This past weekend I spent a day helping out at the first #LadiesLearningCode Workshop. It was a most eye-opening experience. It made me realize that there is a huge demand for a space where women can learn how to code. I want to quickly say thanks to Heather Payne and all the organizers and developers who helped make the day run so smoothly. As a developer realized what a terrible teacher I am. However! It has, happily, left me with a new drive to spread the word to all women in Engineering and Computer Science and young ladies all around the city.

One of the lightning talks given by Jessamyn Smith made me realize that all the feelings of insecurity I had for 3 years of my undergrad were apparently normal! Who’d have thought!? It took me until my fourth year, after coming back from my Professional Experience Year, to realize that I actually *DO* know just as much if not more than a lot of the guys I thought were always smarter than me. Finishing up now, I realize how much university has helped shape me into a more confident, and independent person. This is largely due to the interactions I’ve had with some of my classmates (for better and worse). So really, Thank you all!

A couple weeks ago, when I was first put in touch with Heather, I started thinking about why I was in computer science. I always tell people it’s by chance in high school, but I wish it wasn’t. When I graduated high school I was one of a handful of girls going into a technical field. I always felt put-off by that fact especially since I was lucky enough to go to a prestigious school that’s ranked on a world-wide scale. So why weren’t more girls interested in programming or computers? Why was there such emphasis on the arts and humanities where it was less so on maths and sciences?

I’m hoping to be able to make it a personal goal of mine to get to the bottom of it. The current plan is to contact *someone* from the faculty and get some information. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to eventually give a talk to these girls about the merits of technical fields, the problems they may encounter, and anything else I can come up with. *IF* I do get to give a talk, I’ll definitely be looking for input about content from my fellow CS girls or Branksome girls.

Wish me luck!

Just a heads up to anyone who cares, I’m still working on my Google Chrome extension. As soon as I get any significant progress done on it, I’ll post my results up here.

University life is soon coming to an end. 2 more months, 1 more class and it’s all over! So what am I supposed to do from here? Well fortunately enough, I’m already employed full time so that’s not an issue. But what else? With work, there is less time for travel (though I long to go back and visit all my friends in Japan!) We’ll just have to wait and see.

I can already envision myself becoming restless. No more assignment deadlines. No more tests lurking around the corner. No more overnighters in BA. I admit, I’m going to miss all of that. I took a vacation just after my last exam in April to relax on a beach in Mexico. It was phenomenal! I did nothing and thoroughly enjoyed myself. But even as I lay there soaking in the sun, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling of an assignment I forgot to do or a test I forgot to study for. I just hope that feeling doesn’t last too long once I’m officially done.

I think this means I’ll have *MUCH* more time to work on my pet projects…in theory. Life commitments seem to appear out of nowhere. For now, the end is near….I can taste it!

At first, I started working on some front end things and integrating into the chrome browser. Admittedly, I don’t feel like I did enough for a first milestone. I had basic front end functionality and basically no back end functionality.

Milestone 2: ‘Coming Along’

I decided to focus on server side processing and have the client interact with the ‘master server list’ of videos that are problematic. This meant that I could write a server side application that just scrapes YouTube for content and processes each video. Initially, I thought this would be OK. I knew the Python Imaging library existed and so I thought I’d try my hand at it. That was a failing attempt. Not only did I not remember much Python, I couldn’t even get a development environment set up (I’m terrible at that sort of thing). Next, I thought I could do it in Java, since I’m more familiar with Java. Again, I couldn’t get my environment set up. (yes, I’m a failure). The Java media Framework did NOT want to cooperate with me. In the end I turned to Matlab. Trusty, reliable, bloated Matlab. This was because it’s just easier. No environment to set up, it has all the packages I need already so I didn’t have to go out and download/install other libraries. Simple! Also, given that I’d already done this type of thing in Matlab, I had the basic code written up in 15 minutes. *sigh* <– One whole weekend of work….

My Matlab program appears to come up with the same results as the PEAT application, but does not display them as nicely. I look at the average value of each frame and compare it to previous frames. If there is a difference of moret han 100 between a set of frames, then set a warning because this indicates a large change in the sequence of frames. Granted, this is not the most scientific way to detect flashes in a video, but it’s start. To save time, we can stop processing the rest of the video once a warning sign has been detected.

Next I had to set up a local server. I decided to just use my localhost. Googled how to do it, and found IIS simple enough for my purposes. Now my client can connect and read data off my localhost. *good enough*

My new problem is trying to get a modal dialog box to appear in the YouTube window that covers the video and warns the viewer of the video. I can get a regular dialog box, but not the flashy in window frame. I might just stick to this for now.

Next Steps:

Trying to get the server to automatically scrape YouTube for videos to process OR accept requests from the client. Accepting requests however, means that I can somehow automate the process of grabbing videos off YouTube, process it, and return the result back to the user in a timely manner. (not likely to happen anytime soon)

I need to make the client side more usable. Still lots of “features” that need to be attended to. I also need to test on a real server, but I need help setting one up properly and not just hacking together a default localhost.

PEAT is designed as a free, downloadable resource for web developers to identify seizure risks in their web content and software. It is NOT designed to analyze commercial videos or games, to remove epilepsy risks, or for day-to-day web site screening by a person with photosensitive epilepsy. It also cannot make unsafe videos safe (but others can use it to figure out how to make small changes in their content to make it safe). – PEAT User Guide

Thus, my proposal is a tool that would be able to integrate it into browsers for day-to-day web site screening by a person with photosensitive epilepsy.

I wish to start with a Google Chrome extension that detects if a Youtube video is capable of inducing a photosensitive seizure. It is often difficult to determine the contents of a Youtube before it starts. Before it plays, there should be a warning if there is a possibility of inducing seizures. If the user is on Youtube, it will take the video before playing, analyze the frames and determine if there are high contrast flashes that occur in the video. If there are, a warning box will appear in the window before playing the video to see if the user wants to continue or not.

To extend this to websites in general, the PEAT tool takes a video of the site contents while it’s loading and running. This video is then analyzed and can then be used to see the implications of certain Flash applications or animations. I would try something similar to this and provide a warning before the website renders and/or offer a warning in the browser URL bar.

Frame-by-frame Processing:

The image intensity can be calculated for each frame and compared to the previous and next frames to determine whether there is a large change in intensity. The basic calculations are easy, but optimizing for speed is something I need to look into.