After passing my defense on Thursday, I mainly did a bunch of catching up and organizing. I guess I didn’t mention it here before, but my toilet had been broken for ten days (I had to manually flush by filling the bowl with a bucket), and even though I had reported the damage to my apartment management on Friday, June 8, and they promised to special-order the part on Monday, nothing was done. This was partially my fault for not following up, but I had my defense on my mind.
The Friday after my defense I started to take care of things again and was disappointed by the management: I called in the morning and was told management would “check the work order and call me”, and I called again in the afternoon and was reassured the manager would “get right back to me”. None of the return calls materialized. On Saturday I submitted a letter of complaint in the morning and went to the office personally in the afternoon; the response I received was “this hasn’t been taken care of?” No. No, it hadn’t. Finally on Monday, a new tank was installed; the repairs took about 10 minutes. I guess the only problem was getting a tank that fits, or I could have easily done the repairs myself.
I also called my eye doctor on Friday, because I’ve been waiting for my new pair of glasses (which I mostly wear only from bed to bathroom and back) for a month and a half now. I suspect a flaw in their system, because my order of contact lenses was forgotten too.
I reorganized the download directory for the Concutest website and a semi-automatically created download page that combines all the downloads from other sections. Finally, today I submitted my first releases to SourceForge.
I find the release process on SourceForge incredibly cumbersome… someone didn’t think this through. It reminds me of my first web content management system, which allowed users to add posts and news by entering text in a web form, but pages had to be uploaded by FTP, so the whole experience was not purely web-based but a schizophrenic web-FTP hybrid. SourceForge is actually worse: It requires you to upload your submissions by FTP, then select the files from a list of files that also includes other projects’ recent submissions. For every change you make in a field, you have to push a “Submit” button, and that only saves the changes to that particular field, not all fields. I released 14 files today and, if I remember correctly, I had to push a “Submit” button 18 times. That’s just plain ridiculous. No wonder only two people currently in our research group know how to release files on SourceForge.
I’ve also automated the SourceForge Concutest news announcements. Right now I have a script that runs four times daily to exports the news and includes it on the Concutest front page. In a similar way, I’ve automated RiceMBS releases now.
I’ve also found out that Matt Barnett, a Rice and JavaPLT alumnus, is in Houston again and lives quite close to me, so I’m looking forward to getting back in touch again with him.
