Today was a the final day of my apprenticeship. Yesterday, realizing I had a lot left to do, I worked after session and finished most of my banners. I was disatified with the quality of a few of them so I made new images and did not use my logos. Although it took me longer I was pleased with the work that I created. After I had updated everything I prepared for my presentation. I incorporated (or I tried) what I learned during the mock interview. One of the flaws that I worked to fix was my constant use of "I guess." It makes me look unconfident
Since the morning I had a lot of work to finish. I had realized I still had many banners and photo modifying tasks to finish. During the work hours I had learned each skill modifying images and scaling them to fit the requested size. Gimp was suprising easy to use because its effects were direct and easy to control. Inkscape was a bit more unexcpected and tedious. One of the features that I struggle to use was making holes into shapes. I learned you can not make holes into shapes that is made by grouping, but if you had to make the hole you had to ungroup them make the holes 1 by 1.
Today I worked on my Vensim Model, and it was hard. I finished the model and technically by the end it was working. But the graph did not look as I wanted to. It looked like a linear graph. This was a big problem for my final presentation so I fixed it in the end with Aaron's help. Although my choice of number was more to the real numbers, Aaron suggested it was better to use lower number for better graphs. So when I used the lower numbers it could see the number of each different types of passenger fluctuate.
Today I worked on my Agent Cube model and I am now done with it. The graph worked by using the counter and I implemented all the hill climb that was working on layer 1 to layer 2 so the planes would have the airports as the goals. Vensim, however, looks very hard. The number for the graphs are so sensitive and it will take time to balance out the numbers so the graphs don't just shoot up.
In morning I worked on my agent cube. I added a new layer "sky" and added airplane hill climb affect to the airports. By the end it was not working so I plan to work on it on monday. In the afternoon, we watched the Shodor Scholar Program students' presentations. They showcased their vensim and agentcube model just like what I was working on. Their version were easier but still very cool. My favorite was the ant colony. It seemed the research was well done and the effect where the ants move around the food was interesting.
Today was the last day of Shodor Scholar Program. In the morning I had documentation. I worked on mostly my website because agent cube was not working on the computer. I read more into bootstraping and how it can be used. It was confusing at first because I had only written css by hand before. But I learned it was bootstrap was like a list of styles or options you had for your website that you call by using tags and css.
In the afternoon half, we watched a documentary called "code debugging of the gender gap." This documentary pointed out the injustice in STEM based work spaces against women. The documentary contained nothing too unexpected. Like in most other subjects, women were being harassed and ultimately discouraged to continue. Frankly, I have was not too interested in the documentary. BUT this does not mean I do not feel anything concerning this issue. I can relate to this subject because I am subjected to the "asian" standard (ie nerdy, short, weak, cheap). I can not say these standards are always wrong. But the fact I have to be compared to these stardards are unfair. Clearly, there is a problem concerning bias against gender. And clearly, there has to be something done about it. To improve the diversity in STEM, I believe the workers play the biggest role in that. If workers tried to be more mindful of their actions and what they say, more diverse group of people will join for they feel safe and welcomed.
Today I had morning reception. The power went out due to a crash on one of the roads nearby. So the interns and the apprentices gathered around and played a group game called "the mafia." It was fun. About 2-3 hours later the power came back. The computer was not allowing any code editing so I fixed the computer by downloading a new editor. I was talking to Miguel yesterday where he explained to me why atom was not a very good editor and introduced me to a different editor was was sublime. Unlike atom and textwrangler sublime easily opened on the old computer at the front desk and was able to open files from cyber duck. I worked on my website as I got it working and the shift was soon over.
Today I worked on the model I had decided yesterday which is the airport system. The agents given in the agent cube did not match with that I had in mind so I created/ edited new agents to fit the big picture. I also programmed the hill climb affects of the people to the airport and when the people reach a certain number the planes fly out. I have yet to make the planes more and have certain destination.
In the morning, I wringing my brain for agent cube model ideas. At first, I thought I would do the life span of ones life. And have the people agents do certain activities that would affect their life expectance for example exercise and what food they ate. But it seemed to not fit with the vensim model because all factors depended on the percent chance they did something and you can not really use percent chance in vensim. So I thought of a more stable idea one that has a consist change and it was airport. I just thought about what 2 things had relations and I chose airports and planes because it can also have other factors added to it such as crashes and weather changes.
Today I had morning documentation. Dr.Panoff started off with a brain teaser that I thought was pretty fun and later Joel lead the web designing class. It was about internal, external, and inline css and the tags of html. I was working on website design recently so I could help out a little. I understood a few news things that I just understood as rules before. After lunch, I worked on inkscape. It was a little laggy which was annoying, but it was not too big of an issue. The tools were a bit hard to get used to especially the cmd z because I have always used it as undo but on inkscape it was zoom.
