Reaper Blog

Another week down! I’ve actually done a fair bit on the group project this week, which I’m happy with. Unfortunately, a lot of the time I’ve spent has been attempting to set up the graphics library we’re using under CentOS. That’s been fun (sarcasm intended). Anyway, onto the week that was.

Monday: It was a pretty average start to the week. Most of the day I spent either watching YouTube videos or working on my CV assignment. I was able to get a step further in that than I was already, which I was happy with. One of my friends was also there, so I spent time chatting with him while he was around. Later in the day, I decided I might do a bit of work on the updater for my plugins. That was pretty interesting, figuring out if there’s any easy ways to install the updates. Turns out there is!

Tuesday: When I got into university, I had a meeting with my EM group to start organising for the proposal pitch. We got a fair bit of the outline done, which I was happy with. After that, I just went to the BESE lab and got onto reading papers for the SPI essay due in about a week. I got through two of them before about 1, then decided to see if a friend was free and meet up with them. They (somewhat) were. We pretty much just chatted for about an hour about assignments and lectures, which was good. Afterwards, I thought I might do my 100th post (Time). I got a fair bit of that post done before deciding to leave.

Wednesday: Yet another pretty average day. When I got in I continued reading my papers for the SPI essay then started on my introduction. For some reason, that took out a fair bit of my day. A bit later on, I did a little bit of work on the group project. Not really anything major, just merging my work with everyone else’s. My friend was also there for a little bit, so I chatted with him while he was there. We also decided to play some Minecraft for little while, which was really fun. We hadn’t done that in almost two months. I also had my slot car racing this week, which was really fun. This week’s was a fun night, where we just race for the fun of it (although, placings were still recorded). We even got three races in! At the end of the night, I had tied for 3rd overall! I was happy with that.

Thursday: I spent a fair bit of Thursday working on my CV assignment while chatting with my friend. I was able to get a fair bit done on it, actually (at least, question 1). I was happy with that. In the middle of the day, my friend and I decided to play some Minecraft again. That was just as fun as it was on Wednesday. After stopping with that, I got back to work on my CV. Later on I had my CV lecture, which was decent. It was on visual tracking (tracking of objects in video). It wasn’t as complex as I thought it’d be. Still complex enough, though.

Friday: Ah, Friday. Once again, had to be up early for the lecture which was the second TBL tutorial session. The questions this week were seriously hard. I have no idea how we were meant to answer some of them. I got all but the last one done, though. And that was only because I ran out of time (since we had 10 minutes this time, instead of 20). The questions for the group part of it were just as hard and stupid. We got over half marks, though. After we finished that, my group had a meeting to finish preparing for the pitch. We got some things cleaned up and content added for nearly everything. The only major thing left to do was to make it look pretty (as well as add a little bit of content). We organised to meet about an hour before the lecture time on Monday, to finalise everything before the presentation, then went our separate ways. I went to the BESE lab to meet up with a friend. The whole time I pretty much just worked on the group project (mainly compiling something to try and get something else working) or watched YouTube videos. He worked on finishing his SPI essay. At 4, even though the compilation I was doing hadn’t finished, I left.

And that ends yet another week. Things are going to be hectic over the next couple of weeks, since assignments are all becoming due. I’m sure I’ll be able to handle them all, though. Thanks for reading this week’s episode.
Robert

I’ve made it through week 10! This week started out fairly decently, but quickly become hectic as the due date for the EM group assignment got closer. Want to find out how we went getting it finished? Might as well keep reading, then. Or you can skip to Friday, up to you. Anyway, onto the week that was!

Monday: As I said, the week stared out fairly decently. I did my usual 10am start at university, and spent most of the morning just chilling in the BESE lab. You know, watching YouTube videos and the like. I also spent a bit of time looking into how to do a proposal (for EM), and for some templates. I then started making my group’s proposal – at least, I made an outline of what we’d be putting in it. At 3:30 my group then had a meeting, which was alright. We had a fair bit of information to work with, and the rest of the group seemed to have things under control. We also took some time to upload some of our files to Google Docs, so that we could all work on the files. That surprised some of my group, since some of them had never used it before. Once we’d all given our updates, we just went our separate ways – I went home.

