User:Bhinesley

Who I am

My name is Brandon Hinesley. I am a 26 year old, unemployed, full-time student finishing up my sophomore year of a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. I live in California. My preferred coding environment is in any *nix operating system, while using vi and screen.

Contact

• IRC nick: bhinesley
• email: bhinesley@gmail.com

Experience

I have 5 years of experience designing commercial plumbing systems in 3d, using AutoCAD. My experience is minimal with C/C++, Java, and Python, but I have coded dozens of VBA programs for several companies I have worked for. I was a Linux systems administrator for a small business network, as well, for about 3 years.

GSoC 2011 Project

I'm migrating MGED commands to Archer, and cleaning up existing commands.

Log

• 06/04/11
  • Reading documentation today.
• 06/03/11
  • Since the man command was made functional yesterday, today I started work on moving it into it's own file/class in tclscripts/man_browser.tcl. The class is now partially functional, and Archer.tcl has been mostly modified to work with it. I'm having problems with some Itcl/Itk stuff, so it's back to the books tomorrow.
• 06/02/11
  • I was still having problems today, but I knew that I really just need to read some more, so that's what I did. A couple hours later I figured out what I was doing wrong and made some progress.
  • The man command only accepts commands that in fact have man pages as an argument, launches the man page browser, but I'm not sure how to load the page for a particular command yet. and loads the man page from the args. It appears to be fully working, plus improvements. There is still some refactoring/cleanup to do, though.
  • Note: It would be nice if the man page browser TOC would jump to commands based on keyboard input, or if it had a filter. I've proposed it in #brlcad; I'll look into this once I have a better handle on things I'm done migrating it.
• 06/01/11
  • Reading documentation. Resuming migration of man command tomorrow.
• 05/31/11
  • Started logging progress to this wiki.
  • Submitted patch 3309910. This modifies Archer's opendb command, so that when no arguments are passed it behaves similarly to MGED. There is a small bug that I'm not sure how to fix yet.
  • Taking (probably) the rest of the day to read Tcl/Tk and Itcl documentation.
• 05/30/11
  • Mostly done adding the man command to Archer; running into a wall with my Tcl/Tk and Itcl knowledge.
• 05/29/11
  • Submitted patch 3309107. The Archer closedb command is an explicit part of my project.
  • Submitted patch 3309109. Changed MGED's new file input box to a dialog.

General plan

My development timeline is rear-loaded. My plan is to migrate the 2 commands in each of the first two milestones quickly. I can then focus on cleaning up Archer commands in order to become proficient with the relevant code. The remaining commands will be more challenging, so this will help later on.

Development timeline (from proposal)

• June 14th
  • Milestone 1
    • A minimum of 2 commands will have been migrated to Archer by this date.
• July 5th
  • Milestone 2
    • A minimum of 4 commands will have been migrated to Archer by this date.
• July 5th to 11th
  • Prepare for mid-term evaluation: cleanup, review, handle of unanticipated issues
• July11th – July 15th
  • Mid-term evaluations due
• August 2nd
  • Milestone 3
    • A minimum of 7 commands will have been migrated to Archer by this date.
• August 16th
  • Suggested 'pencils down' date
  • Milestone 4
    • A minimum of 10 commands will have been migrated to Archer by this date.
• August 16th - 22nd
  • Prepare for firm 'pencils down' date: cleanup, review, handle unanticipated issues
• August 22nd
  • Firm 'pencils down' date