MURPA-Lin Wei-Week 1

Finally, Wai Keung and I arrived at San Diego on Tuesday. The long boring flight makes me exhausted. Not mentioned that the long queue at Los Angeles immigration kept us waiting for an hour and we missed the flight to San Diego. The security staff who inspected my visa was unfriendly. He never greets visitors and the way he looks at me makes me feel that he just wants to reject anyone from entering the United States.

The weather at San Diego in winter is so pleasant, the apartment is fantastic and the people at UCSD are friendly. Everything at UCSD helps me recover very soon and I feel I'm in the right mode to work on my project. I particularly like the supermarket here. It's still open after midnight and it's got tons of food, much better than Australian supermarkets. The plastic bag design is brilliant. There is no need to rub the bag to open it. You pull the front bag and the next bag opens automatically. This design reminds me Don Normans's book "The design of everyday things". This book is the best introduction to the importance of usability in design: much of the value comes from the fact that it is not about computers but about all kinds of other things that we suffer from every day. Australian supermarket should definitely learn from the plastic bag design here.

In terms of my project (Integrating Opal and Nimrod/K), I had one meeting with Ilkay, Maria and Jiang Wu and another meeting with Wilfred this week. Colin says my project needs much more than two month's work. The current version of Nimrod/K does not work with Kepler 2.X. Another student is updating Nimrod/K at Monash and it's going to take 4-6 weeks. In addition, the Opal actor cannot determine the order of files. It is not worthwhile to make Nimrod/K and Opal web service works in Kepler 1.0 and upgrade them to Kepler 2.X. Ilkay suggests that I should define a use case scenario and create a workflow in Kepler 2.X before I work on the integration part. Wilfred and Colin advise me to fix the Opal actor. I'm going to have a meeting with Ilkay and Wilfred to discuss my project plan further. I think fix the Opal actor, create a workflow and design an integration plan would be achievable while I'm at UCSD. The difficult part at the moment is to set up the development environment. Wai Keung I have spent hours on it but we made little progress. Certain part of the installation instructions on the Kepler web site is outdated. Apart from the installation, I need to get opal.xml workflow and the associated libraries.

Next week, we are going to have a cocktail party and promote MURPA program. We also plan to visit San Fransisco during the long weekends.