Day 34: Walter arrives, MEng report, Vacation Extension and a dual-list GUI

Walter arrives

I now have two PC's on my desk! I do like having two PC's on my desk.

Reinstalled Walter with the oncampus windows 7, he's now activated correctly, finished installing everything up to date and got the AR Demo with version control all sorted out and set up. There are massive amounts of backups on Walter, on Donald, and with a full set taking up 300 or so GB on the 1TB external hard drive.

ExportJPEGs and models

So it looks like having a scrollable list of heads and allowing the user to select between them is going to be a little difficult (i.e. I have no clue how to finish the implementation of ScrollPane and it would waste too much time to try).

So as an alternative I could have one list with space for 10 head names, and then allow the user to press a button to go the next set of 10 names, and the next and so on and so forth. Two buttons in fact, to go back and forward between sets of heads. Then the user can export them as they see fit.

Implemented it, ended up having two adjacent lists on the GUI because that means I can fit 20 heads on one screen instead of just 10 which is great.

Some extremely complicated programming was involved, so I used a bit of good old abstraction to make it all easy on the brain. Basically trying to decide when the forward and back buttons should be enabled and disabled, and working out when to initialize a new list for each of the two lists, and when I can assign an initialized list to one of the visible lists and how to determine which model to load when all I have is a list index that could be from any of the two lists and all this stuff is nigh on impossible. So, I simply made a bunch of wrapper methods around the two lists that make them behave like a single, simple list.

Namely:
makeNewHeadList() - which actually makes a pair of lists but the user doesn't see that.
setHeadList(int whichListToShow) - which shows on the GUI the correct pair of lists, indexed 0, 1, 2 etc, each index referring to a pair of lists.
getModelIndex() - which takes a list selection (i.e. after a user selects an item in one of the lists on the GUI) and returns the index of the corresponding model so the program can load whichever model was clicked.
addModelToList() - takes a model name, and adds it to the latest slot in whichever of the two lists it needs to go.

(remember each list is showing 10 names of models, the user clicking on a name makes that model show up in the GUI)

Here's a little taster of what it's looking like:

ExportJPEGs running - the heads will show up in the list as they are added to the watch folder

Placement Report

Got an email from the MEng manager Nick Filer informing us that we will need to write a full-on 35 page report regarding the projects us MEng students have been doing over this summer - worth 15 credits alone! I'm so glad Toby had be blog everything, because this is just great - I have all the information I need all here in this blog and all I need to do is write it out into a report. I would have loved to do this Augmented Reality stuff as a third year project (not in any way belittling the project I actually did, a SpiNNaker demonstration, because that too was awesome), and now I can finally live the dream with a lovely little report and a seminar all about the work I've been doing.

This is quite probably the first time the prospect of writing a report hasn't been met with unadulterated despair bordering on utter doom - what a nice change :-)

The vacation experience

So, in general, this summer has been absolutely fantastic. I've enjoyed every bit of it, from the copious random tasks to the huge events to the rebuilding some ultra-extreme-cutting-edge PCs to the difficult programming to the combining of Visual C#, .Net, XNA, 123D, shell scripting and various other technologies in order to make one heck of an Augmented Reality program. So much so that Toby is actually pursuing an extension to my work placement! If that goes through it would just be great. I can spend three more weeks doing what I do best and having a great time doing it, and as a result we should see a super polished and refined Augmented Reality experience by the time this summer is done. Count on it.