Day 2

Today I started off the day by installing SP2 on the virtual machine. While it was installing I transferred all of the files I downloaded last week onto the virtual machine, and extracted the libraries. Once SP2 was installed, I installed Visual Studio 2008.

GraspIt! uses the Qt library and according to the manual, works better with the source code, so I stated to build Qt from the source (which is apparently a very long and slow process). While Qt was building I decided to start experimenting with Bitten.

After gaining access to the trac and bitten sites, as well as ssh to the server I logged into the admin area of bitten. Bitten allows you to write "recipes" in XML, that tell a bitten client or "slave" what actions to take. The slave connects to the server, checks which recipes are waiting for it to run and then runs each recipe in its cue.

My first goal was to write a basic "Hello world" recipe, and to get a slave running on the server to connect to itself and run. The next stage was to get the slave on the server box to check our the GraspIt! code from subversion. This is where I hit a small roadblock.

The recipe would run, and you could follow the checkout process in the console but the files didn't seem to actually get saved anywhere. I realized that you can specify a path for where to check out the files, but still no luck.

I decided to move back to working on the virtual machine and attempt to connect with the slave from the virtualized WinXP box to the bitten server. Unfortunately, I know nothing about Python and this is all based on Python so I'm going to have to do some reading.

I installed Python and the bitten slave on both the virtualized WinXP box and a standard WinXP box but I haven't had any luck getting them to run or connect to the server yet. I'll need to play around with this next week.