My 2008 turned out to be a pretty great year in general so I’m eager to see what 2009 brings. With a couple large jobs already underway, a new version of Magento just released and a lot of personal projects begging to be either completed or just started, it looks like it will certainly be busy!

One change is that I most likely will not be continuing my role as a project supervisor at Melbourne University, thus ending my three year run there. It was fun but full time work is too demanding on my time and far, far less frustrating. Although there are some good people at the uni, I honestly feel that the whole place is going to the dogs and that some of the people in power really don’t have any idea what they’re doing. Particularly disturbing is when people teaching engineering lack any kind of engineering skill.

I do look forward to having some time to do some work updating and expanding the range of Fontis Magento extensions. 2008 was the first year I made a real contribution to an open source product and I feel a great sense of achievement for having done so. Overall responses to our extensions have been positive and I have been thanked for quite a few people for releasing Australian extensions. I’d like to say a big thank you in return – I truly appreciate hearing that the work that I and my colleagues at Fontis have done is helpful to people.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to post here more frequently, and hopefully I’ll end up following through on it. It does require a fair amount of dedication to write stuff regularly.

Here’s again to a fantastic 2009!

I’ll now have to start setting aside a beer budget for team A…

The third day started a bit later than I would have liked but I still managed to get to the campus around 10:30am. So I missed the screening of Nagasarete Airantou but that didn’t matter too much since I’ve seen most of the series already. Mostly I like seeing comedies at Manifest because I can enjoy everyone else laughing at the same stuff as I do! What I was in time for was the Hare Hare Yukai dance competition at 11am. Oh, and there was yet again a large queue for passes, although not not as large as the previous two days.

Unfortunately what I did not realise is that the competition itself was in the PLT and the mass dance was to be at the Economics Courtyard. So I ended up completely missing the competition but managed to see the mass dance, which took place at about 11:30am. In the mean time I had front row seats for the final performance of the festival by My 6 Cents Worth who were belting out all manner of anime themes. The Pokémon theme actually got played twice. the band’s performance in general was excellent and they had a few people dancing around – including a great performance from a “dancing Aizen“.

The dance itself was quite impressive. As a guess I’d say there were more than 50 people taking part, which already makes it the largest Hare Hare Yukai dance in Australia. I wonder if the numbers will increase next year or if everyone will have moved on to Motteke! Sailor Fuku by then. If you want to see what it looked like plenty of people were taking photos, including myself – you can see mine below.

After the dance it was time for some more spending so I headed back to the trader’s hall. There was nothing new of course but it was marginally less crowded than Saturday morning (which is nuts). I also went back in the afternoon for a final look around and I ended up buying a ridiculously overpriced, yet downright adorable, Yakumo plushie and a subscription to Animavericks, a locally produced otaku magazine. I got the subscription for the “freebies” they were giving away with it – an old Madman Bleach poster that I missed getting at Animania. The magazine looks alright so it will be interesting to see what future issues have in it.

I ended up leaving the campus to head down to the city for lunch, as well as to do more shopping at JB Hi-Fi and Minotaur. I got volume 5 of Chibi Vampire manga, volume 3 of the Chibi Vampire novels and the first two volumes of Welcome to the NHK, along with the Cowboy Bebop movie on DVD.

Back at Manifest the highlight of the day for me was again the AMVs. On Sunday, rather than a competition, the AMV screening is a showcase of what the organisers think are some of the best works from the last year. Again, there were quite a few videos I had already seen but I didn’t mind seeing them again. I was happy to see Skittles! in the line up and even happier to see it go down very well with the crowd. The announcements of the winners from the previous day were done right at the end and everyone in the theatre was ecstatic to see Plunder Propaganda again. I’m so glad that it’s been put up for download now! (Update: In case you don’t have an account on animemusicvideos.org you can find Plunder Propaganda on YouTube.)

The Iron Chef competition was a lot of fun as usual. The judges seemed to be less harsh this year but that might have something to do with the extremely high standard of the entries. Some of the contestants were quite creative with the Naruto manga scans. From the sounds of it it was an extremely close call for the judges and I don’t envy them for having to pick a winner from this year’s selection. I know the videos from EvilTom, lockstock and xpaperclip are available for download and I’m sure some of the others will be in the near future.

