  • Remote File Ingest to handle http and https
    • Server – HttpUtillities.java and SSLUtilities.java under com.edgeti.utils
    • Flex – added Remote File button in IngestVBox, RemoteFileWindow.mxml to handle remote file ingest
    • remote file added to Files Available after validation
    • change handleFileSelected() in IngestVBox to handle http and https and related events/services
    • columns returned from http and https
    • removed old remote file routines from AutoIngestConfigVBox and put RemoteFileWindow to use http and https autoingest…..
    • changed server codes to use full filename for remote (http) and uploadDir for local files.
    • ingest works!!!! seems nothing is broken….

Week of 09/14

  • disabled Use Remote location for Auto Ingest for now….
  • fixed auto ingest to run specified time, hourly, daily, weekly.
  • creating RoleColumns/RoleTree component so it can be used by IngestVBox and AutoIngest.

Week of 09/07

  • Resolved most of the bugs/fixes/enhancements Phil asked.
  • Reworking Ingestor, AutoIngest Config, and Ingested Data Config to use Roles and Role Columns. This requires changes to the Servlet, too.
  • Ingestor problem resolved
    • moved connect/disconnect for each insert SQL to east ingest. It seems ingestion is a lot faster now. XLS ingestor should be changed
  • Continued troubleshooting ingestor problem
    • Ingestor running too fast?
    • file too large?
  • Remote File ingestion
    • running Tomcat under SYSTEM prevents the Ingestor to read remote files
    • running different user (me) works fine.

Week of 08/31

  • Test Deploy to EdgeDemo – successful
    • change endpoint in assets/setupModel.xml
    • MakeFakeData in ManagementUtilsTest.html fails. It seems there is a problem in populateFakeUsers in UsersAndRoles.java
  • Having problems with ingestor. MySQL reports socket not available error
  • Continue looking into remote file ingesttion

Mike 9/20/09

  • Allow users to delete their dashboards (from the save menu)
  • Start up in ‘Builder’ layout
  • If nothing is selected, have a popup that says “No items selected for query” (done in adv and basic query widget, querybuilder defaults to select * so I didn’t change that)
  • Don’t allow components (particularly minimized windows) to go behind the top “VISIBILITY2” UIComponent
  • Resize events on the builder window should re-trigger the layout (Only occurs when in builder layout)