Week 1: May 27 - May 31 |
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Monday, May 27th was Memorial Day. For that reason, I didn't really start on that day. Tuesday was my official first day. I met with Professor Rodger and she gave me a brief overview of what I was to be doing, which will be explained in greater detail later. For the most part, this week was dedicated to getting set up in the right systems, activating new accounts, and familiarizing myself with appropriate programs and software. I completed tutorials on the Java programming language, and then moved on to one on JFC Swing, which is used to create multi-platformed graphical interfaces. Below are links to the previously mentioned tutorials: |
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Week 2: June 3 - June 7 |
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After spending the first week on getting familiar with the basics, I was ready to move on to familiarizing myself with the program that I was going to be working most closely with...JAWAA. Right now, I'm still learning all about it. It seems pretty interesting though. It is it's own graphics software package that allows the user to specify objects to be drawn by using a set of command options. It's file has the extension .anim and is associated with a html file of the same name. These Jawaa programs can be viewed in a web browser. With the commands, the objects can be animated. I spent a lot of this week looking at the code that makes up this package and viewing some of the animations already created. Below are links to some of the animations found on Prof. Rodger's Jawaa Page:
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Week 3: June 10 - June 14 |
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This week, I actually looked more at the Jawaa code and created some animation files myself. It seems to be a really interesting program and I think that it is something that will greatly benefit other students who are just starting out in programming. This Jawaa program has the ability to displays certain data structures in computer programming It graphically displays such structures as arrays, queues, stacks, pointers, nodes, linked lists and more. I've created a few really cool programs and I will try to add links later.
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Week 4: June 17 - June 21 |
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I am also working with another student who is actually a Duke student. Her name is Nikki. She has been a tremendous help to me because she's actually really familiar with Jawaa because she took a class on it. We've started fixing a lot of the bugs that were found while exploring and experimenting with the creation of the animation files. We've gotten off to a good start. Some of our problems include the creation of nodes. Linked lists, which are a collection of nodes function properly, but nodes themselves don't work. I will go over more problems in detail next week.
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Week 5: June 24 - June 28 |
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This week we continued fixing some of the bugs that we found in Jawaa. Jawaa can create linked lists. Prof. Rodger wanted us to modify the code to allow each linked list to have a head pointer and other pointers that can move or step through the list based on the target node and direction given by the user. One of the bugs that we fixed was to create separate code to handle changes to the text color of the arrays, queues, stacks, and nodes. Before, the text color was always the same as the outline color, but we realized that that may not always be a good idea. We added the textcolor as a parameter but defaulted it to where if the user doesn't specify one, it will give it the color of the outline. Another thing with the lists was the ability to specify whether we wanted the nodes to be of circular or rectangular shape. We modified the code to do that also. Ironically, after we got everything working with the lists, we decided to check to see if the nodes alone miraculously worked, and it didn't. In the old Jawaa code, nodes worked fine, but in the version that I started working in, it didn't. After painful days, we finally got them to work, so now it seems that everything is coming together.
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Week 6: July 1 - July 5 |
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This was a pretty short week due to the 4th of July holiday. We did however get a few things done. We cleaned up the code that we had worked on last week and did a few more test animations to make sure they actually worked. We also started to go through the Jawaa Editor code which was written by another student working here this summer, Thomas Finley. The Jawaa Editor is similar to such programs as Microsoft Paint. It allows you to draw shapes by using the mouse and dragging. It's really useful because in Jawaa itself, it becomes somewhat frustrating to try to figure out the exact coordinates . The editor allows you to simply click on where you want the object to be drawn and figures out the coordinates for you. Once you save a file in this editor, you can export it as an .anim file and modify the code in Emacs and run it as if you'd handwritten the code yourself. It makes it a lot easier. However, there were a few minor problems. Some of the code written for the editor was inconsistent with the actual Jawaa code. For example, to create a rectangle, the editor outputted the keyword "rect" while Jawaa recognizes the keyword "rectangle". Also, when creating a polygon, the editor didn't specify the number of points to be made which made it impossible to create the polygon when the code was actually ran. The incompatibilities may seem small, but it's always the smallest things that cause the biggest problems.
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Week 7: July 8 - July 12 |
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This week Prof. Rodger suggested that we create animated examples that can be linked to from our Jawaa Commands page and Jawaa Example Animations page. We did example animations for the basic data structures, arrays, queues, stacks, linked lists, etc. The purpose of these are to allow the viewer to actually see in action what Jawaa can do rather than simply reading it and seeing a snapshot of the animation canvas. By doing these simple animations, Nikki and I discovered a few other minor problems that were fixed as we found them. For example, when grouping objects together, we realized that we couldn't change the text of the group, the changeParam command for the color of the array did not work, and also that an entire array couldn't be accessed, but only it's individual elements. As previously stated, these problems have been fixed. Later we worked on creating new web pages for Jawaa and making sure everything was well documented.
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Week 8: July 15 - July 19 |
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This was a pretty short week for me. I left to go out of town on Thursday morning. However, at the beginning of the week, we did get some things done. Our presentation is coming up rather rapidly and we didn't want to wait until the last minute to get started on it so, that is what we worked on. We set the basic form of our presentation and gathered all of the materials like demos and examples that we wanted to use. Sounds simple, but it took a while to gather all of the things we needed and to determine a layout and outline for how we wanted to present it. The presentation will be linked to this website by next week. On Wednesday, Nikki and I went to lunch with Prof. Rodger, Dr. Carla Ellis, another Duke professor and her CRA student (and my roommate), Emily Tennant. The CRA students and mentors at North Carolina State University invited us to attend this lunch just to meet and talk about our summer experiences. It was a nice lunch. We ate a Cuban restaurant. Below is a picture of Prof. Rodger and I, followed by a group picture of all of us that went out. |
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Week 9: July 22 - July 26 |
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This week, we are finishing up our presentation. Our scheduled date to present is actually this Wednesday. We gave a practice talk to Dr. Rodger on Monday, and made modifications based on her suggestions on Tuesday. Our presentation went really well. Afterwards, we went back to cleaning up all of the code, and making sure that everything was okay with the web page. We are working now to be able to release JAWAA to the public next week.
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Week 10: July 29 - August 2 |
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I can't believe that it's been ten weeks already. Nikki and I are still working to get everything tarred, zipped, and jarred up so that others can download and install JAWAA and the JAWAA editor. We have almost gotten everything figured out and pretty soon it should be ready to go. Well, it's 2:42 a.m. on Thursday night/Friday morning, and I'm working on this webpage. I just wanted to add all of the finishing touches to it now so that tomorrow, I can send the email with the files attached and be done. Nikki and I are working on JAWAA tutorials. I will finish that tomorrow. It's been a pretty good summer. It's been a good experience working with women for a change. I would definitely recommend the program to others. One more thing I forgot to mention -- Professor Rodger's kids, Erich and Markus, are adorable! She invited Nikki and I (and one other student) over to her house for dinner Wednesday night. It was really nice and I had a good time.
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