Following Iron chef was the closing ceremony, which featured some video from the festival and concluded with a plea from the organising committee for more people to sign up to MOC. Apparently this year’s problems with queues was partially due to the fact that they simply didn’t have enough people to effectively organise the event. If you want to see Manifest grow then you should think about joining MOC.

Although there were still a few panels left, as well as the karaoke events, I was far too tired after a weekend of little sleep and lots of walking – not to mention having a brain on anime overload – so I just went out for dinner with my friends and headed home. My thoughts overall on the event are extremely positive, as per last year. The AMV events alone are something to turn up for but having a ton of merchants available in the ones place (rather than requiring traipsing all over the city), being able to check out new anime with a crowd of fellow otaku and seeing all the cosplayers out in force make it truly something special. Manifest is one of things I look forward to all year (although my wallet doesn’t feel that way) and I hope that it can be even better next year.

Now, I’ll leave you with some personal photos from the festival but if you need an even better fix for cosplay action then you should check out the collection of photos from participants on the Manifest forums.

The first thing I did for the day was check out the fan traders as they were again placed just outside the main events theatre. I think the fan traders are a great asset to the festival – you can usually find some excellent artwork and various non-canon scenarios envisaged – such as typical yaoi/yuri couples or pictures of canon pairings that haven’t … err, announced their relationship. You can also find doujinshi, original artwork and a couple tables were offering anime-styled portraits for very reasonable prices. I ended up buying a set of 20 Harry Potter bookmarks of various characters.

After the fan traders it was into the theatre for the Manifest Opening Ceremony, which was mostly a short welcome by a member of the organising committee (MOC) followed by an amusing short video about Peppa-chan making her way to the event.

Following the Opening Ceremony was one of my highlights of the festival: the AMV competition and AMV Iron Chef Unveiling. The AMV competition showed off some excellent videos from the year, many of which I had already seen from animemusicvideos.org. One downright hilarious video which I had not seen, called Plunder Propaganda, had the entire audience in stitches. To sum up, it was a send up of the ubiquitous anti-piracy ads from the movie publishers, set to the anime One Piece which, if you didn’t know, is about pirates. Irony ahoy!

The Iron Chef unveiling was rather interesting. If you don’t know how an AMV Iron Chef works, it’s like this: a group of AMV makers are given roughly 24 hours to complete a video from a given set of anime footage, the “ingedients”, and a “secret ingredient” that they must use (other ingredients being optional). The anime they were given to work with was Murder Princess, The Girl Who Jumped Through Time and Byousoku 5 Centimeter, which I had seen the previous day. the secret ingredient was perhaps the most insane thing I have ever seen: the chefs had to use 10 seconds of the Naruto manga! Yes, that’s right, they had to make a video including 10 seconds of video of a comic. There were actually a few cries of anguish.

By this time it was lunch so I quickly checked out the commercial traders in the Grand Buffet Hall of the Union House building. The place was packed as expected and I had fun squeezing through crowds of people and standing on tip-toes to see over heads at the merchandise. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more of what I wanted to buy, which was mostly posters and anything for Lucky Star, Code Geass, Lovely Complex, Hayate the Combat Butler, Ouran High School Host Club, and a few other (apparently) more obscure anime. There were a few things available, such as a Zero mask, but overall I was underwhelmed. Posters for anything were hard to come by too – they mustn’t be as popular as things like plushies and figurines. I did manage to score a nice looking Naruto wallscroll though. Some series that were quite popular with the vendors were Naruto, Fullmetal Alchemist, Fruits Basket, Fate/Stay Night, Death Note, Bleach and, as usual, all the popular mechas were available as kits (Gundam, etc).

Overall, the traders tend to sell stuff for less than they would in their stores but that doesn’t mean a lot of the products aren’t expensive. It’s not uncommon to see the really nice figurines going for $150 or more. I ended up buying 7 volumes of the Ouran High School Host Club manga from the Madman tables since it was going for $10 a book, as opposed to the regular price of $14.95. DVDs weren’t all that much cheaper so I didn’t bother with them – JB Hi-Fi is usually my purchasing venue of choice on that front.

