Author: Harry Newton

The second release of Orbital has gone fairly smoothly. Joss has written an official 0.2 release, here I am commenting on how the release has gone personally. There were a few bugs which got ironed out after the meeting with Bingo, but otherwise Pivotal tracker has shown that we are on track. The bugs were only ones that were unlikely to appear in the final version, for example if no licences were enabled. This still means we needed to fix them, but it meant that it had been overlooked. The number of licences enabled needs to be checked for before displaying the dropdown selection in the edit pages or file upload. No licences meant no licence post request. And of course, breaks Orbital.

The main features of this release are thee dynamic data sets and file collections. Now, files can be organised into file collections, like a group of files, but can also be contained in multiple collections. This was one of the major features Orbital needed to implement, and a feature requested by Bingo. He is happy with the results and specifically noted the timeline. Now, each project you own or are a member of will have a timeline of activity you can view, or add comments to. Mostly, this is to track changes over time in the project. Thoguh we have also added a summary of all activity in all projects you have access to on the home page. Its also been colour coded so you can see which comments are public and private.

Though the clocked number of points tends to fluctuate, the releases have been on time. If visualised, the graph shows the projected work speed as a steady incline, whereas the actual workload appears more like steps. this is because of the amount of work being done increasing at some points and decreasing at others.

A patch, 0.2.1, has been release since. This was fixing the bugs found when testing. Mostly, the licences and other such things were improved. No interface overhaul as it was behind the scenes. Though I have just finished moving teh file upload  to a new page. it now has a nice interface! As a plus, this also fixes the invalid upload token issue that sometimes appears.

Having now been working on the Orbital project for almost two months, I have been slowly getting into the developer mindset. Coming from an Artificial Intelligence and Robotics background, I have always been more focussed on my own work rather than writing about whats going on, blog posts and generally being more active in the developer community. This Blog page aims to be a repository for any thoughts on the project or other progressions or difficulties. A step, I guess, towards being more active.

Having gone to MRD Hack day, I have seen what the community of developers is like when they get together. It was an interesting experience, having made ‘Project Rainbow beam’, an activity data stream, and had a number of talks and collaborations between people on such project. Being more active in the developer community, such as seeking out conferences and hacks days that might benefit me, is encouraged and I intend to do just that.

Getting across what CERD are doing and projects being worked on that benefit the University, or anyone for that matter, is important. If no one know what is being done then the work will go unnoticed.