Week 2: July 11 - 17

Dr. Shapiro told us that we will be meeting with Kasia next week Monday (July 18); Kasia is the girl who is helping Raven with the programming part of the project. We wanted to meet with her so that she can show us what she has done and so that we know where to start.

During the week, we corresponded a little bit with Kasia, Raven and Todd (who had worked on Emily), and got the Java code for Emily and eventually Kasia's code for our project so far and the database we are going to be working on. I spent most of my week finishing my website, looking through the Emily code and trying to get Kasia's code to run (I was successful at 7pm on Friday :))

It took some time to get the database and the code running by myself because I didn't know anything about the Protégé knowledge-base framework so I had to read up on it, look through the API, etc. Since the Protégé editor isn't installed on the computers we're working on, I fould an Eclipse (Eclipse is an open-source IDE) plug-in so that you can use the Protégé editor (limited features though) through Eclipse, and that helped a lot in figuring out what the database looks like.

I figured out that the database Kasia had sent me wasn't the complete version because by mistake she didn't paste all of it. After I saw this, I fixed the database files and got the code to run. The GUI that Kasia has so far is similar to what Tejinder and I were thinking the GUI should look like. There is still a lot of work to do on it, but it's a start.

During the week, I also got a Java book from the library and looked at some online Java books, specifically Java in a Nutshell, 5th ed. by David Flanagan. That website has many other books too, so it's a very useful reference because you can search all the books for the topic you need. I just skimmed through to remind myself about Java, running applets and also about .jar files.

Some interesting things that also happened during the week are that we went out for lunch with Dr. Shapiro on Tuesday, and we went to her graduate students' meeting on Wednesay. Lunch was fun, we talked about grad school a little bit and chatted about Seattle.

At Dr. Shapiro's students' meeting on Wednesday we heard about some of the other projects that are going on here. Some of them sounded really interesting, even though a lot of the details discussed were way over my head :)

Our first two weeks haven't been very busy or stressful, but next week we will begin real work on the project. Yey!

Harry Potter midnight party!

I had another busy weekend! On Friday night, Tejinder and I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was a really cool movie! After the movie finished at around 11pm, we went to the University Bookstore because they were having a Harry Potter midnight party. The sixth Harry Potter book was coming out at midnight and we met up with my friend Dana and some of her friends. I thought we were going to be the only people there older than 12, but actually there were all sorts of people: young, old, dressed-up, etc. It was pretty funny, but I had a good time :) I also got the Harry Potter book, and have been trying very hard not to read it too quickly. I took some pictures.

U. District Farmer's Market

On Saturday we went to the U. District Farmer's Market, as usual. I got some Rainier cherries, which are white and red and very yummy. Then we went to a vegan cafe and bakery called "The Flying Apron", it was great. Took pictures there too. Spent the rest of the day reading Harry Potter and then going to a Dana's party in the evening.

View from the Golden Gardens beach

Sunday was a beautiful, sunny day, the weather was as perfect as you can hope for in Seattle. It would've been a shame to be a lazy pile and stay indoors, so I got on my trusty bike and rode to the Golden Gardens beach; it was lovely ~10 mile bike ride along the lake and the Sound. I spent the day sitting on the beach, reading Harry Potter and getting sunburnt. I would have loved to go for a swim but the Sound is very cold and there was lots of seaweed in the water. And, guess what? I took pictures.

I met Tejinder and Mike (a roommate) for dinner in Greenwood, but to get there I had to go up the hugest hill I've ever climbed with a bike.. I'm going to be fit by the time I leave Seattle :)