Tuesday: I don’t really know why I went in to university on Tuesday. Aside from wanting to do work, which I could have done at home, I had no reason to be there. Most of the morning I spent just looking for papers for the final SPI essay. That was exciting (sarcasm intended). Around midday I decided I’d get in touch with a friend and meet up with them for a bit. That was pretty good. We spent a bit of time just chatting at “Hub Central” (as the university decided to call it) then went to a computer room so they could do some work (while still chatting). Somehow, during the time we were together, I got some practice in for my EM “New Skill” (drawing a human face). I honestly don’t know what made me practice, but I guess it’s a good thing I did. At around 2, we had to go our separate ways because they had a lecture. So I just went back up to the BESE lab. Up there, I actually did nothing. Just stood there for about half an hour, thinking of what I could do, then just left for home.

Wednesday: This is the day things started getting really hectic. I began the day by starting the final CV assignment. It actually doesn’t look too difficult, but still difficult enough. Annoyingly, the program I’ve used for the past two assignments doesn’t include some functions that I really need to do the work. So I just gave up for the day and watched a YouTube video before going to the last SPI practical for the semester. This week’s practical was a bitch and a half. In the end, I had to go off from my original design to get it working. Even then, I still didn’t finish by the time I was supposed to have a meeting with my EM group. At 3:30, I finally decided I’d stop programming and just have the meeting. Turns out my group was going ok, but they’d found out that we needed to do some risk management. I helped them with it (since I know a fair bit about that from last year), then left for the day.

Thursday: Thursday was a killer for me. Most of the morning was spent fixing things with my EM group, and clarifying a fair bit. It was at that point I realised we’d been doing some things completely wrong. I let them all know that, and we started fixing almost everything. Didn’t get that far before everyone left, though. For the rest of the day, I mainly just watched YouTube videos and started looking into getting a new program to use for my CV assignment. Unfortunately, the one I found took too long to install so I had to stop and leave it for later. That’s when I went downstairs for the CV lecture. It was a pretty good one this week. Mostly about the practical side of vision, like Google’s car that can drive itself. I enjoyed that. Somehow, the lecture even finished early!

Friday: Most hectic day from this week. I started out, at 8am (since I got into university that early) I started working on getting one section completed for the proposal. 9:30, met up with another member of the group to start getting their stuff into the document. A bit later another member turned up and started working with us to get their work in. About half an hour after that, yet another member came in to help out. By this time, we’ve gotten about half the stuff we need into the document. An hour later the last member of the group turns up and helps out a little with some other things. At this point, we’ve rewritten most of our work and transferred just as much between each other. Right on midday, we finished it and had it uploaded for the web submission. That took a load off! But only for a few seconds, since we also needed to submit a hard copy. Thankfully, that didn’t take too long. At that point, we all just went our separate ways. I just went up to the BESE lab to find one of my friends working on his SPI practical. So I sat chatting with him for most of the rest of the day, with others coming and going as well. From the submission onwards, the day was pretty good.

And that ends another week. I’m really glad we don’t need to worry as much about that proposal any more. That was starting to get to me, I think. Anyway, thanks for reading this week’s post.
Robert

Week 9 of this semester down already! Gees, this year’s going quickly. This week was actually pretty peaceful for me, since I didn’t have anything really due. I’m happy with that, though – got a chance to work on some of my own projects, as well as play some games. I’ll get right into my week.

Monday: It was a pretty decent start to the week. I had “finished” my CV assignment over the weekend, so didn’t have to worry about working on that. Since I didn’t really have much else to work on (aside from finishing the settings part for the group project), I decided to watch some YouTube videos until one of my friends turned up. He had some news – firstly, he’d won a graduate position at the company he’d applied (and had interviews) for. That was some awesome news. Secondly, he’d sprained his wrist while skateboarding to university so he wouldn’t be able to do much work for the project (or his own assignments) for a little while. Not so good news. He seemed really down about it while we were chatting (between him coming and going for meetings). At 2 I had a meeting with my EM group, since there was a client meeting for us at 3. In the time we had, we worked on combining work breakdown structures (WBSs) and creating an agenda then went down to the meeting. Once again, the lecturers were a whole group (maybe even two) behind schedule! That annoyed me. At least my group’s meeting went very smoothly and quickly. We were in and out within our 10 minute allocation, but found out a lot more than we had known. At the end of the meeting, my group organised what work needs to be done then left (in my case, for the day).

