Comments | zandperl: Summer Projects

zandperl

Summer Projects

Apr 27, 2009 21:27

My current list of Summer Projects. Enumerated for convenience, not priority.

Organize photos. My high school photography instructor told me the secret to good photography is to take many photos and only show the best ones. With the advent of digital photography I have perfected the former, but need to work on the latter. My goal is to take ( Read more... )

real life, me, mood, projects, summer projects, goals, summer

Comments 17

framefolly April 28 2009, 03:53:34 UTC

What fun and productive projects!

zandperl April 28 2009, 11:53:00 UTC

I've discovered over past years that I don't really do New Year's Resolutions and instead Summer Projects are more fruitful. I have more time in summer, and most resolutions people come up with need some devoted time to establish as habits before they can become life changes, while others only need a certain amount of dedicated time to accomplish.

jrtom April 28 2009, 04:49:39 UTC

Cool. If you would be willing to share what you come up with on #2, I'd like to hear it. (I'm not averse [sic :) ] to collaborations either, but I can't play guitar at all, and I'm not sure you really need baritone vocals for the covers you're picking. :) )

As for #5, what did you have in mind? As stated, it's about like "do music". :) What kinds of programming, and to what end?

zandperl April 28 2009, 12:01:49 UTC

I have never had a course in programming, and in my undergraduate research I performed a minimal amount of programming. Then when I went to grad school they assumed I already knew how to program and threw me into a numerical methods course, as well as two research projects that required programming skills. I taught myself enough of the commands to hobble along, but I don't have a coherent framework or understanding. Some day I want to go back to grad school, possibly in astro or phys, and I will need to know how to program to do so.

My goal is to learn the equivalent of a Programming 101 course, focusing on concepts in one particular language (probably C++ b/c that's used in astro at times and my co-conspirator jethereal is interested in it as well). (I also reason that concepts I learn in one language will carry over to another one, but that it's important to be able to DO one language.) I want to learn procedural programming (if/then/for loops), pulling in/writing to data tables, images, and graphs, and GUIs. I'm not sure if object- ( ... )

seekingferret April 28 2009, 15:00:49 UTC

I suspect more people in the sciences are at this stage of programming knowledge than you think. It's about where I am. I can do things in Matlab and C and C++ and Basic, have even done a few reasonably sophisticated robotics projects by teaching myself just enough to make it work (Man, my laser galvo scanner code is ridiculous), but I have no consistent framework for understanding what I'm doing.

zandperl April 28 2009, 15:13:37 UTC

I think most of my peers had taught themselves programming, but they did it years before I did so and thus didn't have the problems that I had.

And regardless of what other people have done or not done, what's important is what works for me. What I did last time did not work for me. I know from past experience I learn well by following the traditional steps of taking assignments sequentially, so I wish to do so this summer to help me learn programming better than the mess I cobbled together before.

Thread 9

marquiswildbill April 28 2009, 14:35:07 UTC

Thanks for posting about the Franklin institute. I can't wait to bring T to see that. Lemme know when you're going if you want to try to meet up or go together. That is just so awesome. Yay for artifacts of great heretics.

zandperl April 28 2009, 14:39:09 UTC

I'm really excited about going to see it. I'm going to have to plan to go early on a weekday morning so there are less crowds.

marquiswildbill April 28 2009, 14:46:03 UTC

That's when I would go. I can offer a place to crash that's about 45 mins away if you want.

Yay summer list! kelsin April 30 2009, 19:48:11 UTC

A quick note about #5, try to learn Ruby first. Even if you don't have many things that you can do with it right off the bat, it is installed on Mac's (by default now I think) and is a gorgeous language for many reasons ( ... )

Re: Yay summer list! zandperl April 30 2009, 21:46:56 UTC

On #5, my goal is to learn programming for physics and astronomy. Because of this I am inclined to learn C++, Fortran (no clue what version it's in now), or IDL, because these are what astronomers use. jethereal is going to be working with me on this, and he's inclined towards C++. IDL I think I'd have to pay for unfortunately ( ... )

Re: Yay summer list! kelsin April 30 2009, 23:26:13 UTC

Have fun :) I hope to not have to touch C++ again... ever :)