I Like Waffles

No lights in the moo

Our lights have died in the moo, and its dark outside.

Heather and I being the creative people we are made a lamp out of a flashlight to fix this.

We are awesome (:

Interviews Begin

So in ~15 minutes, I begin my first interview of the term (:

It’s with BlueSun, they do interesting things with Financial stuff. After doing a bit of research into them, the job sounds more appealing then my initial thoughts. Though they still make a good first interview, someone I want to work for, but I would not be super sad if this isn’t my best interview /:

As a side note, apparently I look like a douche when i dress up fancy. And I am okay with this.

anyways, time to go show off my awesomeness. Wish me luck (:

p.s. This is absolutely A M A Z I N G!

The Mythical Man-Month Chp. 1

The first chapter was amazing. It gets you into the book very quickly!

Frederick starts the chapter with an analogy of how large system programming is like the tar pits of yester-millennium — “The fiercer the struggle, the more entangling the tar”

Beautiful!

It then describes what a programming systems product really is, especially compared to just a program. He explains the amount of money, and work involved in bringing a program to the aforementioned state, and how rare and difficult it is.

Then, to lighten the mood, he goes into quite a bit of detail of why us programmers love what we do! One thing he said here really stood out to me as both beautiful and inspiring.

“Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.”

Brooks finishes the chapter by discussing how programming is not all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.

I must say though, if the rest of the book is even remotely as elegantly written as this first chapter, I may have to consider the best book on the subject I have read.

Information Architecture

This past week I have been working on a new Information Architecture for the staff web at my coop job.

I have learned so much in this single week it is amazing! I had read a book on information architecture at the beginning of the term, and it gave me an idea of what I had to do, but physically doing it is just so much more different.

My initial ideas were alright, but as I worked on it I kept discovering things I could do differently, do in a more intuitive, or organized way.

Then my boss’s boss began helping me out here and there (she did this kind of thing a lot at her previous job), and I learned more than the entire book had taught me.

She was just so effective at explaining why we needed to do what we were doing, which just brought everything together in my head.

And even thought the architecture for the staff website is really simple, that’s what it needed to be, and I think that this was the idea she really showed me. It’s new vision is a simple one, and the simpler the architecture, the more it will force the site to stay that way.

Library Reflections

Hello Everyone!

I thought I’d do a few reflections on what my experience has been like so far working in a library.

I can say for sure that it is nothing like I initially thought it would be. I’m not sure what I thought it would be like, but it has been a pleasant surprise. The variety of things being done is staggering, and the people all bring very different experiences to the table.

I have had the opportunity to work on things as dry (no offense!) as cleaning computers, to things as exciting as creating a framework for generating forms using php!

Some of my projects have been for a small, small group of people, whereas some have the potential to be used university wide.

This experience thus far has been one that has taught me so much, and I know there is so much more I will learn from the people I am working with.

Although, I think this just really brings to light the fact that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover!

Keep that in mind my friends, and peace.

Google Analytics

Hey guys,

So I have been doing some interesting stuff with Google analytics at my coop job (which is at the DP Library, University of Waterloo), and I figured I would share some of my progress.

I have been looking into how to track embedded youtube video progress using google analytics.

I’ll start by explaining why I would even want to do such a thing. I am working with the pilot team for screen casting in our department, and one of the things that they really wanted to do was be able to collect data with regards to watching screen casts. Obviously, this information could be really helpful, as they could find out if people stop watching videos after a certain period of time, or if people never watch the opening / closing statements, and other interesting things like that.

It had also been decided, that for the time, YouTube was the most viable option for the hosting of these videos, for various reasons.

I eventually, after spending some time familiarizing myself with the YouTube API’s was able to create a nice piece of javascript that does everything we needed. Basically, it tracks the current time of the video, and compares it to a few pre-decided points of time (the points you wish to track). If it hits a match, it calls a piece of javascript that tells Google analytics you “hit” a new page. Each of these pages are uniquely identified as the point name.

Thus presto, when you check your google analytics, you see hits on “pages” which represent different times in a video. Now as long as you organize these points appropriately (for example, /screencasting/video1/point1), you can easily see your progress.

However, there was still one problem with this solution. It was not the most user friendly approach, as you had to play though lots of javascript to create unique points. Since this needed to be very simple to use, considering that most people using it will not know any javascript at all, or code for that matter, I created a php front end that generates the appropriate javascript needed.

Now you might be thinking, isn’t php just as bad as javascript? And in a way yes, but being as it was a front end, I was able to make it quite simplistic to use, and change it from editing several * n lines of code, to n lines of code (where n is the number of tracked points).

I realize that this overview was very vague, and didn’t go into a lot of detail. I would go into more coding details, but I keep my code at work. Perhaps at the end of the term I will put the code up on my website, so that those who are really interested can see exactly what I did.

If you have any questions, email me, or just make a waffle (post a comment).

Cheers~ <(^.^,)>

The Mythical Man-Month

I have begun reading this book today. Only read through the introduction, and intend to read about a chapter per day.

Thus far it is quite elegantly written, and from what I have heard, it is a beautiful book.

I’ll keep people posted on my thoughts for each chapter as I go!

Site Update

Hey guys,

I have been working on a major overhaul of my website for a while now, or rather, not working on it.

I intend to get back to work on this project soon though. I was waiting until I finished a project I’m working on at work, as it would be useful for my website, but I have decided it would be better to finish the website, and later integrate my little project into my website later (:

I’m mostly working on the back structure right now, adding in javascript with ajax for sorting my projects, and a few other goodies that I won’t disclose right now.

Comments

I now have setup the ability to use comments!

I also intend to start making (almost) daily updates to this blog from now on!

I have been lacking in regards to having this blog updated regularly, and I intend to fix this!