Week 4: Jun 21 - Jun 25
With further examination of the e-commerce website for the Avatar Shopping project, we anticipated that there would be some difficulty in selecting items from drop down menus using the touch screen interface. In light of this we decided to change the original design of drop down menus and replace them with radio buttons. What I thought might me an easy task turned out to be anything but. Another REU student had actually made an attempt at this task last week but he kept getting unexplainable syntax errors. In order to assist him I had to complete several JavaScript tutorials since I had no prior exposure to the language and its rule. I was able to locate the syntax error, but then had a runtime error. Subsequently, I was able to locate the runtime error, but then that resulted in another error. This definitely tried my patience, my ability and also the knowledge of several other people who have had experience with JavaScript codes. However, after a few days I was able to get the website operational and so far apparently bug free.
On Thursday we had presentation by Dr. Brian Dean who spoke about his currents research projects pertaining to Algorithmic Applications in Biology. His projects included a tool for analyzing EEG and diagnosing Epilepsy. He also found a similarity between finding bugs in a software and findings "bugs" in a binary string created from a human's genetic traits. I found this very interesting, and now him and his team are now taking a program that indicates the buggy lines in software and use it in a similar way to locate genetic traits that result in specific diseases.