Shambling Towards Perfection

Finally, last night the kiln used for the soda firing and the main kiln (used for the cone 10 firing, in which the majority of pieces went... at least the majority of everybody else's pieces ;) ) were unpacked. My flower came out gorgeous and it'll be going into the show. For the summer class, there's generally an art show put on with the students' and teachers' best pieces; everybody always has at least one or two things that turn out well, and they get put in a gallery with fancy lighting and it's just awesome. So anyway my flower and my horsehair piece will be going into the show for sure. Cthulhu or my teapot may go in, as well, but as the teapot wasn't yet fired our teacher hasn't yet made up her mind about it. The blue tape on my flower marked it as something our teacher wanted in the show. ;) Other than watching the main kiln being unpacked, I also glazed my spoon rests, as they had been bisqued. I did one each in Emily's Purple, Michi...

Saturday, August 3, was Glaze Day. As it happened, I only had a single thing to glaze: my teapot. My spoon rests were still being bisqued, and everything else was fired using an alternative firing method (my flower was still in the process of being soda fired, in fact), so the teapot was it. This turned out to be a very good thing, as it took an inordinate amount of time to finish the teapot. I painted it with underglazes, so it was a very meticulous and time-consuming affair, as I had to make sure all the nooks and crannies were colored, that there was even coverage and no splotches, etc. I was at it for at least 2 hours, I think. I painted the eyes blue, with black pupils and lighter blue lines in the irises, so they aren't so monochromatic. I painted the hair and eyebrows black, then added small lines of brown, to try and give them some depth. Finally I painted the body and trunk light grey; I tried to thin out the glaze a fair amount as I was a little worried it might come out ...

The last week has been pretty insane, so I didn't have much of a chance to sit and recount my pottery adventures. Thursday, August 1, was the last day for wet clay. There were also two raku firings, items were chosen and put into the kiln for the soda firing, AND we had a potluck (my contribution: curried deviled eggs, yum!). So it was a pretty hectic evening. First, I had to paint Cthulhu with raku glazes, which I did in a massive hurry in order to get him into the first raku firing. I used curdle blue for his wings and the front of his body, alligator rust for his back (to look like scales), white crackle in his eye sockets, some kind of black on his tentacles, turquoise crackle on his arms (I think), and copper luster (again, I think) on his eyes. Towards the end I was in a crazy hurry so things got a bit hazy! I left his eye slits and his teeth bare, in the hopes of them getting all black and awesome from the smoke. Here's a pic of the kiln before it was fired up, with Cthu...

During Saturday's class I was able to finish Cthulhu. Admittedly with a bit of a rush on the legs/feet; they're not quite as nice as I would have liked but this is the last week of pottery, so I was running out of time. There'll be a raku firing on Thursday, and both my horsehair piece and Cthulhu need to be in that one, so Cthulhu had to be finished on Saturday. I actually took the piece home to baby it through the drying stage, so I'll have to take it back tomorrow night so it can get bisque fired before Thursday. The last week is always pretty insane, trying to get stuff finished at the last minute. But anyhow, Cthulhu is all done as far as sculpting goes. I realized last night that so far this summer I've made 4 pieces, each of which will be finished with different techniques. The teapot will be fired in the usual, high fire way, after being painted with underglazes and having a clear glaze applied (I'm hoping). Then the horsehair piece will be rak...

Last night I finished my flower sculpture. I think it turned out very nicely, although I had a heck of a time trying to avoid getting red clay dust on the white clay. I finally gave up trying to scrape off the dust that did get on there; I'm hoping once the sculpture has dried a bit I can just brush it off. The timing looks ok for this to make it into the soda firing, so that's exciting. Our instructor said there may be glazes to use with that, but I think I'll just leave it plain; the glaze from the soda looks spectacular even on plain clay in different colors, so that's plenty of decoration. After the flower was done, I moved on to another sculptural project. It's a sculptural dice cup in the shape of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu . I'm trying to follow this description from The Call of Cthulhu : A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hin...

