It's been a good first week here at FOSS. After spending a couple days getting everything set up with my computer (git, TurboGears, fedorahosted, etc etc), I started working on making a demo of the kind of widgets CIVX could use to display information, particularly for the New York state senate. I've been playing around with a jQuery tabs widget that's pretty sleek looking. After some struggling to get that working in TurboGears, I think it looks good so far, and will be really awesome once I l ...

So today JT and I ran tests on all of the various formats we had decided to look at, except SVGs, and we learned a lot of useful information we did not previously know. First and foremost we learned that bmp, while a larger format when it comes to file size, is easily the best for performance. It constantly performed almost two times better than every other format in every test. We also learned that when we used images with transparency, whether it was built- in with the format or rendered to lo ...

Today will be dedicated to proof reading the CIVX future list roadmap, and to documenting what has already been written for the game engine. Last night I was able to get linux working on my laptop and now the engine is running so development should be much easier. ...

Today I managed to get a semi-working mockup of a tabs widget that could be used to display information about NY state senators. Each collapsible tab contains a category of information such as bill sponsored by that senator, committees they are a member of, contact information, etc. Hopefully the coolest part of this will be a calendar widget embedded in one of the tabs, to store events relating to the senator. This part is not functional yet; right now I put up a very basic calendar as a placeh ...

Worked all day on formatting (and eventually reformatting >_>) my mac book. Installing linux as a separate partition for development. Almost finished. ...

So after a long and fruitless process we finally finished retooling the first animation test tool. The current version displays the average time it takes to display a frame which we can then use to determine how many frames are being displayed each second. Later tonight JT plans to continue refining the program so that it gives us this information directly and so that it works for all of the file formats. Ideally tomorrow morning we will have preliminary test results that will tell us how effect ...

So it is still the third day but I thought the blog deserved an update for what's going on right now. Basically JT and I have run into a problem with our testing. Our original plan for testing was to have an image on the screen that was moving across the screen in a specific pattern and was constantly cycling between a set of images. Then once the test program was up and running we would then use the terminal program, 'htop' to record the CPU cycles and memory use. The goal here was to determine ...

So it is the third day and JT and I are on track to start testing today and continue through with that till tomorrow. Yesterday we made a test program and we are now working towards enhancing that program to fill some needs we did not think of yesterday. I will put out more updates as far as how our tests are going tomorrow. ...

I found some pretty cool jQuery calendar widgets that would work better than the rather ugly calendar already in place on the New York Senate page. First is a continuous calendar ...

Time to start getting down to business - planning was nearly completely finished. Today will be dedicated to setting up SOAS on my macbook and wiping the 1.0 and setting up a 1.5. Time for lunch! ...