Tuesday, May 20, 2008

And the verdict says...

I am done!!!! I presented my defense and the committee agreed that YES I was good enough to get my A and finish being a masters student at RIT. This has been a long and hectic trip getting this shit done, but it IS done now! Never again will I have to think about my capstone, lay awake at night contemplating these damn data logging!


Oh well... the point is, it works! and I am done FOREVER YAYYYYYAAYYYYY!!!!

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Capstone Defense

Its tomorrow..... w00t!!! less than 20 hours away and I will be done with school

Thursday, May 15, 2008

T - 3 Days

Hmm... so its official, this Monday at 11am in bldg 70 room 2400 I am going to be presenting my final defense. Over the past week there has not been much to write about, I have been doing a lot of final write up stuff for my defense and working on my presentation. Now I can see the end, and its glorious. So in roughly 3 days and 17 hours I will never have to worry about this masters again, and I will be done forever. Needless to say I am fairly happy about this but also slightly ass clenching terrified. Oh well, good bye school forever!!

Friday, April 25, 2008

Final write up

So this exciting adventure is coming to the end. As of right now there are about 29 days and 5 minutes left till graduation. I am began my final write up about a week ago, and I am currently working on it right now. I am to have a rough draft finished tonight so I may hand it out to my advisors and get feed back / have it torn apart with comments. This being the case, hopefully I will be able to have the final final writeup done in 2 weeks after that then have my final defense, and finally be done. Wow, my stomach is flippin just a bit while I type this out :/ oh well it will be done, then I will go to my new job and start a new section of my life. (wow I sound emo.. oh well)

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

More Errors!!!!!

Soo... This always happens with upgrades, I go and create more error handling (as stated in previous post) and more errors happen (with more accuracy!!!). I just finished fixing a bunch of errors that were little one line things, like forgetting to set something to true etc.

Then there was one major issue that made my gmail cry like a little girl, something like 600+ emails in about 2 hours. thats about 300 emails in 1 hour, 150 in 30 minutes, 75 in fifteen, 32.5 in 7.5 minutes etc...

So here is what happened:

First, the version of Joomla that I had, had not gotten up to date recently. So I updated that and this fixed the problem when you had tried to create an initial account, and it through an error. This was also the cause for the error after you clicked the link in your email. This part was not my fault directly, I should have checked for an update, but other than that it was just a bug in their program.

Secondly, the error that caused all of the errors in my Email... I have written everything in a language called PHP. In PHP you can have variables, think of these as boxes that can hold things such as names, or numbers. You say $someVar = "hi"; This puts the word hi in the 'box' $someVar. What I did was say: $tempObj = "something"; print $temObj; This would throw an error in any other language cause the word $temObj had not been previously assigned, however PHP will not do this. Thus, It messed up.


However, everything works now, so yay!!

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Proposal

So, once upon a time I figured out what my Master project was going to be and spoke with various teachers to see who was interested. I already knew one (Chris) becuase he was the one that suggested it to me. The project was time sensitive meaning it had to be done by the beginning quarter of Spring. So with some preliminary research I went and worked on it. With about 5 weeks left till Spring, both of my instructors came and queried me about the status of my proposal, to which I replied "Look, you can have working code by dead line, or a proposal... your choice" so thus it was decided that I would go and complete code, then move to the proposal when I completed the coding. So here I am , writing this forsaken proposal. That is what I am doing... oh what fun...

Friday, March 28, 2008

Version 1.5

So today/tonight I am going to roll out the newest version of my framework.. there are less errors, and more error handling. Before, when an error occurred, it did not bubble up. It just triggered other errors so It was FUBARing up all my reports. However, now all my errors bubble up so when there is an error (HAHA like that would happen) it will give me a much clearer reason for having an error. I demo-ed things all day today to make sure that it was going to work, and fixed any little errors that occurred from the 'switch' so now I will move all the files from Server 1 to Server 2 and we will be in a good place!

Now I have to get my capstone proposal written and submitted, then I can work on the design of the visualizer.... T- 56 days till graduation, and 44 days till I want to have this all done. I think i can, I think I can, I thi....

Monday, March 17, 2008

Then the Gods said.... let there be errors...

Sooo.... the frame work went live on Thursday the 13th of march, and Errors started rolling in Friday the 14th. As we all know there are going to be errors, and as far as errors go, these aren't that bad. It turns out that two errors happen with my framework (that I know about) First, if you try to upload an avatar that is too big (so rather than 100 x 100, they put 200 x 200) then it throws an error. Also it would appear that if they do not specify a recipient during a private message then it throws an error. I am going to attempt to remedy this situation soon. After this, I am going to try to come up with some more creative error handling to be more specific when Errors are thrown. Then I am going to start planning out the visualizer then graduate and get a job.... Wow this is just moving a bit fast huh?

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Coding Done pt2

Wow, so ya I just finished the coding for the data collection. I know previously I said I finished, however I forgot about 3 main keys, accounting for people closing the window instead of logging out. This was fixed over the past week. At first I used onBeforeUnLoad... and well if you read the post below, you can see how that turned out. After that I switched to onUnLoad which worked fine for sending one var back and forth. If I used more than one var, and closed the window it crashed on me. After much researching it turned out it was an async problem. So after some fussing around and re-working the way I handled my JS calls everything seems to be in working order.

Now I have finished posting all my new code to the prod Server so it is all ready for Monday! Hopefully everything worked and will work how its suppose to, and God Willing when/if any errors do occur, I can find them swiftly and vanquish them!

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

onBeforeUnLoad

onBeforeUnLoad can go to hell and die.... words can not express how my BRC is rising (Blood Rage-ohol Content). So it turns out, that it is not worth using onBeforeUnLoad instead of onUnLoad. One of my teachers referred me to that for the 'IE crowd', this has caused so many screw up its not even funny. The things in the function that is called from this event will work erratically at best, unless you have an alert in there. I realize that this is most likely a timing issue or even compatibility. So what happened was I would call this function from onBeforeUnload, and it would or would not my one line of AJAX code (jQuery). This caused me to put in an alert to test it out, the alert would always fire, and my AJAX would successfully execute. Take out alert, call fails. Now I have said 'forget about that noise just use onUnLoad' and everything works peachy, including in IE. So the moral of this story... use onUnLoad unless you are POSITIVE people will ONLY be using IE