As I said previously, 8 was a write off thanks to a different paper. A lot of Week 9 has also been spent on that paper because at the end of week 10 we have a presentation to do for said paper. It's ridiculous.
However, Anneke has been playing with php in her spare time and I started to write the security application in C++. The idea was that we'd have a web interface that communicated with the system. A few different methods have been looked at, and now I'm settling on writing the system in Processing because it's higher level and getting that to communicate with a mySQL database. The web interface will also communicate with that database.
Right now I'm trying to get Processing to talk to the database and it's saying access denied. Fun.
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Weeks 5-7
Oops.
We stumbled a bit during this time and in some ways there wasn't much to write about. We were both mildly annoyed at lack of liaison with tutors, despite Anneke's best efforts and I was getting quite grumpy with a different paper that wants a disproportionate amount of my time.
We struggled with conceptual statement writing. We had an idea of what we wanted to do but putting it into a coherent statement seemed a little bit elusive.
Oh we both started one each though. Reflecting on it, I think wanting to do conceptual research before doing any physical building is all well and good, but doing the real thing might also help one think about the conceptual implications. I feel like we were led down some garden path with the conceptual side. It was over-emphasised. Yep, sure, it's a good basis for a project but on it's own it's worthless. I don't want a degree when I get to be all conceptual about something but can't actually make anything. No employer does either.
We did eventually tie in our research with a question that is both conceptual and practical. Our question is: Can we improve security with Social Networking?
Our system is a social security system!
I could break this down further and if I'd maintained this blog properly I'd likely have done just that. But instead I'm going to push on so I can write about current stuff. And more often. It doesn't feel like we accomplished all that much anyway except a lot of theorising. This leaves us with bugger all time to produce a product.
We also got pretty annoyed because at the end of week 6 we started our third paper and that took up the entire following week and much of the week after. Like a wall it completely blocked all studio work. I haven't encountered one student who hasn't been pissed off about this.
So week 7-8 are write offs.
What I did do in that time though was score a free laptop from a friend moving overseas. It's an old Dell Inspiron 1501 with some missing keys but it starts up. I'd looked into little micro controllers but they are all a bit pricey. I've been following the development of a cheap $25 computer project, and recently it has started to get legs. But it won't be available before this project is due. So the idea now is to pull the laptop apart, make it into a small-as form factor as possible and strip it of most parts. Make it boot of a SD card or something.
Another issue I had been concerned about was how on earth to build a camera/PIR sensor that was wireless. Cheaply. It seems that it cannot be done and conflicted with our goals of making a cheap system. Plus it's technically hard. For us. In the time limits we have. So for the prototype, its USB web cameras rewired to broadcast over Ethernet. Preliminary research suggests that this is doable and not too hard.
That's really about it....
We stumbled a bit during this time and in some ways there wasn't much to write about. We were both mildly annoyed at lack of liaison with tutors, despite Anneke's best efforts and I was getting quite grumpy with a different paper that wants a disproportionate amount of my time.
We struggled with conceptual statement writing. We had an idea of what we wanted to do but putting it into a coherent statement seemed a little bit elusive.
Oh we both started one each though. Reflecting on it, I think wanting to do conceptual research before doing any physical building is all well and good, but doing the real thing might also help one think about the conceptual implications. I feel like we were led down some garden path with the conceptual side. It was over-emphasised. Yep, sure, it's a good basis for a project but on it's own it's worthless. I don't want a degree when I get to be all conceptual about something but can't actually make anything. No employer does either.
We did eventually tie in our research with a question that is both conceptual and practical. Our question is: Can we improve security with Social Networking?
Our system is a social security system!
I could break this down further and if I'd maintained this blog properly I'd likely have done just that. But instead I'm going to push on so I can write about current stuff. And more often. It doesn't feel like we accomplished all that much anyway except a lot of theorising. This leaves us with bugger all time to produce a product.
We also got pretty annoyed because at the end of week 6 we started our third paper and that took up the entire following week and much of the week after. Like a wall it completely blocked all studio work. I haven't encountered one student who hasn't been pissed off about this.
So week 7-8 are write offs.
What I did do in that time though was score a free laptop from a friend moving overseas. It's an old Dell Inspiron 1501 with some missing keys but it starts up. I'd looked into little micro controllers but they are all a bit pricey. I've been following the development of a cheap $25 computer project, and recently it has started to get legs. But it won't be available before this project is due. So the idea now is to pull the laptop apart, make it into a small-as form factor as possible and strip it of most parts. Make it boot of a SD card or something.
