Intro

I forgot to start a blog when I got my current job, so I'm backdating this entry to the start date. I really want to make it work this time and hope to find enough will power to continue writing every day. I just need to remember to sit down and jot a few notes 30 mins before leaving work.

Just to overview the last month and a half... BJS wanted me to impelement a menuing system for IRIS2. He wanted to be able to specify menu structures in XML and have the application construct the menu at run time. I thought it was easy and I could finish it in under a week since I already had done this sort of thing at previous jobs. The devil, as usual, is in the details. Parsing XML was probably the easiest part of the task. What comes after proved to be much tougher. The menus have to be dynamic: any time a new page of the application is activated, the menu should change to reflect context of that page. In addition, there are also toolbars to consider. They are dynamic and change with every page as well. I've implemented a simple stand-alone mock-up of how it all is supposed to look, but integrating what I wrote into the existing code is tricky. I'm still working on that.

They also want me (I think) to establish a reliable continuous build process and a system for tracking bugs and project artifacts. So far I've looked at JIRA and OnTime. IntelliJ IDEA came with a TeamCity license, so we are using TeamCity for continuous builds. It ain't half bad.