Day 64: The beginning

All good things must continue forever... or something like that.

Today I did some documentation, I implemented the IMAP and mbox tutorials inside the wiki itself which required the uploading of screenshots. It turned out file uploading hadn't been implemented when the Wiki was set up, which was soon rectified via Steve and its now all done.

The wiki looks good.

Also troubleshooted some printing stuff with John Latham. And we noticed that when logging into your Unix account or logging in on My Manchester, it doesn't matter whether you use capitals or not in your password - it makes absolutely no difference. Very strange and somewhat worrying too, makes one wonder whether they are sending our password over the network as plain text... I've clearly spent too long with John.

My, what a summer this has been! From Monday I'm back to being just a regular student, one of gazillions coming to the Uni for Welcome Week. This is going to be a fun year, I can feel it!

I wrote a 300 word summary of my experiences for this vacation job, apparently to go on the school website. Here it is, I think it aptly describes how I have felt about the past 13 weeks:

Frankly, it's been a whole lot of fun! This experience has been the polar opposite of dull. There is new stuff coming up all the time that keeps every day unique, events and jobs of a huge variety to do alongside the core task which makes for a colourful, interesting, and exciting work experience. This place is massive, so much goes on it boggles the mind. I've done programming, documenting, porting, debugging, testing, blogging, cabling PC's, troubleshooting PC's, buying PC components, building PC's, upgrading PC's, swapping components about, formatting PC's, reinstalling OS's, managing email clients, IMAP, brushing up all manner of skills (.Net programming, networking, embedded development,  Python, shell scripting, Visual C#, XNA, OpenGL to name a few), manning demos at events, attending meetings to discuss and decide immensely important stuff, playing with the very best 3rd year projects of all time, moving 42" televisions and all manner of super high end computer hardware about, photography, modelling for photography, barbecuing that I didn't actually attend, and general tomfoolery when the occasion called for it. I’ve honestly enjoyed every moment of my time working this summer, one of the best ever. 

I would recommend it if you want a fun summer whilst earning. You get to interact with your lecturers, professors and people behind the scenes on a daily basis. Great opportunity to get to know the important academics especially if you are planning to do further study at the University later on (masters, PhD).

In addition all the work you do has an impact. Often in industrial internships the work you do is barely helpful, you aren’t important for the work you put in but for other reasons. Whereas working as a vacation student the whole reason you are here is first and foremost to complete a task that the department needs done (and a million other subtasks). You are important and the work you do is important - nothing is contrived or just to keep you busy, which really helps in motivation and enjoyment.

In short, it has been a tremendously positive experience.

I would like to thank Toby Howard for being a fantastic supervisor. I can't fault him in any way, him and his team (but mostly him) and everyone I've interacted with over the course of this work (included but not limited to Andy Wise, JTL, Graham Gough, Steve Pettifer, Tony Curran, of course Toby, Ruth Maddock, the hardware guy walking about, Gavin Brown, Rina Srabonian and a whole bunch more) have made this summer a real success in so many ways. Words fail me.

Goodbye.

Day 63: Wiki

Finished off the tutorials for the wiki, they are linked into it and everything is set up.

Did a load of documentation.

Alerted Tony to the fact that there was mistake in the MAC logging for a few machines which would potentially have resulted in about six of the computers in LF31 freezing intermittently and being generally horrible to use. All fixed now though.

Did some other spontaneous tasks, all looking good everything is coming together nicely.

Day 62: Three days to go

Three days to go, wanted to finish LowryDemo today, managed to get a good chunk of it done but it's now 1am and there's a lot left.

Documentation is one of those things where you need to curb your perfectionist tendencies and not overload information into it. The most effective documentation is short and simple, so that's the direction in which I'm trying to mould my documenting habits.

It's going rather well but taking a little longer than I expected :)

Fixed a few things I noticed in ExportJPEGs and LowryDemo as I documented them, polished off some loose ends and made the complicated bits of the code tidier.

Also spent some time moving bits of code about to where it really belongs. The fact that I'm categorising different areas of code really highlights places where I've put code that doesn't belong there, so I'm quite enjoying perfecting the programs.

Till tomorrow!

Day 61: And into LowryDemo we go

Started LowryDemo documentation. It's difficult to get your head round such a massive program and then try to work out how to even structure the documentation, but it seems to be taking shape slowly.

Finally got the IMAP working fully, updated the guides and tutorials and the wiki. Published the google doc tutorials for mbox importing and for setting up Thunderbird IMAP, and then linked them into the wiki. Also made pdf's of them and sent those to Graham so he can consider putting them onto the wiki in place of the google docs because the google stuff is obviously hosted on Google's servers which is less than ideal.

It turned out the way Thunderbird works is that you need to only enter the server name in the IMAP and SMTP settings boxes, and then let it auto-detect the rest of it. It actually uses different ports and protocols to what Outlook was using.

In the email field you need to enter your user ID that can be found on outlook, mine was firstname.lastname@student.manchester.ac.uk

In the username field you enter your Campus ID, e.g. mbxxxxxx, and in the password field your Campus password.

All done, now to concentrate on documentation! Aiming to finish it by tomorrow.

Day 60: Blogging!

Forgot to do my blog posts lately - working from home does throw some simple habits off kilter as it were!

Continuing documentation, aim to finish ExportJPEGs today at the very least and make some headway into LowryDemo.

.. And that's what I did. ExportJPEGs documentation finally finished! Only about 10,000 words. Time to sleep, bye :)

Day 59: Working from home

.. and did a bunch of documentation!

5000 words and not even finished ExportJPEGs, I think it's a bit too detailed so may start summarising stuff from now on to finish everything in a day or three. Only a week left till University starts off again!

So far I've been adding a lot of detail, with the intention to make it so that the user can read the doc and understand basically everything that went on in my head when coding the programs and will barely need to look at other sources to understand how it works. But this is slowing the documentation down, so from now I will just do the normal thing and refer the user to other documentation when necessary, and just give the basic framework of how and why things do what they do. This will leave a lot more scope for the user to teach themselves.

Did a few other menial tasks messing about with Office 365 and email and whatnot. All good fun!

Day 58: Completion of cabling

Cabling all completed.

Did a few hours of it yesterday, finished half the room. Came today and finished the rest, looks quite pristine now - hard work coming to fruition and all that.

Three of the desk cable tidy hole slot covers cannot be found, so three desks are looking a bit messy.

One of the desks didn't have the computer set up in it yet, so I haven't done that one but apart from that all is done.

Logged onto the Linux machines in the lab and sorted out the Thunderbird tutorials. Office 365 mail verification is still broken so I couldn't finish the IMAP guide, but I added some info to the wiki:
http://wiki.manchester.ac.uk/compsci/index.php/It.changes