IRC log of chat with Nandita Mangal about Matlab Actor

The matlab actor i've been working on i've also been colaborating with Nandita Mangal from SDSC since she was also interested in using the Matlab actor.

In the kepler group's latest meeting they did i code review of the MatlabExpression code that I had added to their CVS.

I've uploaded the presentation given by Nandita and the results of the code review here: Code Reviews

After I reviewed the document created from their code review i had the following chat with Nandita on the kepler irc channel. I thought i should copy and paste it here to keep a record of it.

note: Nandita seemed to have gone AFK after i started this rant. I'll append her comments later if she has any.

tristan: the network execution has been something i've been thinking about to. if there was some sort of matlab server then it would remove the need to start a process, and we could just send input and get output from network sockets
tristan: i've seen some things (that i've not looked into much detail yet) where someone has created a java network app that runs in matlab and controls talking to matlab over the network. Might be worth looking into. would be a fair bit of work tho, since you'd have to look into security and stuff
tristan: one thing i think we can change is the expression port. we can just change the expression parameter to a PortParameter. i'll work on that today
tristan: also, the p.waitFor() method blocks the execution until the process has ended. so there's no worries there
tristan: i'm adding a inputstream.close() call to close the inputstream
tristan: the log file used has a different name everytime the fire() method is called. i append it with a randomly generated number each time.
tristan: maybe rather than having a parameter for the switch -nodesktop, we should make it part of an interactive mode.
tristan: we'll have to come up with a use case where someone might want an interactive mode so we can properly look at what needs to be done there