Week 1 Day 3

Today I learned quite a number of stuff. To begin with, I now know that for Linux, its founder only created the Linux Kernel, and the rest of its components have totally nothing to do with its founder.

There are so many distributions (or type) of Linux, not because of the development team, but because of distribution people who put together the different components of Linux (such as Messenger for Linux, FireFox for Linux) , and they called their combination names. An example would be Ubuntu and Fedora.

Currently, the most popular Linux OS is Ubuntu, not because it has a nice name, but because the person who combined the components to form Ubuntu focuses more on making it work well, rather than being concerned about the availability of the source code for its components.

Another key learning point today would be the use of FTP,SSH service and Remote Desktop in Linux. Indeed Linux doesn`t like me, encountered many failure while trying to install and run Remote Desktop. At last Kelvin came to my help, and another GUI Remote Desktop service, called vino, was installed and used, and I was gald it finally managed to work. The Remote Desktop service installed in Linux can not only be used to Remote Windows Desktop, but also MAC desktop, and this is what Windows Remote Desktop is currently unable to do

Terminal commands (or Command Prompt commands) in Linux were also taught to us today. Although some common ones such as cd, mkdir are common to me as they exists in windows, there are many that I have never see before, such as ls, killtask, vi. I am also taught regarding the Linux's structure for its folder, and how is it different from Window's structure.

The last learning point of today would be GNOME and KDE in Linux. GNOME and KDE are developed by 2 different groups, and they are responsible for the display interfaces in Linux. GNOME focuses more on stability whereas KDE focuses more on Special effects, such as transparency. Although KDE does look much better, but it is not as stable, and not too compatible with certain programs too.

For instance, if another machine were to Remote to a computer running Linux using KDE, the Client connecting to the Linux PC running will see some weird colours effect, that is not seen on the actual PC

The day passed so quick that it was like a blink of the eyes, and tomorrow I will be getting started on learning more about C! Feeling excited!!

Week 1 Day 2

Today was the second day at work, learned about jhow Project Hollow Touch is going to be implemented, and can`t wait to work on that.

Currently the plans for my internship are as follows :
- Now till Mid October -->learning basic stuffs
- Mid Oct till Mid Nov -->LightDraw project enhancement
- Mid Nov till Mid Jan -->Project Hollow Touch
- Mid Jan till Mid Feb --> 2 Applications for Hollow Touch

Now I am still trying out on Fedora, so far installation was successful, Firewall working, Media Player working, Web Browser working.

Currently there are problems with the FTP service ( by proftpd ), which I am still not able to solve by the end of today. Although I have found a solution, which is to use PureFtpd instead, but I wanted to know and understand why ProFtpd failed to work, and hence spend much of the time trying to understand what is wrong with it.

Today we were shown how Graphics were made into Studio images when there are 2 different images (each being seen by each eyes). We were also taught regarding the flickering effect on the Studio Glasses, and how does it help each of the eyes to see different images. When Kelvin explained to me the use of 3D cameras to capture a dimension called depth, I was surprised. I had never known that there is such type of camera, and it actually uses infra red to measure the distance

Our first assignment will be to create an application that allows our hands to interact with Studio objects on the screen, and when its being pushed, it will move according to the direction of the initial action

First Post - First Day of the week

Hello IHPC ! Its my first time using MAC to blog. Today was my first day of work at IHPC, and the demos of LightDraw blow my mind away. However, it leaves me with one question, how is it able to differentiate between 2 different lasers, with the same amount of light being shone, without confusing one for another.

After the demo, we were asked to review Lup Peng's blog at IHPC. Their development process seems interesting, but there are some parts that I couldn`t understand well due to the technical terms used. Nevertheless, it was interesting reading about their experience developing the LightDraw project, which was initially a gaming project, and slowly evolved to LightDraw. The blog actually provided me with what I will be doing throughout my intern, and reading it was thus preparing myself and getting the overview of the work to be done.

Thereafter, we were also tasked to research on Linux OS, and select 2 versions that suits what we will be doing. When I saw the list of Linux OS available, I was surprised as I initially only knew about Red Hat Linux OS, and thought that it was the only OS available for linux.

We researched for almost 30 minutes, and was pondering on 32 bit and 64 bit architecture, when Kelvin give us a lesson on the differences and their advantages. Sincerely speaking, if now I were to ask any of my friends which is better, most will certainly says 64 bit, because "it has more bits". It was only today I found out of the advantages and disadvantages of 64 bit. It is able to support > 4gb of memory, however, if the application developed does not use much data type of size 64 bits, there won`t be any differences in terms of speed and performance.

Thanks Dr.Kelvin and Dr.Ming Hong for your guidance

My favorite task was when it comes down to setting up desktops and installing the OS. I haven`t done it for a long long time since my Secondary School days, and I terribly missed assembling PCs, setting up computers and installing OS in them.

Can`t wait for tomorrow to setup the PCs and install Linux OS! Feeling excited once again!