Work completed 05/23 - 05/31

1.  Attended workshop at BGCA, Albany on Friday, 05/27.  Noticed the following phenomenon among various notebooks on which the applet was installed:  On some of the notebooks, the applet ran successfully within the context of the browser, Internet Explorer.  However, in the event it did not execute successfully, then the user clicked on the button at the bottom of the page (in the browser) to trigger a jnlp download.  But this generally resulted in an install that did not have the "remove arc" functionality at the bottom of the page.  Furthermore, in the browser, the applet did not include that functionality either.  Need to determine why the "remove arc" functionality did not load properly.  Initial theory is that the jnlp is loading a different (older) version of the applet that does not have this functionality (?) from the server.

2.  Worked out issue with password for accessing source code in svn.  Simply use network credentials for cs rpi network.

3.  Downloaded source code, loaded it in NetBeans and after was able to get the project to build locally.  However, the following issue arose during the build:

Had to delete what appears to be an extraneous library dependency - JOgl (there's already a library dependency, JOGL for the project.) in the project.  I copied the project.properties file from svn, deleted the line for this dependency, and only then was I able to get the project to compile.  Initially, I mapped this library dependency to the same jogl.jar as for the JOGL library, but NetBeans didn't like that - it immediately picked up on the duplicate reference, and generated an error.  So, eliminating that library completely is the only thing that seems to work.

My guess is this libary, JOgl is a typo.  However, the previous developer would have had experienced an error in the project if both libs were pointing to the same jar file, like I experienced.  This makes me think that this should be kept in mind as we move forward with development - in case there's another library (or different version) that the prior developer was trying to reference.  If that becomes the case, we might have to contact the prior developer, if that's at all possible.  For now, it looks like the project works...

Work completed 05/16 - 05/22

1. Attended kick off meeting on Tuesday, 05/17.  Received overview of work to be completed, which included work to be performed on the Wigwam applet, an applet that helps teach kids a conceptual, geometrical understanding of parabolas.  Three areas of work were described - a.  address issue of applet reliability (applet seems to not work properly at various times for students/trainers. b.  make the applet programmable (so that students can drag/drop controls on coordinate plane) c.  make the applet support creation of buckyballs.  This may involve some work with the setting of the applet - moving the xz plane down, or showing negative range of y axis so that full shape of object can be viewed, not just top half.
2. Attended training session at Boys and Girls Club of America, Albany NY, on Thursday, 05/19.  Trained Brandon, a counselor, on basic functionality of applet and on how to make real-life model from the specs provided by the applet (curve length and end-points).  Biggest stumbling block seemed to be conveying a comfort level with plotting points on the graph paper.

Outstanding issue is getting the security credential (password) for accessing the source code.