As mentioned, Thursday saw the handing in of the 4th year solo projects and the 3rd year group projects, after this was the compsoc end of term event at Café West followed by the GU.

My project was finished and ready for handing in at 3:30 (30 minutes early!), after handing it in it was off to Jim’s Bar via the food factory to grab some lunch.

Then after a few drinks it was Café West time, whilst there we were kept entertained by Stevie, Neil, Steve and Derek all having a pop at DJing for the night. After a lot more drink there it was off to the GU and to The Hive.

Finishing the project is strange, it has been coming for so long, yet now that it’s done I’m kind of missing not having to do it. On Friday, after my project demo, I was feeling really charged and ready to do some more work on the project even though I had nothing more to do. I’m sure I’ll be able to channel all this drive into my revision, or perhaps playing some computer games!

My photos from the night out are available on flickr. There is a set containing all the photos from the night, or you can view the photos as a slideshow.

I encourage everyone to join flickr and also to join the Glasgow DCS group, here you can add any photos you have of nights out or other things relating to the department, as well as post to the group only forums.

Hope everyone had a fun night and your easter holidays are relaxed and fun.
- Chris

We talked about the project in general and about what it is that I should be building. We decided that instead of building a tool which would be specific to visiualising and editing say HTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1 Strict I would build a framework for such a tool. This framework would have pluggable parts which would then be used to create specific tools. For instance we will have plugins for parsing XHTML 1.1 Strict and for parsing HTML 1.0, we will also have plugins for editing HTML markup and PHP code. Through a combonation of these plugins we can visualise and edit a site written in HTML which has HTML 1.0 valid markup or edit a site written in PHP which generates XHTML 1.1 Strict markup. Having a pluggable framework will allow the software to be much more extensible than having a specific tool.

As well as deciding this we agreed that it would be useful to look at similar tools to see what types of tools are already existing. This will be worth doing not only to see what existing tools are available but also to see which facilities are available/lacking in them.

Other things we discussed were the general meeting times, and work I will do for next week. It was agreed that we would meet on Friday afternoons (a nice wind down to the week) and that by next week I would have produced a project plan and have a more strictly defined outline for the start of the project.

Best get on with it then,
- Chris

I had proposed a project as I mentioned earlier which will be supervised by Ray Welland. And today the project lists came out matching everyone to their selected projects…

I was matched with my project which I suggested the last week, I can’t wait to start getting into it. Matt was matched up with his Pie Menus on Mac OS X which he suggested. Some other people got projects which they suggested and the majority got choices they had put on their forms. Although most people I have spoken to have ended up with their 2nd or 3rd choice. This does not seem to be the most student friendly way of allocating projects but will probably work out for the best in the end.

I would think it better to allow students an opportunity to all propose their own projects (perhaps before the start of the university year). This would give each person enough time to work out a feasible project, find a supervisor and get a jump on the project selection. It would also allow each student to propose something which they would really like to do, rather than make a compromise for the next best thing.

Anyway, all the projects are up, everyone has one and we are all raring to go! On a side, Neil got the integration of DECS into Eclipse project… um, good for you dude. I can sell you inside information on the DECS stuff and recommend a good man to talk to about it. But, it all comes at a price… that’s right, all the tea.
- Chris

So we’re back at university. Life is good, lectures have started and we are all basically back into the fray of that which is University. Seeing everyone again is ace and getting back into the swing of studying has been easily done. This is a good thing as it has been straight back into the thick of things, no pissy week course on Unix or much of an introduction at all. After all we are the truly hardcore!

Anyway this post is mainly to bring about the attention of my new project which I have proposed. After working on the DECS project over the Summer I was very interested in building some sort of CASE tool. When I consulted the list of 100+ projects I was upset to find nothing of this nature (except of course the DECS extension projects). Therefore after the first of Ray Welland’s SEP4 lectures I went to talk to him supervising me building some sort of CASE tool.

After agreeing to this we had a preliminary meeting in which we pulled together all the ideas we had and came up with a rough idea for a project. I then went off and wrote the project proposal which would be officially handed to the university as the details of the project.

Therefore VisiSite was born, I wont go into details here, but the details will be available from the VisiSite home page and the synopsis of the project also available.