Week 7

This week began off with a meeting with Professor Lyons. We talked about all that I had been learning, what troubles I was having, and what all still needed to get done. I told her that I was still a little iffy on asking questions, but she said as I am learning that I need to ask many questions and it also helps the Graduate students in teaching what they know. Even if they look a little frustrated with all the questions being asked I should continue asking. We spoke about the previous week and the project that I had been testing. I was a little nervous that I hadn't gotten enough done, but she said what I had done was fine and it was good that I had tested out as many possibilities as possible. The goal isn't to have all the pieces working, but to see what would work best. She then sent an e-mail stating what needed to be done and my progress so far. Since Tia wasn't with me the first day this week Professor Lyons told me what I needed to get done next and basically how I should get it done. It was mind easing to speak to her and know I wasn't doing as bad as I thought.

On Tuesday, Tia was there to help me with the testing and problems I had been having. We sat down and identified the main problem, which seemed to be the reflective table, and the picture it was grabbing wasn't big enough to find the key points. Tia then figured out how to threshold the image so that it could be read better. She also made a way possible to resize the image the camera was getting so that it could match the key points much better. Once that was fixed I was able to finish up testing the white squares on a black background. We had not yet gotten the other materials to work with, so I was done with testing and headed over to the ERF building to finish up my transcriptions.

Wednesday started off okay. We were successful in changing the threshold image to look for black images on a white background. At first it did not work very well, but after a few trial and error of debugging we got it working. Then Tia took me through the code to make sure I knew what each part was doing. Once she left, Hamlet and I began testing the black pieces. An error window kept popping up, so I tried to fix it. In doing so I seemed to have destroyed the program. I searched what to do and if I needed to reinstall the libraries to Eclipse, but found nothing to help. After about two hours of trying to figure out what went wrong I decided I should just wait till tomorrow to see if Tia could help fix it. I had hoped I didn't mess anything up too bad. I walked over to the ERF building to see if Chandan had any other videos for me to transcribe since I couldn't figure out the coding and I had finished the ones that were assigned to me. So, for the rest of the day I transcribed more videos.

A frustrating Thursday began with trying to fix the code in Eclipse still. There were no errors in the classes shown, I restarted the computer, remade the project, and added all necessary libraries, but it was still not running properly. The program even built, yet kept saying it was having errors. Binary not found, application failure. I e-mailed Tia numerous times to see what I could do. I tried all of her suggestions and decided that by noon I should just go over to the other lab and continue transcriptions. Around 1 I received another e-mail from her stating that we had had this error before. She said she knew what she would have to do on Friday and she would just fix it. I hoped that she knew exactly what she was doing, and I felt a little silly for not being able to fix it myself since we had this problem before. Anyways, the rest of the day was transcribing videos.

Friday was a long day of transcription and not much else. From 9 to 5 I transcribed the groups speaking. Not a fun day.