Before entering my final year at uni I consulted an academic advisor to see if I would graduate when I was expecting to. Both degrees that I was studying (IT with an Interaction Design major, and Multimedia) had been restructured and some subjects that used to be core were now electives and vice versa. As it turned out, some of the subjects that I had already finished thinking they were core were now considered electives so now I had to use up the electives that I had been saving on core subjects. One such subject, MMDS1400 (Intro to Scripting) didn't even exist when I started uni but since it was now a core subject I had to take it.

MMDS1400 is a first year scripting course that introduces students to the basics of html and javascript. The major project for Intro to Scripting was to create a game using javasript (and no AJAX as well ). A friend of mine and fellow forth year at the time, Dan Wall was also taking the subject and shared my general sense of ridiculousness that two final year students had a first year subject suddenly becoming mandatory. Because the coursework was so simple we decided to push our major project a bit further than what was required to pass. For our javascript game, we chose to implement Chess.

We set about drawing the pieces (in Inkscape, of course) and writing a quick script to free-form move the pieces around the board. Pretty soon we had a very basic chessboard. Our next move (chess pun? no, just a coincidental choice of words) was to restrict the movement of the pieces to within the rules of the game. We started by writing down all of the moves that each type of piece could make and found any patterns that we could exploit in our code; the moves of the Queen, for example, can be found by combining the moves of a Bishop and a Rook. We wrote in the moves available to each piece, added a move timer and our game was done. We had several known limitations (such as moves wrapping around the board, and no Castling or Pawn promotion) but we felt that we had more than satisfied the requirements of the assessment.

A final part of the assessment was to bundle our game in a website explaining the process of constructing our game. You can view our chess site here.

Multimedia Studio 4 was a subject I took in the second semester of 2006. The theme for the course was 'Aware Homes' and the major project had students designing something 'aware' for the 'home' user.

I formed a team of three with Tyson Dudley and Sarah Whelband and we began brainstorming for ideas for an aware device. We came up with several ideas but our favourite involved an automated shopping system that suggested recipes based on the food a user had in stock. A few other groups seemed to have similar project proposals (an automatic grocery tracking system seemed to be most groups first idea of an 'aware home' device. We decided to change our idea slightly and instead of tracking food we decided to build a system that would track alcohol; a smart home bar. Our bar would work out what kinds of alcohol a user would have and then suggest drinks that could be made from what was available. We gave our smart bar system the name 'Spirit Guide' because it guided the user in mixing various spirits and because the name sounded catchy . We wrote up a project proposal and were given the green light to start building. The bar itself would consist of a dispenser housing where the user would store their bottles of alcohol along with shot dispensers for each, a main bar area for mixing drinks, and a computer screen and control panel for navigating a GUI of drink recipes.

We needed another group member and were lucky enough to get Rob Ninnes to join our project. Rob and I had the most programming experience in the group so we assumed the roles of GUI programmer and back-end programmer. Rob had more experience in Flash so he chose to write the interface. I had more experience in Java and databases so I opted to write the back-end. I started by writing a simple server and a test client and testing read-outs from the database. I gave the server a few simple commands that could be sent to it from a client to manage the drinks database. The server needed to be multi-threaded to handle connections from not only the GUI but also the micro-controller that was watching the physical drink supplies.

After I had finished writing most of the server Rob tested it with his Flash GUI. The GUI connected to the server... it sent a message to the server... but failed to listen for a response. Many frustrating and failed tests later, we finally found the problem: a missing '\0' meant Flash didn't know the reply was finished . We fixed the problem and all was good.

During the time that Rob and I were coding the software that would power the bar, Tyson was busy building the bar itself. He had constructed the dispenser housing

With our server and GUI talking happily amongst themselves we decided to move onto coding and wiring the micro-controller. We had chosen the use an Arudino, an open source micro-controller that could be programmed easily. We wrote the sketch that would tell the Arduino how to monitor drink stocks and uploaded it to the board (and after a few hiccups, it finally uploaded). In our test environment, we got the shot dispensers to correctly update the database through the Arduino but, unfortunately, we could never seem to attain the same success when the dispensers and Arduino were connected to the actual bar. I keep thinking that we must have damaged our wiring when we moved it into the real bar. The GUI and the server/database worked but their utility was lost without a dispenser monitor to track drink stocks.


