The biggest reporting deficiency I immediately found was that I wanted to produce a nice list of milestones organized by month and year, so that it was easy to see at a glance what deliverables I was supposed to have at any given point. The first sticky bit was that I didn’t have a way to do a search for just the milestones in Merlin. I could define milestones, yes, but the interface didn’t allow me to search for them. To overcome that, I had to manually add the word “Milestone” as a comment to all the milestones. When you do a “search”, you can then say “Milestone” and a list of Milestones will be retrieved as a “report”. Unfortunately, this is pretty ugly and useless because it didn’t include any of the date information, although you could see if something was late (red flag):

So instead I hit upon the idea of creating a “workspace view” for the Milestones which included the kind of information I would need to produce a nicely formatted list: The milestone activity name, its end date (due date), its “path”, and its “subtitle” (the comment field which says “Milestone”. The “path” is the a string showing the outliner path of a specific activity. For example, it’s writing a chapter in the thesis, the path is “Ph.D./Thesis Writing/Chapter 1″ where “Ph.D.” is the overall project name, “Thesis Writing” is the enclosing activity container, and “Chapter 1″ is the actual activity. Here’s what this view looks like:

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a way to only include just the Milestones. So if you go down the list, it actually includes everything, but the other items don’t have a Subtitle of “Milestone.”

Once you have this view, you can export the view as a comma-separated values file. Actually, it’s a semicolon-seperated values file, but let’s not be too picky. That gives you something that looks like:

Title;Group Path;End Date;Subtitle
Ph.D.;;04/25/2007 15:00;
No Assigned Resources;;;
"Michelle ""Ein"" Hoyle";;;
CVS/Subversion everything;/Ph.D./Organization;09/23/2005 17:00;Milestone
Analysis summary of Exp 1 and Exp 2;/Ph.D./Statistics;12/16/2005 17:00;Milestone
WordNet lit. review document;/Ph.D./Literature Review;07/25/2005 18:00;Milestone
IR/SE lit. review document;/Ph.D./Literature Review;12/09/2005 16:00;Milestone
Semantic net lit. review document;/Ph.D./Literature Review;03/22/2006 18:00;Milestone
Modified prototype;/Ph.D./Formula Work;02/03/2006 13:00;Milestone
Revised analysis summary document for Exp 1 & 2;/Ph.D./Formula Work;02/08/2006 18:00;Milestone
Analysis summary document for Exp 3;/Ph.D./Experiment 3: Semantic Web;11/08/2006 18:00;Milestone
Thesis committee 2006 report;/Ph.D./Communication/Thesis Committee 2006;05/24/2006 17:00;Milestone
Published CSR document;/Ph.D./Communication/CSR Paper 2005;12/23/2005 15:00;Milestone
Semantic web document;/Ph.D./Communication/Semantic Web Paper 2006;11/15/2006 16:00;Milestone
Other: Copyright Clearance;/Ph.D./Thesis Writing;02/04/2007 11:00;
Prepare Appendix 7;/Ph.D./Thesis Writing/Appendices/Appendix 7: NLP tagging;06/01/2006 17:00;
Prepare Appendix 5;/Ph.D./Thesis Writing/Appendices/Appendix 5: Exp. 3 Documents;11/23/2006 18:00;
Prepare Appendix 4;/Ph.D./Thesis Writing/Appendices/Appendix 4: Exp. 2 Machine/people data;06/22/2006 17:00;

When I originally did this, I was having trouble with the date format in Merlin. Merlin was using European date formats and everything else in my computer was using the System-defined date method of mm/dd/yyyy and not dd/mm/yyyy. Before I could use this data elsewhere, I needed to fix the dates, so one of the first patterns I wrote was one to strip out the times and flip the month and day fields around. I eventually fixed that, so the flipping isn’t necessary, but one of the first steps in a BBEdit Text Factory is still to strip out the times. Before that, though, I need to remove the non-milestone entries. They’re the ones that end with a ; instead of “;Milestone”. The regular expression pattern “(^.*;\r)” will search for lines that end with a ; and replace the entire line. When I used “(^.*;$)”, I ended up with multitudes of empty lines.

The next thing to do is get rid of the “;”. If I import it into another application, tabs would be better than ;. The pattern “;” replaced by “\t” solves that admirably, leaving the file more or less ready for the bulk of the manipulations that need to occur. Here’s an annotated list of the operations that the BBEdit Text Factory performs:

Before doing all this, I need to manually remove the first four lines at the top of the file. I was able to write a regular expression to find/remove the first four lines, but then it would “replace all” What I needed was a “replace once” action, but that doesn’t seem to be a possibility in BBEdit at the moment. I should probably suggest it. The end result was something like this:

