Week 8, and this means 8 more weeks to the end of my internship at IHPC. Giving it some thought over dinner, I am definite that I will miss IHPC and the Cove once I'm gone. Working here at IHPC, though only 8 weeks, have not only been fun, but also an educational and eye-opening experience. *opens eyes*
Now that I've opened my eyes and am finally awake, lets start this week fresh, energetic and in the mood of X'mas. I want my play-doh please. Whoops.
Odd shape detection is very challenging. With all the strange point coordinates its returning me and attempting to draw lines to. After spending some OT on Friday to separate the method used to draw the coordinate and calculate the corners (making it much more neater and easier to understand), I sat down the entire morning to do a code walk through. My waste-paper stack cum mouse pad is increasing with every paper I use. :)
Anyway, finally managed to more or less solve the problem before I called it a day - the coordinates being passed into the array of points seemed to be giving very strange numbers, such as (18912345, -1452) and (-523, 8), resulting in the lines being drawn all over the place, in an attempt to connect these nonexistent points which seem to fluctuate over time. With the time hitting 6.30pm, I decided to leave the office to grab some chow on my way home...
I've given some thought about the skeleton for the slides on Monday - hopefully I'll be able to get some interesting pictures to add to the slides. And that they won't bore anyone to sleep.
*back @ home*
Starting for SCJP is not easy. I've spent 0.0 hours today studying about it. The thought of it resurfacing regularly in my mind though, reminding me to study, but alas...
Picture of the day ...
I mistook this as a pillow by the roadside. Guess I was still sleeping.Tuesday, 11 December 2007
RedSteel - and the "oh yes" scene.
What should I say? Eureka! or whatever word that has the same meaning as it.
Before lunch, finally manged to find out why the coordinates for the points were so strange - they were actually values of the memory addresses which I was using thanks to a addition of a wrong variable to the array index. After lunch, managed to fix that problem and move on to ironing some other bugs, such as deleting some unwanted repeated code to make the program more efficient (hopefully) so that it does not skip a few points when the total number of points and pointers increase [which happened a few times for some strange reasons, where the total # of points increased up to 110+ but the program was still reading the points from around 105 ].
After 7 days, managed to find out what is wrong with the odd shape detection code, solve it, and tidy up the code on my side a bit as well. I've also improved my knowledge of the parameters used in various OpenCV functions and its parameters. The idea behind it is still the same, taking only the points which are required to draw the n-gon shape and draw them, skipping those points on the contour which are already drawn, or contours with only less than 3 points.
This n-gon (or odd shape) detection is by far one of the longest task which I have done for Lightdraw so far. However, the experiences and challenges it brings is something worth exploring and solving, as the focus moves away from what I usually do in school, web dev, to something a bit closer to Computer Visioning and pattern recognition.
Pictures of before and after:
Before...
After...
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
With the odd shape detection / n-gon shape detection done, we moved on to discuss the rest of the game play and the immediate step to take. JL did a great job on the .png pictures which were used as the encircling symbol for the game play.
The next step would be to detect a single point collision within a shape via (ideally) a sequence of points of the shape or (not so ideally) by redrawing the shape.
In order to properly and more effectively get the sequence of the points and perform this encircling detection, it was suggested to perform "point merging". Which is to say, if on the n-gon where there are a couple of points which are closely positioned of X units between, we would merge them as one point so that the shape will become more defined, and that there will be lesser points to draw on the screen. Which will in turn lead to better point collision code. Hopefully.
After lunch went to double check the code and tested it to see if any hidden errors / memory leaks were hiding before updating of the SVN.
Just when we were all ready to start with the next step, we were reminded that we had a presentation to do on Monday and Kevin suggested that we prepare some slides and do a sample presentation to him so that he can give us areas of improvements.
Well, seemed like a pretty straightforward task to me. (or so I thought before Thursday)
Picture of the day:
Cake
Thursday, 13 December 2007
We focused mainly on the slides today which I have done up yesterday to present on next Monday. However, having not done presentations for a long time, I had lost touch of many presentation skills and did not synchronize well with JL, partly due to my complicated and over-wordy slides.
