The Report on Work at Nevron Company

8/6/2019 The Report on Work at Nevron Company

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TEHNIKI OLSKI CENTER KRANJ

VIJA STROKOVNA OLA

THE REPORT ON WORK AT NEVRONCOMPANY

(a seminar paper at Strokovna terminologija v tujem jeziku, course Informatics, year of

study 2009/2010)

Mentor: Author:

prof. Marija ubic Tadej Peri

Ljubljana, 28.3.2010


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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

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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). Imanaged to arrange my practice (to get that free position) at the company called Nevron inLjubljana since one position was still free (the other was taken by my classmate Primo olarwith whom I was working there for these three months) . The company's main area of work isto provide products and services for e-learning (mostly for clients in Slovenia), whichincludes development of materials for e-learning of foreign languages, bit it has alsoexperience in providing specialist advice in the introduction of e-education in general. It alsohas a long tradition in participating in national and international projects related to e-learningand education in general. It is also involved in the development of advanced interactivesolutions. It is also involved in the development of advanced interactive solutions andstreaming media technology (with emphasis on theITV services) for a number of years.

Picture 1: nevron_location.png

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http://www.tsckr.si/vss/index.htmhttp://www.nevron.si/http://www.nevron.eu/http://www.nevron.eu/http://www.nevron.si/images/splosno/zemljevid_nevron_slo.gifhttp://www.tsckr.si/vss/index.htmhttp://www.nevron.si/http://www.nevron.eu/http://www.nevron.si/images/splosno/zemljevid_nevron_slo.gif


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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. Afterfinishing 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 withcomputers (therefore my involvement with computers started roughly 7 or 8 years ago when Iwas still studying Architecture); in fact, it was that because of the Architecture I got mysecond PC (the first one was Sinclair Spectrum +, a decade ago), and that was obe of the mainreasons to give up studying since I've become so enthusiastic about computing in general. Atfirst it was just a hobby, but then it became much more. I've even created a website titledTadej's computing homepage Tadej's computing homepage which contains my owncomputing related articles, hints, principles, and rules, while specially interesting are mynumerous discoveries and experiences.

Picture 2: my-website.png

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 operatingsystem's behaviour with various applications from Sysinternals website, then I do a lot ofcustomizing 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 itssuccessorXHTML),CSS, and JavaScripthigher-level web-development programminglanguages, then I was also learning how to program in Python scripting language, the ABCABC programming language, and I also know a thing or two about C++ and a tiny tiny bitalso 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 operatingsystem 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,

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http://tadej-ivan.50webs.com/http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspxhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTMLhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTMLhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheetshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheetshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScripthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScripthttp://www.python.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2Bhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_languagehttp://tadej-ivan.50webs.com/http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspxhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTMLhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTMLhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheetshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScripthttp://www.python.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2Bhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language


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and so I like to rather explore these "already made things" (already invented stuff), like forexample the behaviour of these programs, then I try to discover useful things that I can do tohelp my computer (to make it faster, more stable and so on); in one sentence, I could say thatmy "mission" is to make the use of my computer easier and more reasonable, as well as fasterand 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, spontaneousrestarts etc.), how to change various computer's settings (undocumented parameters undervarious headers in operating system''s or programs' .ini files, the various usages of operatingsystem's Environment Variables, numerous useful registry hacks), and maybe as the mostimportant thing, I know how to increase the speed and stability of the computer.

Then finallly, beside being really enthusiastic about various computing principles (that meansdiscovering how the computer behaves when I am tinkering with the it), I am also totallyenthusiastic about anything that's automation and optimization related; be it an automation ofsome task or operation (like defragmenting of a hard-drive, backing-up of importantfiles/directories etc.), optimization of computer's and program's settings, or simply usingbatch

files (well, in fact I love batch processing in Windows) to make some annoying and repetitivetask (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, whichincludes development of materials for e-schooling, but it has also experience in providingspecialist advice in the introduction of e-education in general and it is also involved in thedevelopment of advanced interactive solutions. It also has a long tradition in participating innational and international projects related to e-learning and education in general. Thecompany has a permanent staff of five to eight people, and sometimes they hire also someexternal 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 abusiness 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 respectiveproject. Occasionally there comes to the office also the some sort of secretary (who has nopractical knowledge of computing) to deal with administrative things. The working hours inthe company are from eighth in the morning to four in the afternoon, although occasionallyvirtually 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 takingfive to ten minutes long breaks to drink coffee and chat outside the workspace, so regardingthe relations between employees in the company, in general the atmosphere is good and

personal communication is very relaxed. Of course, the communication between the mediaunit 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.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batch_filehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batch_filehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batch_filehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batch_filehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batch_file