Tuesday: I had to be up at 6 because of the client meeting for this week. I got in fairly early and started getting things ready for the meeting. This week’s meeting went awesomely! We got a lot of positive feedback on the prototype, and a lot of suggestions for the next one. I think we were all pretty happy with the result. After that meeting finished, I had to run off to another one with my EM group. When I got to where they were, I found they’d started getting things done without me. That made me really happy, actually. They gave me a quick run-down of what they’d talked about and what still needs to be done before finishing the meeting. At that point, I just went back to the BESE lab to look at some things with one of my friends for a little bit. He left a bit later, though. So I decided to meet up with another friend for lunch (since I still didn’t have much to do, and wanted to get out of the lab). Catching up with them was pretty good, as always. We mostly just chatted about university work, a bit about the weather (and how weird it is at the moment), and some other random stuff. Afterwards, I went back to the BESE lab and just spent a few minutes watching some YouTube videos before going home.

Wednesday: I had the SPI practical on Wednesday, so it was a day with some actual work in it. First thing I did when I got in was do a bit of research into how to profile python code for the group project. Turns out it’s as simple as importing one module and calling one method from it. After that, I met up with the same friend I’d met up with on Tuesday. We pretty much did the same thing as Tuesday – chatted about random things. It was pretty good again. Afterwards, I went off to the SPI practical. That was pretty good this week, since this week we just needed to implement a sorting algorithm. I think nearly everyone would have gone with Quicksort (at least, all the people I was talking to used it). After getting that working (somewhat a pain in the butt, actually), I just went home.

Thursday: Thursday morning was a real pain, to be honest. Most of my time was spent trying to get PySide (a library for python that wraps Qt‘s C++ library) installed onto my group’s server. It’s a lot harder than it should be, I think. The first library that it requires to be installed I got done fairly easily without any problems. Then when I got to compiling and installing the actual PySide library, I first get a problem about missing headers (files that define function and class prototypes). I can somewhat fix that, but then the next part of the compilation fails at 95% because of some missing C++ files that do the actual wrapping of the Qt library. After a while I just gave up and looked into how to package up our program so that it could be given to the client for them to try out. At 4, I had my lecture for the day – CV. It was a fairly interesting lecture, actually. We looked into object recognition. The main concept (I got from it, anyway) was that the program needs to be trained with different objects first, then it should fairly easily be able to recognise objects apart in the testing images (depending upon how many training images were used, obviously).

Friday: Yay, the last day of the week! It started out with a team-based learning (TBL) tutorial for EM. That was pretty crap. We were first given an individual quiz made up of 17 questions created by groups during the group management assignment. Luckily, one of the questions was my group’s. After doing that, we had to split into our groups to complete 10 of the 17 questions done in the individual part. That wasn’t too difficult to do. In the end, we left an hour into the session (and we were one of the last groups to leave). My group was then going to have a meeting, but that didn’t really happen. Instead, I just went up to the BESE lab and watched YouTube videos. A bit later, while one of my friends was there, I looked into getting Git (a versioning system like SVN) to work on the server so we could try to install PySide from its repository. That failed, mainly because of the university’s proxy. After my friend left again, I went back to YouTube videos for a bit before working on an update system for my plugins and themes (since I’m not making them available through WordPress’ own system). I got it looking a little pretty before leaving.

Looking back, this past week may have been a little hectic. It hasn’t been too bad, though. I hadn’t really noticed how much I’d done until writing this post. Anyway, thanks for reading this week’s episode.
Robert

Welcome to another week! It’s been another hectic week at university, but I’ve been getting most of my assignments done. I’m pretty happy about that. The coming weeks should be a lot less busy for me too, so I may not have as much news from now on. Anyway, lets get into it.

