frutti.gummi

For the first time in my life, I did not get much sleep for one consecutive week. My supervisor only managed to give me feedback on the first quarter of my paper a week before the submission deadline. Over the next few days, while I revised the introduction and background chapters, I also received the feedback on other parts of the paper. By the end of the week, I managed to make most of the major revisions. I wasn't sure how long it would take to make the printed copies so I tried to finish everything by Saturday morning. Then I went to the printers and it turned out that it would take 2-3 hours for the printed copies to be ready. So, I decided to print them the following Monday. I spent the weekend fixing small mistakes and grammatical errors. I'm very thankful for friends who helped me to proof read parts of my paper. Well, I'm glad I managed to finish everything in time but I'm not satisfied with the quality of the paper. It's really a pity that my supervisor didn't have the time to read my second draft earlier when it was ready more than a month ago. Anyway, I've learnt a lot from the experience of writing this thesis. I was so surprised to find out that my writing has become so sloppy.

And with the thesis submitted, I'm unofficially graduated from the master's programme. It's kinda strange that I didn't feel anything special. No joy, no relief, just as if another work has been completed. Perhaps I was already focused on the next task of moving out of my room. I initially planned to have one big box but it didn't work out. I needed two more medium boxes. At last, I packed everything and shipped the boxes to Trento and carried my luggages home to KL. So, goodbye Aachen!

According to my plan, I'm supposed to finalize my thesis today so that I could enjoy two weeks of freedom. However, I still have not received the feedback from my supervisor. Furthermore, I'm still stuck with writing the conference paper because the deadline has been extended till Thursday. I'm starting to get tired from all these writing in the past two months.
I finished a draft of the conference paper on Wednesday with minor changes on Thursday morning. When I met with my supervisor on Friday evening, he hasn't read the paper yet. 90 minutes later, he managed to go through half of the paper and we went through the other half together. So based on his comments, we worked separately over the weekend to complete the paper. This afternoon, he sent an email telling me that the deadline has been extended and we should continue to improve the paper in the next few days.
I hope that my supervisor will still have time to read my thesis and give me the feedback before the end of the week. I really would like to submit it by the end of next week so that I could at least enjoy the weekend.

I finished my second draft a couple of days later than what I had scheduled. It was also partly due to the fact that my supervisor was so busy last week that he suggested we meet on Friday. So I took my own sweet time to complete it. I also continued work a bit on the conference paper by copying and pasting some of the materials from my thesis. Now I have a total of 5 pages without abstract, conclusion, and any figures. I figured it's a pretty good start.

When I met with my supervisor on Friday, there wasn't much of a discussion about the papers. Since he is still going to be very busy, he said he'll try to read my second draft as soon as possible. He also said that it's pretty unrealistic to write the conference paper now that we only have a week left. But since I have already started writing something, he'll try to support me. I tried to discuss about the content of the paper but my supervisor wanted to read what I had written first. I hope he managed to squeeze some time to do that and we can have a short discussion on Monday. Anyway, instead of writing the paper together, I'll be writing it myself and hopefully my supervisor have the time to review it the end of the week because it's due on the 30th.

I was reading my old entries and I realised that I had pretty much stopped updating this blog since I started on my thesis. Anyway, my thesis has been progressing well. I just finished writing the first draft. 70+ pages! I've never written so much in my entire life :D I just hope that it's of the acceptable standard. I'll find out when I meet with my supervisor next week. Pretty much done with the development work. Just a bit of fix here and there when bugs are found. And I have a conference paper to write as well. I hope I could get started on that tomorrow.
This weekend has been rather nice in the sense that I didn't do any work. I just watched a couple of movies, coincidenly both have the word 'sunshine' in the title, and cooked myself some nice meals. It's a nice change considering that I had 2-3 meals of instant noodles in the past week. Plus, I have been staying put here for almost 2 months now and it's a record! Haha.. I did shop once in a while and ended up with quite a significant damage. I definately will have trouble moving all my stuff out when I leave. Aahh I shall worry about that later. Hehe

I haven't been posting lately simply because I didn't feel like writing. Well, I've also been busy but that's just an excuse. So in the past two months or so, I have traveled to Rome, Prague and Amsterdam at different times. Also made a long day trip to Koblenz that consists of a short hike, castle visit and boat ride. In between traveling, I worked on my thesis and about two weeks ago, I presented my work proposal. I'm currently starting to do the development work; learning .NET 3.x Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). After playing around with it for a while now, I have a better understanding of the major concepts. I'm starting to think of a GUI design that is most user friendly but what can be done is also limited to my newly acquired WPF knowledge. Anyway, I don't have travel plans for this month yet and I plan to get as much done as possible before I go away again. :D

Yael Naim - New Soul

I've spent the past week reading some papers on related research projects and playing arond with the application while consulting the user guide. The user guide is the one that comes with the original installation of the app. It is not very useful because the app has been extended with some sort of project management functionality which I am supposed to work at. Although my advisor is patient enough to show me the features that were implemented, there isn't any documentation. So when I'm playing around with it, I have to figure out what is working and if not working, whether it is a bug or a feature that is not implemented. The development environment on this app is through a very bad UI which one can create objects and make references, etc. I don't really know how to do this yet since there isn't any manual for developer.

I know that non-existence of proper documentation is quite common. However, in order to develop something, I'm sure there would be a list of what is desired to be developed. And since this is a group work, I don't think people just keep everything in their heads. Oh, there is a wish list and a bug list but not the current list . Maybe I can try coming up with a current list by looking at those two lists. Hmm... not sure if these list are written in German though coz there are only limited project related papers and documentation written in English.

I met with my advisor yesterday to discuss about the thesis. He did most of the talking, explaining about the project and showing some of the applications. The focus of my thesis would be on process management. Since I already have some related experience, I could easily understand the big picture and the goals of the project. The difficult part is to understand how the existing systems work because part of my work is to port a research prototype to a production system. He printed a few papers for me to read and hopefully I'll get a better idea about the existing apps. I'll also be getting access to the lab's computers so I can play around with the apps. He told me that it'll take 2-3 months preparation work to come up with a specification for the project which I'll have to present to the professors and other group members. After that, the development work will probably take about 6 months and of course, I'll need to write the paper in the end. This will mean that I can finish by the end of the year if I don't take any vacations. Most unlikely since I already have some travel plans in mind. I guess I just need to work more when I'm not travelling.