PhysX » CARET

Almost at Cambridge

PhysX — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:56:59 +0000

It’s been a week now since I started working for CARET. I’m not in Cambridge at the moment as I’m working at home but I’ve booked my ferry ticket today. My car is coming with me to Cambridge so the ferry is the way to go I guess. I’m looking forward to move into my new home.

The biggest disadvantage is that I’ll miss my girlfriend and family though . I will be coming back to Belgium on regular basis to visit everybody.

Cheers,
Bert

job@CARET

PhysX — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:00:55 +0000

I’ve been in Belgium for a couple of weeks now and I’m still getting used to it. It’s definitely good to be back but I’m looking forward to return again too. From August on I’m going to be working at the University of Cambridge at CARET. I’ve completed my internship there and I’m happy to be able to go back and work in Cambridge. I’ve met a lot of interesting people during my internship so it should definitely be a good experience again .

Visit CARET

All good things come to an end

PhysX — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:32:39 +0000

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

Functional testing coming together

PhysX — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:15:09 +0000

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

Sightseeing and stuff :-)

PhysX — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 12:36:00 +0000

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

Bank day ftw

PhysX — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:37:33 +0000

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

Widgets ftw!

PhysX — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:01:54 +0000

Today I finally started a project on my own where I have to create a widget for use on Sakai (http://sakaiproject.org/). There is a website called Identi.ca, you can compare it to Twitter. People post a status, have friends, join groups,… The widget I’m creating is doing stuff with the data from that website. It’s JavaScript, Ajax, HTML and CSS and it’s cool to create something like this.

I’ll keep you guys posted about the progress of this project. We already got a cool widget working on Sakai, maybe I’ll post some screenshots about it later on.

Cheers, Bert

epic note :-D

PhysX — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:46:05 +0000

Someone left an hilarious note on the dishwasher today.

New assignment just for me ^^

PhysX — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:28:56 +0000

Yesterday I got a briefing about a new assignment just for me. It’s just for me because I’m the only Multimedia student currently in CARET. I didn’t start the assignment yet because I helped Henry out today with the widget we are creating for Sakai. It had some work waiting to be done and I’m really interested in Sakai as well so the choice was easy.

I’m amazed about how much I’ve learned so far about javascript, JQuery, GIT, Sakai,… Practical experience really is the key to succes :-)

Tomorrow evening we’re going to have a drink with some colleagues so that’s going to be fun too. We’ll probably drink some Belgian bottled beer (inside joke xD).

I’ll keep you posted so check out my blog!

Bert