Naturally, our presentation didn't go as well as we would have liked and were given numerous areas of improvements for the presentation, including rewording and redesigning the slides. Reworking of the slides took place over throughout the rest of the day (and night) as the next demo presentation was in 24 hours after the first one ended.
After the presentation, we started filming the short video to complement our presentation. with JL as the director and myself as the star, who knows what rating will our video get. R21? Just kiddin'.
The idea may be good, but without a good presentation, no one will buy the idea.
Friday, 14 December 2007
Today I learn the meaning of 3 minutes. And good customer service.That aside, today we sat through some presentations of some AC staff. We observed how they presented and what points which they did well on, and where they can improve. Indeed, every day seems to be an eye opener. It seems that many people fear presenting, and occasionally choosing to memorize their slides/speech, which should not be the case. As memorizing (IMHO) would mean that the speaker would not be flexible in his speech and panic when he/she forgets the words or point sequence ( i learnt that the hard way from the MSP dinner too ). The memorized sequence would partly seem to be very mono-tone and no tone of enthusiasm for some.
Anyway, after which, we all headed down to doc green for some healthy food ( a man of my word ). And some humorous incidents at the Vaio roadshow. And then back to the Cove for more slide editing and video filming before finally presenting to Kevin and Harold again. This time round, they mentioned that we have improved from the previous time, though there were still many points to take note. They gave many valid points of improvements for the slides as well as some of their learning points from previous experiences. Thank you, to Kevin and Harold, if you are reading this post. :)
Finished up some last minute work on the slides, and finally left the office at 9pm.
We take some, we give some.
Picture of the day:
Reflection of the Week:
I always thought that presentations relied only on the speaker - How confident the speaker portrayed himself and how detailed he elaborated about was somewhat all that mattered. Of course, the speaker must know his/her stuff thoroughly enough to do so.
Or at least that is my perception until this week at work.
When we got the points of feedback pertaining to our first presentation, it was then I realized how much things that I have been doing wrongly for my past few presentations in school. It is true that while presenting, we do a few things which we do not consciously take notice of, such as swinging our arms and playing with things in our hands. And we need people to tell us that we are doing such things before we actually realize it.
I also thought that speech came fluently to the speaker so that abstract slides, or even no slides, can still get the message to the audience within a short period of time. But again, I was proven wrong as I stumbled a couple of times during our rehearsals and got tongue-tied. Perhaps I need to speak slower in order to be concise and clear.
In terms of abstract slides, to me, I know what that one word means on the slide and/or how great a screen shot may be, in terms of time and effort spent. But putting myself in the shoes of the listener, the word is just another word and the screen shot might be just another possible photoshopped picture.
But this experience is great, as in school, the presentations were focused mainly on the way we portrayed ourselves (formal attire, etc) and the project which we have done (the so and so system which does ABC). Rarely were we actually corrected us on things like how we should not read from the slides, speaking too softly, not making eye contact, body movement, not presenting confidently, etc. The focus, was more or less on attire and project.
I'm not saying that there was totally no help or constructive feedback given to us by our tutors and peers. But perhaps the state of seriousness (or the lack of it) of the situation inside a classroom with all our peers looking equally worried as they frantically coded and amended their code before their turn (myself included) while they half-listened as us did not really drive in the point. Also, with our friendly tutors as our evaluators, the familiar faces reduced one of the stress and pressure points on us.
Peer to peer evaluation is equally important and should be taken seriously. Though it is rare that peer evaluations included pointers on presentation skills - more on the project and teamwork issues. In my experience, very few friends have came up to me and actually told me in my face that I was doing something wrongly. Of course, if feedback came my way, I would have to put aside any emotional feelings and see the feedback as it is, and not from who it was said by.
Well, at the end of this post, would just like to summarize the learning point for this week, which is: good presentations need quality visual aids to compliment the presenter. When given feedback, accept it modestly, thank the person and work to improve on it if it is a valid point.
Anyway, hope Monday's presentation goes well.
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