Yesterday I finished my flower holder. I cleaned it up, then burnished it with the back of a metal spoon. Then I painted it with terra sigillata and burnished it with a plastic bag (apparently blue Walmart bags are the best for this, but I made do with a generic grocery bag). It now has a shiny, smooth finish, which is required for horse hair. You can kind of see the shininess in the picture; this piece looks lighter than others I've photographed because it's reflecting more light. The piece will be bisqued and then fired in a raku kiln; it won't have any glaze applied. Next I started on a small sculpture of a rose, which will hopefully be part of a soda firing that will be done during the last week of classes. Soda firing is accomplished by blowing baking soda or soda ash into a hot kiln; this results in the pieces within essentially being glazed on all their surfaces. The pieces are propped on raw clay in order to prevent their sticking to the kiln shelves. White ...

Last night was the third pottery class of the summer. I finished up my teapot by cleaning it up a bit, paring down the excess clay on the bottom, and embiggening the hole in the spout, as I was a little paranoid about how small it'd be after the clay shrinks and glaze is applied. I tried to model the shape of the spout hole after an electric kettle I have which pours magnificently. The spout hole in that kettle is slightly oval, flat across the top, and doesn't spill even a drop of water. Whether or not my teapot will pour well remains to be seen, of course... Next I started on a majigger for my grandma. It's a silk flower holder (doesn't that sound nicer than "fake flower holder"? One of the other students came up with that ;) ) and will be finished with the horse hair technique . This means I'll have to burnish the clay and paint it with terra sigillata, then it will be bisqued and later fired in the raku kiln. Then I'll put horsehair or other org...

I'm currently taking a pottery class for the fourth summer in a row (via Doña Ana Community College's Community Education Program ). I figured I might as well blog about that creative exploit, as well, because why not? It might help me get a better idea of how much I can accomplish for next time, at least, as I always have about a million projects I want to complete and not enough time to do so. So being able to prioritize and plan better would be swell. Anyhow, I'm nearly done with my first project. The first class was on Thursday and we spent an hour or an hour and a half discussing what we all wanted to accomplish. The class I'm in is for "advanced" students (aka we've all taken pottery at least once before), so we all have ideas on what we want to do. My list of things I want to make is, of course, extensive. ;) After that, our instructor encouraged us to try making a "30 Minute Teapot" which has now taken me at least 4 hours, but I can n...

Last night I started dismantling my Wall o' Stickies representing my product backlog and finished items,  and before I did so I figured I'd take some photos to commemorate all the hard work documented on my walls. Here's the final state of the backlog and finished item areas: As you can see I started to run out of room in the finished section there at the end. And here the finished items are, nicely stacked into piles for each sprint: The backlog contains a lot of items that were OBE (overcome by events) by being rewritten and implemented in a slightly different way, plus some ponies and things that turned out to be too big or not necessary after all. I'll have to go back through these later this summer and get rid of the OBE items and rewrite the rest. Some of them I would still like to implement, so I'll probably do a sprint or two and knock out a few items. Plus there were a few bugs that turned up at the end, so I do need to fix those. So there are...

I figure I may as well start sprinting, as it were, since I've been slowly doing stuff anyway, and this will help me be more organized about it. From my initial backlog I finished two items: Post on Ravelry asking about discrepancies with swatches/question numbers Finish reformatting instructions It turns out that I discovered a slight error in the instructions (for 3 swatches the wrong questions were listed) during my reformatting of the instructions. So now I can proceed knowing that I have the correct questions figured out for each swatch. Anyhow those two items are no longer in the product backlog, so I'll proceed with the next-highest priority items. The sprint goal is to finish gathering materials and finish prepping so that I'm ready to start knitting swatches. I think, since this is supposed to be fun and not work, that I shall not have an actual sprint length. It'll just be done when the items are done. The sprint backlog items are: Priority Descripti...

So I figured I'd begin with listing all the items I've got figured out so far. This will be the product backlog. Some of these items will definitely need breaking down, such as the individual swatches, and probably even the project ('cause it'll take a bit), but this is just the first go at the backlog anyway. I'm listing priorities and rough estimations of time, too. Priority Description Points 1000 Post on Ravelry asking about discrepancies with swatches/question numbers .5 950 Finish reformatting instructions 1 900 Wind all yarn for project, swatches, and test swatches .5 850 Find all books 3 800 Catalog books in Ravelry and also in a file in the format for the paper 2 750 Test knit "slingshot" long tail cast-on 1 700 Test bind off techniques to eliminate having a big stitch below last bound off stitch 1 650 Test knit a stockinette swatch to find gauge 1 600 Block test swatch .5 550 Measure test swatch .5 500 Type up cover letter .5 450 P...

