Project Blog

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Blog posting has been initiated.. orientation sucessfull, charging proton boosters.. and we have lift off!
Sort of.

All joking aside, I am very excited for all to come this semester. In particular I'm excited for the opportunity to work on a larger project and also the independence that accompanies this project. My project entails sifting through 'big data' and creating an easily readible format for analyzing this data. The data itself is a compilation of geographical readings (temperature, wind speed, water levels, etc) throughout Wisconsin.

My first priority then will be to start sorting what data is important and planning what that means for the structure of the final representation.

Until next time, see you in orbit! *Rocket sounds*

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 For updates, I have one big one and one small. Firstly, I have completed the data-cleaning program, although it is specific to data from my NOAA source only (as of now this is my main source, and a sizeable portion of my data should come from here). So I have a segment my data ready for the site, now I am working on creating a simple interface to view it.
I plan on updating this interface extensively once
 1) I can test that it works properly and
 2) I do some more research into what method I would like to use to graphically implement the map
And that brings me to my second update, which is on my search for how I will implement the graphically component of the map. I think the easiest way to do this will be in utilizing SVG files and libraries that make working with SVG easier, and if possible, more efficient.
Here is a short list of such libraries that I will be looking into further:
- Lazy Line Painter
- SVG.js
- Snap.svg

 The second point I wanted to write about was a simple realization I had over the weekend. Which is, I have not completed as much as I thought I would have by this time. That being said I am setting up a pseudo-schedule for myself, with the goal of putting in at least 2 hours of work into the project each day. The exception for now will be on weekends, depending on if I have other plans I will most likely be working then as well. On my next post I will talk about how this goes!

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Here is a quick visual to illustrate the breakdown of my general plan. According to this there will be three big components to this project; being:
 1) Preparing data
 2) Creating a working webpage that handles this level of data effectively
 3) Creating an animated implementation of #2 that allows for better ease-of-use

I am almost complete with finding data sources, but there are some points that I would like to include in my data set that I have not found yet. The downloading and cleaning portion of this project should be very easy as I have written scripts to download all necessary sets of data from a given online source and a seperate application to clean them all afterwards. These should make for short work.
 The simple working page has turned out not to be quite as simple as I thought, but I doubt this will take much longer to finish. And then it will be to testing different methods of transfering the data to client-side to find which is the most effective.
Intermittenly, I will also be working on creating the animated implementation, although I think this part can wait for a couple weeks at least (I would like to have the core functionality of the site complete before I get ahead of myself).

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It has been awhile!
A lot of different stuff happening on campus and in my life, but I have some progress to talk about. I now have a working system that can take data from the webserver and move it to the client for displaying on their page. This system uses a buffer array to smooth out the time it takes to transfer the data, which is implemented by calling a LoadBufferArray function everytime I unload the buffer array into the current array. In doing this, everytime more data is needed a new HTTP request will be sent to the server, returning whenever the data is ready - then filling the now empty buffer array.

My next step is to create the GUI, and after no usable ideas, I have decided to use google maps api to achieve this. Within the next week few days I will post again with a run down of how everything is put together so far, as well as how I plan to implement the current design within the context of a google maps. Additionally I might upload an updated schedule, as I near the end of the project.

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