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Saturday, July 7, 2007
This week went a little slower than last, at least in terms of work. The Fourth on Wednesday really interrupted the week a lot -- I got back on Thursday, and had Monday all over again. No fun. Also the mid-week holiday meant that the Tuesday meetings got rescheduled for Monday, which was nice because that meant I could go to the San Diego County Fair with Liz and Qing on Tuesday afternoon. I haven't been to a fair since high school, since the North Carolina State fair is after I leave for Mudd. Switchfoot was doing a concert, which is why we wanted to go that particular day. I got my ferris wheel ride and my funnel cake, so I would call it a successful sojurn.
I'm pretty much all moved in now. I like the room a lot better without Diane's huge desk in there. I suspect it was a very useful desk for her, but since I don't really work on desks, it was just taking up a massive amount of space. The room looks a lot more open, and we actually have floor space, which is cool. I'd like to put up a few more calendar pictures on the walls, since they're very, very white, but all the essentials (read: my books) are unpacked.
Between the fair and Independence Day, and then my boyfriend visiting this weekend and us going to the beach Friday afternoon, I really didn't get a whole lot done this week. There are a couple more issues with NoteBlogger that I've started looking at. The layout does rearrange properly when the window changes orientation, but when the slide strip is in its horizontal orientation, the slides don't resize when the width of the slide list changes, and the scrollbar mysteriously disappears. It's a bit irritating, because I have no idea how to fix it right now. On top of that, there's another recurring bug where practically nothing in the window refreshes correctly, so when I resize it, the buttons all leave pictures of themselves on other buttons, and the slide list keeps not displaying correctly. There are correctly-sized thumbnails, but their contents are often blank, or other slides. It's annoying. Apparently that bug has been around since long before I got here, though, so at least I know I shouldn't feel bad if I can't fix it. Another thing is that sometimes blogger ink doesn't display right on the web interface. Both instructor slides and blogger slides can be minimized, so that there's more writing space. They were minimizing in different ways (blogger slides to the center and instructor slides to the top left corner), which I made consistent. However, when the instructor slide is minimized and the blogger slide is not, or vice versa, not all of the blogger ink shows up, because it's not scaling properly. I've started looking at some of the server-side code, but this is a bit of a challenge because I don't actually know php. Mostly it's searching for things like "min" in scripts, and following references to other scripts.
On the positive side, Beth is going to be back tomorrow. It'll be nice to have a real live advisor. I went for coffee with Krista again Thursday, and we talked about what I could do for my research project this summer, which was cool. Apparently I could in theory turn NoteBlogger stuff into a research project. We talked a little about possible directions it could take, like moving to being more of a standalone application that would make it easier for students with tablets to take notes on their instructors' slides, whether or not their instructors are using UP. There's been some discussion already about making it possible for bloggers to save private ink along with the ink that gets published to the web interface, but no real answer to the problem of how to show the difference between public and private ink on the interface. Krista and I also talked a little about how it might be useful to facilitate conversation between students in classes, not just between students and instructors. I'll be meeting with Beth on Monday morning, hopefully, so maybe we can talk more about what I could do.
I've concluded that my next computer is going to be a tablet. Unfortunately, that probably won't be until after I graduate. Oh, well. I really like having what is essentially an infinite notebook in Windows Journal. It makes keeping notes on what I've been doing really easy.