Today we headed down to the Wieliczka salt mines. The journey was 30 minutes long. When we got there we had to head down a few flights of stairs. At first all we saw were wooden beams and pillars holding up the mine. We were shown some salt sculptures made by artists and miners. As we slowly started to descend in the mine further, we noticed less wood and more salt. Some rooms were completely made out of salt, even the floor. Most of us were scraping salt of the walls and eating it. Shane bought a bag of salt halfway through the trip. After the halfway mark we were taken to a massive church. We were told that it was the prettiest thing we would see on the tour and that it was the biggest underground church.
All the sculptures were breathtaking. There was an incredible carving of the last supper on one of the walls. We were shown how miners moved salt using rope and how salts with different minerals would affect the colour of the salt. After the tour we went down to the gift shop. We were all tried on the way back, Morgan fell asleep in the back seats. Matthew and I were looking at cool secret Nazis casinos. We decided to watch Schindler's list to get ourselves ready for Auschwitz. After work we went back to the apartment. Morgan stayed in because he wasn't feeling too well. Sammar and I headed out and met up with Liam, Michelle and Matthew at the Galleria. Matthew even surprised us with his newly pierced tongue! After browsing the shops for a little while, we all met up again at Moaburger for some food and then grabbed some really good ice cream before leaving for the apartment.
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We made a good start to the day as we arrived at work a little earlier than usual. Sammar, Morgan and I are making good progress with our assigned task as we're getting a good understanding of XAML, C# and Visual Studio. We've each been focusing on different ways to do each of the GUI's(Graphical User Interfaces) over the last couple of weeks and now we're working on creating a finished program that utilises the best pieces from each of us.
Since the start of our work placement we've each learned a lot about how to efficiently use the software that Sharptec uses, which will be a lot of help in the next few years of study. The thing that I'm happiest about is the C# that we've gotten to learn, as it's going to be great bringing that knowledge into the next couple of years of college. It's also a great confidence boost getting a head start on learning a second programming language, not to mention that it's one of the main languages that Microsoft uses, which will help with future job opportunities as it's a company that's heavily based in Ireland. I finished the game app that we were working on for the past two days but wasn't exactly fond of it, so I got started on writing a better one since Kuba wasn't in today to check our work. About 3 hours flew by and the new one was taking shape and was far more aesthetic pleasing than the previous app. There was a few hiccups but since I had dealt with them in the previous version they didn't take too long to fix. To end the day I read a few articles on XAML and watched another video on c#.
We got home and we greeted by the other 3. We were all quite tired so we decided to stay in for a while bar Michelle who went into town to look around a few shops. We met up with her eventually and took a walk around the square to clear the heads a bit. We finished off the night with a quiet pint in a hidden pub just off the square. We’re about halfway through the small game application that Kuba suggested we do in order to familiarise ourselves with c# and XAML a bit more. It’s going quite well but there was a few issues with sizing and windows crashing. Overall though it’s really enjoyable having something small to work on to keep us focused on learning this new language.
After work we all regrouped and decided we’d go for food in the Italian place just down the road from us, Grazie. The food was enjoyable and we went for a walk around the town to draw a close to the night For the rest of the evening we mostly stayed in as a lot of us were pretty tired from the last few days. We watched a couple of movies and looked up some activities that we would be able to fit in during the weekday evening. It was a pleasant and quiet night in. Afterwards, we went to a restaurant and pub called C.K. Browar to grab a bite to eat and wind down after the active day. The food was great and the place had a great atmosphere. When we were all done we headed back to the apartment and stayed in for the rest of the night. Overall it was one of the most interesting and engaging days since coming to Krakow! Today Sammar, Morgan and I were given a small project to work on to help us practice and to get a better understanding of C#, XAML and Visual Studio. We were to write an application that displays a selection of games to the user and would allow them to click on a button that would open a new page that corresponded to the appropriate game. We were given a couple of days to work on the app before we began work on the locker application. It was very fun to work on and it was a great way of introducing us to all of the various tools in the WPF library as well as giving us a good handle with XAML and Visual Studio Max.
After work we decided arrange some activities to do over the weekend since it would be the last weekend we'd have in Poland. We booked a tour to the Wieliczka Salt Mine for Saturday as well as a tour of the Auschwitz-Berkenau Memorial Museum for Sunday. We agreed that these two were places that we should definitely see before leaving Krakow. Today Sammar, Morgan and I spent the day focusing on practising XAML and C#. C# was proving to be pretty difficult to learn, at least to a level where it would be useful in the application. XAML was turning out to be much easier to get the hang of, but its extensive library made it necessary to spend a lot of time learning about the various ways that we could go about solving a problem. Fortunately XAML is quite similar to HTML and C# is similar to Java, so the learning curve wasn't too big, as we have good experience in Java and a little bit in HTML.
