TEHNIKI OLSKI CENTER KRANJ VIJA STROKOVNA OLA

THE REPORT ON WORK AT NEVRON COMPANY

(a seminar paper at Strokovna terminologija v tujem jeziku, course Informatics, year of study 2009/2010)

Mentor:
prof. Marija ubic

Author: Tadej Peri

Ljubljana, 28.3.2010

The report on work at nevron company

INDEX

1 INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................................3 2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR.........................................................................................................4 3 ABOUT THE COMPANY......................................................................................................5 4 WORKING AT NEVRON......................................................................................................8 5 THE SUMMARY..................................................................................................................14

The report on work at nevron company

1 INTRODUCTION

As a part of the study of Informatics, which I am studying at TC Kranj , there is also a required "practice" lasting three months (specifically, from Januar to end of March). I managed to arrange my practice (to get that free position) at the company called Nevron in Ljubljana since one position was still free (the other was taken by my classmate Primo olar with whom I was working there for these three months) . The company's main area of work is to provide products and services for e-learning (mostly for clients in Slovenia), which includes development of materials for e-learning of foreign languages, bit it has also experience in providing specialist advice in the introduction of e-education in general. It also has a long tradition in participating in national and international projects related to e-learning and education in general. It is also involved in the development of advanced interactive solutions. It is also involved in the development of advanced interactive solutions and streaming media technology (with emphasis on the ITV services) for a number of years.

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The report on work at nevron company

2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

My name is Tadej Peri, I am 29 years old and I live in Ljubljana and in year 2009 I started attending the first grade of a two year course of Informatics at TC Kranj school. After finishing the High school I've beeen studying Architecture for approximately two years, however I haven't finished the studying it since in the mean time I've become involved with computers (therefore my involvement with computers started roughly 7 or 8 years ago when I was still studying Architecture); in fact, it was that because of the Architecture I got my second PC (the first one was Sinclair Spectrum +, a decade ago), and that was obe of the main reasons to give up studying since I've become so enthusiastic about computing in general. At first it was just a hobby, but then it became much more. I've even created a website titled Tadej's computing homepage Tadej's computing homepage which contains my own computing related articles, hints, principles, and rules, while specially interesting are my numerous discoveries and experiences.

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Although I am interested in computing in general, that means for instance being interested in various computing concepts (i.e. how things work, for example by observing the operating system's behaviour with various applications from Sysinternals website, then I do a lot of customizing the OS and finding the limits of its capabilities and so on), I also have the basic programming/scripting skills, in particular I am quite knowledgeable in HTML (and its successor XHTML), CSS, and JavaScript higher-level web-development programming languages, then I was also learning how to program in Python scripting language, the ABC ABC programming language, and I also know a thing or two about C++ and a tiny tiny bit also about Intel's native Assembly (a.k.a assembler) programming languages too. Actually, I noticed that rather than in programming, I am more interested in the operating system itself and its usage in general. In fact, I was thinking the other day, and I came to the conclusion that in the world of programming, more or less everything is already done; meaning that there is a freeware program out there for almost anything one might want to do, 4

The report on work at nevron company

and so I like to rather explore these "already made things" (already invented stuff), like for example the behaviour of these programs, then I try to discover useful things that I can do to help my computer (to make it faster, more stable and so on); in one sentence, I could say that my "mission" is to make the use of my computer easier and more reasonable, as well as faster and more efficient. This surely also includes a knowledge on how to cope with various errors (including problems such as computer being slow without any obvious reason, spontaneous restarts etc.), how to change various computer's settings (undocumented parameters under various headers in operating system''s or programs' .ini files, the various usages of operating system's Environment Variables, numerous useful registry hacks), and maybe as the most important thing, I know how to increase the speed and stability of the computer. Then finallly, beside being really enthusiastic about various computing principles (that means discovering how the computer behaves when I am tinkering with the it), I am also totally enthusiastic about anything that's automation and optimization related; be it an automation of some task or operation (like defragmenting of a hard-drive, backing-up of important files/directories etc.), optimization of computer's and program's settings, or simply using batch files (well, in fact I love batch processing in Windows) to make some annoying and repetitive task (or bunch of tasks) to perform efficiently and finish faster.

3 ABOUT THE COMPANY

The company Nevron is located in the third floor of the Telekom office building in Ljubljana. It is, as mentioned earlier, basically providing products and services for e-learning, which includes development of materials for e-schooling, but it has also experience in providing specialist advice in the introduction of e-education in general and it is also involved in the development of advanced interactive solutions. It also has a long tradition in participating in national and international projects related to e-learning and education in general. The company has a permanent staff of five to eight people, and sometimes they hire also some external staff as part-time employees for certain projects when specific expertise is required. At the head of the company is director and owner of the company, under which there is a business partner and project manager, and below this so-called multi-media unit manager, programmer and system administrator, the main programmer and a few more employees with no particular name for their position, who are performing different tasks for the respective project. Occasionally there comes to the office also the some sort of secretary (who has no practical knowledge of computing) to deal with administrative things. The working hours in the company are from eighth in the morning to four in the afternoon, although occasionally virtually all employees afford to come to work a bit later. In the meantime at one o'clock, there is also a half and hour long lunch break, while almost all the employees are also taking five to ten minutes long breaks to drink coffee and chat outside the workspace, so regarding the relations between employees in the company, in general the atmosphere is good and personal communication is very relaxed. Of course, the communication between the media unit manager (which was my mentor), programmer and systems administrator, and other principal staff is farmore relaxed (and on a personal level) than communication between them and the owner and co-owner of the company.