Another issue I had been concerned about was how on earth to build a camera/PIR sensor that was wireless. Cheaply. It seems that it cannot be done and conflicted with our goals of making a cheap system. Plus it's technically hard. For us. In the time limits we have. So for the prototype, its USB web cameras rewired to broadcast over Ethernet. Preliminary research suggests that this is doable and not too hard.
That's really about it....
Thursday, 11 August 2011
Introduction
It's the 4th week in on this project so let me recap what it's about and what we have done so far.
Week1
The project hadn't actually started, in fact it hadn't been approved. The first week of semester is the week that Studio projects get pitched from staff and students. Students then pick their top three choices and Staff decide which projects are worthy or doable and who gets into what. I had to create a presentation and find two members of staff to approve the presentation (which was quite frustrating btw...) and present it in a conceptual way. I found that to be a bit painful and unnecessary to a small degree because I felt I could develop the project conceptually but not in the timeframe of a couple of days on my own.
The Project:
I wanted to build a security system. Last year my mother's house had an attempted break in and that annoyed me. I was out for blood but felt a bit powerless given that she lives 60km away and being a student I often don't have time, money or transport to visit very often. So my reaction was to conceptualise some sort of video camera-based alarm system that could upload pictures immediately to a web server. As I thought about it while on a trip to Mitre10 to buy 2x4 to secure an unused garage side door that someone had tried to force their way in, I realised such a system had commercial viability and that I could probably make it quite cheaply. However nothing would ever come of it. Until last semester when I realised I wanted out of the last project and needed something sufficiently challenging and technical. So I asked Anneke if she'd be interested too. The motivation isn't commercial gain, though that would be nice - but security is not exactly something I'm passionate about and launching a product requires commitment. It's mostly about doing a challenging project and doing it well. With a good team.
Only quite late did I come up with an idea that really made this a bit different and interesting - networking the system into a virtual neighbourhood watch. This is probably what got the project approved....
Week2
The project got approved and I had only one other person on my team. This is exactly what I wanted, and exactly what Anneke wanted too. We both work fairly hard and quite well together and can bounce ideas off each other. We've both experienced what it's like to work with people who live in some alternate reality of what is expected of university level projects and how it can derail something that would otherwise be good and we wanted to avoid that. Sorry, a little bitter about our last one still.
We had a few previous commitments in this week so all we really did was plan the planning. We wanted to be organised and on top of everything and avoid all the headaches that our previous project caused us. I guess we also have something to prove - how our 2 person team is better without deadweight, committees, negotiation on every unimportant or obvious detail.
We jotted down a list of what we wanted in an alarm system. We also decided that we needed an online collaborative system - a project management CMS to keep track of everything. We looked into what was available and installed one called Collabtive on my theothernews domain.
Week3
While all excited about how we can produce results without anyone derailing our efforts it was now time to try to work out what the hell we were going to do. We decided that we should start with conceptual research first. A number of practical projects seem to start with making something and not really considering conceptual stuff until quite a bit later. We decided that because on the face of it a security system is a bit boring and well, it's kinda been done before... several hundred times... we wanted conceptual research to inform us on what exactly we were making. What is our question or our statement.
So this involved asking various tutors what their thoughts on the project were and some recommended readings. I joined the Auckand City library (finally) and we got books from both there and from AUT library.
We talked to Gabrielle, a tutor about our project, to get his insight. I found it helpful for clarifying our thoughts and getting us a bit more excited about what we were doing but I wish we'd thought of recording the conversation. We'll do this in the future.
We set up a calendar in google docs along with a shared folder containing our bibliography, ideas, presentations, a mindmap (mindnode is a free app on the mac, rather good) and the workings of 2 conceptual statements.
It's hard going though. The Michel Faucoult readings, while applicable are certainly not accessible to the uninitiated. We've found a few good books though and have been doing our best to get through them.
Week4
Collabtive hasn't really served us that well, we haven't used it. Google docs seems to work well enough for now. It's too bad Google+ isn't a launched product yet (and not going to be ready for apps users for a few months) because that could potentially have helped even further.
I felt like I floundered a bit this week, I think that conceptual stuff is a bit of a slow burner in our minds in some ways.
We also seem to have been missed out on the first formative assessment. Which would otherwise help us get to grips with things. Anneke has tried to organise it several times, and we were stood up on one occasion. Normally I'm quite understanding of whatever is on tutor's plates but so far this semester we've turned up for things at a specific time only to find they aren't happening or happening later, been given short notice and had to chase people just to talk to them. It's actually quite annoying.
