Tutorial Seek Development Blog

So we had to have this essay due on the big big day, which is - the day of turning the final project in and wrapping it up. For the category that my project was sorted into, my essay had to be between 1500 - 2000 words. Pretty easy task, just that I went over the limit by 745 words. My Written Presentation as it is called, was at a length of 2,745 words. Pretty nice huh? But it was hard to put everything in that I needed to. And it was rather detailed, and if I didn’t keep the details in, it wouldn’t sound right. So I have go to print the Essay and put my name on it. Or else I am dropping out of the program =/.

I will be posting the written presentation in a bit when I finish everything up. That should be in an hour or so.

The same lady called me after Church while I was in the fellowship hall talking to some of my friends. They said that they wanted me to come in and see a proof of the print, to make sure that it was how I wanted it. I was planning to go there anyways coincidentally because I ordered it for 1 PM the next day, since that was an option. I thought that it was possible, and the website made that assumption possible.

I went in, met the lady and she told me that the printer was going to turn on the printer so that she could print it. It was a pretty massive HP printer, one of those heavy duty stuff. I was thinking that I came to the right store for sure.

Time went by, I kept looking at my phone. 5 minutes… 15 minutes… 20 MINUTES! for the stinking printer to warm up and finally print the massive picture in less than a minute. It was pretty sad and depressing.

The printer was waiting for the ink to dry, and I was looking at the picture for the first time. IT WAS BAD! The quality was nothing compared to the vectored version in Illustrator. I was very very disappointed. The lady was telling me about how the printer is an ink-jet, and only used 6 colors while printing. That wasn’t going to cut it for me because my image was very high quality, possibly too much for that printer to use.

I started complaining, and she tried to reduce the colors, which ended up taking probably an hour before it could be printed again, for the printer to receive the image and make good use out of it.

This time, she only sent a piece of it, to see if the quality was to be better. It was a bit more vivid this time, but still not what I was looking for. I asked her about their laser printers, and she informed me that the sizes do not go up that high using their laser printers, why? I have no idea.

I had to go with a smaller size, and it cost only a couple dollars to print, and the same amount per square feet to get it laminated and mounted, a lot cheaper than getting the big poster.

She went to a different computer that was connected to the laser printer and then the printer was giving problems, and it was not working. By now, we have been at kinkos for the past couple of hours, and I have probably read every greeting card in their library twice!

I saw Mr. Desmond there, printing some things, and said hi to him. Apparently he was printing some papers for his English I class - the final and study guide. That man never seizes to amaze me.

By now, at least 20 people have passed through Kinkos, got what hey wanted and have already gone out, it seemed to be a very busy day today, due to the fact that Christmas was just around the corner and everyone wanted to Fed-Ex their things off to families and friends.

I was getting frustrated now, and I am sure she was too. My mom needed to take her passport photo for her new driver’s license, and she even got that done too before we got anywhere else.

She got it printed at one point on another printer, but it came out with a purple tint. Kinda weird and funky, but the image quality was not of that I was looking for.

An hour or so pasted now and everyone wanted to go home. Including myself and my family as well. The finally fixed the printer and she got it working. She printed out the copy that was to be mounted and laminated and got to work.

There was production again at last! She took it to the side and warmed up the lamination machine which would take 20-30 minutes, waiting time? We were used to it by now, which is a sad thought.

Back to read some more greeting cards, maybe I missed one or two. I might of dozed off on the table in that area to take a quick nap and my sister Joanna to come and wake me up.

The lamination machine was finally ready and I went to go watch her move it through the massive heavy duty thing, and use a slicer to take off the excess plastic around the edges. She messed up on one of them so she printed another copy which took a mere second, mounted it and ran it through again.

The first one she showed us had a lot of air bubbles in it and she said she would do another one. It didn’t have much of an imperfection now, maybe one air bubble which was not noticeable, so we took it and head to the casher.

It seems like we were finally going to head out of Kinkos, probably the longest visit on record even.

So now we have 2 posters laminated and mounted, she said that she would only charge me for printing them, which was a mere couple of bucks since we had to wait so long.  That was fine by me, I saved more than 95% than what I wanted to, so that was good enough.

I walked out of Kinkos a happier camper than I walked in, it was a long day, and I am thankful for that Lady.  She had one heck of a day because of me breathing down her neck.

So I was thinking about the future MYP presentation that would be in the 07 year. And just showcasing a website a lone would be very boring and such. Then it hit me, why not create a poster of the Mascot and the Logo to put along with it. It was a handy deal I could settle with.

Here is what it looked like:

I asked my mom if she could drop me off at Kinkos to go in and check what sizes we could get the poster printed at, and decided to go with the 18×24 inches purely because it was pretty big, and it seemed very “decent” in price compared to the others only at around $50 after it was laminated and mounted.

The lady said that I could get it printed the next day ( Sunday ) if I went home and sent it online from their print website.

Fine by me, I went back home, loaded up Adobe Illustrator and played around with the finished mascot and logo that was given to me by the artist. Decided to go with a background sprite from the finished website layout and I resized it from Adobe Photoshop to preserve as much quality as possible.

Finally resized it to the required 18×24 inches, went through the online wizard to upload my .ai file, and with some specific instructions as well to make sure that they didn’t mess anything up. It was a fairly painless process, took about 10-15 minutes and it was easy to understand, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

It told me to call the store in about 30 minutes after I sent in the order to make sure that hey received it, just for verification purposes, just re-assuring that there was not a problem accessing the file that I sent them.

I went off to work on some other projects while I waited for the time to past by. Got distracted to the point where almost an hour passed by, I called them finally when I got the number and I was put on hold. The joy… the agony.

Not only did I get put on hold which was bad enough, but twice, for about 40 minutes even. I eventually hung up, and better hoped that they got it.

It is now 4 in the morning, and I have spent it testing the spider on various tutorial sites.  I spidered all the tutorials on GreyCobra in a couple of minutes, found out they have 229 tutorials to be exact.  This automated process will make it easier for webmasters, in the sense that when they write a new tutorial, they do not have to submit it to the database, but instead, the spider would crawl the site for it.  The test went smoothly of course, and I am liking the speed and the accuracy of the spider to a great degree.

My next big opponent is 13Dots.com.  I figured that if I had a lot of tutorials in the database, even to start off with at least 1000 tutorials off the bat would be great for the website.  So I might as well test the spider on the larger tutorial communities.

While testing the spider, I made a lot of changes to the algorithm of the spider and how it operates.  I changed some methods for parsing the tutorial urls and ensuring that we are grabbing the correct urls.  We will also depend on the user community to keep the spider in tip top shape, reporting bad tutorials, so that the bugs can be investigated and recompiled into the spider.

Tomorrow will be the last of the journal checks by Mr. Desmond.  A lot of people have been working hard and fast to get some journal entries, but I personally think that I have a good grasp of what I am supposed to be doing and I like the amount of entires so far that I have put into the project.  I think its going rather good so far, but no one can really know until it is finished!