August 10, 2005
The Last 5 Minutes Take Forever
So the program works, the server is off the local network and out from behind the firewall, Camista is running, VNC Server is running.... what's the hold-up? Well....
Ok, two problems *I* can't fix: eclipse is being stupid about the memory thing (It claims to be out of heap space when I build the project more than once), and connecting to VNC is not working (Cannot connect to server - can't see why not). So, since I can't fix them, someone else will have to, and so I'm gonna stop worrying about it. For now.
What I am working on is the how-to document and the demo video the study participants will get before the study. The tricky part is making sure all three versions of the documentation (for the three versions of the program) contain identical or equivalent information (where applicable). Whouldn't want the results to be skewed because I forgot to mention to one group that *this* happens if you left-click *there* on the diagram.
August 02, 2005
About Time Something Worked
Well things seem to be running more smoothly now. Camista (the screen capture software we're using) is co-operating with Remote Desktop. VNC apparently doesn't work on a mac, but that's ok, I'll either log in with VNC from Wes's machine while the subjects use Remote Desktop, or I'll get the subjects to log in with VNC while I work directly from the server.
I've come up with a list of questions to use in the study. I have to find the answers using ActiveAspect, just to make sure one can, and come up with the wrong mc answers. Then I have to come up with a mini tutorial/demo and then we'll be ready for a dry run.
July 22, 2005
Windows is EVIL!!!
As a born-and-bred Mac user, I'm supposed to think Windows stinks, but it's TRUE!!! gah! I was stymied for four hours by stupid file permissions. On a unix system it would have taken me all of 30 seconds to figure out what the permissions were supposed to be, set them, test it, and realize that wasn't the problem. Of course, there wouldn't have been a problem, because unix systems don't have problems unziping mac files.
So, on top of the fact that Windows is stupid, and on top of the fact that I look like an idiot because I can't figure out how to stop Windows from being stupid, I look like an idiot because I can't figure out the obvious solution.
Me: It works from CVS, just not over ftp, but I can't use CVS, cuz Eeclipse won't start up on my laptop any more.
Gail: Have you tried re-installing it?
Me: That won't work because we needed a custom version or our program won't run -
Oh. Right. I don't need our plug-in to run on my machine, I just need CVS. D'oh.
One clean install of Eclipse later, and the last working backup is transfered over to the new machine.
And apparently, I can't use CVS either. I'm missing about a week of work, because my working copy of eclipse was corrupted when Eclipse went boom and in the subsequent attempting-to-fix-it, and the last backup was buggy, and I don't remember why. So, I went back to the second last backup, did a bunch of fancy copy-paste work and reconstruction, and a few hours later had something that was ready to be backed up. So I open the CVS repository, and somehow overwrite my copy with the copy on the server instead of the other way around.
I am going to get Wes to solve this on Monday. I give up.
EVIL, i tell you!!
getamac.
July 04, 2005
I'm supposed to update this *how* often??
Oops. Blogging regularly is apparently not my "thing." Oh well.
So we got ethics approval for the experiment (we want to find out which of several versions of the plugin is the most effective). We're now starting to think about how we're going to work the remote login, etc.
I've got all the main functionality working on the program now, but there's still a bit of work to be done - streamlining and improving the code, and putting in buttons so people can switch between the versions - which means recombining three versions of the code into a single version... eh, shouldn't be *too* hard.
June 08, 2005
Ethics and Debugging
Went over the Ethics proposal for the reasearch experiment we're going to do regarding the tool I'm working on. Found one mistake. Hope there aren't more. Complicated much?
The highlighting of relationships is being buggy. Off to fix that now. I think I know what the problem is, but we'll see.
Update: Oh. yay. It works. I'm going to sleep now.
May 18, 2005
Progress, sorta
Well, at least I understand something now. I'm supposed to be adding a palette to the Eclipse plug-in I'm working on. (Package: org.eclipse.gef.palette) I think I understand how it works now, but I can't test it because there's strange bugs popping up regarding parts of the code I didn't work on.
May 11, 2005
Why won't this work?
Relearning Java is a pain in the ass. Of course, I didn't expect to be instantly fluent in it, but still. Well, it's only my second week on the job...
I'm working on a visual modeling system for Eclipse, so that programmers can see the relationships between aspects and classes in their program. Its pretty cool. So, I got the functionality that I was working on to work, but in the process killed some other stuff. Debugging is always the most frustrating part of a project. And since most of the code is someone else's, and I'm not very familiar with any of it, it's an exersise in frustration. But everyone in the lab is nice; I'll go bug people to help me later.
May 03, 2005
First Post
Ok, so this is my first post in this weblog. As such, It's ab it of a test... Testing 1, 2, 3...
Ok, it works. Cool. On to the content.
Today's my firt day at the lab. It's pretty good so far. I alwas find first days a little freaky. I was at my last job for over a year, and it's an abrumpt jump from expert to newbie. I'm not sure which project I'll be working on yet, I'm supposed to just play with the tools and get used to the environment today. I don't even have a computer yet, I'm working on my laptop at the moment. I must remmber to ask Gail about getting my workstation set up ergonomically, otherwise I'll be having trouble with my wrists again. Other than that, not much to do today.