The cosplayers were out in force again and they did a great job of bringing a real “otaku” feel to the entire festival. There were plenty of Bleach and Naruto characters out and about along with some characters from Haruhi Suzumiya, Ouran, and even a whole group of Code Geass guys! Some people chose the more toned down way and just went with some cat ears or came as “generic ninja”. Overall, the quality of the cosplay was outstanding.

I spent the rest of the day watching screenings of D.Gray-man, Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto and Bartender. I thought D.Gray-man and BKI looked interesting and have potential. Bartender didn’t really do it for me and I found it to be pretty boring and dull, although it did have excellent production values.

Well, that does it for the Day 2 report. Days 3 coming soon!

The day officially starts at 2pm for the general public – I’m sure the organisers and host of volunteers started a lot earlier than that. The afternoon start turned out to be really good for me as I was coming out of an extremely hectic few days in which I had very little sleep, so a good long sleep was needed for me to fully enjoy the weekend festivities.

I arrived at Melbourne University at 2pm. I was on the opposite side of the campus from the Manifest registry, which was in the economics and commerce building this year (it was held in Wilson Hall last year), so I got to the registration area about 10 minutes later. I could tell I had arrived by the cosplayers.

A note about some of the cosplayers: whoever was playing Kakashi and Sakura from Naruto, you guys rocked! Especially Kakashi for dipping a girl and kissing her. Still with the mask on, of course. I also saw some people reprising roles from last year, such as Archer from Fate/Stay Night and a bunch of shinigami from Bleach. I actually saw someone playing Pheonix Wright from the Ace Attorney games, complete with “Objection!” speech … err, sign. While I was queued up the girls in front of me saw him and yelled “objection!” as loud as they could.

Overall though most of the day was pretty boring. What did I do? Here’s a hint:

Yep, from 2:10pm until 4:40pm I was standing in a very long, very slow moving queue. I now have that queueing shit down.

After that there wasn’t much to do. I’d missed the Lovely Complex screening (which is fine since I’ve already seen up to the current episode), I took a look at some of the fan traders that had set up and I went to see the screening of Byousoku 5 Centimeter (5 Centimetres Per Second) which was a superbly animated and sad/bitter-sweet story that I recommend watching if you’re into that kind of thing. So my accomplishments for the day were:

• I watched a cool new anime that I hadn’t seen before.
• I bought my first doujinshi … although it wasn’t manga-style so it was really a fan comic.
• I got my passes for a weekend of awesomeness!

Now I’m just psyched about the rest of the festival! More reports to come!

The talk was entertaining as you would expect, with plenty of jokes about the life of a grad student and their relationship with the rest of the world. While there were too many jokes to go through – and I don’t want to spoil the talk for people who might be attending future visits (in Queensland for instance) – but here’s one I remember well and really liked.

Another type of email I receive is: “Cecilia is so hot. Can I marry her?”
This disturbs me a little.
First of all, she’s an imaginary comic book character.
Secondly … she’s my imaginary comic book character. Hands off! Make up your own imaginary woman.

I quite enjoyed the slideshow as well since he used illustrations of the PHD characters for everything. A graph of “grad student motivation level” is made quite fun when a picture is shown below of the various states of distress of the comic’s nameless hero.

The only thing I was unhappy about (extremely upset is more accurate) was that I wasn’t able to hang around for the book signing as I had a meeting to rush off to. I guess I’ll have to go catch another one in the United States … or I can blackmail the postgraduate society into inviting him back.

Go here for the events schedule.

Directory Structure and File Naming

Your directory structure is very important as it makes finding things easier and makes managing your code base much simpler. If getting a test set up is difficult because they’re strewn all over the place then chances are that it won’t be done. Similarly, if something is difficult to find then it might as well not be there.

What you name things also plays a critical role in this. Names should be obvious as to their purpose and easy to remember. Source code should go in src or source, tests in test, libraries in lib or libraries and so on.

