Team meeting 6/29/2011

Meeting agenda/notes 6/29/2011

Old business

Event viewer (Noam, Jimmy, review)
  • Jimmy needs to add in labels
  • Check permissions before displaying fields in template code (see last week's notes)

Diff displayer' (Mike, Noam)
  • Aiming for delivery with email integration 6/30
  • Display all fields that have changed with their changes
  • Table with each changed field, columns are field name and change

Email integration (deliverable due June 30)
  • Will include diff display
  • Firewall issue on Deme website not an issue for AIR specifically - can't send to outside addresses; need to get Stanford to unblock port 25 per the following:

Rosy Alvarez Feb 3, 2010: "In addition, port 25 is blocked at the Stanford borders for security reasons.  Please read through the following documentation, and see if your
server meets the requirements set by the Information Security Office to be
exempted from the port 25 block.  If so, there is a helpsu url at the bottom
of that page that will go to the security office directly:


Mike thought: "If we need the ability send mail from this box to outside email
addresses, it would probably be much less of a nightmare to find a way
to proxy our mail through another SMTP server somewhere on stanford
campus. There is something on the link mentioned that says "All other
traffic will continue to be routed through the Leland servers" so
maybe there's a way we can set up our mail to go through that. I
submitted a helpsu asking about that, so we'll see what they say."

List viewer proposal
  • Basic proposal looks good - we decided collection and search viewers can utilize more general list viewer, with actions defined by each on selected items (chosen by checkboxes in the list viewer)
  • More complex querying by user (especially state-modifying actions, such as creating a Comment and a Transclusion simultaneously), in multi-link relationship cases 
  • Jimmy will research existing CRM software and how it handles complex queries

Shared drawing board
  • Screen share with one screen that runs Powerpoint or OmniGraffle (for mac) or MSpaint
  • Chris will look into the options and come up with a solution by next week or earlier

Symsys website - spam, slowness, code push (Chris, Mike, Joe)
  • Caching is a feature of deme, but is currently disabled on the symsys website. Probably due to the fact that we won't have an invalidation policy other than timeout, so when someone edits an item, they won't see the changes until the cached copy times out. What is a robust way of determining all actions that can invalidate a cached page (other than deleting the whole cache every time the database changes). Most sites have a static hierarchy and a specialized set of code per page to determine when to invalidate its cache.
  • performance problems may be due to virtualization - Ubuntu standard (KVM) in use now, but everyone else uses Xen or vmware
  • Also may be due to database not being able to fully reside in memory
  • Chris will copy Symsys databse to his laptop and see how fast it runs, profile performance, work with Mike to get started (look for PostgreSQL backup on Google)
  • Chris  will do research and  take on moving to the cloud: 4 servers are PIECE  ($40/mnth on Linode),  Whovoted (under $20/month); keep Deme and Symsys  on our box; entire  machine would cost about $200/month
  • Google App Engine?
  • may be able to use nonprofit status for Whovoted and PIECE
  • Whovoted exceeds 500MB db
  • Chris will talk with Mike about integrating alumni database with spreadsheet data
  • get started parsing alumni data with python program (save excel to csv), then integrate data into symsys site with Mike's help

Issues document (and Mike's local todo document) - create project tool?
  • Mike recommends using Git plaintext document instead - committing a text file there
  • Synchronous and asynchronous editing with notice to users seeing users - synchro is harder because can't use TinyMCE, and how do we store versions with synchro editing
  • Jimmy  created new Git  document in repository for issues, migrating issues, merged with Mike's old document  in repo
  • still needs to organize issues, placing link item in Deme Team Folio  to replace current  Deme Issues document

Empirical studies
  • Possible empirical studies this summer with Jimmy
  • Todd and Jimmy will meet to discuss

Mike webcast to everyone to explain Deme plumbing (including permissions) - all went well

New business

Document viewer
  • Noam, Jimmy, and Todd will meet to discuss on Tuesday 7/5

  • Or get yuuguu membership $80/yr 1 person, $100/yr 2 people
  • Mike will try to set up VNC forwarding through his private virtualized machine, alternatively we'll get yuuguu

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