CVS/Subversion everything                              Organization                09/23/2005
Analysis summary of Exp 1 and Exp 2                    Statistics                  12/16/2005
WordNet lit. review document                           Literature Review           07/25/2005
IR/SE lit. review document                             Literature Review           12/09/2005
Semantic net lit. review document                      Literature Review           03/22/2006
Modified prototype                                     Formula Work                02/03/2006
Revised analysis summary document for Exp 1 + 2        Formula Work                02/08/2006
Analysis summary document for Exp 3                    Experiment 3: Semantic Web  11/08/2006
Thesis committee 2006 report                           Communication               05/24/2006
Published CSR document                                 Communication               12/23/2005
Semantic web document                                  Communication               11/15/2006
Chapter 1 document                                     Thesis Writing              01/04/2007
Chapter 2 document                                     Thesis Writing              04/06/2006
Chapter 3 document                                     Thesis Writing              04/20/2006
Chapter 5 document                                     Thesis Writing              06/14/2006
Chapter 6 document                                     Thesis Writing              07/12/2006

The new version of OmniOutliner Pro is quite cool. They added many new column types to it to help people use it for things like David Allen’s Getting Things Done and building to-do lists with due dates, etc. As a result, it was possible to build an OmniOutliner document which contained months and years entered as top-level items with “due dates” as the first of the appropriate month/year and tell it to sort the document based on the “due date” column. Any items you added with due dates would then be sorted correctly. I set up a template with just this information in and formatted and spaced out the way I wanted. Then I could paste in my BBedit output. I’d end up with something like:

Everything was at the same level. However, everything I’d just pasted in was still selected. I discovered that if I just hit the tab key, it made all the selected items subordinate to the items above them. Since the items above them were always the month/year headers, I got a perfectly arranged list like:

Ta-da! How cool is that? Of course, it did take quite a bit of work to figure all that out. Now that I know how to do it, though, it’s easy-peasy to produce a similarly-formatted list. Here’s the set of steps in order, with a list of resources required at the end.

Share/Save

Despite my pitiful progress on the items on my list, I hadn’t been completely idle. I was able to report that I had been investing time in helping coordinate and set-up the new FirstClass intranet to be used by the IDEAs Lab. I have also been providing some advice to Julie Coultas on creating a web-site specification for her EduServ project. These activities do not directly further my Ph.D. work, but Thufir pointed out that they serve to help relieve the intrinsic isolation of my position in the group, as I am not working on a project with others and my work is not very directly related to most of the Lab’s projects. I must be careful, however, not to spend the majority of my time on Lab-related work.
On my list of things still to do is to sort out my MATLAB problems. Prior to leaving for Canada last October, I was in correspondence with Dr. Tom Browne, who is responsible for academic license management here at the University of Sussex. While the software can be run directly on campus from various UNIX boxes, copying and pasting data/diagrams between the UNIX machine and the Mac isn’t particular convenient. Sussex maintains a pool of MATLAB licenses. Purchasing individual licenses and toolkits is very expensive, so I have been trying to acquire the use of a license for use on my Macintosh. I need to follow up and see what the status of this last was.
One of the things Thufir is concerned about is that I have been basically stuck at the same point of my Ph.D. for several years now. Of course, that has not been helped by my lengthy absences due to work and my poor health over the past few years. It also has not been helped by the fact that the analysis I need to do is quite tricky and not understood by many people. Thufir admitted that the statistics was beyond him. Imagine a supervisor not knowing everything, but he was happy to admit he’s not the end-all, be-all for everything. He tried forwarding me to various people and I spent ages asking people for advice and help all over the Internet and locally before I chanced across something on my own. The other factor that has been impeding the analysis is that statistics is not my strong point. I do not enjoy doing this analysis, yet it is hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. He worries the analysis tarpit is making my Ph.D. a chore and leading to anxiety and a constant circling without any substantial progress. He is looking for ways to help me break the “logjam.” He suggested two things. One thing was to look for something “fun” that I could start work on now, which might help rekindle my enthusiasm for my project. Another related idea is to see if there is something I can do which does not hinge upon the results of the analysis, perhaps, for example, some of the writing. I promised to look at that as I continue my work on updating my timeline.
Finally, we discussed my general health and wellbeing. I confessed to being tired, after a hard week the last time he saw me of preparing for a big client demo and then following it up the week after with energy-intensive marking. He wondered if I could afford to not do the work at the Open University. The financials do not allow that at the present time. Almost half of what my company paid me (pre-tax!) went out as rent here in England. Without the OU income, I would have been in the hole. Nevertheless, I did discuss with him my idea of working more at the OU, maybe up to three days a week and none for my own company. I would probably make more money, be less stressed, and have more time to spend on my Ph.D. Doing so, particularly without planning and warning, would place my own company in a precarious position, so I will need to muddle along as best as possible for the moment.
Next meeting is April 2nd at 16:30.
Task list:
- Resurrect and review Ph.D. plan.
- Sort out MATLAB issues
- Work on CSR version of my paper so that I can submit it for publication and send it off to my external advisor

