Monday, May 30, 2011

Setbacks and Starting Fresh/Community Bonding Period--Take 2

Happy Memorial Day everyone!  Finally feels like summer here in Chicago. First day in a while that it hasn't felt like November. Just wanted to provide you with a few updates as to what has been going on the past week.

First, remember my last post when I was really excited to get started because my code base was finally built? Well, lesson #1: never get too excited. Somehow, some way, I managed to seriously botch up what I had spent the past few weeks doing and had to have Rutger help me out. Nothing says mentor-mentee bonding like a 4 hour VNC session!

That is one extremely useful thing I have learned to do thus far. VNC. I've never run it before on my Mac and spent an evening testing it out with my dad. It's actually very simple once you figure it out. First, for Macs, you go to System Preferences, Sharing, and then check the box that says "Screen Sharing". There, you can click on Computer Settings and set the password that people will use to log to VNC into your computer. I also had to set up permissions for my router--that was probably the hardest part. And finally, I found that the easiest way to figure out your ip address is http://whatismyipaddress.com. Pretty cool :) Although I have to say it is extremely freaky to see your mouse moving on its own.

Thankfully I had this all figured out at the time I was in real need. After creating an endless amount of new projects, I ended up having to check out the code in Eclipse, and then installing Maven via my terminal rather than through Eclipse.

So I think I am OFFICIALLY ready to go now. Before this drama happened, I was just about ready to start writing code :( The first thing I was working on was expressing row-segment metadata for NeXML. At first, I was a little nervous. It seemed like there were a MILLION places to start. But then, the the advice of a professor (I really wish I could remember which one so I could give him credit for his words of wisdom that I use daily) resounded in my head--Step 1: Don't Panic. Okay...trying my best. Step 2: Start with what you know. Okay...I know that I am working on the NeXML section. I also know what metadata annotations entail, so I was looking for keywords. And I ALSO vaguely remember an e-mail from a while back that said that annotations to georeference information had been included. After spending some time looking at how pieces fit together, I found that I was going to be editing the populateXmlMatrix() function within the NexmlMatrixConverter class.  I checked with Rutger and it was very exciting to know that I ended up being correct! Yay.

Now that I am finally on the right page, I will be putting together a JUnit test to make this work.  I have never written one before so it is going to be challenging, but I am looking at code that was already written to see how others have done it and am reading up on tutorials to do so. If I can get it working, I will be committing my first piece of code!

Other things I will be working on this week (this is mainly to keep tabs on myself):
--Progress report.
--Add charsets. There are two ways to do so and get back to Rutger about which way would be best and if changes to the NeXML API are necessary.
--Fill in Wiki.

Okay that's all for now. I know I'm supposed to be taking the day off for Memorial Day, but I at least wanted to work a little in the morning to make up for some lost time from last week. Ta-ta for now!

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