Week 20: Cluster-fuck

This week was insane… well in a clusterfucking way. I spend the first few days of the week polishing the specifications for the new features added to my project. Now I do say specification, what I really did was to put it into a compliant Software Requirement Specification document.

When I was done with that, I started on the specification for the new LabView project had to do next week. Basically it should allow basic arithmetic operations to be performed on multiple signals. Creating this simple project actually made me use my brain, since I have very little-to-none experience in LabView. I knew the basics of basics, like data types, loops and the mind of dataflow. I even spend my weekend on figuring out how to use TestStand for unit testing LabView code. I still have some unsolved problems though. Like how to put stuff in a specific index of an indicator array, how to get a property of a control (I have a hunch that I need the property node)… etc.

I installed LabView 2011 a while ago taking a whole day installing. Friday, I’ve got a LabView 2010 license… So I had to spend 1 day uninstalling and yet another day installing LabView 2010… *sigh*

Anyway,
Imma ready for last internship week, Zamu-han.

Week 19: All in one week

It’s actually quite amazing what I’ve done this week. I had planned to finish a major feature to my project about generating some xml configuration files from some Excel files. It should now be able to map from Xml to Xml. It doesn’t sound like a very hard task, but there’s a lot of thinking concerning the architecture. You can’t just use a xml schema to map the values because the values requires some logic and sorting before turning into the final output. I think that I spend like a third of my time on this project and most of the last third on supporting my ‘old’ supervisor with my implementations in his project.

Speaking of supervisor, my supervisor from school came to see how I was. It was a bit awkward at first, but we got a nice talk when my team leader left. Dunno why… I guess he wanted to talk to me in private :S

Later that day, I got to interview an intern. Well I didn’t do the whole interview myself, my team leader bat him up quite bad before I came :3

Let’s move on to Thursday. The day where we get our Christmas Presents from Work. I’ve got a docking station for IPhone/IPod made by Tangent. The model is called Fjord designed by Jacob Jensen. I could say a lot of thing about that dock, but I want to keep it simple and call it: Awesome.

Oh yeah, Hubris came for me. Since soo many nice things happend this week, it was natural for hubris to strike back at me in the end. TFS… Microsofts Team Foundation Server. I understand why people avoid this version control. I was making some test for my project while my Visual Studio 2010 suddenly crashes on a “System.out.of.memory” exception. Okay… Sudden crash. Ok I can live with that. But when I start up my Visual Studio again… *sigh* all my changes have been reverted. Or at least visual studio thinks so. When I go and check the files, I see that they are different from TFS’s version – but there are still no changes! It is important to note that I was not running anything, just writing new tests. I had to wipe my project and reload the files with changes. 2 hours wasted…. Thanks TFS, The Fucking Sheit!

I did manage to finish on time though….

Anyway,
December calls for Zamu-han

Week 18: Estimation Goat

My supervisor left me this week… well he got another position in the department. So now I’ve got some new tasks for December involving LabView. LabView is interesting and fun – but also quite different from the usual text-based languages. Data-flow based languages bring up some strange challenges which is no problem in text-based. I see data-flow based languages like LabView makes it easier to figure out that happens with the data – and probably many other goodies which I yet have to discover.

Anyway, I have to estimate a lot on stuff which I havn’t tried before. Take implementing my Xml config generating tool, which should be implemented in LabView. I have basicly no experience in LabView, and I only know the basics. Estimating this task would requite me to investigate the task and my skill level. But I don’t know how long it will take until I have tried it – so I asked my supervisor for advice and got the Estimation Goat as reply.

In the end, I’ve got estimated work for about 32 days for the 18 days I have left of my internship. I see a problem here :/

DE-fucking-CEMBER! Yes, it’s Christmas soon, which made me bring my cookie jar. I brought cookies on 1st December, but when my team leader saw them, he refused to believe that I brought them to work. The reason was that any other team got the exact same bag of cookies.
*Sigh*
Unappreciated work :/ They were yummie though and another colleague of mine brought pebernødder (origins from the German “Pfeffernüssen”). And today, we made a ri-donkey-lous gingerbread castle. It was like 1 meter tall…

Anyway…
December brought you Zamu-han.