The Cisco speaker, Rene Daughtry, was very intriguing. He talked mostly about jobs and how one can be successful by doing what we have been doing. he talked about interships in Cisco which seemed really cool. Cisco is a massive company and it would look really good on the resume if I ever worked there. Although interns in Cisco have hard restricions, if I got the chance to work there as an intern I would want to at least try. Rene has inspired me to try harder and go beyond what I am assigned to do.
I worked on what I read up on yesterday and applied it to my website. What was really hard was creating the nav bar that worked properly. Parts would often be in a place where I did not intent and it was hard to manage all of it when it was mostly copy and pasting.
Today I had afternoon reception duty so I read up on the css libraries and css bootstrapping. It looked fascinating. In the morning, I was mostly just helping people out and bug fixing my own programs for problems. One that gave me a hard time was the one in Jane Doe. The input the user puts in was not being saved when I inserted an else statement so instead of making a default value for if they leave it empty I just made it required they insert a value in it.
Today I learned the new requirements of the data base project. At first Ernie told us that to display all the fields of tables we had created in my_sql. But Ernie had changed what was to be displayed so During the morning half I worked on the avg/count queries of the the data base. I added new features to the database where you can see who rolled 100 dice and selected green as their favorite color.
I removed the extra header today. I did not really know what the problem was so I just erased all the table headers and added them back again. And also I read up on the css libraries and talked with Michael about the options of web designing. The method he found was foundation.
Today I had morning documentation shift. Dr.Panoff was the instructor. It was not too different form the first documentation because it was also the first day of the week. Since it was the beginning, today was mostly about introduction. In the afternoon half, I worked on displaying the data that I got from the database. You can now see the average shoe size and the frequency of the color inputs. I stripped all spaces and capitalization to make less variety othat would be shown in the diagram.
Today I worked on creating connections with the php and the my_sql. My connections was working and the firstname input and the last name inputs were working fine. But when I added shoesize and the favorite color many errors came up. I had to make a back up of what I had so far and undo'ed everything to make it work again. Then I compared what had caused ths issue and I could not really find it. I asked Michael for help and he came over and gave me suggestions where I had the mistakes and how he did his. From his advise I was able to fix the connection and added the shoe size features. Then I had went over to the intern lab and asked them to add their data into my data base. I thought I had finished the projects and I started styling my website. The websites looks decent now and does not create a seizure(it had lots of bright colors before..). After I had finished the styling, I checked my colleagues programs for quality assurences. Some had errors but many were fine. Ernies later put up the 2nd part of the project which was to display the data in the data base onto the webpage. I had the general idea and I managed to add info form one of the tables to the webpage but adding the other ones with the original one was hard. I worked a little over time and skipped the time for reflections and blog to finish the table. For some reason the table has an extra header and I plan to fix that on Monday.
The morning half I worked on fixing my_sql. I dropped the tables that I had to reset the id count and created new php to go along with the my_sql. Since the id had been reset the problem from yesterday was gone. So the rest of the day I worked on bring the id of the query that I put in to be used for the other databases. I used the code that I found on w3school and changed the variables. But I made a lot of mistakes on changing and had to revert back to normal almost 3 times and make back-ups.
Using what we learned yesterday, I started connecting my_sql and php. I first started by making 4 more table and edited the php to have other inputs of the users. I asked Ernie for help several times but the error seemed to persist. But by the end I understood how to fix it. I will research on Thursday.
We started on relational database in the morning lecture but due to the ODAA changes I was incharge of the reception desk. In this time I finished my syntax guide and worked on improving the css of my websites. From some reason the css changes that I made did not apply to the website so I plan to look furthur into that. The afternoon period of the day was a work day. I watched the lecture from the morning and worked on making my relational database. I make a lot of mistakes so it took me a while but now I understand how the data base works.
Today I started my 3rd block. Like last block we started wit a syntax guide. The theme of this block is database so the first program that we started with was MySql. This is a program that is a lot like excel and helped you make a chart. After everyone finished or had grasped the syntax of the MySql, we moved on to ER Diagrams. It is a diagram that you make relations to by using the field ID. I helped with the demonstration by being Ernie's hand because he was video calling and wrote on the board.