The report on work at nevron company

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The employees operate in four rooms, one of which is the main office room of the company's owner (and this one is across the hall and is separated from other rooms), while the remaining three rooms are connected with each other, meaning that the doors open all the time so that communication between employees is very relaxed. Only the company's director and business owner is not present in the common area most of the time (he director comes for example only if there's a serious problems, or due to administrative things, and so on), while the coowner and business project manager is more or less present at all times and is giving directions on how to carry out specific thing, suggest ways to resolve some particular problem and the like. While the media unit manager's position in the hierarchy of the company is slightly higher compare to for instance the main programmer and system administrator. But even though media unit manager has a higher position in the hierarchy of the company than for instance the main programmer, he nevertheless never gives orders in terms of a command (only a guidance, maybe), as mentioned, especially not to the programmer, as well as to the

The report on work at nevron company

other employees. The communication concerning less important things is done mostly through Microsoft Messenger program, but when there is a problem or anything like that that cannot be resolved through text messages, then the communication comes to a personal level (a correspondence in person), meaning that the employee visits his fellow coworker at his desk in person. The assignment of work in the company is relatively easy and and logical. When there is a new project employees get exact instructions on what to do, whereas each employee is an expert in his/her own field, for example one deals with the design of an ematerial, the other is a programmer and deals only with programming the code for the respective project and so on), and so each onee is relatively independent in his/her own work.

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The report on work at nevron company

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4 WORKING AT NEVRON

My work at Nevron was mainly the developement of e-learning projects. All in all there were two projects on which I was working; the e-learning project "Spoznavanje okolja" (for classes 1, 2, and 3 of primary school) and the e-learning project "e-portna vzgoja" The main work was done in two Adobe's programs, the Adobe Flash (which is is a multimedia platform used for adding animation and interactivity to webpages) and Adobe Photoshop (or simply Photoshop, which is a commercial graphics editing program), however, many times there was a requirement to use numerous other programs too, such as for instance video processing programs VirtualDub (a video capture/processing utility), WinFF (a GUI frontend for the command line video converter, FFMPEG), Flash Converter (which is used to convert video to .swf flash files) and numerous others. Although the two projects mentioned above were a bit different (e.g. in case of the first one it was a .fla file with many frames, while in case of the second one it was a .fla file with single frame and externals .xml file which specified for example where a video or picture or text will appear on the screen), the procedure of creation of separate lections and steps was always more or less the same. As first I needed to open a so-called scenario for a respective chapter (as we called them; the chapter consisted of lections and lections consisted of steps or screens) which was a detailed description of how the particular screens should look (i.e. the type of interaction, so that I could use the right template), what pictures and text it should contain, and so on. Afterward, in case of the first project (i.e. "Spoznavanje okolja"), I then needed to edit the pictures in Photoshop (e.g. size them appropriately, marge them in layers with the template-graphics so that they had round edges and so on) prior to importing them to Flash. When all the picutres were imported to Flash I needed to convert them to symbols and according to the type of interaction used name them and insert the code. Some examples of 8

The report on work at nevron company

interactions: a quiz, a drag & drop, a multimedia (playing video), click on an image (to get some info) and so forth.

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The report on work at nevron company

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While in the second project's case (i.e. "e-portna vzgoja"), I also needed to edit the pictures in Photoshop before importing them to Flash, but in much less details. Because in this case the "containers" for pictures (or any other object that would appear on the screen) were already there so I just needed to specify the file name in the external .xml file and drag that "container" to appropriate position. However, there was much more coding (modifying the code from the template .fla files) needed to be done in Flash's internal ActionScript ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript (the programming language that is used primarily for the development of websites and software using the Adobe Flash Player platform) programming language for example in cases where the template was made for a quiz with 6 questions, while the quiz on which I was working has 8 questions. Also there were numerous cases when the necessary template .fla file for a particular type of interaction was missing (they weren't even made) so I needed to made it "from scratch".

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The report on work at nevron company

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The report on work at nevron company

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For the first few days my mentor was often coming to my desk to show me how to do a certain thing (or perform a certain action) Since I was unfamiliar with Adobe Flash and Adobe Photoshop programs, however, later on I've become quite independent and I didn't need much help anymore. Occasionally there were also disputes with authors of these scenarios since in many cases they were written ambiguous, but above all, the main problem was the missing material (pictures, animations and video). But anyhow, I managed to finish all the lections that were given to me, so my mentor was very pleased. Anyhow, there is no doubt that I've learned quite a lot of details on how to work with Adobe Flash, and Adobe Photoshop programs, and other programs too.

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The report on work at nevron company

5 THE SUMMARY

For the conclusion I can say that work at Nevron was a very pleasant and educative experience. Actually, the only bad thing was the confusion over how much (if anything at all) I will get paid, however, this was solved relatively soon. As mentioned, the atmosphere and relations were very good and relaxed at the workplace and I've got to know a few very interesting people (mostly my mentor and the company's main programmer) with which we had many interesting discussions while having those five to ten minutes long coffe breaks and with which we will surely stay in contact in future. And above all, I've learned quite a lot of details on how to work with the various content management, video and image processing programs mentioned above, which I will certainly put to good use also in the future. And no mather all the problems that I needed to solve (and akward situations that I needed to go through, for example when exchanging e-mail with authors of the material used in the projects), I've certainly gained quite a lot of knowledge and skills working at Nevron company for this period of time and I must say that it was a pleasant and educative experience.

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