After work, we met up with everyone else and decided to go for a walk around the city. It was Easter Monday so everywhere was buzzing and there was lots to see and do. We visited the square and it was bursting with people who were checking out all of the different stalls. We browsed about and got some trinket souvenirs as well as a few snacks and treats. Easter is pretty big in Poland and it’s a big public holiday. Over the last week or so there has been a similar setting in the main square as there is in Galway over the Christmas. It was full of stalls and markets selling antiques, gifts and traditional Polish delph, clothing and food.
A lot of stores and shops were closed on Easter Sunday so we had a walk around the market and picked up a few gifts and ornaments. After visiting the Market we decided to go down to the Jewish district, Kazimierz. We visited a small market there and picked up a few souvenirs, after that we visited the Church of St. Stanislaw where the Krakow bishop Stanislav was put to death in 1079 and statues of the seven kings of Poland who had him executed are there in remembrance of him. It was very interesting learning more of the history and culture in Krakow. Wojciech introduced us to a website named Trello that the company use to communicate with each other by giving a to do list of the tasks that need to be completed. He added us to a board on the website and this is what we log onto every morning to see what we have to do for the day.
We got started with learning some XML. There were plenty of tutorials posted on Trello that day for us to read to get a better understanding on the syntax and the uses of XML. I found it is very similar to HTML. Once we had gone over all of these tutorials, we were asked to create a basic project in XML using Notepad++. We started off with the “Hello, world!” basic application and then we went onto creating ones with more ’nodes’, these are like the variables. We also had to read about the different languages that are related to XML, such as, XSLT and XPath. XSLT is XML’s version of CSS, it was what you use to design the webpage. These tutorials were all very interesting and we were looking forward to learning more about them. We then had to use a validator which looks for any errors or mistakes in the code. Tomasz then gave us a copy of the code from one the webpages with a database from their website. He told us how you can create XML programs on Netbeans, the software we use in GTI for building projects. He taught us how to can implement the XML document into a Netbeans project and wanted us to output the data from that onto a Netbeans output screen. I think this was a great lesson to learn and i never knew it was possible to do this! It’s fair to say, we are learning a lot in our work placement and learning about all of this now, is definitely going to benefit us in years to come! - Michelle. Myself and Matthew are doing our work experience with a company called Ontia. Ontia focus on cultural institutions such as museums, art galleries, antique dealers, private collectors, research and scientific institutions. They provide various different types of software and web collections for the particular types of customers that may act as a catalog for certain institutions to keep track of collections, exhibition management and information on their artefacts and conservations. The different types of software they provide are Musnet, Naviagart, Collectio, Mediastore, Expono and Integra.
Since most of these applications are web based and in our first year of programming we don’t study any web development languages, there are a lot of new things we are learning. They use online databases which is also quite new to us and they are teaching us little steps to using these apps along the way. On our first day here, we met with an employee name Wojciech who told us about the company and what services they provide. He gave us a brief description of what we will be learning here over the next 4 weeks and gave us an insight into how they complete their work, what software they use and got us all set up and ready to use it. We got started with using the PHPmyadmin website which they used to create and maintain an online database for their company through another app called mySQL. Tomasz, who is another employee here showed us a few of their databases and the information it includes. We were giving a few tutorials on how to create a database and then we were given tasks to complete to build the database. - Michelle. Friday: Michelle and I spent the day at work doing more XML work and learning how to create Databases using phpMyAdmin. We had to read a few tutorials in order to figure it out. After we mastered the basics we got to work creating another database using Netbeans and then syncing that database with phpMyAdmin on the company server. After a few hours and a few more online tutorials we eventually got our databases up and running. I really enjoyed learning what we did today and I think it will definitely benefit us in the future. -Matthew- Saturday:
We woke up late today so we decided to go to Rynek Główny to see the Easter Market. We spent a few hours there buying souvenirs, eating and taking in the sights. Afterwards we spent a long time looking for a restaurant to go to for dinner, a lot of places were closed for Easter but we managed to find a few places still open. |
Information Technology 2016Michelle Lally Map of Krakow |