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

Day 57: Only a week and a half to go!

Time management

Time is short, so I've been increasing efficiency. I want this documentation finished as soon as possible. I've been missing some hours a day at work the past week or so (have been working 6 or 5 or even 4 hour days - I've been busy with my sisters wedding, which is now finally over), therefore I have a few extra hours to work overtime to make up, so I plan to work a lot longer than usual this week, and probably into the weekend.

Annoyingly I also need to divide up my time for my MEng report, but it will be manageable.

And I've also decided to work at home for most of the next few days, only coming in to get the cabling done in LF31. I can afford to do this now because documentation doesn't really require much rebuilding and testing of the AR, so my home PC has everything I need. This will save a lot of time in travelling and eating and all sorts of other time-eating activities that I normally do, which is great.

I will need to be in the School to test and run some things though, get screenshots etc, until I fully install the AR onto my home machine and find myself a webcam, but I'll be sure to list up everything I need to do beforehand and stop by my office to get it all done efficiently at one sitting when I'm already in Kilburn to do the cabling.

Scratch that - change of plan

Just talked to Toby, decided I'll get the cabling over and done with and then work from home thereafter.

Spent the afternoon cabling, finished half of the whole room. All I can say is that for about half the room, frankly whoever did the cabling there is now my sworn enemy. I have never seen so many shoddy mistakes - network cables just thrown over the desk instead of going down into the tidy hole and out the other one, the USB extension that users will need to swap often being stuffed down the tidy hole and sealed there by using a cable tie in completely the wrong place so they are completely inaccessible, using a cable tie on every single cable around the tidy hole which is frankly horrible, being unpredictable and simply not consistent, and so on.

Sorted it all out now. The other half of the room seems to be much more sensibly cabled (I presume different people did each half of it), and now I'm looking forward to finishing everything tomorrow morning.

Out of interest, takes me 3 minutes a desk on average (provided the cabling isn't too bad, just replacing tie wraps and sorting out cable positioning etc - when I didn't have to lie down under the desk trying to feed horrendously placed cables through tiny holes to their proper positions or fix other horrendous cabling mistakes). I cut out the cable wrapping plastic and put one of them along with one cable tie onto each desk beforehand. Also cleaned up all the left over cut cable tie bits into a bag, from my own cutting and the load that are strewn over random desks from the previous cabler; will hopefully save someone having to go through everything afterwards (well to be honest someone probably will still have to go through everything afterwards, but at least it will save them some time).

I realised after about 3 rows that I was using too little of the cable wrapping plastic, it didn't really reach end to end. I increased the length for the rest of the desks though, looking much better on the left side of the room. I'll probably replace this on the ones that are too short, there seems to be a lot of the stuff left over.

Day 56: Cabling and Documenting, day one.

The documentation continues, and Pi cabling is underway!

The cabling is pretty simple, ensure the cable ties are correctly done and correct them if not, apply the plastic stretchy translucent cable tidier things to the two cables going from the back of the monitor (USB and power or something) to the cable hole in the desk; apply the cable hole cover thing and slot the two blue cables (network and USB) out of the far slots, the power and HDMI out of the front slots, and the two aforementioned monitor cables out the right slot.

The four cables apart from the two monitor ones (i.e. usb, hdmi, network and power) go through the cable ties.

All set! Only about 80 to do, got through about 5 today before turning in, will continue in earnest tomorrow.

Continued documentation, I have a pretty solid structure in place now, Divided each program into functions - so for ExportJPEGs that would be something like:

1. GUI Handling: creating, displaying and managing the GUI and its functions
2. Server Polling: monitoring the server for new models, and copying them to the incoming directory
3.  Directory Monitoring: monitoring the incoming directory for new models, then loading them for processing
4. Model Processing
5. Exporting GIFs: exporting JPEGs, converting them to a gif, and uploading the gif to the web gallery.

Then there is a section for each one, which first describes the aim of the function, then lists and explains in bullet points the global variables used, and then lists and explains in bullet points every method which contains code relevant to the function.

All looking good, I've pretty much done Server Polling and Directory Monitoring.

Day 55: The return of the Howards.

The Documentation

Continued documenting the mass of excellence that is ExportJPEGs and LowryDemo, improved the intro a  massive amount, started off a basic structure for the general code explanations and got stuck right into it.

Toby is back! Some cheerful reunions ensued, at one point I'm sure I heard guitar music of some sort coming from his room in the afternoon :)

And I'm now convinced that Toby is an excellent photographer. These aren't just images that are pleasant to the eye, rather after browsing his new Japan August 2013 photo album I realised that each and every one of those captures serves to work together to portray the real essence of Japan. I now feel as if the beautiful country is my long lost home that I have only the fondest memories of, with the images tentatively prodding and stirring those feelings into an inner desire to experience it for myself... now, if Toby worked at a travel agency's my flight would be booked.

Tomorrow I may be helping out with some Pi cabling in LF31, a nice change - some manual labour which would be a welcome respite from the mental stresses and stressful mentals of documentation.

Ahem, till then.