First post in the 2009

The TechReport for 699 course. The importance of. :)
I've finished the Fall 2008 semester writing a technical report concerning the DTW algorithm, it's existing implementations, uses and extensions and outlined possible application to the software metrics based on my own implementation. While being a little worrying about this before starting I found the report writing as an extremely helpful and interesting activity for the number of reasons:

• first of all it forced me to summarize and distill all of the essence from the work done so far and get it graded. By doing so I've not only reassessed my current position in the research but what I found extremely useful - I was able to identify gaps (weak points) in the research I am doing. The goal now is to make my research complete through evenly covering all of the areas of the interest and connecting it with adjacent fields.


• secondly I found that in my case writing the "tech report for the 699" is actually more likely writing a draft (or an outline) of the Literature Review and the Thesis Proposal: two pieces of writing which are required for the PhD degree. How cool is that?


• in addition to these two items, overviewing the research done so far, seeing things in the ToDo list and having outlined LitReview and Proposal makes ones (my) minds clear and brings confidence of the right track chosen.

Current progress.
This week I am working on the setting up the "working environment" for this semester. Taking in account the amount of the software development and writing ahead, spending some time on selecting technologies, cleaning and organizing the system environment and hardrive, updating tools etc seems to be a reasonable activity.

As in all previous work I am going to use Java, Eclipse, Hackystat infrastructure and the standard set of Hackystat libraries for the core programming. More likely I'll be using MIG Layout for the UI development of the stand-alone Trajectory tool. The R will be used for making figures and fast-scripting when I need to test something before actually implementing.

For my latest report and all other previous LaTeX-based documents I was successfully using a combination of the MikTex and TeXnicCeneter, but the recent changes in the CSDL requirements moving me towards the use of the TexLive and currently I'm setting up tools and environment testing this new for me approach.