I'm really sorry for the major delay since my last post. A lot has been happening and I've been fairly braindead when I have had some free time- my apologies for that. I'll briefly summarize what I've been up to over the past few weeks and then showcase a few of the more visual items below as well.
C++
This Course has been largely focused on the Skeet shooting project and the principles that would be applied in it. We took what we learned about classes and methods and expounded upon it with "Is-A" and "Has-A" relationships. The general concepts are referred to as inheritance and polymorphism. I'll do my best to summarize those here using examples from my Skeet project. It was suggested by our instructor that we should consider creating abstract objects (something not found in life but the concept behind it is) to make our programming more efficient. We created an abstract object called a "movable" that could be used to share code for various objects. In the UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagram below, the relationships between objects is represented visually. There are "Has-A" relationships which are represented from left to right and "Is-A" relationships which are represented with up and down relationships. For example, a normal bird, a tough bird, and a strong bird are all birds (ie. a tough bird is a bird) and both a bird and a bullet "Is-A" movable object. Furthermore, all movable objects have a velocity (the speed and direction in which an object moves) and a point (where the center of an object is). What does all of this mean???
I write code to tell the program what a movable object is. Now every other object that is also a movable object "inherits" the code that I used to explain what a movable object is and does. That way I only have to write the code once if the characteristics of all movable objects are exactly the same. If there is some slight variation (say a strong bird having 3 hit points vs. the other birds which have 1 hit point) I can write a unique version of one piece of that code which is specific to the inheriting / child object. Using a unique method or variable is what is known as "polymorphism" and allows mostly similar objects to have some particular uniqueness to them. By explaining to the program that a normal bird is a movable "Is-A" bird which "Is-A" movable object, the program now knows that the normal bird "Has-A" point and a velocity (follow the arrows for some visual help with this concept). Thus, I write the code once for the point but it is used in 6 places. If something is wrong with the code, I only have to change it in one place and not all 6 which is a great boon to efficiency.
There were a few ways in which I experienced some tender mercies this week so I included some notes on that below as well to show gratitude. A tender mercy is essentially a relief or comfort that comes in life and really helps you to feel that you are being looked out for and are cared about.
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| Roommate (Evan) Demoing Skeet Shooting |
03-17-2015
After stressing about my incomplete project over the weekend, I was still determined to accept the loss of some credit in school if I couldn't complete my work for Monday. I started Monday with the following list of assignments due:
Monday Morning: C++ chapter and quiz
Monday Evening: Digital Systems Homework assignment
Monday at Midnight / Tuesday Morning: C++ Project
Tuesday Morning: Chapter and Quiz for HCI
By the end of the day, this load was significantly reduced:
C++ Chapter & Quiz, delayed two days
Digital Systems HW, mostly completed by lab partner, took very little time
C++ Project, due date pushed back one day
HCI chapter & assignment, only took about half an hour to complete.
Tuesday: While trying to finish up my Skeet project, I couldn't figure out why my safe birds (stars) were no longer rotating. I had to leave my project to attend to my volunteer work as a student ambassador but found my answer while walking to my shift. I had removed some code earlier in the day and wasn't 100% sure why it was needed. That portion of code came back into my mind along with a clear explanation of why it was needed and what it did. I don't know why I didn't see it before that but I was really grateful for that spark of inspiration on something that had me quite perplexed more than once during my project.
HCI
After about 35 hours of hard work and focus, I had produced a mostly functional and somewhat appealing skin for Windows Media Player. Though there were some minor issues at the end, I was able to turn in something that I was fairly proud of and received a 93% for my grade on the project. There will be a usability study performed on my WMP skin and I will likely need to make some changes to the skin but this is how it looks now. You can download the skin and try it out yourself if you have a Windows computer. The download link is below:
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Digital Systems
OK, this one I'm not even really going to try to explain in detail. I'm definitely confused in this class but I'm doing my best to keep up. In short, we are working with circuits that return values back into a circuit. We are using counters and clocks. D-Gated Latches are a primary component and synchronous shifting of data are fairly common in our reading and lab work. Let me try to explain something in a real world context.You know those reader board signs that push words and other information across them from left to right? Data is stored in each portion of the readerboard. The circuit that holds all of this data is called a register. When a clock cycle occurs (think tick or tock) then the data moves down the circuit. What information was present in one part of the circuit (held in a D-Gate) is transferred to the next part of the circuit (the next D-Gate). When we are working with 1s and 0s, this is like telling our reader board sign that "this light is on but after the clock ticks it will be the next light that is on and this one will turn off." This creates the visual appearance of movement across the lights.
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| Circuit diagram from Recent Lab |
The rest of Life
Everything else in life is going fairly well and filling in the gaps in my schoolwork. I found a game for my roommates and I to play on the X-Box and we put in about 12 hours over the course of a week. It is a lot of fun, and I thought we were going to play the game this weekend, but other things happened. I got invited to the "Academy of Comedy" show on Friday night. There was some good improv and some not-so-good improv but it was easily worth the $1 admission so it was a good change of pace for a Friday night. For some reason I have felt really braindead over the past few days and didn't do much schoolwork. Thankfully there was a slight break in my coursework though those are often more imagined than reality so we'll see if I regret going with what my brain was telling me for most of two days that I would normally study a lot. Last night I joined my roommates for their ward talent show and saw my roommate Brady play a song with a friend of his. They were definitely the best performance of the event... actually the turnout was poor but they did have the crowd clapping along. It was a good song choice. Other acts had chosen to play hymns or other songs not ideal for a setting meant to be more lively and social. Here's the song that they performed on Vimeo (not their performance).Shark in the Water
This week I haven't kept up on my weight lifting but I was seeing improvement each week before that and adding new exercises when I did put the time in to weight-lift. The other major thing that comes to mind is that I took part in my roommate's video editing class twice in the past week. Though I didn't have the comedic chops to find my place in the blooper reel, I did receive some reassurance about my acting skills. One of my roommates watched me in the Stress PSA video and asked if I even knew that recording was going on. I told him, "of course I did, it's called acting." It was a good laugh but I guess I was a bit more focused than some others in the videos. On the second video, the news cast, my scene was the only scene that was done in 1 take. Also, if you pay attention, there is some pretty random things that you can see in the videos to keep you laughing. I think this is it from me for now. I'll try not to delay so long before the next update but this is the final countdown as far as the semester goes. Just 3 more weeks and it's all over!
Parting Note:
If all works out for the family reunion this summer, we should definitely do this: https://youtu.be/1TphEh0Qgv0.
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| Stress PSA (With Bloopers) |
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