wrapping up

Acomplishments

I have been keeping a blog of my work through out the semester, which is a good thing because much of the work I did produced no tangible results. One of my greatest accomplishments this semester was to convince the SWITCH team to use the Mambo C.M.S. (content management system) instead of Plone. Plone is written in python, Mambo is written in php and SQL which are languages I am much more comfortable with, and by the way are highly sought after job skills. But I did not push for this change as a selfish act of not wanting to work in a new language; I pushed for the switch because it is a better system plain and simple. The modularity of Mambo allows us to create multiple issues of the SWITCH journal with a single C.M.S.. As part of my responsibilities this semester I also created an informative “how to” document to instruct future semesters how to build the essential elements required to create more issues. Aside from some technical troubleshooting and installation of custom modules, I also helped Aaron Siegel with the backend data base side of his Pacific Rim Visual Directory Project. I build a small application to store the data his visualization would run off of. I worked with him to get his project to submit data directly to the database and creating a text output file that his flash application would read its data from.

Over the course of the semester I have worked a lot with creating custom skins for the software I am working with. Skinning software, the practice of applying a customized style or interface to a program. It does not affect the functionality but it can increase effectiveness of a product to perform a specific task. Skinning software is kind of like changing clothes. Some are merely for aesthetic value, the kind you would wear for a night out on the town. Some skins promote a specific type of interaction, like a uniform the skin may help make the purpose of the program more apparent. Additionally some skins may alter the configuration of the interface and increase efficiency in the end user. The skin is proof of our culture effecting software development. There is a natural desire for variety, the software skin allows us to break the often drab and boring appearance of the software we have incorporated into our lives.

semesters acomplishments

PLONE – python

C.M.S. – Content Management System

Bad interface for creating custom skins

The ability to support multiple sites or issues is not built in but has to be hacked

Switching to MAMBO – php

Allows a greater flexibility for creating custom skins

Creating MAMBO template from html template (provided by Ethan Hunt)

Creating custom menus and documentation

Creating “How To Mambo” guide for future semesters

Installing Plugins and modules (discussion forum, gallery)

http://switch.sjsu.edu/mambo

http://switch.sjsu.edu/mambo/administrator

Aaron Siegel’s Pacific Rim Directory

Small Data Collection Application with administrator area to add, edit and delete records from the database. Done in PHP and SQlite. Created a text output file that reads the db and feeds the data into the flash file Aaron produced.

http://www.arlenthurber.com/sjsu_art175

http://www.arlenthurber.com/sjsu_art175/admin.php

http://www.arlenthurber.com/sjsu_art175/textout.php

Other Projects this semester

Sonic Piano – My BFA gallery where I turned a gallery and it’s contents into an interactive musical interface. Review website

http://www.arlenthurber.com/agt_sonicPiano/

Visual Perception – Helped Brian Schwab with his BFA gallery. Hardware hacking, Actionscript, and a data collection application to gather the information created by the users of the system using PHP and SQlite.

Happy birthday to me!

Well today is my birthday, woo hoo! 26 years old and still waiting to graduate from college. It is funny how time flys when your..., well I guess it's just funny how time flys. This semester has been pushing me to the edge of sanity, so i guess it's good I'm graduating. I would hate to have to commit myself to a mental institution before obtaining my degree. Cheers, have a drink with me for my birthday!

bugs bugs bugs

Mambo is still a better solution in my opinion, depite the problems we have still been encountering. Menues are a little strange, but as long as the links are formed right it seems to work fine. Using the CMS takes some time to get used to. Thankfully Mike has worked with Mambo before and the work appears to be getting done smoothly. However I have heard thru the grapevine of emails that there are problems i have not gotten any complaints to me directly. I am unsire of the feelings of the rest of the SWITCH team, no one has had anything bad to say to me so I am going to go with my feelsings and say that the switch from plone to mambo is still the best thing I could have done this semseter. If I hadnt dont it next semester someone else would have.

Visual Perception

This week was Brian Schwab's BFA gallery in the Herbert Sanders Gallery. It was titled "Visual Perception". How much visual data is required to recognize an object? The user was given a joystick controller that controlls the amount of the picture they get to see at one time. Initially the user is only given a small vertical bar of the image that moves to the right at a fast pace. With the joystick they can increase the width of the section of image they can see and change the speed at which their slice passes of ther image. Once the image has been recognized the user pulls the trigger on the joystick and starts over on a new image. Each image was acompanied by a new sound in the background. The image and the sound choosen are completely random, sometimes they would help and sometimes they would throw you off.
We hacked the joystick controller into a usb keypad so we could interact directly with the flash file as if the user was pressing a key. The flash file was also interfaced with a small php database application I wrote to collect the information that was being produced. I think it was a very good show and was happy to be able to help him pull it off.

mambo discussion forum

I have been researching many forum components for the mambo CMS and to be honest most of them suck. James had a request to create some sort of threaded discussion. I know what he is talking about but there are so many options it is hard to decide what one will best suit our needs. I have installed several but think that the one called "simple board" seems to work the best. it has options to view the topics as a traditional message board but also as a threaded discussion. I have been trying to communicate electronically due to scheduling restrictions but it seems that my messages are being lost in the ether. Hopefully we can get a conclusion on this soon, but regardless of the outcome I have been putting in my hours. This class has been a challenge due to it's unstructured nature. I have been doing my best to accomplish all tasks regardless of the lack of interaction I have receieved from my group members.

Upgrades

I bug in Mambo was found in the newest version of php 5. It causes an error when trying to add or edit content items in the cms. ouch. Not a horrible fix though, just need to upload one file according to the mambo forums and it should work fine again.

Things like this are deffinatly unavoidable when working with the latest versions of anything that could possibly still be in Beta. It is becuse we are riding the learning curve as it is being created so we are obviously going to stumble and hit some problems that were not anticipated. If this were going to be a stable environment that would not be an acceptable learning environment in my opinion because the real world always gives unexpected results