new

Some new work today, I was given a quick crash course in Dream Weaver and given a web page on the ICT faculty site to re-vamp. Previously I had only used Front Page before, there weren’t too many differences on Dream Weaver, but I had never worked on a live page before.

It was cool to learn that there was a communal template for web-pages so there is consistency throughout the site; it also saves you a lot of coding and making your own templates. The downside is you can just say “I don’t like those red hyperlinks, I’m going to make them blue” because it’s all centrally controlled. I still think big websites are a bit of a nightmare.

The other thing that’s hard about doing web development as part of work experience: is that you’re totally clueless about the content of the website, so you can only guess about what is the most important information, and what you can edit or move to sub-pages. Even the lady that was doing most of the Dream Weaver work often asked the other people in the office, about course information. Though, you do feel bad about bothering other people so much, so you get used to doing some of your own research. Generally I don’t like reading up on stuff; better start liking it though. I do, however, enjoy re-organising the information into a more reader-friendly layout.

As with my flash work, you had to keep publishing your work and previewing it. It’s good to have other people in the office to ask their opinions, because after you look at the same thing for a while it starts looking weirder and weirder. Another note: if you’re a perfectionist, don’t try doing this sort of work because you’ll never get it done. There’s always a: “I could make it better if I had more time up my sleave.”

I spent today revamping my interactive quiz to include facts; luckily the content was quite similar to some of the things I had learnt in school, so I was able to use some of my own knowledge as well as things from the text book.

Along the way I learnt to use variables to make my coding more efficient. And tried to clean up my messy use of layers and symbols (kind of like template images or buttons) so there was better consistency. Again these are things I probably would be able to do in a more logical way if I learnt to use flash, as opposed to trial-and-errored my way into using flash. Now I really want to do a course on software programming, because I really like the logical but creative aspect of this sort of work.

Occasionally I have a brilliant idea, but I don’t know how to code it to make it work, so I have to find an alternative. I ended up with another version of my drag and drop, but this time it’s much more elegant. The objects you drag lock into place when you put it in the right slot. It’s always an awesome feeling when something finally works the way you want it.

Today I was given a “Hello World” tutorial for visual studios that was written by some uni students, to work though and provide some feedback. When you do this sort of thing you really notice what grabs your attention and teaches you something, and what just bores you. It was a pretty good tutorial all in all: an otherwise boring “Hello World” text and shapes tutorial interspersed with cute comics.

So after doing this I was inspired to re-vamp my own interactive quiz. So instead of having just drag and drop questions, I included summaries of the chapter information, with nice pictures, and not too many words, with a “test yourself” sort of interactive question at the end. I figured this would actually be more helpful to students (hopefully).

Kept working on my flash interactive quiz today.

At one point one of my buttons wouldn’t work, and I check and re-checked the coding but it wouldn’t work. Couldn’t quite move onto something else until the button worked, but couldn’t work out what was wrong. In the end it was the actual graphic that was the problem. These errors really take use up lot of time, and at the end of the day you feel like you’ve wasted a lot of time. Though, I guess if I had learnt action script (scripting that goes with Flash) properly I may have been able to avoid such problems. And also this makes you understand why it’s important to design something before working on it, cause otherwise you do a lot of time-consuming trial and error. Though already I’m getting back into using flash, and things are gradually progressing faster.

Lots of discussing course applications, since VCE results were released yesterday; turns out that some universities are happy to consider someone for a course if they have done IT applications or Software development as VCE subjects even if they do not have the required enter score.

Today, I read through the Swinburne ICT Faculty website to understand a bit more about how things work. Universities have these massive websites that are easy to get lost in, though it seems with websites it’s hard to redesign something unless you start from scratch which can be costly, and bothersome.

Then I was given the yr11 IT text book to have a look at and to develop some questions for an interactive quiz on flash (support material for Secondary School students). I was given some previously made interactive quizzes, so by looking at the code on those I created my own adaptation. (A little bit of trial and error involved)

 I’ll be doing the second part of my work experience at Swinburne University. With the marketing area of the ICT faculty.

Why the change? Well it turned out that the Gould Group went into voluntary administration, and the staff were made redundant But Lisa was nice enough to get me this position at Swinburne

So today, all I did was attend a workshop program for high acheiving IT students in yr10 and yr11 as an induction to my work experience. Swinburne runs several such programs to encourage students to do IT.

We had a look at astrophysics, which is where they use 3D computer models to simulate how things might happen in space. We got to have a look at some interesting 3D documentaries. If you’re into astromony, multimedia and programing, this is definately looks like the sort of thing you should go persue! (No planets and stars for me though, no thanks)

Then we did some programing using visual studios. It turns out that to teach students how to programing language, they make them create games. Which is good! It’s fun, but you don’t nececarily have to go into the games industry later on. Yay!

