Monday morning

Typical Monday morning, woke up lazy... late, rushing, just in time.
Got in the office, Mischa greeted me and said: "Check your inbox, there is an important email!". I was a bit surprised, I thought I had messed up the office's network or something (I had this experience before, as there was some spam in my gmail that got circulated to some colleagues, even to my manager and some colleagues abroad! :O). Turned out I was the winner of last weeks Football pool! :) those were pure lucky guesses though. And apparently it is not something to be happy about, since I have to organize the next poule.. yet I know nothing about football! :P Wish I could start a basketball pool, they said i can organize anything I want. But I thought it wouldn't be wise as the others don't know anything about it, so I decided to stick with football (ehm soccer......:P). So next matches to bet: Tottenham vs PSV and Glasgow vs Bremen.

Back to the project, last week we have been working out some objectives for the second sprint. We have narrowed down the "to do" list we had with Eric before he went on holiday for his new house. Initially the list consists of 7 points, and we've done 6 so far (roughly), but the last one would take up to a week. The "to do" list is:
-Licenses
-Development environment Lisa
-CVS setup
-Investigate GUI(UID)
-Documenting the process (school): Start with the intro, Tooling choices (what?, why?)
*Original 4
*Why down to 2
*Why Flex
-Design documentation: Use cases (db location, access, display), Realizations (UCR) work up to design
-Build it!

On the previous post, I had mentioned that we contacted a guy from Adobe about the licenses, and so far we have no more problems with the watermark on our charts, but the official release date of Flex 3 builder is still undisclosed. We had asked him about it, and he simply replied: "Soon :-) Sorry, can't say more."
We have also set up the environment for Lisa. I myself have started over a clean installation of Apache and ColdFusion server. This time we did not include the installation of LifeCycle DS, since there is BlazeDS, which is open sourced.
We have also talked about how we struggled sychronizing our projects through the CVS. The solution we took was to just share the whole project on the CVS, but in developing, we will only check out and commit the .mxml files that we are working on. That gives us the freedom to test our changes locally on our own machines, and somebody else can still check out the whole project, fully working, without changing any configuration.
On Wednesday we further investigated about the ongoing projects and the desires of information from the project managers. We found out, that there are 3 main projects going on, and all the other projects fall under the big three. The tricky part is that some these subprojects within one main project are part of the other main project(s). And the difficulty for us is that there is no categorization within the databases of the tools they are using. I guess there will be no easy pizzy for us :P.
Other than that, we have completed our documentations so far. We've got a tool research document, an architectural design, a document of User Interface Design (draft). However, we still need our Scrum master substitute (Michel de Blok) to check them out.

Today I am working all by myself. Lisa is off today as her friend (*wink*) is coming over from Germany ;P, and Michel is apparently ill today. Guess i'll sneak out the office early today.. like.. after lunch!.. oops Eric is probably going to read this so I'd better keep it down ;P. Naah nah, we have so many things to get done in a week, so I'm going to be responsible ;)
Anyways, today I have listed down my own planning of the day:
1. Explore BlazeDS
2. Architecture OK? (I guess this is not possible today as Michel is not around)
3. Explore JiraDB and work out a possible query
4. Try to get another page for the application and get them cycling around (i'd prolly have to check out some Slideshow application tutorials)
We decided on Friday about exploring BlazeDS today, because I noticed that when I was still using the LifeCycle DS for the demo, the loading time was so much faster than what we have now (only using CF and Flex data services). BlazeDS uses binary data transfer format, allowing better performance in our data-driven application (hopefuly! ;) ).
Oh, by the way, eventhough it is not listed in our sprint list, but there is something that has been buggering me: the scalability of the application. So far we are just planning and building the application to view the current ongoing projects with certain components to show, but in fact it should not stop right there. We also have to think about the future projects and future desire of more/less components to show. I think we have to discuss this further with Eric when he's back, for now I'll just focus on our Sprint log.
Okkaay... back to work.........!