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Thursday, September 16, 2010

Lab Meeting -2

This lab meeting was held in ARMS. We discussed about various topics, most of it was interactive. 
We went through howe to use the SVn in detail, things like commit and update changes. We also were shown the log of SVN. The meeting also included how to revert the changes back if you feel your code didn't work. If you have messed up with the code that every one is working and the cod doesn't compile, we can just go back to the previous revision and can make the changes accordingly. I felt this was a very useful tool because it generally happens that we might mess up with the code and then regret and start doing everything from scratch. The repository is of great help in such cases.  

We have decided to have a meeting with CFRC on September 16. We decided to show them the new "cfrc.info". CFRC was very busy and could not pull out some time for the feedback, so we have to design a solution for them without the feedback. We also have written down a lot of specifications and also decided to continue the list in the future course of time. 

We went over various things like:
1) Family Accounts
2) How do we display events to everyone?
3) CSS stuff
4) Start screen -Ideas
5) Activation Techniques 

There were few problems that we faced while implementing the family accounts. We were not sure about how many number of accounts to be created for the family. 
For Example : Lets say there are 4 people in the family, we were not sure if whether to have 1 primary account or have 4 accounts. We had to discuss some pros and cons for this issue and we finally decide on having one family account for the whole family. This lead to another question, how to add other family members to a particular event. We came up with a rather quick solution this time. We decided to have One active member of the list and then to have a drop down box or a pop up box. The user can check his family members and just by checking the box, he can add the members. I personally felt it was a smart move because people who access this system are not aware of the computer a lot. So , I wanted to have something that is very obvious so that the user will not have any trouble accessing this site. 

I raised the topic of how the website should look for a user. My personal view was , any person should be able to see the past, present and future events, but when he is planning to sign up for the events he/she has to create an account if he doesn't have one. Thanks to all my team mates for accepting my idea. I felt this was needed because, if I wanted to attend an event first I have to know what the event does and how were the past events. It gives me an idea of how the company is organizing the events and helps me in deciding whether I have to attend the event or not. 

I wanted to have some cool stuff on the site like a floating box. Other team members came up with something like a pop up div on hover( javascript). We thought the CSS would create some problems in browsers like IE 6. It hardly supports any CSS commands. So we went with the pop up div on hover. 

 
We also went through how to display the events. We had two options 
1) List
2) Calender
We had some pros and cons for these 

a. List:
i. + Screen space
ii. + Simpler to code
iii. + Short term
iv. + Lots of events on one day

b. Calendar
i. + Long term
ii. + Long number of events across several days

We had ideas on the start screen, some of them are :

a. Pop up divs on hover
b. Multiple columns for description
c. Expanding description
 The team decided on Expanding Description. 

We had various Specs that we went over the meeting. I would like to list some of them here.
a. Events displayed in a list (Expanding Description)
b. Viewable to the public
c. Must have account to login
d. Use redirect when unauthorized occurs
e. Activating Account 
I like the redirect when unauthorized the most because I felt it was a vital fix that some of the websites don't have.

We had some nice Activation techniques as well.
 
a. None
b. Email & Code
c. Email & Link (with encryption)
d. Captcha
e. Admin

When the user acreats the account but we give him a grace period to activate the account.
If we want to set a grace period, then we might want to send them an email saying the account was not able to be activated. We also need to explicitly tell the user that they need to activate within the certain time. If the user never activated the account, then they should be deleted from the event and an email sent to the email that they were removed from the event.

So this was the end of the Lab meeting. It was a long meeting but we got a lot of things figured out. 

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