So now that my Master of Science degree is complete, I've decided to start working on the The Knitting Guild Assocation 's (TKGA)  Masters Program - Hand Knitting . There are 3 levels, and the first involves knitting a mitten plus 16 swatches, writing a report and answering questions about the swatches. On the surface it seems pretty easy, but from reading the Ravelry group's posts  I'm quite convinced that it's not. The knitting has to be technically nearly perfect: no weird stretched out stitches, no "rowing out" (in stockinette, where your purls and knits aren't the same tension so there's a visible difference between rows), etc. The swatches and mitten are to be blocked, which helps with some things, but not everything. It's extremely common to have to re-knit and/or re-write things, even by very experienced knitters (e.g. people who've been knitting 30 or 40 years). It should be plenty challenging for me. I'm currently working on...

I consider the "final exam" containing my presentation and demo of the project plus an oral exam on coursework to be the final sprint review. The committee judging the final exam consisted of my advisor plus another professor from my department (my database professor) and a professor from another department (Accounting and Information Systems; I've been perusing classes in other departments trying to decide what to take next and discovered that she teaches a lot of database-related stuff in BCIS). The review/exam went well in that I did, in fact, pass. The project presentation and demo could hardly have gone better. I was able to answer questions intelligently and explained all the features, pros, cons, etc. of the project with no problem. Two of my friends who also work in the industry attended (the presentation/demo portion is open to the public) and so I answered questions from 5 people who knew lots about the domain in which I worked. I consider that quite an accom...

So I figured I should do some final(ish?) updates on the project and finish off the sprint data and so forth. So here's the sprint 11 retrospective. It went swimmingly and I finished everything by the time it needed to be finished. Many things took even less time than I thought they would, so I didn't actually end up having to stay up all of Tuesday night to finish the programming issues before Wednesday morning. The tasks I finished were: Mark subtasks on the project page.  (15 minutes) "Task created" page should return to the project page. (15 minutes) Add a link to the login page/project page (depending on whether or not the user is logged in) to the error page. (10 minutes) Turn the subtask radio buttons on the task/new task pages into a drop down list. (.5 hour) Change the dependency checkboxes on the task/new task pages into a drop down and a button to add more drop downs as needed. (1 hour) (Actually changed to 3 checkboxes for now) Make the comment te...

The first priority is getting as much programming done as I can before Wednesday morning. After that, it’s all about getting the presentation done and brushing up on past coursework. So those are the sprint goals. So the sprint backlog items are: Priority Description Points 800 Mark subtasks on the project page. .5 790 ”Task created” page should return to the project page. .5 780 Add a link to the login page/project page (depending on whether or not the user is logged in) to the error page. .5 770 Turn the subtask radio buttons on the task/new task pages into a drop down list. 2 760 Change the dependency checkboxes on the task/new task pages into a drop down and a button to add more drop downs as needed. 2 750 Make the comment text box count down how many characters remain as the user types. 2 740 Add a javascript calendar picker for date fields. 3 730 Make the task list on the project page a sortable table. 3 720 Create slides for the presentation. 3 710 Study for the or...

This sprint went remarkably well. Being a hermit all weekend helped me to get as much done as I wanted to (and is probably the only way I could have gotten as much done as I wanted to in earlier sprints, but that really, really doesn’t work as a long-term thing unless one wishes to leave sanity behind). There was one item I started on and then realized I needed clarification from my advisor before I could complete it, but I got everything else done. I also didn’t do quite as much studying as I had intended; honestly I really, really don’t want to have to do this wretched studying, so I procrastinated. Anyway here are the items I did get done: Create outline for presentation. Gather study materials for oral exam. Fix task creation error where error message is sometimes shown though the task was created. Fix blocking tasks page. Fix task editing bug where the task creator can’t edit the title/desc. Study for the oral exam. (sort of, as discussed above) Move the task list on the...

