Late last year I somehow managed to haul myself out of bed before 7am on a Saturday and attend a Code Retreat. We spent the day, except for a lunch break, splitting into groups of 2 or 3 people and spend 30 minutes experimenting with developing software. At the end of the 30 minutes you delete the progress so far and start over with a new group.
The goal is that you should not be able to complete the program, but instead you should concentrate on software development best practices such as testing, documentation, pair-programming, and even refactoring came into play.
In this talk I will talk about my experiences at my first Code Retreat and how it has impacted my software development since.
Sean Reifschneider is a professional System Administrator and part-time computer programmer. As a Principal at tummy.com, ltd. he largely works on system administration tasks, however many small internal and customer software projects are written by or maintained by Sean. He is passionate about Linux and Python and does most of his work in these environments.
The Community Earth System Model has many users including scientists and developers. With the increase in the number of experiments run using the CESM, it has become necessary to provide a centralized application to store run meta-data. The CESM Experiment Database is a n-tier, web-based, database back-end application that is designed to be a collaborative on-line lab notebook for storing and tracking the state of the CESM at the time of a run. The current version, 1.0, is accessible only from within UCAR/NCAR networks at http://csegweb.cgd.ucar.edu. Future versions will be open to outside authorized collaborators. This talk goes "behind the screens" to look at the software engineering used to build the CESM Experiment Database application
Alice Bertini joined NCAR/CGD/CCR as a part-time casual software engineer in early 2009. She transitioned to a permanent employee in November 2011 splitting her time between CCR and CSEG related tasks. Prior to coming to NCAR, she worked as an independent computer consultant for 13 years, at the CU Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy as a Senior Professional Research Assistant, and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Graduate Research Assistant. She holds degrees in Computer Science, Geology, Mathematics and an Oracle DBA license. She has a 1 year old Bassador and is getting ready to retire from over 11 years of volunteer youth sports coaching.
Download video from
http://video.ucar.edu/mms/sea/alice_bertini.mp4
First, this talk briefly describes the Open Monitoring Distribution(OMD) which bundles Nagios with many important add-ons. This talk shows how using the check_mk software greatly simplifies deploying Nagios. Next, this presentation explains how I developed check_mk plug-ins to monitor EOL's data acquisition and product generation software on the S-Pol radar. The talk describes how we added hardware to the S-Pol radar to monitor environmental conditions and hardware faults and the check_mk plugins that reported this status. This talk also explains how we configured Nagios to use a cell phone to send SMS (text message) alerts to notify our technicians and engineers when faults occurred. Finally, this talk explains how the S-Pol monitoring system allowed EOL field staff to work shorter hours, but still operate the S-Pol radar 24x7.
Joe VanAndel is a software engineer in the Remote Sensing Facility in EOL. Joe graduated from Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI with a double major of mathematics and physics in 1978. He earned a Master's degree in Computer Science at University of California at Berkeley in 1980. Joe worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Westminster, CO on a real-time operating system called Oryx/Pecos. His next job was with Cadnetix, where he worked on porting Unix to proprietary workstations and servers, computer aided design tools, and software configuration management. In 1988, Joe started working at NCAR/EOL and lead a software team that transformed a prototype weather radar into a research testbed serving the FAA and the National Weather Service. Joe has continued to work with radars and lidars, working on diagnostic software, data acquisition hardware and software, fuzzy logic-based data classification tools, radar control software, web-based user interfaces, data displays, and hardware/software monitoring tools.
Download video from
http://video.ucar.edu/mms/sea/j-vanandel.mp4
This will be a two parts talk
The Interoperability with C features added to Fortran with the Fortran 2003 revision of the standard defined interoperability only where the entities involved were reasonably similar in both languages. A new Further Interoperability with C specification adds standardized interoperability of Fortran allocatable, pointer, and optional arguments. This provides standardized means for C programmers to query and define descriptors of these Fortran procedure arguments. It also adds standardized specification for C void pointer arguments from the Fortran side.
Coarrays as defined in the Fortran 2008 revision of the standard represent a basic, workable subset of the original proposal. The work was split into two sections, the first of which was included in the 2008 revision, with work on the remaining features only now recommencing. Proposals include collective procedures, teams, notify/query, and parallel I/O. I will review the current proposals for the further coarrays specification. The work list has not been set, so suggestions for how to improve the work list will be appreciated.
Daniel Nagle is the chair of PL22.3 (formerly J3) Fortran Standard Committee. He has been recently hired by NCAR for the USS.