I started by resolving the issue that came up because I incorrectly ran a script last Thursday which messed up the permissions. Then, I helped one of the teachers get online. Then, I returned to work on my superground documentation fixing up. I have fixed the text and am getting my screenshots for the zip. After fixing up the images, I asked Jenna to look over it. In the afternoon, I did some TAing, and also explored an issue with poses that one of the teachers had brought up at lunch. I did figure out how to transfer poses through the XML files, but it seems that the teacher's Ninja issue is a bug in Alice, and I have emailed Don. Every time we revert pose, the Ninja gets glasses and his right arm gets messed up. I also did some troubleshooting and verifying all the links on the repository page. There should be no more broken links in the repository at this point in time. In the later afternoon, I showed one student how to use drop.io to transfer files to himself over the internet. Then I spent some fun time talking with Brian and Bill about making Newton's cannon.
I started today by changing my hard drive back and uploading the PDF versions of three of my tutorials. I am moving them to the repository and mailing you. Also, I had a brief chat with Bill about coding acceleration using two events, one to deal with horizontal motion, and another to deal with vertical motion. Also, another teacher (Steven) showed me a bug in the "Let mouse move <objects>" Apparently, if you empty the list over the course of the animation, the mouse can still move the objects that were originally in the list. Furthermore, if you let the mouse move an empty list, it is the same as saying the mouse can move everything. I am also exploring the globe concept with my enlarged texture map (which I made last night). Around 11-ish, when everyone went out to take a walk, I went upstairs to see how the teachers were doing. Bill showed me his precise trajectory monkey-shooting world. I looked over his code, and then we talked about the Newton cannon idea. I showed him my globe with my higher-res texture map, and then Steven suggested special earth bitmaps. I was intrigued, so we got that map, and stuck it onto my globe. It looks quite wonderful. We still have a slight issue with the polygon-nature of the sphere, but we will proceed to try to rewrite the Glib in the afternoon to work with a round earth. I also talked to Brian on my way down, and we decided we would try to use Maya or 3DS to make a better, more perfect sphere. In the afternoon, I managed to get the vertical falling to work on a round earth. For the batch removal of empty directories, the easy way was to simply change all of my previous "mkdir's" to "rmdirs" since I knew exactly which folders they were, and rmdir does not remove non-empty folders. However, I really wanted to find out to do it with a loop, so I stayed in the office until about 6:30 working out how to Loop in BAT files. I managed to get a working script, but there are still parts of it I don't completely understand, so I'm going to give you the version that is guaranteed to work tomorrow. Also, I tried to print the PDF's, but they were landscape, and I didn't know the command line options to fix it, so I took a trip to BC to print using Eprint.
I spend the morning working on gravity with Bill, and together we discovered a number of interesting factoids about orientation, and motion on the macro scale, with our spherical earth. We modified the Gravity library to successfully emulate gravity on a normal scale, and we are trying to create Newton's cannon with the world view. We had to some tricks with axes and dummies. I have handed off the project the Bill, since I needed to help one of the teachers recover some files. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful, but I will bring in a recovery CD tomorrow for her. We are planning to do a joint presentation to the group tomorrow or this afternoon. I TA for the rest of the time, and played chess with Katie at the end of the day.
I started this morning by doing part of the Alice's questions tutorial, and then I tried to help the Indian teacher recover files. Apparently the idiot of an IT person from her school deleted all the work on her Desktop while trying to "declutter" the system. Unfortunately, she had also re-downloaded Alice and this corrupted most of the deleted files. Then, I spent some time assisting Elaine with a bounding-box on random motion. In the afternoon, I TAed, and worked on converting my scene change to DOC/PDF formats. I learned how to get named anchors in Word by copying them from a website.
We learn something new every day. This morning, I worked with Steve and discovered that you can do Pop-up boxes in Alice with multiple lines of questions, by copying annd pasting from a text editor. I spent the rest of the working on converting my scene change documentation to a word document to print to PDF. I joined everyone except Gaetjens on the trip to Duke gardens. In the afternoon, I helped Kristin edit (shorten) a sound file in Audacity, and then looked over Elaine's stuff on bounding-box random motion. I plan to move my scene change template to repository soon. In the afternoon, I also talked with Bill about our gravity issues. It seems that the Glib is indeed limited to a flat world, because it uses TIME to determine the radial velocity. In other words, the object keeps hurtling towards the center of the world faster and faster, so the escape is not in effect as it should be. We are trying to write a new algorithm, but we can't figure out how to derive the RADIAL VELOCITY, given the radial acceleration g. I think we will have a breakthrough if we can solve the physics problem. I also helped Cristin do the fade-out after she presented. From looking at her code, it seems that we have not done a sufficient job of teaching Do-Togethers and nesting with Do-In-Orders. In the late-afternoon, I helped Steve with his block-building game, by making suggestions as I played it. I ended my day by moving my scene change stuff to the repository, and also putting up PDF/Docs.