Waiting on Shirts and Shipping (Fri, 7/11)

Spent most of the first half of the day trying to co-ordinate the vote on our t-shirt design. Between tracking who had and hadn't voted, and additional designs that I hadn't seen for one reason or another, the process was far more complicated than it had to be. Helped Jimmy figure out a problem he was having with the Prototype, and between our two versions, we should be able to move forward with the project as soon as all of the parts have arrived. As far as I know, we are only really waiting for the suitcase itself to come in. After lunch, Jimmy, David, Abraham, and I went to visit Adam in his lab. He showed us the php script he had been working on to generate random math questions. I answered the question and broke the program within 5 seconds of touching it. After we left, he discovered that he had been using an old version of the script, so it worked again. For the afternoon, we worked on making some small tweaks to the Prototype, as well as trying to come up with an actual name for it. The best results were either the Educational Solar Projection Navigator (ESPN), or the Solar Universal Navigator (SUN). I also made a new KMZ file of another wavelength to be used with the DSE.

Making progress towards being able to work on the Science-sphere (Thu, 7/10)

Started the day making a few changes to my totally "useful" page that I made with HTML and JavaScript. On the click of the button, it now picks a random platypus out of 3, displays the picture, and tracks the number of times each one has been displayed. Then, after a coffee break with the undergrads, I began trying to install Google Earth, since that is used to display all of the images for the digital solar explorer. The download went smoothly, but once I opened it, I got an error message that it could not reach the proper server, and was redirected to another site. After reading a bunch of solutions to other peoples' similar problems, I finally discovered that I had to change some DNS settings in the network, and it finally worked. After that, I was able to view a couple of the different wavelengths of the sun. We should be able to start working on the Science-sphere suitcase prototype as soon as the parts arrive. At the end of the day, we got to look at the code for the prototype, and began trying to fix a few problems they've been having

404 error: title not found (Wed, 7/9)

Spent most of the day trying to get the prototype to load pictures correctly, and recognize when the website returns a 404 error. Jimmy and I spent most of the afternoon trying to make sense of the six digit time codes which seemingly have nothing to do with the actual time the satellite took the picture, since the code requires the full url of the picture in order to retrieve it from the NASA site. Tried to tackle the code for a while, and then looked up facts about the sun for the DSE.

Adventures in JavaScript (Tue, 7/8)

Spent most of the morning learning JavaScript. Went to a meeting with the Insight Lab and the REU, got to learn about everyone's projects. After lunch, went on to learn about HTML. Got the source code for all the SET projects, but had to wait a while for them to download. Also downloaded Celestia, which runs the project, and played around with it to view planets and stars in the solar system and beyond. Experimented a little with html and javascript, made a picture of a platypus change into a picture of a different platypus.

First Day (Mon, 7/7)

Today was a good first day. Despite the rain during the scavenger hunt, and not winning the overall competition, Team Walrus still won paper plate awards for Shortest Film, and Most Random. I still maintain that the walruses were a necessary addition. After that, Jimmy and I headed down to the Insight Lab, where we got to see a few of the projects they've been working on, and that we'll be helping with. Finally, I wrote my bio for the lab's website, and then this blog.