refactoring iteration 28 May 2008
Posted by Baz in Uncategorized.Tags: refactoring, v-base
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Yesterday, as I was about to start coding, a blue screen appeared with an error message. I restarted the machine, believing a simple restart would solve it, how wrong I was!!!
My Windows XP was corrupted and after it was examined by a Technical Support member, it was necessary to install a clean copy of XP. Which meant I spent most of the day installing and configuring software on my machine.
In the process I created an image of the machine so that should a similar scenario arise, we would not need to spend as much time installing and configuring all the required software.
We are currently doing a refactoring iteration, changing the way which we store the lookup tables in our database. We are currently doing regression testing to make sure changes we made have not affected the way the application works.
iteration 10 21 May 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: Accessibility, refactoring, skills, v-base
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yep, we’ve broken 2 figures on the iteration count, woo hoo! another refactoring iteration.
on monday we drove iteration 9 into the corral. this was sofia’s first proper iteration and martin was tasked with introducing her to the intricacies of the v-base codebase. despite the overhead of induction, the 2 of them delivered some functionality that takes us into some new territory for v-base, skills management, which seems to be the current hot topic. martin’s also been making progress on accessibility and if all goes to his plan, v-base 3 will be a truly accessible product. outside of the client development, ben’s been working on user account administration, which contains functionality to make lots of our users extremely happy. it did me, because it will deliver the kind of control that some of our users have been hankering after for ages. what about the rest of the team? well, our intern sheetal is, with olivier’s help, skilling herself up in spring and subversion; olivier has been immersed in system administration tasks… orchestrating virtual servers, installing databases, upgrading our various tools (this may not be his ideal way of spending his days but at least he’s not having to deal with recruitment agencies 
); paul and camille have mainly been tied up with other youthnet projects and i’ve been wrestling with the product backlog in jira and starting to get to grips with expression blend, so that i can input more into the actual development. and baazi? he’s been on annual leave for a couple of weeks, writing his final university exams. busy us.
v-base shout out to vbay 20 May 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: v-base, vds vbay
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’scuse the cringeworthy post title but we received a comment on a previous post saying that one of our friends from volunteer development scotland had dropped by – hi alex!
vds have their own v-base-like volunteering management application – vbay – used by all of the volunteer centres in scotland. olivier and i caught a train way up north to see them last year and they gave us a tour of their latest version – really impressive, especially as (like us) they don’t have the luxury of an army of developers.
ah yes, the old resourcing chestnut. when speaking to people involved in commercial software development they’re always amazed at the scope of our project given the size of our team and that we aren’t all working purely on this project but have other commitments in addition. i recently went on a training course for my product owner role and it was again confirmed to me that what we’re achieving with our limited resources is nowhere short of amazing. i suspect the same applies in many non-profit technical teams and is probably largely due to the commitment of the people involved and their willingness to put in an incredible amount of effort towards something of social value rather than making themselves or/and their employers a huge bucket of cash.
anyway, enough of me giving us a pat on the collective back. it was great hearing from vds. as i’ve said before, you guys have an open invitation to visit us any time… as long as richard doesn’t thrash us too badly at pool (again)
Just Like Google ;-) 15 May 2008
Posted by Olivier Van Acker in Uncategorized.Tags: cloud computing, google, v-base, virtualisation, virtualization, xen
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Because of the way our funding works we had to buy the hardware for the back end of this project relatively early. So at this stage of the project we have two beefy servers. Both have two dual core processors with loads of memory and underlying this we have half a Terabyte of storage for the database (that is a lot of volunteering opportunities ;-P ). To make optimal use of this hardware we decided to use Xen virtualization. With this technology you chop up a single server into multiple ‘virtual’ servers. Meaning: you can run multiple OS’s on a single piece of kit.
In back end application building it’s commonly thought good practice to dedicate a specific task to a single server. So if a single server crashes it doesn’t tear down the whole application. Also, running software in separate servers prevents them from interfering with each other and makes it easier to upgrade and maintain them. We have, for example, one big Oracle database server and several Java application servers all with different tasks.
Another big advantage is that the file system of a virtual server is stored in a large, single file, in our case stored on the storage device, which is a redundant raid5 setup. This has two advantages: If the hardware of one of the servers breaks (cpu meltdown or something similar) we can just login on the other server and start the same(!) server from there (this can also be automated). And the other big advantage: if we want an extra server with the same functionality (e.g for clustering), the only thing I have to do is make a copy if that big file and fire it up next to the original one; no lengthy installation processes anymore once done 
In the final setup one server will function as the main server with the other one as backup in case the main one gets struck by disaster. Normally this would mean that the fail over server would gather dust and do next to nothing. Not with us! We use this fail over server for all our development, experimentation and test server needs. All set up as virtual servers of course. And in a case where the main server breaks, we stop all the development / test servers and simply start all the (virtual) production servers on the fail over server, stop development, focus all our attention on repairing the main server and when successful, switch back again To put it in money, this saves us easily a couple of thousands pounds because we don’t have to buy expensive development kit.
I have to say this wasn’t an easy task to set up but I finally got it working and it does gives me a little bit of geek pride because it puts us in line with two other major users of this technology: Google & Amazon
VDAG 12 May 2008
Posted by Tracey in VDAG, stakeholder involvement.Tags: do-it.org.uk, stakeholders, UCSD, v-base, VDAG, volunteer centres, volunteering
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Yesterday we finally kicked off the VDAG. The V-Base Development Advisory Group is something we’ve been trying to set up for some time, but for several reasons (mainly capacity issues) it’s taken us longer than expected to get it off the ground.
Membership currently comprises 12 organisations who have shown a real interest in being closely involved in the development of V-Base 3 and helping us to shape the new product. All of our main stakeholder groups are represented, including Volunteer Centres, Student volunteering, Youth volunteering, Sports volunteering and Councils for Voluntary Service (CVS).
Over the coming months, we’ll be consulting in depth with the VDAG on topics related to specific areas of functionality. When we’re ready to share the fruits of our labours the VDAG will become an integrated part of our development process, by starting to help us test prototypes of the new version and giving us their feedback – both good and bad – on how the application looks and behaves. This kind of end user involvement is vital if we’re to deliver a successful product and we’re really looking forward to working in this way.