Today was the final wrap up day for block 2. I did not have too much to work on. The XML blog project which was the last project turned out to be pretty easy. Ernie helped me with the error I was having. Turns out I need to load the xml file in the top line and have the conditions of the xml at the top or the files will not connect with each other. It took a long time but by researching on google for a long time Enrie and I were able to find what the error was. Afterwards I moved all files that were in newdev folder and moved them to the public_html to be viewed by the public. My overall thought of my block was really fun. I think it was the process of learning and figuring programming concepts by myself was what made it so fun.
Today I learned about the good cookies that stores the previous data. I had all the code together but I didnt quite understand how they all fit together. I asked Miguel for help and told me the syntax that the function setcookie followed and from there I did more research to finish the cookie. Miguel helped me through out when I hit errors. I then worked on validating all my pages. Ernie helped me understand what a proper html looks like and from there I worked to fix all my errors. It was really complicated because I was not used to html coding by I understood by the end. I also had a mock interview. Jennifer and Levi said I was not very good a selling my good points. I need to tell them indirectly why I was a prime pick compared to the other contenders.
Today I finally finished the calendar. I thought about how I can add spaces to the calender. I figured that by for looping a function that added spaces to td by how many blank days there were would do the trick. And it did. Then like i did with the dice roller I changed the variable that determine the month of days and the number of blanks to a $_GET variable. By the end of this I completely understood how to create a function and how to retrieve user inputs. I carried my momentum and finished up the form validation lesson and worked on the background selector.
After I had the dice roller completely finished, I started on my last project of part 1 which was calendar. This was really hard. I worked on this the whole day and still could not finish. I started off with a function that displayed 1 thorough to the number that ended the month. And created table headers from Monday to Sunday. I did not really understand what or how I was going to put the values of days I got into each table data cell. I requested help from Keeth, an intern, and he helped me think about the next step and how to start a new row after the 7, 14 ,21, and 28. From here I was able use what I learned from the dice roller and create a table but it always started on the Monday.
This morning I had morning documentation of Exploring Engineering class led by Dr.Panoff. In this class we learned the basic concepts of engineering such as the process of expectation, oberservation, and reflection. Dr.Panoff did his demos which was based mostly on false expectation. In each experiment he brought back the idea of the expectation, oberservataion, and reflection cycle. After lunch I worked on my dice roller. I learned more about creating tables in php and what tag is used for each place. Creating the table was not too hard when i grasped the basic idea. I used array count function and ksort to get data from the array in lowest to highest order and changed the frequency to the number that would for loop a function that echoed a bar. So in the end I had a table that displayed the number that came up frequently and the number of time it came up.
Today was a work day and I worked on dice roll. The goal of the project was to create a program that takes the users desired number of rolls and the number of dice rolled to create a table that displays the statistics. This project was one of the 2 hardest ones. I first started with a function that output a random value between 1 and 6. And using for loops I changed how many times this would run. It was essentially a for loop in a for loop. 1 that run by how mnay dice there were and the other by how many rolls there were. Then I changed all input values to a variable and retrieved the the input the user put using $_GET.
In the morning Miguel taught us about Dynamic Webpage. From these lessons we learned to link php with the html and how to design our websites better. We created 3 other files, page1, page2, and page 3 and created href to the files. In the afternoon I finished up the Jane Doe project that I had started yesterday. The project goal is to switch up the first letter and the last letter of the users input when they submit. First I focused on isolating the first letter form the last of a word. I learned using substr can selects the indexs from the string can be used to isolate the lettes. Using this I first created a function that acchompished the goal. Then I added text input boxes and a button for the user on the webpage, changed the word to a variable which the user would input which is otherwise set as Jane, Doe, and had the function echo out the new concatenated string.
Today we started on our "krista's projects" list. We were givens lists of programs that would be displayed as a webpage and users can use their inputs to change the out come of the function we created. The first one that I started on was hexcolor. This goal was to create a page that changes color everytime the page refreshs. At first I had no idea how to go about it. But Miguel, an intern, taught us what hexadecimals are and how the values determine what color is going to be displayed. From this I created a function that picks a random value from an array and concatenate it to a new string. Then I echoed the string in the html as the background color value and the program was working.
We had our 2nd go at the coin flip model. It was successful and we managed to link other files to it. We changed the program into a function and we called it from a different file. Then we created another file, coinrender. This file basically made 3 giant strings of codes that contained html code in php and echoed it to display it on screen. The coinEmbed, and the coinRender helped me understand proper webpage designing. After the morning period, I was assigned the ODAA afternoon reception job. At first I did not understand how to transfer someone to voicemail, but Levi, a mentor, helped me through each step and by the end I understood. I received 1 important call which I tranferred to Joel and 1 other call that ended up to be a mistake. During this time I worked on my programming concept sheet.
