mission failed

We weren't able to get the idt program in on time. It was a failure in both planning and in estimation of abilities. When we had first sat down to plan it out, we divided the work into equal parts for the three of us. We figured that since we only had about about a week left, working independently with division of labour was the best way to go about it, and it might have been.

The problem, though, was that we didn't estimate properly the time it would take each of us to work out the problem. I don't know how much work my teammates were putting into it, but I put in about an hour or two every day that week. I guess (I hope) they were doing the same. I estimated my programming ability pretty well (which is unusual for me), and got it done just in time - I then volunteered to do the extra work of putting the three parts together at the end, because we needed someone to, and I might as well. All this time, I assumed that my teammates were working at about the same pace as me, and making about as much progress. This was a mistake.

On friday, when the sent me their code, so that I could combine it with mine and submit it, it turned out that they, together, had about 50 lines of code to my 200, and were asking me to finish doing the majority of what they were supposed to have done - the abstraction of figuring out window locations and comparing them. There was no way I could have done this, together with adding a user interface as I had volunteered to do, before midnight, so I figured it was best not to submit at all - this was wrong.

The main thing I learned from our problem here is that equal distribution of labor is not the best way to go about things. Instead, I should have made sure that my teammates were not being given more than they could handle. Of course, I could not have done much more than I did in a week, so perhaps it was impossible for us to do it. Still, I should have given myself much more work than I gave them, rather than distributing it equally. Still, though, they did say they'd be able to handle it, so I also learned to always report my ability correctly in planning - and to make sure others do the same.

finished the corner-finder

I just finished my assigned part of the program for idt, the bit that actually scans the image and finds the corners between windows. It's pretty good and effective, it scans from the bottom up and left to right for windows, and although it isn't perfect, windows would have to be positioned just perfectly in the right spots to trick it. It is, unfortunately, a bit slow, but i don't believe the competition grades us based on execution time.

Last week I:
Learned about the png library we're going to be using to read images, and figured out how to read individual pixel data from an image using it

Today I:
Started working on a function that will read an image and determine the number of non-occluded windows in it

Before next week I will:
Finish work on that function, while the rest of my team works on the overall algorithm for computing the number and locations of windows using my data

Odd problem

I'll describe what happened more in detail in this class later, but first - an odd problem I found.

when I loaded a page handled by the generic static-page function for the app engine (the one that basically just calls the render() function), even after I had logged out (using the google users module), it still used my username in referencing the page. This didn't happen with any of my other pages, even the highscores one which did absolutely nothing involving users. Eventually, I fixed it by making the default function just pass an empty dictionary. I really don't know why this worked, but it did.

Work on guessing game

I finished all the code for the actual guessing game, which works beautifully now, and then spent about 45 minutes completely failing to get a highscore table to work. I may try again next week, but at home I'll work on getting it to use the datastore and not just the memcache.

I had written the code for the game, but eventually had to move it to make it more sensible and work better - moving much of the logic from the post to the get function. I have not yet uploaded it to Google's servers

New Book

Started the new book today, It's interesting. Assumes you havn't read the other one, so I'm learning the same things multiple times - and multiple ways. It's good though, learning some stuff. I plan to, over this week, re-write the clock app using more stuff - templates, css, etc - from the other book, that style seemed a lot better, more elegant, easier. I'll probably learn a lot by combining them as well.

Chapter 2 work and reactions:

I read through the chapter. I liked it, it was good and informative. I've got to say, I don't much enjoy working with html - now or any time i've tried it before. CSS is interesting, seems like it has a lot of potential to do cool stuff with, but still not amazingly fun to work with. I did the work, it's at http://students.gctaa.net/~dreich/projects/ch2/. I didn't do either the end-chapter excerices or the excerices you linked to, because they all just seemed like meaningless busywork, considering I understand the stuff already. If you want me to do them, I will, but that's the one thing I didn't expect to see taking a college-level course. Particularly that one you have where you wanted me to make a table of dec/hexa/octal/binary values; that's excatly the sort of thing I (and, presumably, other computer-hacker-y people, including you) would hate - mindless, not even copy-pasting, but typing the same thing over and over. If you made me do it, I'd likely just write up a python script to generate it. Which, admittedly, may take longer, but it might not and it would wind up actually teaching me something - which doing that wouldn't. Not to mention, it would be about 100x more fun.

Anyway, that semi-rant went on for a while. Looking ahead a bit... the next chapter's on really insanely simple stuff with python. I can skip that, right? The next one's on.. (these ellipses are me checking)... Something I don't know, that looks fairly simple. I'll do it soon then. I'll probably be done with it by the time I come to the acreer center, finally - next tuesday, right?