Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

It's Saturday afternoon and the student who was supposed to take the special final exam isn't here. I thought earlier he might have seen his grade already and was okay with it, but his course card was still in my pigeon box where I left it after my schedule yesterday. since he didn't it either means his parents haven't arrived from out of town or he's resigned himself to a low or failing grade in my subject.

Before I left to attend a wedding at 10am this morning, I told the secretary that if the student shows up with the special exam form that he can just leave it to be signed and processed Monday morning, when he can take the exam. When I returned, no form either in the secretary's table or mine. It's all up to him really.

Now, on to my theses defense/s yesterday.

First of all, my thesis advisee showed up at 930am and approached one of his panelists, Ricky. Ricky was surprised to hear about the 10am defense because he already promised that slot to another student's defense.

He was already badgering the student about not following through when the student told Ricky he had given me the new schedule to relay to Ricky, as had been instructed. I showed Ricky the celphone number of his wife (and co-teacher) that I used to send the message last Monday.

Ricky said he didn't receive any text. At least the student got off the hook. But we still had the problem of conflicting schedules.

I told the student to ask his panelists if they are okay with 11am. They all agreed.

We should have gone through with the defense at 10am anyway because the other student did not defend until 4pm waiting for one of his other panelists to arrive. We pushed through with it at sometime past eleven instead.

I just figured out what the student's main problem with his thesis is: no initiative for giving convenience to the user.

He computes for incidences of solar eclipses one year at a time. If the current displayed year is 2003, his program shows the eclipses for that year (even if it is past the current displayed date) and indicates whether they are visible at the designated location.

We had to do that for Manila six times before we could find an eclipse visible in 2009.

Why couldn't he have just computed for the next visible eclipse for the location? His excuse, given during his previous defense, was that it takes a long time for the program to compute, when he could have just executed it with a progress bar to show the use the program has not yet stalled ("Searching May 2004 now...").

Same is true with showing the tracing motion of the Sun, the Moon and the planets. For the Sun and the inner planets, the duration of tracing is pegged at 1 year, and 3 years for the outer planets. For the Moon it is for one month plotted one day at a time, showing several small dots on the screen that are difficult to distinguish as being in a line.

For his program's buttons, when switching from one view mode to another (equatorial or horizontal) certain features are disabled. How? By blurring the font, not by graying it like Windows does.

Another bad feature left over from his previous program: when asked to indicate if a certain planet is in a certain Zodiac constellation, it has to be confirmed by clicking on one of the stars near the planet, which will display the name of the star and the constellation of origin.

When we tried it out for Cancer, the faintest zodiac constellation, we had to take it on faith because none of the stars in Cancer are part of the 174 (magnitude 3 and below) star database he included with his software.

Solution: a belt that shows the general area/boundary of each Zodiac constellation along the ecliptic (or the apparent path of the Sun across the celestial sphere, traversed in one year).

This is taking more time and space than I expected. I guess I'll continue with it in the succeeding post.