PhysX

We’re closing in on the last week at CARET. I’ve received my final project last week. It’s a design project for the American Academy of Religion (AAR) to be implemented in Sakai. I’ve been doing some design work for a few days now and I really like this project. ‘Designing stuff’ is something that’s often looked at as ‘not that hard to do’ but there is so much wrong with that statement. To make a design you have to be able to get in the skin of the one that will end up using the site. User testing will help too but you still need that ‘Fingerspitzengefühl’. If I’m not sure if something is decent in a design the chances are big that the end user most certainly won’t like it. I usually just rethink or throw it away in that case.

I sometimes refer to a good design as love. It’s hard to get it, easy to be thought of as obvious and frustrating if it never feels right. People often forget that behind a great website goes a lot of thinking, throwing away ideas and starting all over again. It’s one of the downsides of being a designer; but getting it absolutely right makes you forget about all downsides. Just my two cents.

I’ll end this post by giving you an example from Clients From Hell.

Client: “The cost is very high, we can save costs by getting our guy to design it.”

Web designer: “That’s possible, would save some amount of money.”

Client: “Yeah, he’s an illustrator but I am sure he can do web-design, it’s all the same art stuff anyway.”

AAR: http://www.aarweb.org/

Clients From Hell: http://clientsfromhell.net

Last week we went punting in the Cam. The weather was excellent to do it that day and it was very relaxing. Punting seems easier than it is and you should definitely try it if you get the chance.

Yesterday we visited the 37th Cambridge Beer Festival. The atmosphere was brilliant I must say and I got a cool balloon hat! I gave it to another guy when we left and he seemed very happy with it . Some beers where better than the other but ‘Funky Monkey’ was definitely the best I got.

Work has been cool too, I’m working on an AIR application that let’s users log in to Sakai from their desktop and do everything they can do on the website itself. I’ve been cooperating on the Cambridge University Library widgets project, BERA project and now starting the AAR project too. You can read about them in the links below. The rest of my time is divided between writing my thesis and enjoying the good weather (not today ).

I’m getting my first job offers too. That’s a big confidence boost . Check out Meebo!

http://www.bera.ac.uk/

http://www.aarcorp.com/

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/

http://www.meebo.com/

It’s a little late to say my internship lifted off but I meant the planes on the awesome air show yesterday. The air show was, not surprisingly, held in Duxford. Duxford has a former Royal Air Force (RAF) airfield that was used a lot during the Battle of Britain. ‘Battle of Britain’ is a name given to the air attacks waged by the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, against the UK during the summer and autumn of 1940.

There is a museum at the airfield where you can view old and new planes and enter some of them. We got inside some planes including the Concorde. I always thought that plane was much bigger. We didn’t get to see everything of the museum since there are a lot of planes, bombs, vehicles,… to view and the air show started at 2PM.

You can view the photos in my gallery linked here and in the top menu. I’ll provide some interesting links about the Battle of Britain and Duxford too. It was good fun!

Duxford: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duxford

Imperial war museum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_War_Museum_Duxford

Battle of Britain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain

After Planet Rock, the new Slash album and some Q music I’ve tuned my UK radio to Last FM. I’ve created an account which you can add as a friend so we can see what awesome music we like. Apparently in Belgium you have to pay for the “Radio” on Last FM but here in the UK I don’t seem to have any limits on it so it’s free!

Last weekend some we held a football match with some Caret Colleagues and friends. Our team lost in the end but it was a great game, I really enjoyed it even though the weather wasn’t that good. I hope this weekend the weather is better because we are planning on playing football again.

Cheers

Bert

Apparently my laptop decided to give some weird stuff on my screen while booting. Luckily it still boots and I can work on it like I should be able to. I hope it doesn’t break while I’m in Cambridge because I need to get my thesis done.

It has been a great weekend so far. Some friends from Belgium were visiting the UK and they were in Cambridge for three days. On Friday we went to several clubs and had a great time there. We were joined by a colleague of mine too, awesome!

On Saturday the weather was great! We walked around in the center of Cambridge, laid around in some parks, talked some nonsense and enjoyed it a lot. This city really is kick-ass when the weather is good.  ”Awesomesauce” would one of the guys say that visited . In the evening I went to their hostel and had some diner at “the Rock”. Sadly enough it was raining on the way back home. There are some pictures but I’ll probably get them later this week.

Life can’t be about partying all the time ( ) so today I’ll work on my thesis and reports. The first version of it is due in 17 days so it’s probably a good idea to spend some time on it. Tomorrow is a bank holiday so we’ll probably do some laundry and, depending on how the weather is, play some frisbee or football in the park.

The project at work is starting to come together. We (Henry Houdmont and me) almost have a working prototype and I think we’ll be able to show it tomorrow at one of the weekly meetings. The project is about functional testing for front-end developers. It basically comes to this: you create a site, you create some sort of test for that site to check if it works like it should, you submit that test to our website and you receive results of the tests executed on the website on the servers dedicated to this project.

The advantage of this project is that you don’t have to test everything manually but just check some settings, put in some descriptions and press a few buttons to get your results in a nice overview. For the people who think that there already are methods to do this: you’re right but we add screenshot functionality to check for the smallest CSS errors and represent everything in a fancy way.

I’ll probably put a demo screen-cast online in a few days.

Cheers

Bert

Yeah the new Reckless Tortuga typical gamer is out! If you haven’t seen the first 2 parts check out my previous posts. I’ll link you up with the link on the actual Reckless Tortuga site. Enjoy

Typical gamer part 3

A couple of weeks ago we visited the backs of Cambridge. They’re amazing to see! The backs are basically ‘the backs’ of the colleges here in Cambridge. Most of them are really huge and have a great architecture. It’s an interesting visit if you’re in Cambridge. We should go punting before we leave it seems cool too. Punting is driving a boat with a large stick you push in the ground (that sounds kinda lame but it isn’t ). Yesterday after work we got some beers at the Mill, a pub next to Caret. After that we went for some Chinese food and checked out this pub called ‘The Fez’. It was awesome!

You should definitely check out all the pictures we’ve made so far. All pictures from everyone here are in my gallery. You can find them in the ‘Cambridge Internship’ directory and subdirectories. Check them out and leave some interesting comments if you want.

Cheers

Bert

Tomorrow and Monday we don’t have to work (well, at Caret…). Tomorrow we’ll probably work on our thesis and in the evening go into the city to have some fun. We were planning on visiting some things like the university this weekend so I hope the weather’s great.

Normally I’ll go out and take some pictures too, I haven’t really done that and that’s a shame. Cambridge is a really nice town for photographers.

Cheers!

Bert