A place to describe all my experiences at Queen's.

July 6, 2007: Week 10.

HAPPY CANADA DAY - JULY 1, 2007

Canada Day was quite nice. I was invited to 2 barbeques over the weekend. At one, I was able to try playing pool. My team actually won, but it had nothing to do with my ability! I think pool is quite interesting but I can't say that I am very good at it. I was also able to try PS3, there was a dirt bike game which again, I wasn't very good at, but the graphics were really quite good. I went to the fireworks display in downtown Kingston. It was really good. Some of the fireworks that they had, I hadn't seen before. I tried to take pictures of

The weather can't make up its mind. I have started to bike to the lab. This works out well as the morning is nice. But by the evening, it is either raining or pouring. I end up with the bike seat being soaking wet.

I have managed to get a lot of things done with the User Interface. After last week's meeting, there was a bunch of changes that needed to be made. After the modifications were made. I started to divide up the Assessment tests into individual dialogs that you could place the results. Once I created a template, I was able to use the template to assembly line write similar parts. It really moved fast since code could be reused frequently. I am starting to see the end of the tunnel, but there still needs to be a way to communicate between the program and the database to update the results, etc.

Thursday night at the Grad Club, they have trivia night. It is a whole lot of fun, and a nice way to get together with people that I know. I joined a bunch of my house mates (I am living in the Science 44 coop with 8 other people) for the trivia. The group has been particularly lucky. I have gone about 5 times and 3 of those nights, my group won a round. Last week, it earned us enough money to buy snacks last night. Since we again won, we will have money to buy snacks next week as well.

July 13, 2007: Week 11.

A quiet week working away on the project. It was a week of programming, programming and more programming. It is starting to reach the end of programming and the start of the testing and usability testing. It now is able to save user input, the main task for next week is getting the input to be uploaded to the database. It is also time to crush some bugs. It is annoying when you get a bug that you can't always reproduce. Every time I tried to show it to anyone else, it didn't throw an exception! But I think I crushed it in the end. The weather this week looked like it was storming but most of the time, the worst weather passes us by. The most important thing this week was my Birthday. As a really great present, I was able to go to see the new Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). It was fantastic, one of the best movies I have seen in a while and the best of the series so far. Next week is the other highlight, the last Harry Potter book comes out. Yes, as you likely figured out, I am a Harry Potter fan.

Finally, I have uploaded some more pictures including the every rotating display of the view from the lab. I am so glad we are on the 6th floor of Goodwin with such a nice view (if only I could get rid of that one smoke stack). One of the nicest features is air conditioning, while not always necessary, it was a very nice treasure to have on the hottest days in the past two weeks.

July 20, 2007: Week 12.

This week, all the screens were completed for the user interface. All that is left is the uploading of data to the DB2 database, this is not going to be simple! Also started this week is a research project looking at the Stroke data. We are going to look at those stroke subjects that have been tested multiple times (3) in the hopes of finding some ways to distinguish significant change in their KINARM scores as well as clinical scores. This involves using MatLab which I am slowly getting more familiar with. I have also found it is a useful tool for determining if the SQL code I need for the user interface works in the way I expect. I also spent time going through my user interface code to ensure it is easy to read and understand as well as well commented. Hopefully this will make it easier for the next person who will be working on it once I go home at the end of the summer.

July 27, 2007: Week 13.

Heat, Heat, and more Heat. This week was particularly hot. It even seemed hot in the air conditioned lab. There were a few changes in the information collected in the User Interface. I spend some time going through code that others have used to access data in the stroke database. I have also started to write SQL queries to determine which subjects that I want to look at (those with 3 or more KINARM sessions). I also discovered a few things in Java that will improve the user interface. One was a very simple listener that enforces the amount of text you can write in a JTextArea. This is really handy and much better than my previous solution. The second is how to force the focus to be in a particular component, unfortunately this does not seem to work in my user interface, so hopeful I will stumble on the solution. I tend to discover these neat tricks when I am looking for something entirely different which is sort of nice.

On Thursday / Friday, the women at Queens (Women in the School of Computing) had a retreat on Amherst Island. One of the professors, Mary McCollam kindly lent her cottage as the location for the retreat. We were able to float in Lake Ontario to cool off, have a wonderful dinner (and breakfast the next day), roast marshmallows over a bonfire and play some games. Altogether it was an absolutely wonderful time.
For more pictures, refer to my pictures section.