Me, Sarah, Rob, and Tyson and 'Spirit Guide', our smart home bar.

Even though our Spirit Guide never fully worked as it was intended, I enjoyed working on the project. I certainly learned a lot. At the end of the semester, as with most Studio subjects, we had to create a simple folio site to reflect on the project. Click here to view my folio for Multimedia Studio 4.

In the second semester of 2005 I took a course at uni called IENV1802: Information Environments. The major project for the subject involved building a weather monitoring site that displayed the data gathered by the UQ Ipswich Weather Station.

The first part of the assignment had students analysing the needs of such a site and designing it accordingly. We were also asked to write a Requirements Engineering Document to outline the needs of the system and how it was to be created. From the start, I decided that my design for the weather site would focus on something other than just a big table of random weather stats (we were given an example implementation that did just that... boring). I lived in Brisbane but was taking the course in Ipswich (about an hour on the train) so I thought my weather site might suggest what I should wear for the day; I could check in the morning before I left and the site could suggest a coat if it was windy, an umbrella if it was rainy, or whatever I might need. The design I drew up for the site was simple. It didn't overly bother with specifics, just a general feel of what the weather was like.



The next part of the assignment was to form teams of two and implement a weather site using jsp on the uni's tomcat server. The weather data was stored in a Postgres database and were given a few javabeans to make our life easier and help request common information. My partner for the project was Alan Peacock. He liked writing documentation and I liked writing code so, for most of the assignment, we assumed those roles. We decided to write what we referred to as a KIT (Keep In Touch) Journal that consisted mainly of emails that we sent back and forward to coordinate the project. This helped us document the process of building the site. The design we choose for our site was a combination of my big, colourful icon idea and Alan's idea of postcards. The result was a site that looked like a postcard and informed people overseas about how the weather was over here in Australia (particularly Ipswich).

The minor project for IENV1802 was to redesign a piece of medical software made by Impedimed. The software had several usability problems and the assignment required us to discover and address them in our redesigns.

At the end of the semester we were required to build a simple folio (in the form of a website) that summarised the work that we had completed for the course. Click here to view my original End of Semester folio for IENV1802.

One of my new years resolutions was to get this blog/folio thing of mine in order so that's what I'm going to start doing. I have gone through all of my old uni projects and uploaded anything worth uploading . Over the next few posts I'll be writing a short piece about a few of the projects that I completed while I was at uni.

First up is a project from a course I took in first year. We were given a week to come up with and create a game that used only rollovers to play. My team was called 'Not the Face' and consisted of Nigel McBryde and Brett Holton, two Multimedia Design students. We began our brainstorming with ideas of some kind of 'find the treasure' game based on Hot and Cold where you are told if you are warm (close) or cold (far) compared to the treasure. We soon found that most of the other teams had similar ideas so we opted for something completely different.

I had a random idea for a game based on a guy dancing. I'm not sure if it could technically be called a game because there are no rules or even any goals. The idea was that you had a guy at the top of the screen and several smaller version of him in varying poses, or dance moves. As the player moused over the smaller guys the main dancer would move to copy their pose. The more the player moved the mouse between each pose, the more the main guy would seem to dance. We found a few midis to throw in as background music (which only works in Internet Explorer, but this was in a time before Firefox ) and the game was done.

I think the game was received quite well; we had most people amused for a while. Theo, the lecturer, even kept it for use the following year to show students an example of how the assignment was meant to be done .

Click here to play the game.

Today at around 3:30pm I officially became a qualified Interaction Designer . I graduated from a Bachelor of Information Technology (in the field of Interaction Design) from the University of Queensland. The idea of graduating from university doesn't really hit you until you don the robe and trencher. Here is me getting my complimentary empty blue cylinder from the Chancellor of UQ (I got my actual testamur about 43 seconds later after walking to the back of the hall).


