Project Updates

GVC Web Presence

During the OJAP downtime many improvements were made to our website. Going forward, further effort will be expended to validate and clean up existing HTML pages time permitting. The GVC Homepage is now valid in HTML 4.01 Transitional. In addition several not immediately noticeable changes were made in an attempt to improve GVC's placement in major search engines. Our site ranking for a variety of keywords is being monitored in order to provide metrics on which to base further changes.

All other GVC framesets and navigational menus are currently not valid HTML 4.01 Trasitional (Frameset). This can be easily rectified, but artifects are then introduced in a variety of browsers, thus these changes remain undeployed in hopes of an ideal solution can be discovered. Approximately 4.87-8.5% of browsers would render noticeably different if GVC's current framesets were made into valid HTML.

Other minor changes include the creation of templates for: News Releases, Project Summaries, Project Teasers, and Portfolio additions. These can be found in the Resources section of StarTeam. An extremely minor update was made to the FxVol site as well.

GVC SiteMaker

The first draft of the test plan has been written and final edits should take place in the first week of June. The plan is to have the testing done by the second week of June and AAPS deployed at GVC shortly thereafter. The date for conversion of the University of Michigan to the new version has not been set. The implementation of Virtual Tables has been delayed due to the delay in testing and deploying GVC SiteMaker version 2.5. Virtual Tables should get underway before July.

PURS

Work has continued on the project over the last month, although at a slower pace due to the break for Leon's wedding (and his honeymoon absense). The rest of the team has been working on providing design documentation as well as the continued work on the system infrastructure setup (frameworks and installation of the new Sun servers). Work over the next month will include the design and prototyping of two major subsystems (product data integration and Electronic Data Submission) and the conclusion of Phase 2 of the project.

Online Job Application Project (OJAP)

Evolution 1 is expected to be completed by the end of this week (June 15th) and will be released to the client for their review. Evolution 1 encompasses the creation of Job Announcements and the assignment of tasks to various staff (question/criteria writing, and scoring of applications). Some of these pages will be re-addressed once we have completed development of application creation. Evolution 2 is expected to start soon and will encompass two areas: profile creation, and application creation and submission. It is expected that Evolution 2 will take about 1 month calendar time to complete. Evolution 3 is the final phase and will encompass the administration area (add/managing user and post codes). It is hoped that there will be some calendar time left at the end of development to perform some optimization of the more intricate areas of the system. This project is both budget and time sensitive so this must be kept in mind for all team members.

TPD

The GVC internet server which was hosting the TPD websites was replaced on May 12th by a TPD server. This server is also an ANS server. GVC will continue to support that server for TPD. Minor cleanup of this project was completed, leaving the only remaining tasks to be server maintenance or any requested PO work which may periodically come in.

Ramblings

Non Microsoft Productivity Software

An email forwarded to me by Chuck

This year we see a lot of new software coming online to fill the space that MS Office will be making since announcing XP Office will be going "leaseware" next year. The free Sun office has become penOffice.org while they have stepped up their commercial product line for SunOffice.

I found the Windows freeware office of my dreams in a product called "Easy Word". This is just the kind of office product I had been looking for with Windows. It's a 48 mb download but it is worth it. There is a free version and a very cheap commercial version as well. The Easy Office will also make PDF files.

On a Linux note, we have found a little browser worthy of great things contained in a binary less than 300 kilobytes! Dillo.

There have been a few people on this list using the new Mozilla browser and I have to say it is excellent! Mozilla works flawlessly in Linux and Windows. They have a saying to introduce the new version one which has been eagerly awaited for years since the code was made open source. "Stick a fork in it..it's done"

Sacha extols the virtues of Jass

As you may know, we are converting our frameworks away from iContract to Jass. This is mainly because iContract is completely unsupported, while Jass is under active development. Jass does have several deficiencies of its own, so perfection has not yet been attained, but, since we have the source, we can hack on it to our heart's delight ;-)

All developers should familiarize themselves with it. Chuck or I can give any help you need...

Links

• First International RoShamBo programming contest results - Muskie McKay
• Kartoo (Graphical Meta Search Engine) - Muskie McKay
• Using the Internet to Pick up Babes and/or Hunks - Muskie McKay
• Wired article on extreme car stereos - Muskie McKay
• A funny but unPC Kiwi - Chuck Hill
• An Eric Meyer Interview - Muskie McKay

Happenings

• June 13th - Leon's Vacation
• June 7th - Erica's Seminar (until noon)
• June 10-19th - Pierre's Holiday
• June 17th - Muskie's 27 month review
• June 24th - Pierre's 27 month review
• July 1st - Canada Day
• July 16th - Alann's 36 month review