August 23rd

It's been grand. Goodbye. The End.

August 22nd

Second to last day of the internship! Today we did the dry run of our presentations...that took a while to get through everyone and give everyone the advice they needed, but it was helpful, I think. I didn't really need to change much with my presentation, so I spent the rest of the day reading through it a few more times to prepare myself tomorrow...another pretty short and easy day.

August 21st

There's only two more days left of the internship, now that today is over...it went by really quickly. I did manage to get my PowerPoint done for the presentation tomorrow relatively quickly, and spent the rest of the day touching it up, thinking about what I was going to say, and practicing my presentation (mostly in my head)...all in all it was a pretty easy, short day.

August 20th

In the morning today, I started in earnest my presentation for Friday, thinking that I would easily have it done by the end of the day. However, I had a meeting with Jake at 10:00 (originally I thought that the meeting would be a brief checkup on my progress in my presentation), but he instead gave Ian and I the job of moving all the contents of the Insight Lab from its room on the third floor down to the new room on the first floor. This took all day, even with considerable help from some of the other interns. Thus, I made almost no progress on my presentation.

August 19th

It's been quite a while since I had to make a blog post (I went on vacation last week)...

Anyway, it was relatively easy to get back into the swing of things yesterday, despite missing a week of work, mainly because I ended at a good stopping point on Friday before I went away (I had just finished (for good) my GUI program). This morning, I did a final run-through of my GUI to make sure there weren't any obvious errors with it that I had overlooked, and I sent it off to Vlad via email. After that, I spent the rest of the day finishing the UML diagram of the entire VoTech program that I started a few weeks ago, and thus finished up all the actual work I have to do for the summer. It now looks like this (obviously, it is zoomed pretty far out):

All I have left to do now is to put together my presentation for Friday, actually do the presentation, and the internship will be over...it went by rather quickly.

August 8th

My program was finally, completely finished today...or so I thought. I did completely debug it, but after lunch I had a meeting with Vlad, and there were some aspects of it that he wanted me to tweak. "Tweak", however, is probably a misleading word to use...the changes themselves were rather minor and seemingly insignificant, but when I went to try to make them after lunch, some of them started causing me lots of problems...many of them weren't fixed by the end of the day, so that's what I'll be doing tomorrow. This whole dubuging process is certainly the most annoying part of coding that I've come up against so far.

August 7th

There were several times across the course of the day today that I thought that I had finished my GUI, but every time I did what I thought would be a final run-through, I found some error that made me have to go back and revise my code once again. I am fairly certain that this occurred 7 or 8 times, each time requiring me to spend an additional half hour to hour figuring out what the problem was, finding it, and fixing it. Not a fun process.

August 6th

All I did today, with the exception of taking some time to help Jacob with some of his work (he needed a second pair of hands again), was find errors in my code and fix them. Some of them, such as the issues with the Move to Top and Move to Bottom buttons that I mentioned yesterday, were quite annoying (although I did end up getting that particular issue fixed by the end of the day). I made the last of the buttons do something (the save buttons), but while I had expected that those buttons would be quite easy and I would finish with them quickly, it turned out that they actually were quite problematic (I couldn't get my files to save to the right places). Thus, I did not finish writing the program by the end of the day today, as I thought that I would.

August 5th

By lunchtime today I had my GUI almost entirely operational...almost all of the buttons work; questions appear in the question field, you can click on them, etc. However, there are a number of bugs I have yet to work out. For example, when you click the "Move to Top" button, the entire question set gets thoroughly screwed up (essentially the same thing happens when you click the "Move to Bottom" button). I spent the rest of the day trying to work out these bugs and others - some problems I solved, whereas others I repeatedly tried to fix with no success...I guess I will just have to try again tomorrow. I still haven't done much in the way of organizing my code (which is likely a big part of my problem).

August 2nd

I had thought that my GUI was almost finished...however, I talked with Vlad today, and although it is in working order, there are a lot of things with it that I need to restructure and organize to make it more usable for other people; so that other people can edit and change my code after I am done with it without needing me to explain how it works to them (I have to admit, it does make sense to do this; as of right now my code is rather unorganized and hard to follow). So, after a day of working on getting it almost all the way to complete functionality, I'm thinking that I will need Monday to finish doing that, and Tuesday and Wednesday to get it well organized, and then I will be done with it.

August 1st

Today I tackled the issue of having an editable list of selectable items (a list of the questions that the teachers enter that can be clicked on to select a question to edit or move)...as far as I know, that was probably the only thing in the GUI that I wasn't sure how I was going to make work. Because of the fact that I do not know all of the different components of Java Swing, I spent a large portion of the day trying to utilize the components I do know how to use to make such a list, only to find that 1) I don't have the programming ability to do that, and 2) there is a Java Swing "list" component that does all of this for me. Although it was somewhat annoying to find that the answer was right there all along, after I found that out I was able to get quite a bit done.

July 31st

I worked solely on my GUI again today...my guess is that is essentially all I will be doing for the next week today. I got several of the buttons to "do things"; thanks to the Java plug-in Jacob showed me, doing that is quite easy. However, I do have to keep things in a certain format (it still has to be in Model-View-Controller), and the plug-in doesn't actually let you do anything as far as giving the buttons actions, so it does still take some time to make sure everything is how Vlad wants it.

I also went to the summer seminar series again today....this time it was a series of short videos on "elevator speeches" - some of the videos were on how to give elevator speeches (essentially 2-minute sales pitches asking someone for something very concisely), and the other videos were of examples of elevator speeches. Some of the examples were very impressive - it was actually very informative, overall.