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Picture 3: workplace-room1.jpg

Picture 4: workplace-room2.jpg

The employees operate in four rooms, one of which is the main office room of the company'sowner (and this one is across the hall and is separated from other rooms), while the remainingthree rooms are connected with each other, meaning that the doors open all the time so thatcommunication between employees is very relaxed. Only the company's director and businessowner is not present in the common area most of the time (he director comes for exampleonly if there's a serious problems, or due to administrative things, and so on), while the co-owner and business project manager is more or less present at all times and is givingdirections on how to carry out specific thing, suggest ways to resolve some particular problemand the like. While the media unit manager's position in the hierarchy of the company isslightly higher compare to for instance the main programmer and system administrator. Buteven 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

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other employees. The communication concerning less important things is done mostlythrough Microsoft Messenger program, but when there is a problem or anything like that thatcannot 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 hisdesk 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 eachemployee is an expert in his/her own field, for example one deals with the design of an e-material, the other is a programmer and deals only with programming the code for therespective project and so on), and so each onee is relatively independent in his/her own work.

Picture 5: workplace-computer.jpg

Picture 6: workplace-angle1.jpg

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Picture 7: workplace-angle2.jpg

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" (forclasses 1, 2, and 3 of primary school) and the e-learning project "e-portna vzgoja" The mainwork was done in two Adobe's programs, the Adobe Flash (which is is a multimedia platformused for adding animation and interactivity to webpages) and Adobe Photoshop (or simplyPhotoshop, which is a commercial graphics editing program), however, many times there wasa 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 thecommand line video converter, FFMPEG),Flash Converter (which is used to convert videoto .swf flash files) and numerous others.

Although the two projects mentioned above were a bit different (e.g. in case of the first one itwas a .fla file with many frames, while in case of the second one it was a .fla file with singleframe and externals .xml file which specified for example where a video or picture or text willappear on the screen), the procedure of creation of separate lections and steps was alwaysmore 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 ofinteraction, 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 toedit the pictures in Photoshop (e.g. size them appropriately, marge them in layers with thetemplate-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 andaccording to the type of interaction used name them and insert the code. Some examples of

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http://www.nevron.si/spo/http://www.nevron.si/esvz/http://www.adobe.com/http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/http://www.virtualdub.org/http://winff.org/http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-Video-to-Flash-Converter.htmhttp://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-Video-to-Flash-Converter.htmhttp://www.nevron.si/spo/http://www.nevron.si/esvz/http://www.adobe.com/http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/http://www.virtualdub.org/http://winff.org/http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-Video-to-Flash-Converter.htm


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

Picture 8: spoznavanje-okolja-main.png

Picture 9: spoznavanje-okolja-files.png

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Picture 10: workplace-screen1.jpg

Picture 11: workplace-screen2.jpg

While in the second project's case (i.e. "e-portna vzgoja"), I also needed to edit the picturesin Photoshop before importing them to Flash, but in much less details. Because in this casethe "containers" for pictures (or any other object that would appear on the screen) werealready 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 thecode 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 primarilyfor 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 6questions, while the quiz on which I was working has 8 questions. Also there were numerouscases 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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Picture 12: e-sportna-vzgoja-chapters.png

Picture 13: e-sportna-vzgoja-lections.png

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Picture 16: e-sportna-vzgoja-screen2.png

Picture 17: e-sportna-vzgoja-screen3.png

For the first few days my mentor was often coming to my desk to show me how to do acertain thing (or perform a certain action) Since I was unfamiliar with Adobe Flash andAdobe Photoshop programs, however, later on I've become quite independent and I didn'tneed much help anymore. Occasionally there were also disputes with authors of thesescenarios since in many cases they were written ambiguous, but above all, the main problemwas the missing material (pictures, animations and video). But anyhow, I managed to finishall the lections that were given to me, so my mentor was very pleased. Anyhow, there is nodoubt that I've learned quite a lot of details on how to work with Adobe Flash, andAdobePhotoshop programs, and other programs too.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flashhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flashhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshophttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshophttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshophttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flashhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshophttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop


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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 andrelations were very good and relaxed at the workplace and I've got to know a few veryinteresting people (mostly my mentor and the company's main programmer) with which wehad many interesting discussions while having those five to ten minutes long coffe breaks andwith which we will surely stay in contact in future. And above all, I've learned quite a lot ofdetails 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 nomather all the problems that I needed to solve (and akward situations that I needed to gothrough, 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 Nevroncompany for this period of time and I must say that it was a pleasant and educativeexperience.

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The Report on Work at Nevron Company

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