Today we started a information sheet that covers the programming concept of 3 programs. The 3 were php, C++, and javascript. The information was divided in to topics and subdivisions under that. We spent the first half of the day working on this. Second half of the day we worked on making a simple php coin flip model. The programming was confusing and we are planning to have another go tommorrow.
Today we learned about a virtual computer and the efficiency of clusters. We thought the work would be done faster when we had more cores and computers doing the same things. But the dependencies slow communications between the computers actually made the computer slow down and work longer.
In the first half of today we learned about the parallel computing. We researched about clusters and the parts of a littlefe which was a mini version of a super computer. I learned that there were way more parts than I had expected but the concepts behind super computing was not too complicated. In the 2nd half of the day we learned about the terminal which was another media such as text wrangler and atom. It was definitely harder to use and less user friendly. But there were more functions to it.
Today we learned about parallel computation. And also about dependency of each computer to the other. An example of this is a rabbit and wolf diagram 1 computer can be in charge of the wolfs and the rabbits can be in charge of the rabbits. If there are a lot of applications to it then another computer can be added to the grass regeneration. If data is spread over the computer then there is dependency. 1 computer's data is needed for the function of the other therefore they "depend" on each other.
Today I created the website for the forest fire and added the screen shots to show the change in the model. I learned the importance of changing the model to show a specific data. Not many groups had done this. It is important to learned from the model that you created. It shows what elements or agents one must add to a model to display certain data.
To change the disease model to forest fire model, I did 3 things. First I needed to change all the variable names. The sicks were fire, the healthy were trees. Also a new agent, burnt tree, was added. Then added the burnt tree agent into the graph and the key for the graph. Then I made minor tweaks to the graph and the inputs so that the model looks more like a forest than just a garden.
I was sick this day but I was able to contact Ritvik who was my partner. He gave me the overall plan for the project. I made the forest fire model and start on the website.
First we learned about loops and i++ function. This is a function where the 1 is added to the i until it reaches a certain limit and the function repeats that many times. We also created the infection function today. First I deleted the "eat" property. Then added the new function "infection." This function deleted the healthy and created the sick when the sick was in contact with the health.
We worked more on atom and learned the importance of variables. We worked on removing all the food compoments and a new way of using comment /*comment*/. We changed color values of the sick and healthy model, removed food count.
Today we learned a new programming called the "mystery meat." It is where you label a button with a unique shape to differentiate the button from others because no certain text or shape usually represents it. We also reviewed the old concepts such as initialization. We reviewed on the atom program where we edited Aaron's copy of predator v prey model.
Today we saw 2 other presentation. They were prepared and the presentation went well. Afterwards I worked on my website and on my portfolio.
We had a successful presentation. Levi gave us many pointers for future references when we present again. The thing I realized was that I usually hold my hands and fidget, but this is a bad habit. We used the extra time to continue our work on website.
I was out for this day. I called into the office and go into a google call with Mihir to work on the project. Mihir had finished a lot of the project so I worked majorly on the website. We also added some screen shots to make our presentaion easier.
Mihir and I grouped up to make our final product of the quarter. We decided to show the population of the worm and the bird where the bird preys on the worm and their populations fluctuate in relation to each other. Once we got the plan down it was quite easy to follow. The vensim was difficult. Our system was initally made step wise and it was hard to put a numerical value for the vensim.
I was absent on this day. I learned about agent cube. It was an interactive program where you create commands using key words and the media runs the program for you. It was actually quite fun playing around with it.
Today we learned the recursive formula in programming. (Have=Had+Change) To do this we used a population diagram. The current population is what it was before the change which is the death and birth.
Today we learned about diffusion in diagrams. Dr.Panoff had us create a color diagram. The color of its respective sqare is determined by the averages of the squares surrounding it. This diagram essentially shows waters movement in a tissue. It spread to other areas and slowly it averaged out.
Today we made the coin flip Excel. Then the whole class used the same programs to determine the random movement of an object and recorded its movements. We then gathered all the data and results of its movement on the X. As we increased the trials, the average became closer and closer to zero.
Dr. Panoff started off with how computers process order of operation. In Microsoft Exel, 3/6 - 1/6 -1/6 - 1/6 ended up to be positive and we talk about why it was wrong. It was wrong because Exel rounded 1/6 down to 0.333... 0000000 where as it should be 0.3333.....Then, we learned professionalism from Ron. He first came into the lesson looking as a goofy guy to demonstrate what NOT to do. We went through some slides to lean about professionalism in office area. Dr. Panoff came back in the afternoon and we learned about the types of models. We also talked about how each model would be suitable for different situations.
First day! Aaron taught us about our website project and the generic introduction to everything.