Share/Save

Planning:
I started off the day by trying to set myself up a new research calendar of days at the University. The calendar left on the door only went until October and, of course, none of those dates were ever used. I consulted with Stephen and arranged to have 5-7 days a calendar month for my research. In most months, 5 of the days are in a row with the other days being made up of Fridays about two weeks before and after the week-long period. I tried to take into account that we might be taking a week off in May to go walking in Scotland. The other days chosen are mostly Fridays because that’s the day we have our IDEAs Lab weekly meetings. One of the things I complained about at our last “away day” was feeling isolated. If I attend meetings, then I won’t be so isolated. The proposed calendar can been using iCal at webcal://ical.mac.com/eingang/Ph.D..ics or on the web at http://ical.mac.com/eingang/Ph.D..
I’ll need to take the proposed dates and map them onto my research plan timeline. Oh boy, another battle with Fast Track Schedule. Is it so much to ask for that a piece of software allow you to edit some things and then have things dependent on that automatically update? Apparently it is, because it’s a pain in the butt to do, but there isn’t a lot of choice of project scheduling software available for the Mac. If somebody knows of something better, please do let me know.
Infrastructure Changes:
After 6 months away, the wireless roaming network is finally live across the campus, but you can’t print from it. Apparently, it was mostly designed with students in mind and students (undergraduates) don’t have access to free printing. I’m hoping they come up with a cunning plan, because it’s kind of weird to not be able to see any of the printers on the network and I can’t, apparently, print to them by IP (although I don’t know why).
While my office was still intact, I needed only to shove some stuff aside, the printers around the building have changed. I had to do all the “Adding” of printers, where I discovered that Mac OS X’s (10.3.2) discovery of printers via AppleTalk is somewhat slow. It seems to take a bit of time to “sync” up when you first connect. In theory, I should now be able to print seamlessly, while plugged in via ethernet, to either printers on the COGS research network or on the teaching network. The teaching network printer is a lot closer, being only a few doors down. The rest of the printers are on different floors.
I had Christian give me a copy of EndNote 7 for the Macintosh. I had requested a license from the lab when they were ordering licenses for themselves. I’ve previously always bought and paid for my own academic license. Version 5 of EndNote, which only runs under Classic, worked with text files, other word processors, and FrameMaker MIF files. As I typeset all of my papers in FrameMaker, this was very convenient. Version 6 dropped that and only supported typing papers into Microsoft Word. At least this version allows you to use something other than Microsoft Word, but it’s still RTF, which isn’t as convenient for me. If I want to make changes, I have to update the FrameMaker file, produce an RTF document, parse that to insert the references, and then print the RTF file. We’ll see how that works. When you change formats, some formatting always gets lost, so I am not completely hopeful.
Intermission:
I picked up a new photocopier card from the postgraduate secretary. The regular school secretaries wanted me to have a research grant to apply the charge to, but I was pretty sure I was entitled to a quota of copying per year as a research student, as indeed I am. I also asked her about the whole intermission process as my supervisor wants me to intermit. Apparently, I can only intermit entire terms, so I need to intermit for the fall and spring terms. I guess that makes any time I spent in March bonus time, assuming I’m granted intermission. She says she doesn’t know of any limits for postgraduates on intermitting, which is good, because I’m apparently going for some kind of record. I also don’t need to write another letter. If my supervisor e-mails her, she’ll prepare the necessary paperwork and all will likely be well. I e-mailed my supervisor and suggested he do so to get the ball rolling. I’ll check back on that in a few weeks.
FirstClass:
The IDEAs Lab has just teamed up with the new Creative Systems group to purchase a FirstClass server and some client licenses. The intention is to create a shared space for the IDEAs group people to be able to collaborate/discuss papers, have shared resource calendars, and update the IDEAs web site automatically with content from FirstClass. I was just discussing this with my supervisor at today’s meeting. As I was searching for some BluTak in our resources room, a contingent of people came excitedly down the hallway looking for me. They knew that I was very familiar with a href=”http://www.centrinity.com/” title=”FirstClass from Centrinity”>FirstClass from my work at the Open University and that I was also a technical web person. They want me to liaise with the FirstClass configuration person, so I’ve added that to my list of tasks to undertake in the next week.
iPod Study:
Michael Bull is doing a study on the use of iPods. Siufai saw a Wired article about Michael Bull and how he’s looking for female inverviewees. Imagine my surprise to discover that he’s at the University of Sussex too. Actually, I’d read an article in the New York Times (online) edition a week or so ago entitled The World at Ear’s Length, all about how people completely shut out the world by using iPods in New York. That article also mentioned Michael Bull. Anyway, I had contacted him about being interviewed, being an iPod junkie, and had arranged to meet him this morning. I arrived at the appointed time, waited twenty minutes, and there was no sign of him. I left a note and followed up with an e-mail, but I haven’t heard back from him.
So, there’s lot to do, but time has run out for today. I need to wrap up, file things away, and head for home until the next day.

Share/Save