We had a talk on internet development. How there’s lots of new things on the internet such as facebook, google streetview, flickr; that are changing the way we interact with computers.  (Yes, web developers, stop giving us web pages with slabs of text and hyperlinks! People no longer have attention spans.)

And then there was a workshop on network security. We opened up a dummy image of windows, and downloaded some viruses, did some packet sniffing to find a password. Are they teaching us to hack or teaching us to prevent hacking? If you’re into hacking, go learn network security

Though I didn’t do any “work” as such, I did learn a lot about the IT industry today, which is good ^^

***NB: not actually writing this on Friday 12th Dec, but for understanding’s sake I’ll keep using “today”

Today was my last day of work experience for this holiday period.

There was a bit of an issue in the morning since 1) The IT manager was away and no one else knew my log in details. A phone call was made and luckily we got in eventually. 2) Sustainability Wiz was down for some reason. It turned out there was a power failure with the hosts, and it was soon back up.

In the morning I was working on the Sustainability Wiz. The pages were badly formatted and navigation instructions needed to be replaced with hyperlinks. Then there was a problem. The hyperlinks wouldn’t work. It took me a long time of going back and forth to work out why: the URL of the internal pages of the web interface did not stay the same when you logged in and out again. There wasn’t anything I could do about that, so I left a note to the lady who was working on Sustainability Wiz (she wasn’t in that day). After that I fixed up the formatting, hoping I hadn’t edited out any important information (unfortunately there was no one else to ask about this). I have a feeling there are several saved versions though, since the lady who showed me what to do seemed to be flicking between two versions.

In the afternoon we showed the list of suggestions for the website to the CEO and it seems like cleaning up the web page will be my job when I come back later in the year. Though I did have to retype my list off the top of my head because I did not save the previous one to a good location and it was lost (I know not to do that again). It wasn’t exactly a bad thing though since the previous list was probably a bit too long and now it was reduced to the most obvious problems.

All in all I enjoyed my work experience very much, and am looking forward to coming back probably in the December holidays.

I’m running out of animation ideas now, and there seems to be a good stack of them, so in the afternoon I was given the job of testing the links on the organisation’s website. It didn’t turn out as easy as one would imagine, since the website had a very complicated navigation system. After flailing around on the website for a while, I job then became to make note of things that could be improved with the website. Surprisingly what I had learnt in IT Applications this year came into use. There were some issues like too much text on pages, which online users would not have the patients to read. Some pages were far too long and required too much scrolling – I remember during class I had wondered why long pages were an issue, but after trying to read a few of these pages I realised just how tedious they were. Some headings were in blue, and this was a problem because they did not stand out enough especially since there were so many hyperlinks and it made one’s eyes confused – this is another thing I did not notice when studying it in class. It was good to see that a lot of the things I had learnt about web pages came into use.

Just did some more animating today. I found that the more the use flash the better I get at organising layers, symbols and scenes. Also I’ve manages to revive some old rusty skills such as buttons and tween guides. So now there are a few animations with simple button click interaction. We decided that since the animations are to be embedded in web pages they would be distracting if they started playing as soon as they loaded, so I made some intro pages with a “play” button; and added a “stop” button to the corner of the animation while it was playing, which would take you back to the intro page.

This was my second day at work. In the morning I did a couple more animations. (Watch me go! I never knew one could make animations in such a short space of time.) My inspiration for the animations came partly from skimming some documents previously compiled and some of the content on Sustainability Wiz; but a lot of it actually came from the other employees, everyone has ideas! I write them all down, and draw a quick sketch on some paper (recycled/reused of course!) and away I go with Flash.

There were some issues with some videos that needed encoding/compressing for web on Flash 8 Encoder, so I was given the job of giving that a shot. There was a manual with the instructions - easy enough to follow, except that the screen shots were missing but no big deal. Since videos are pretty chunky and take ages to encode I decided to try everything out with a small 1min section before moving on. Lucky for me it all worked without any hitches so I left the rest of the videos to encode while I grabbed lunch. (When I said they take ages, I meant it, really.) 

After lunch, I got to do some gardening which was very refreshing (although not exactly what you expect when you go to do some IT work experience). It was good to get away from the computer for a while, you really get a bit restless when you sit for so long. The Garden that the Gould Group built is amazing: with a pond, and veggie patches, and examples of lawn (fake grass included), and compost bins, and water tanks etc. etc. I think the point is so schools can come in and do a self guided tour on all the things they can do to improve how environmentally friendly their school ground is. Ducks, pigeons, possums and rainbow lorikeets also come in now and then and I can seem them through the office window in the morning.

The highlight of the day must be when I show everyone my less-than-professional animations and they all look at it like it’s the most amazing thing in the world. At this rate I might end up giving some lessons on animation.