Photo by Lorna McDonald

The ceremony itself was surprisingly short (just like this post). I'll finish here with a quote that I think sums up university quite well.

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right.
- Henry Ford

Last night was our Graduate Exhibition at uni. The aim of the night was for multimedia students at UQ to wow everyone with their projects from the year.

While walking through the halls of Building 1 last night it was hard to not be drawn into one of the many amazing projects on show. There was quite a range of projects around. Some students chose to exhibit games they had made, some had films screening, while others simply showed people their folios.

My project partner, Tyson Dudley, and I were showcasing a short animated film we are producing, called 'Worldcraft'.



Our film tells the story of a little boy who sets out from his home to buy the latest craze in video games, Worldcraft. Along the way he has a hard time distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Unfortunately I can't upload the full film just yet but I here is one of the movie-style posters we had pinned up last night.

Well the new Ubuntu is out. It's 7.10 or 'Gutsy Gibbon' for those of you playing at home. There are quite a number of tweaks and changes in this release. After a quick download I had my copy ready for me to burn and install it. However, I did neither. As a rather unfortunate coincidence, each October release of Ubuntu seems to coincide with my uni exams and I know that if I install Gutsy now, it will be way too easy for me to procrastinate and not get my study done.

What I do find it handy, though, is that if I pre-order a Shipit CD of Ubuntu it seems to arrive on my doorstep right in time for the last exam. It makes for a nice reward to finishing uni for another year.

Just uploaded The Watcher to Youtube. The Watcher was a project for a subject at uni that I did back in 2004. The point of the assignment was to make a short film that contained all three of first, second, and third person.

Our initial ideas for this project just seemed to be lacking something (most often the thing missing was a good idea ). One such idea involved a dog trying to give a human a bath. I don't remember the details very well but I remember that that idea was cut pretty quickly.

Eventually we came to the idea of the guy being stalked. This gave us an excuse to have third person (normal shots), and first person (the stalker point of view) but we still had to think of something for the second person. After watching Malcolm in the Middle, I think, we got the idea to have the main character address the audience directly which would give us the second person perspective that we needed. We added the last part as a kind of joke ending. A problem we faced with the last shot was that Nigel (the guy) is a lot taller than Di (the stalker) and we were shooting in a tight hallway so we didn't have a lot of room to move back. We tried to use forced perspective but it didn't really work out. I didn't see that as a big problem so we moved onto editing and took our cut to the preliminary critique.

The pre-crit version of the film was in colour and Theo (the lecturer) suggested we convert it to grayscale, so we did. I think the loss of colour added the final touch that we needed and it was ready to submit. We got a high distinction for the project.

I just uploaded a quick teaser I made a few years ago for a Kings College Conclusion. I was asked to make a quick video to share around the colleges at UQ that would advertise the tropicana themed party.

The clip didn't take that long to make, mostly because a fair chunk of the work was already done. The wyvern was recycled from the Kings Tonight intro and most of the girls in the background are just the same person duplicated with a few colour changed here and there .

I just uploaded Wacky Day at Uni to Youtube. Wacky Day was a film I made with Nigel McBryde and Brett Holton for a university project back in 2002. The assignment required us to make a minute film that showed the audience something ridiculous so we chose to have random stuff happen to some guy while he was at uni one day. Enjoy.

Most of the ideas we threw around in our initial brainstorming ended up in the final cut of the film. We basically just wanted to play around with some compositing so we thought of some simple things we could do with that in mind. After a few technique tests we settled on having a reappearance of a stand-up comic character we used in an earlier video as the first ridiculous happening. We also wanted to have some live action compositing so we decided that Nigel would be hiding behind a light pole and peer out, cartoon style. For our third crazy occurrence we chose to have a giant Lego man walking around the uni campus.

I think our video came together nicely in the end and I think the lecturer and tutors agreed; We got a high distinction for the project