Okay, I'm trying to take some sanity breaks—you may read procrastinate further if you like. Anyway, I thought of a new "column" that would accomodate this break time: Play-by-Play. The idea is, that when I'm working on something, I could give micro-updates on the subject. We'll see how it goes...
I've spent the last half-hour or so, I've been working on trying to get my project revised. I made a few changes to some of my ideas while writing my first draft last week. I also discovered a few missing bits that needed to be plugged in to the system.
I'm designing a "multi-agent" system (I used "agent" very loosely) for use with account management. At the center of the system is RT from Best Practical Solutions LLC. There are different agents for different stages of the process and each agent runs on the system it's made for. Thus, there's a Home Agent that runs on the file server to create home directories. There's a Directory Agent that runs on the authentication server to create user account profiles. There's a Mail Agent that runs on the mail server to add a user to the appropriate mailing lists. My initial demo only included these three agents.
However, as I put the demo together, I realized I really needed a fourth agent, the Sanity Agent, which made sure an application was properly submitted and sane. Some functionality was then stripped out of the Directory and Home agents and placed here.
As I wrote the paper, I realized that I needed a fifth agent, the Verify Agent. This agent is in charge of watching for completed applications and notifying the user of the completion. Ideally, it would also look for errors, but error handling is a little sketchy, so that will not be part of the demo I give on Thursday.
Anyway, I had to add some additional modifications to my RT plug-in to account for specialties these will require. I also had to write these, so that's done. I renamed the agents to match the names I gave in the paper (though, I just realized I need to rename the Sanity Agent again, because I got mixed up).
Next, I need to write unit tests and a system test plan. Then, it's on to actual paper modificiations.
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