Wrap up

Blog entry December 13

I felt sick on Saturday and needed to spend that day to get some rest though I spent Sunday and Monday working on Milestone 4.   My goal for the milestone was to clean up my code and perhaps get started on the unit tests.  Unfortunately, the cleaning up of the code took longer than planned and with exams to prepare for at the end of the week, work on the unit tests had to be scrapped.   Getting rid of the left over Vimeo code turned out to be a lot more time consuming than anticipated and in the end I could only manage to remove the bits of code that handled functionality for the Vimeo player that would be of no use to my slideshow player such as methods for controlling volume, play, pause, etc… as removing more than that would break either or both the slideshow player and the popcorn event manager.   My entire process of cleaning up the code thus consisted of make my edits and then checking if either the slideshow itself or any of the popcorn event handlers broke.  So far everything seems to be working.    The cleaned up code has been uploaded to my github repo.
I’ve also gotten started on the wiki for the slideshow player.    Because this is a totally new project my wiki was started from scratch.  I used the project wiki example posted on the instructor’s website for an idea on how to set it up.   Hopefully this will provide the next person who picks up this project (or maybe myself since I plan on picking this up over the summer should I not wind up in co-op)

http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Popcorn_slideshow_player#Project_Leader.28s.29

While working on this, I also worked on my student wiki on Monday.

http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/User:Dennis_Villasenor

I'm not sure if it will be appropriate to post the project wiki link to the lighthouse ticket for this though it does make some sense as that will be the first place anyone who picks up this project will look.  I'll ask around first and try to see if that is ok or if there is someplace where I should post a link to the project wiki.

 As an aside, here is a link to a demo of the slideshow player in my matrix account.   It may or may not ask you for a password however (I really should talk to helpdesk over fixing whatever I probably broke in my matrix account over the summer during BTI220)

http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~dvillase/decairos/players/slideshow/popcorn.slideshow.html

My many mistakes in my effort at testing mouselock

I didn’t get far at all in my work at debugging mouselock, I just ran into a massive stumbling block right at the very start of my attempt which could have been avoided by asking a few very simple questions on IRC.

So I got assigned to work on developing a test that would handle whether or not the mouse cursor was disappearing/ reappearing depending on whether or not mouselock was activated.  Sounded simple enough.   Because there was no way that anybody currently knew how to test for the visibility of the cursor it was going to be a litmus test.  So I think to myself, OK, I’ll work on a js that will call up mouselock with a button the user can

After reading through the instructions I realized that I needed to do a rebuild of Firefox, and that’s where my misadventure with testing mouselock began.  For some stupid reason I kept trying to build it not from the mozilla build shell but from Git and the windows command line with the predictable failure to compile.   I could have asked on IRC but I just didn’t because it felt like I was asking an incredibly stupid question.  Something I was supposed to have known from weeks ago, after all I did manage to get a build up and running mid November.  There’s also the fact that I was pretty convinced that what I was doing was the correct way of doing things and that it was probably something else causing the problem. (a necessary executable like gmake missing or autoconf).  It wasn’t until Diogo gave me a good swift kick in the butt on Skype while talking about our BTS assignment that I finally got on IRC and after managing to talk with Humph finally figured out that I needed.   Unfortunately though, it had been almost a week since and my test component was by that point long overdue.   So four wasted days of me scratching my head and essentially being clueless about how to rebuild mozilla-central could have been averted had I asked early on for assistance.

I hope this blog entry doesn’t come off as whiny or sound like I’m  trying to excuse my utter lack of progress on the testing work that I volunteered to do.  I’m not,, I just want to have this entry as a reminder to myself of the glaring flaw in how I’ve been approaching my work that I should learn to overcome.

Moral of the story is, not asking that stupid question can often times end up making you seem like a much bigger idiot.