The meeting yesterday with my professor went fine. It was quite brief, as there wasn’t much to discuss. I let him know that I had committed code to the SVN repository on Sunday, and that I had fixed all the bugs I know of and then started on UI improvements. I had a few questions on stuff I worked on during the sprint, which had all been from comments he’d made earlier, so I got clarifications on those items. He will pull my code on Wednesday and get it deployed on his server, so that’s pretty much the deadline for being done with stuff I want to actually be in the demo on Friday. On Saturday I sent my advisor an outline of the slideshow presentation I’ll have to give, and he did say that was fine. The other thing we got done during the meeting yesterday was making sure my laptop will work in the room where I’ll be presenting. One of my friends advised me to do that, and then I remembered that I’d had massive issues in that very room with my old netbook. I believe it was completely...

During this next sprint, after figuring out the basic outline of my presentation, the main thing that must get done is fixing bugs. I’m going to do a quick demo of my software during the final exam, and so stuff needs to WORK. So those are the highest priority items. Anyway, here are the sprint backlog items: Priority Description Points 700 Create outline for presentation. 2 690 Gather study materials for oral exam. 1 680 Fix task creation error where error message is sometimes shown though the task was created. 3 670 Fix blocking tasks page. 3 660 Fix task editing bug where the task creator can’t edit the title/desc. 3 650 Study for the oral exam. 3 640 Move the task list on the project page to the top, above the project info. .5 630 Make subtasks indented on the task page. .5 620 Make the subtask and dependent task lists further apart on the task page. .5 610 Put a link on the task page going back to the project page. .5 600 Make the default task priority “normal”. 1 ...

Yesterday I finished my paper and got it sent in, so I’m calling yesterday the end of the sprint. It mostly went well, although some things (like adding all 64 references, and having my paper tech-edited) took much longer than I thought they would. I also pretty much gave up on putting in a user interface section, as even though I finished the book I don’t have time to actually do much to improve the UI. There are a few things suggested by my prof that I’ll do, and that’s about it. So I’m just leaving that section as a thing to do under future work. Anyway, the backlog items that got completed were Add citations for all research done and tools used (4 hours), Reformat with proper section headings (4 hours, though this one was done by my husband/tech-editor), Add section on rewriting data-access layer if not sufficiently covered and application layer (45 minutes), Add something about UCDetector (15 minutes), Describe work-flow for typical user tasks. (Examples and Screen Shots section) ...

The meeting Monday with my advisor was short and quick. He liked the looks of the formatting (courtesy my husband, the technical writer) and said he didn’t want to take a longer look and to just send it out when I thought it was ready. I hadn’t been able to get screenshots/usage scenarios in before the meeting, so I didn’t send the paper out until last night when I got that put in. For our next and final meeting, we agreed that I’d have at least an outline of the topics for the slideshow presentation I’ll be giving as part of my final exam. The presentation plus demo of the software need to take approximately 30 minutes, uninterrupted. I’ll also work on bugs and UI improvements and start cramming reviewing for the oral exam component. That will be... interesting... as one of the topics that usually gets covered during the oral exam is from the very first class I took, in fall 2008. O_O Wish me luck, ‘cause I’m gonna need it!

Finally, on to sprint planning. I'm going to be meeting with my advisor on both remaining Mondays, so I'm going to plan these last few sprints for a week(ish) each, instead of 2 weeks. This also suits the crunched timetable. I couldn't plan last weekend as I needed to know what my advisor thought my priorities should be, and then I had a couple busy weeknights, so here this finally is. There are some development tasks that need doing before The End, but there are a whole lot of non-development tasks, too, and one of those is the most immediate concern. I need to get my paper for my project done by next week. I've gone through 2 drafts, so it's in pretty good shape. I need to add a few sections (screenshots, review, future work, that kind of thing), plus add citations and sources for all the research I've done and tools I've used. I'd also like to add a figure illustrating the security features I've added, and another showing the database schema, p...

