Posts Tagged ‘planning’
Wasting time
Posted by AI Dating | Filed under Web Development
So many things that take up time while developing things you have in mind. When a human being has to a thousand things and jut ten things go wrong, it will still double the needed time you would have needed to just do that thousand things. This something you do not always realize when planning. After all it is hard to plan mistakes because they appear pretty randomly in your work.
As an example I was working on a photo uploader. After all, what constitutes a good first impression? Is it intelligence, no. I rather think it is plain old attractiveness. Probably the reason why so many people fell in love with those überattractive celebrities. And probably also the reason why they have so many relationships that don’t work out (or is it just that the media is too much focussed on those break ups?). Attractiveness might constitute to a good first impression, falling in love, it does not help much for a long time stable relationship. Well I am loosing the main point now. The photo uploader. I was uploading a photo in the GUI, and Ithought it worked out. The next steps were to generate a thumbnail as well and to add a reference to the database. After generating a thumbnail I downloaded them to see what they looked like. Terrible! The image was completly distorted and not even recognised by some photo software. So I spitted through all the code. Seeing what could have gone wrong. Maybe not the right dimensions, a wrong setting that reduces the quality so much. I kept sending debugging. Till I downloaded the originally uploaded photos and realised they were as distorted as the thumbnails. So the problem was actually not with the thumbnails at all. However uploading and copying is quite basic in the back end. I wondered how this could have gone wrong. After all this code was highly similar with some online resources that described the process. So, I looked into the javascript for the uploader. Maing that javascript code was a pain after all. I looked into content-types and form encryptions. Nothing worked out. And then finally, Euraka!, I found out what was wrong. The ftp program downloaded the photos in ASCII mode instead of binary mode. No errors in the script at all. I lost at least a day for debugging something that was just working. I got the clue when I was reengineering the uploader seperately under the html root (where things are visible in the browser). And it just appeared to work. So I made it more similar to my real application and it was still working. So I knew I had too look somewhere else for the error.
The lesson is, we make mistakes. Always plan double the time you would rationally need to implement something. Some people might have said, just drop the photo uploader as a requirement. It has nothing to do with AI after all. Other people might say, test every aspect of whatevery you do. Testing is not always a bad idea. After all, I was testing and found out it didn’t work (or it did work actually). However testing everything you do, what some scientists do, takes at least 10 times the time you need for implementation.
But happily it works now so I can put more effort into the main part. The matching process. The interaction between user and the questioning software agent. The fuzzy logic.