08 January 1999
December was a month of varied levels of activity in the Electronic Communications Technical Committee, as the holidays took their annual toll on the amount of activity. There were only a few updates to the ASI web site this month, but several other key ECTC projects picked up the slack. David Lundeen made a significant amount of progress on the ADB Outline project, and David Pagan and Greg Bennett worked on steps to increase the use of IRC for ongoing communications about the Artemis Project. The latest commercial version of WebSite Director, the software that is used to maintain the ASI web site, was installed on the web site in late December.
Greg Bennett launched a weekly IRC discussion called an "Open Forum" that will take place every Saturday afternoon at 4:00 PM Central Time. The first Open Forum will take place this Saturday, January 9, 1999. Greg and other ASI members will try to be on the #artemis channel on irc.superlink.net at that time to discuss the Artemis Project with anyone who visits. If you would like to join in the discussions, just stop by the IRC server on Saturday afternoons.
The ECTC added one member in December. Wyatt Batchelor joined the committee, along with two people who didn't provide their full names (ESR and andrew). Chris Low and David Hardman chose to leave the committee. And Stephen Rymill and Vik Olliver both changed their e-mail addresses in December. At the end of December, the ECTC had 30 active members, with another 50 people in the Observer or Rep categories. You can find the complete ECTC membership listing at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc.html. As always, there is still a lot of room for new volunteers for ECTC tasks. If you would like to join the ECTC and help with any of those tasks, you can use the form on the ECTC task list page at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc_tasks.html.
Here is the latest status information from the individual work areas within the ECTC:
Preparations continued on the ASI web site for the pending upgrade to the Team Director membership system. The new version will take over the subscriber listing for the ECTC mailing list in the near future and all members of the ECTC will be able to update their own membership information in the system. The support staff at IO (hosting provider for the ASI web site) reconfigured the ECTC mailing list so that Team Director can manage it. After a trial period within the ECTC, the software will be configured to manage all of the other ASI mailing lists and will be available to all ASI members.
Mark Sumner is continuing to collect news articles for the ASI Online News pages and a periodic ASI Newsletter. If you have any news items to submit, please send them to Mark at "newsmonger@asi.org".
Nanci Brasket continued manning the Comm and Info Center. Robert Dahlquist continued following up on guestbook postings.
No progress to report this month.
Continuing the trend from last month, almost all of the updates to the ASI web site this month were submitted by John Wertz, the leader of the ASI Web Team. During December a total of 14 updates were published to the ASI web site, including 13 modifications to existing documents and 1 renamed document. The latest updates bring the total number of documents on the ASI web site to 2276 HTML documents and the number of GIF and JPEG images exceeded 1000 for the first time, with a total of 1004 images. Most of the work in editing and approving the updates was done by John Wertz, Leah Simpson, Gregory Bennett, John Peel, Luanne Jorewicz, Randall Severy, and John Kruep.
John Peel updated the Web Pages Procedure Guide and worked on many of the documents waiting in the Web Formatting approval stage in WebSite Director. Randall Severy (I know, it's strange referring to myself in the third person ;-)) developed a custom module for the ASI installation of WebSite Director to support submitting web page updates directly from a link in the footer of any ASI web page. Once the footer template updates have been applied to all of the documents on the ASI web site, anyone will be able to easily submit corrections or other changes for a web page simply by clicking on a hyperlink in the footer.
The mSQL database server on the ASI web site was stable this past month, but continuing delays at IO have stalled the transition to the MySQL database server. Just before Christmas the commercial release of WebSite Director version 1.2 was installed on the ASI web site. During the following week the TeamWSD Lite software, which maintains the private directories on the ASI site, was upgraded to the latest beta version. The commercial release of TeamWSD Lite will take place in mid-January.
David Lundeen continued to make significant progress on his ADB outline generator program this past month. Near the end of the month he completed the first fully functional version of the program, which was installed on the ASI web site for initial testing. Sample output from the program was placed in the ECTC private directory and David is continuing to work on enhancements to the program. The final version of the program should be completed sometime in January.
No progress to report this month.
No progress to report this month.
No progress to report this month.
December was a very busy month for IRC activity, and the level of activity is expected to increase substantially in coming months. New ECTC member David Pagan took on the role of coordinating and supporting IRC activity within ASI. He is currently planning the next general Artemis IRC meeting and has configured the main channels used by ASI on the SuperLink IRC server. Greg Bennett contributed to the increased activity by announcing the new weekly "Open Forum" discussions every Saturday afternoon. In addition to the scheduled events, more people have been stopping by the #artemis IRC channel during the past month and starting impromptu discussions about the Artemis Project.
Ironically, the month of December started out with a major IRC problem, when the ECTC IRC meeting scheduled for December 6 had to be rescheduled for the following weekend. The SuperLink IRC server went off the air just before the planned ECTC meeting and didn't return to service until several hours later. The rescheduled ECTC meeting on December 13 was a lively one, however, with a lot of new members joining several of the old-timers for the meeting. A total of 8 people showed up for some or all of the meeting. The main topics of the meeting included the proposed ASI web site tour, the new ADB Outline project, the submission of ASI information to Internet search engines, the New Volunteer Interview System, and several of the Web Team projects. Another topic appropriate to the forum was a discussion about the use of IRC for communications within ASI.
No progress to report this month.