So clearly I fell off the sprint-wagon. Things got a bit away from me at the start of the semester, and so I just haven't been doing the formal sprint stuff. I've been working on bugs and configuring Tomcat, plus getting the first draft of my paper written. But I need to get organized again in order to finish what needs finishing before I present my project May 3 (only 3 weeks away, ack!), so I'm going to restart with sprinting and all that for the little time I have left.  So for sprint 8, I did finish all but one task, Fix weird errors when project only has one user (instructor is the only student). For two other tasks, I'm not sure how long it took to finish them because I didn't write it down (the beginning of my slide into not being scrummy): Update the application to handle errors nicely and Change code to use connection pooling. I finished the rest normally: Add columns/tables to database to support task dependency/subtask relationships (1), Add co...

I keep feeling like I haven't really done that much, and that I'll need to seriously pick up the pace this semester to finish on time. But then this weekend I was contemplating my backlog and list of completed items... The posterboard on the far left is the product backlog, and the one on the far right is the sprint activity chart. The middle two posterboards? Those are all completed items. So really, I've been busy! Things are definitely proceeding. Graduation here I come!

As I was about to work on one of the items for the sprint I realized it'd be a LOT easier if I cleaned up my code first. I've been meaning to do this and it really should have gone in as a sprint backlog item, so I added an unplanned item to the sprint. Basically I ended up with a ton of unused database-related methods, since I rewrote large portions of the data access layer. I didn't remove things as I went along just in case something somewhere needed them; I didn't want to break anything as I went along. But at this point I need to get rid of those methods and clean things up! Being an Eclipse user, I wondered if there were a plug-in to help with this task. So I discovered UCDetector . This thing is great for cleaning up small projects like mine. I just had to tell it to detect, and presto! I had a list of methods that weren't being used. It also had some recommendations on classes/methods/etc. that could be made less public. Very cool. Anyway I thought this ...

The goal for sprint 8 is to make any necessary database schema changes and to add as many features (not just making the UI prettier) as possible. The sprint backlog items are: Priority Description Points 600 Add columns/tables to database to support task dependency/subtask relationships. 2 590 Add columns to user table to support lockout after failed login attempts. 2 580 Add checks for authorized access to all CRUD operations. 3 570 Wrap create statements and the fetching of the ID in one database transaction to prevent incorrect results (if necessary). 2 560 Update the application to handle errors nicely. 5 550 Check all error-related redirects to make sure they work properly. 1 540 Add try/catch blocks for parseInt calls and handle errors appropriately. 1 530 Fix weird errors when project only has one user (instructor is the only student). 2 520 Change code to use connection pooling. 3 This is a total of 21 hours, which I think I can do by the middle of next week. If...

So, since my professor is still out on Christmas break (and so am I, for that matter) I asked my husband to be my accountabilibuddy. Yesterday I did a demo for him and showed him all the stuff I on which I worked during the sprint. He was suitably impressed. That's really about all I can say about the review, since I was unable to get any feedback from my adviser. I have also started pondering what I absolutely need to get done before the system is live, and I decided that really the primary thing is to get all the database schema changes done. So those will be my first priority in the next sprint. Some research was required to figure out exactly what changes are required for task dependency and subtask relationships, so I did that yesterday. I bought the book SQL Antipatterns some time ago, and it had a section on representing a tree structure in a database. The subtask relationships do form trees, as each task can only be a subtask of one task, but the task dependency relati...

So sprint 7 was finally finished last night. I ended up hardly being able to work on the project at all during what was supposed to be the sprint (December 10-24), so this was mostly done during the last week. Being off of work has, unsurprisingly, really helped increase the amount I can get done. So I'll do another sprint for the next week or so, and then in the middle or end of next week I'll work with my professor to get the project set up on his machine and usable for the spring semester. This means I'll need to get all database schema changes done ASAP. That'll be my first focus for the next sprint. During the sprint I finished all of the sprint backlog items. Those are: Set up git repository (1 hour), Rewrite edit user/task/project code (3 hours), Change email code as per discussion (2), Rewrite unfinished tasks page (3), Rewrite most recent tasks page (3), Rewrite blocking tasks page (3), Fix login error when user doesn't exist (1). I pretty quickly gave ...