I started today by putting my stuff in the office and going to the LSRC D106 to help people set up Alice and get online. Apparently some of the computers that the teachers bought from their schools have a VPN of some sort, so it's blocking netreg.
In the afternoon, I got two of the machines they've brought onto the Duke network, by netregging them onto another computer, and disabling the proxy on one of the computers. I also learned something about Apple file extensions today. Sometimes the Alice world will download as text file, and the two ways to get rid of the extension are through the Alice file exploring interface and by right-clicking -> Get Info -> Show Extension.
In the late afternoon, I did some more work on my Drag-and-Drop tutorial. I will try to find time to finish this one up and start fixing up the Camera Control tutorial. I have taken the main repository page down again, since we're making changes again. It can be found at the address /index2.html.
This morning, I was about to start continuing to fix my Drag-and-Drop tutorial, when I realized that my new screenshots again had intersects instead of overlaps. Since taking screenshots is still a time-consuming task, I decided to inveset a little time in trying to make a video tutorial of the same thing. I want to determine feasibility on two counts. First, whether or not such a thing can editted in a reasonable amount of time, and second, whether the filesize would be atrociously huge for any reasonable tutorial. You can download the result of my little experiment. I am working on replacing intersects with overlaps on the screenshots. It turns out that it was easier to use paint to fix it than to retake all the screenshots. I spent somme time in the afternoon trying to get another computer onto our network. This time it was an external firewall blocking the connection. I spent most of the afternoon playing TA, and then moved back to the office to fix up the Camera Control tutorial. I will keep workinng on the Drag-and-Drop a little bit later, as well as the other tutorial I was working on last Friday. At the end of the day, I finally finished changing all the intersects to overlaps (interesting bit of work with Paint - making them almost seemless).
I started today by finishing up my Drag-and-Drop tutorial and putting it on the website. I also helped Jenna upload a new tutorial. I tried to get some work done on my Object-level variables tutorial, but I kept getting called away for help. I managed to get all the text done, but have not finished the screenshots, since my co-workers asked that I stay in the LSRC, and my screenshot software is on my office computer. I spent most of the afternoon helping out in the LSRC, and finished up the screenshots for my ObjectVariables tutorial from 5 to 5:30. I will ask one of my coworkers to look at that tutorial before moving it to the main repository page. Incidentally, I haven't changed the repository back to index.html because I showed some of the teachers my website in the first couple of days, and there is a link from my website to the repository's directory.
I started today by asking Deborah to review my latest tutorial. Then I sat in the room, brainstormed for another tutorial, and handled questions when they came. Since we seem to have a good number of tutorials, and not very many example worlds up, I thought I would spend some time polishing the buffalo hunting world, getting it peer-checked, and put that up. I polished it off, and I will hand it to Deborah when she has time. For now, I'm doing more experiments with various lighting features, and texture maps for generic grounds, since somebody asked me yesterday about whether you could light both sides of an object. I have created a super-ground with all the textures contained within, so that people can easily switch between them in a given world. The directional light appears to be limited in terms how facing a particular direction. I am going to try spotlight. The spotlight seems to work fine, and I have put up a couple of worlds with it on the main repository page. I spent most of the afternoon being a TA. There was one lady I was working with who needed a smooth fade between two different skies. We tried a variety of things, including stacking the atmospheres. Unfortunately, it seems that the opacity change always happens in (large) pixels rather than in a smooth fashion. The teacher was Kristin Bedell.
I helped Jenna upload her world this morning, and then spent the rest of the morning working on a Vehicle tutorial. I'm sorry about the mess-up this morning. I tried to rush it, so I was not as meticulous as I should have been. The vehicle tutorial is now up, and the first link of your main web page now points to it correctly. I decided to spend the afternoon learning a little Scratch as I continue to take questions in the room. I ended up TAing for the most part. I might play with Scratch over the weekend if I get a change. Since I got here at 8:00 today, I'm leaving around 4:30.