We decided early in the week to attempt to write conceptual statements from what we've learnt. We have learnt a few things and once this post is out of the way perhaps we'll delve into it a bit more.
Week1
The project hadn't actually started, in fact it hadn't been approved. The first week of semester is the week that Studio projects get pitched from staff and students. Students then pick their top three choices and Staff decide which projects are worthy or doable and who gets into what. I had to create a presentation and find two members of staff to approve the presentation (which was quite frustrating btw...) and present it in a conceptual way. I found that to be a bit painful and unnecessary to a small degree because I felt I could develop the project conceptually but not in the timeframe of a couple of days on my own.
The Project:
I wanted to build a security system. Last year my mother's house had an attempted break in and that annoyed me. I was out for blood but felt a bit powerless given that she lives 60km away and being a student I often don't have time, money or transport to visit very often. So my reaction was to conceptualise some sort of video camera-based alarm system that could upload pictures immediately to a web server. As I thought about it while on a trip to Mitre10 to buy 2x4 to secure an unused garage side door that someone had tried to force their way in, I realised such a system had commercial viability and that I could probably make it quite cheaply. However nothing would ever come of it. Until last semester when I realised I wanted out of the last project and needed something sufficiently challenging and technical. So I asked Anneke if she'd be interested too. The motivation isn't commercial gain, though that would be nice - but security is not exactly something I'm passionate about and launching a product requires commitment. It's mostly about doing a challenging project and doing it well. With a good team.
Only quite late did I come up with an idea that really made this a bit different and interesting - networking the system into a virtual neighbourhood watch. This is probably what got the project approved....
Week2
The project got approved and I had only one other person on my team. This is exactly what I wanted, and exactly what Anneke wanted too. We both work fairly hard and quite well together and can bounce ideas off each other. We've both experienced what it's like to work with people who live in some alternate reality of what is expected of university level projects and how it can derail something that would otherwise be good and we wanted to avoid that. Sorry, a little bitter about our last one still.
We had a few previous commitments in this week so all we really did was plan the planning. We wanted to be organised and on top of everything and avoid all the headaches that our previous project caused us. I guess we also have something to prove - how our 2 person team is better without deadweight, committees, negotiation on every unimportant or obvious detail.
We jotted down a list of what we wanted in an alarm system. We also decided that we needed an online collaborative system - a project management CMS to keep track of everything. We looked into what was available and installed one called Collabtive on my theothernews domain.
Week3
While all excited about how we can produce results without anyone derailing our efforts it was now time to try to work out what the hell we were going to do. We decided that we should start with conceptual research first. A number of practical projects seem to start with making something and not really considering conceptual stuff until quite a bit later. We decided that because on the face of it a security system is a bit boring and well, it's kinda been done before... several hundred times... we wanted conceptual research to inform us on what exactly we were making. What is our question or our statement.
So this involved asking various tutors what their thoughts on the project were and some recommended readings. I joined the Auckand City library (finally) and we got books from both there and from AUT library.
We talked to Gabrielle, a tutor about our project, to get his insight. I found it helpful for clarifying our thoughts and getting us a bit more excited about what we were doing but I wish we'd thought of recording the conversation. We'll do this in the future.
We set up a calendar in google docs along with a shared folder containing our bibliography, ideas, presentations, a mindmap (mindnode is a free app on the mac, rather good) and the workings of 2 conceptual statements.
It's hard going though. The Michel Faucoult readings, while applicable are certainly not accessible to the uninitiated. We've found a few good books though and have been doing our best to get through them.
Week4
Collabtive hasn't really served us that well, we haven't used it. Google docs seems to work well enough for now. It's too bad Google+ isn't a launched product yet (and not going to be ready for apps users for a few months) because that could potentially have helped even further.
I felt like I floundered a bit this week, I think that conceptual stuff is a bit of a slow burner in our minds in some ways.
We also seem to have been missed out on the first formative assessment. Which would otherwise help us get to grips with things. Anneke has tried to organise it several times, and we were stood up on one occasion. Normally I'm quite understanding of whatever is on tutor's plates but so far this semester we've turned up for things at a specific time only to find they aren't happening or happening later, been given short notice and had to chase people just to talk to them. It's actually quite annoying.
We decided early in the week to attempt to write conceptual statements from what we've learnt. We have learnt a few things and once this post is out of the way perhaps we'll delve into it a bit more.
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