Monday: Ah, Monday. It started out just like it does every week – got into university earlier than I had to be, and did work until my lecture for the day. I mostly just worked on my computer vision assignment, getting the “report” part of the assignment out of the way. I actually went pretty well with that, I think. I was able to get all of question 1 typed up without many problems. Before working on that, I picked out a paper to do for the SPI review for this week which is the final one for the year! A bit before 2, I thought I might as well go to the EM lecture (since I didn’t last week). Not too happy that I did, though. We had a guest lecturer, which wasn’t bad in itself. The problem came with the content of the lecture – contract law. The lecturer was a lawyer for the university, and spent two hours teaching us (in basic terms) “If you can’t prove something, don’t say it”. I already knew that! Oh well, I guess some people need to be told that. After that lecture, I was able to go home since SPI lectures have finished for the semester (aside from the review).

Tuesday: Tuesday was a fairly decent day, actually. I started out the day by meeting up with my EM group to discuss what we’d researched and try to get further with the assignment. I think we were able to clear some things up with each other, and get a bit further with some things. We still didn’t have all the information we needed, though. Afterwards, I went over to the BESE lab to work on my CV (after relaxing with a YouTube video). I was somewhat interrupted before I got to my assignment, though. The other BESE group came in with their client to have a look at the computer they have to work with (my group has one too). At that point, I found out my group had to install the OS (CentOS 6.2) ourselves (I had no problem with that). So I did that over about an hour, which was pretty fun. While it was being installed, I got onto my assignments. Later in the day, one of my friends turned up to take a look at the computer. So we turned it back on (I’d turned it off after installing the OS) and got to finding out how to connect into and use it. That was a fun task. But we got there. After we’d figured it all out, we left.

Wednesday: When I got in to university on Wednesday, I spent a fair bit of time trying to get the OS updated (since we need to install an add-on for python). That was a job and a half. And even then, I couldn’t get it to work. So I gave up and got to work watching YouTube videos (cause I could). Around 12 one of the guys in my group turned up, so I stopped with videos and chatted with him about the computer and our SPI practical for the day. A few minutes later, the other member turned up. At that point, we got onto talking about the project, what needs to be done for this coming week’s prototype, and started working on getting some things done before going to the SPI practical session. That was exciting. Even though it was pretty similar to last week’s program, it was a fair bit harder. And I had a lot more bugs by the time I got to testing. When I left for the day, I actually hadn’t finished. At home, it took me about half an hour to finish. I was happy once that was submitted.

Thursday: Thursday was actually a much better day than most other weeks. I started the day by finishing my second EM reflection and submitting it. Doing that made me feel a hell of a lot better than I have been. I also did a heap of work on my CV assignment, and got question 2 done in the report (for the most part, anyway). Late in the day, one of my friends turned up with (what I’m guessing was) his lunch – a Hungry Jack’s Whopper. I think he enjoyed that. I mainly just sat and chatted with him about assignments, the project, and his interviews. It was pretty good. A bit before 4, he left for home. I just sat for a bit longer before packing up and going to my lecture for the day (CV). That was a fairly decent lecture again. It wasn’t too hard to follow along with what the lecturer was talking about, and was actually somewhat interesting. Plus, we got to leave early!

Friday: Ah, early Fridays. Oh, how I hate them. I started the day in the BESE lab, watching YouTube videos (mostly). At 9, I went down to my lecture (EM). It was a fairly interesting one this time, compared to all the other guest lectures we’ve had. The lecture was all about good versus bad communication. It started out fairly averagely, but the lecturer decided to include some magic tricks. I think the only reason he did was to keep our attention, since the rest of the lecture wasn’t really great. I think it was kind of useful, though. At least, for some people. After the lecture, I went to meet up with my EM group once again. We mostly took a look into the wind turbines, and the number we’d need to generate enough power. Turns out we’ll need quite a few. I left fairly early after the start of the meeting, because we were only really looking into what was available. I went over to the BESE lab and started working on my SPI review. That was a little fun. Took me 3-4 hours to finish it. But I’m happy with what I did. Plus, it only took me a bit longer because I also chatted a little with some friends and the other BESE group’s client – he’d turned up to give them some data that they’d need (24GB worth of it). After I finished my work, I chatted with friends for a bit before they left then just watched a couple of YouTube videos before going home.

Wow, that was a hectic week. But somewhat enjoyable. I’m glad I’ve gotten so much work done this week, since it’ll lighten the load for me over the rest of the semester. Anyway, thank you for reading this post.
Robert