You might think this is all obvious but I’ve actually seen a repository laid out like so:

trunk/
    src/
        APP/
            external_app_1/
               doc/
               lib/
               src/
            external_app_2/
               lib/
               src/
               test/
            src/
                app/
                lib/

This is, without doubt, the worst layout and naming scheme I have ever seen – and hope I ever will see. Let me try and explain some of the reasoning here. The first src directory is there to hold any and all code, including tests, binary libraries the team’s code depends on and the external applications that are “mashed” into the overall application. Then, the first APP directory holds … well, everything I just mentioned. There are no other directories so I’m baffled as to why this was put here, much less in uppercase characters. From there the layout splits into directories containing the external applications and another src directory. This src is code that was created by the team, mostly to glue everything together. In that src directory we have another directory app (which contains, well, source code) and lib (which contains binary libraries the app code depends on). On top of this, you have all the directories that come from the external apps … and some of that code was also modified by the team!

Phew! That actually took longer to explain than I thought! I think it’s a perfect example of what not to do though. Can you imagine me trying to find the code that had been edited by the team?

If you are using tags and branches, as I outlined in the previous post in this series, then Subversion has a standard naming convention that can choose to adopt if you wish. This convention is use the directories trunk for your mainline development, branches for branch copies and tags for tagged copies. Very simple and obvious! You can, however, choose to use this is two different ways:

1. Use these directories as the top-level directories in your repository.
2. Use these directories as sub-directories of the various parts of your project stored in your repository.

The first should be fairly self-explanatory but here’s an example:

repository/
    branches/
    tags/
        version-1.0/
            doc/
            src/
            test/
    trunk/
        doc/
        src/
        test/

So basically you just have all your work under one of these three directories.

The other way is more suitable for repositories that store multiple projects or where you wish to have clean separation between various parts of the project. An example would be:

repository/
    doc/
        design/
            branches/
            tags/
            trunk/
    src/
        branches/
        tags/
        trunk/

This greatly multiplies the number of directories you have in certain cases so be careful if you want to go this way.

You of course don’t have to choose either of these conventions but whatever you do choose, you will need to document that somewhere and have a clearly defined process for dealing with branches and tags and whatnot.

Metadata

Although Subversion does allow for (nearly) arbitrary metadata to be attached to version controlled files, I will mostly be referring to the most common kind of “extra information” that you can add to your repository: commit logs. A commit log is simply a text message saved with the version that you check in. They are completely obvious as you are required to add one when committing, either by using a text editor such as vim, nano or a graphical editor for GUI shells (such as TortoiseSVN) or by explicitly adding a commit option on the command line via -m "message" (or the equivalent for your VCS).

This information is quite important as it allows you to more easily recognise versions, changes, bug fixes and so forth when you are inspecting or auditing your repository later. Some people like to have very structured logs similar to the following:

CHANGE:
REASON:
FILES AFFECTED:

I think listing the files changed in the log isn’t strictly necessary are that information can usually be reclaimed fairly easily (at least on the command line) but I know that there can be some potential pitfalls in Subversion when dealing with binary files. So it’s up to your team whether or not you want to list these files. If you do, Subversion makes it quite easy as a list of the files changed is given in the “template” log and you can easily move this text into your actual log.

Having a brief description of the changes made and the reason for those changes is essential. For someone checking a log later it is nice to be able to see descriptions of each version and track the development of product. While I don’t think it’s necessary to have such a formal structure as above, I firmly believe that the information must be present in all logs. If the information is self-explanatory then you can get away with short messages like “Fixed bug #3535″ but more information about this bug must be available somewhere else (a bug tracker in this case).

Process

Process is one of those things that should be obvious throughout any engineering project – otherwise it’s not really engineering! For your repository, make sure that the process you use allows your repository to stay organised. The things I have spoken about above should give you some starting points – like having procedures to use when writing commit logs, naming conventions to use for file and directory names, where to put tags and branches, when to make branches and tags and so on. Management of the repository is a part of your configuration management plan, which also includes descriptions of what your configurations are, who’s in charge of them, methods used for management the configurations, etc.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas and guides about how to better organise your repository. Again, I did not intend this to be an exhaustive examination of the subject but something to get you up and running. From here you can look into your own ways of keeping your repository in working order – after all, the repository is for your team so it’s for the team to decide what is best.