copelco

The WattNodes came in the mail.

I created an overview of Degree Days. I added a graph of the Dennis Weather Station’s Daily Minimum and Maximum Temperature Values to Miller Farm:Degree Days.

I also contacted Marlene Penfield (x1315) and Dick Smith for energy usage information. Marlene only has information for the past few months, but is willing to give me access to the information. I ended up contacting Greg (Gus) Duke (x7374) at RPNL. He sent me electronic data (updated information that Mary had).

Charlie and I prepped the order for the WattNode’s. We talked with Steve Whitaker at Continental Control Systems, LLC. The order was placed on June 1.
Pulse Output WattNode’s:
1 * WNA-1P-240-P $160
— 2 * CTS-0750-050 (50A pair) $ 42 ea.
— Normal Output
1 * WNA-1P-240-P $160
— 2 * CTS-0750-030 (30A pair) $ 42 ea.
— LCDA-EP (Energy & Power) $160
— Normal Output
1 * WNA-1P-240-P w/ TTL $180
— TTL Output
— 2 * CTS-0750-070 (70A pair) $ 42 ea.

Charlie thinks we’ll use Chapter 2 from my Back to the Basics book.

I stopped by Res Life for records of the farm residents for the past 5 years. I recorded the data in my wiki.

I ordered the “Real Goods Solar Living Sourcebook-12th Edition : The Complete Guide to Renewable Energy Technologies & Sustainable Living (Real Goods Solar Living Sourcebook)” from Amazon.

There’s not too much here to talk about, because I only did part 1. I wrote part1.pl to do mpirun on 2 to 8 processors. Each time a processor was added, primes_single was run three times, and the average was taken (which was grabbed using RegExp on the output of primes_single). I then ran part1.pl three times just to see if it made a difference. The three runs averaged to about the same time for each averaged run.
Speedup wasn’t too impressive. With 8 processors, the run only got 1.5 times as fast, which isn’t great. The primes code, primes_single, loops through the number line, passing each one to a node and recording the result (if it’s prime or not). I think it would be better to divide up the number line into larger chunks, pass the chunks to the nodes, and have them return the number of prime numbers. Much less communication. I think that would dramatically increase the speed.

• Graph: Speedup
• Graph: Efficiency
• Code for Part 1
• Graph Generator

Reflect on the process of how your group designed and built the API for the group project. Consider your role, how the group as a whole interacted, your work habits, etc.

I think our group did well for the first milestone. The first few meetings were pretty slow and unproductive. I think we might have spent too much time talking and not enough time planning and coding. The “roles” we created weren’t important to me, I don’t think they helped out much, but they may have. I think everything fell into place better. We didn’t take in to account how long it was going to take to find and parse sources and the last week turned into a crunch.

* What did I do well? - Helped work over peopels shoulders, yay XP.
* What was my contribution to the milestone’s completion? I helped code and plan out scrAPI with Alex.
* Where can I make improvements, and how? I did a lot of help-programming, but not much on my own.
* What did the group do well? - We worked well together.
* Where can the group make improvements, and how? We were usually late to our group meetings.

The Apple Human Interface Design Guidelines say that characteristics of great software are high performance, ease of use, attractive appearance, reliability, adaptability, interoperability, and mobility. Comment on those characteristics and the value you find in each for the software you use; compare and contrast them to the other “mantras” we’ve encountered in the class so far.

The first section, Part I: Application Design Fundamentals, is XP-ish to me: Knowing your Audience, Ease of Use, Reliability, Keep Your Users in Mind, etc. The last two sections are more related to Mac OS X, Aqua, and their features. It’s all pretty general (e.g. design around a specific resolution, keep multiple users in mind, etc), but it does lay out a framework for their applications. Though the guide becomes too much for me when it starts talking about the appropriate height of buttons, the width between adjacent ones, etc. I take it for granted. Apple’s engineering is pretty darn good. I think Mail is sweet. It’s really easy to use (my dad can use it), quick, reliable, and has a slick, simple interface.
That list is pretty generic: high performance, ease of use, attractive appearance, reliability, adaptability, interoperability, and mobility. I think it applys to all application development, though some are more important in certain areas. I think mobility applies a lot more to a web-based applications than, say, my Mail app.

I set out to design a model generic enough to incorporate the subtle differences between the two Banana production pages. I also wanted to create an idea for a generic data snarfing schema that could later be incorporated (possibly) into my group project.
I used PHP for both snarfing and reporting the data. I wrote two classes for snarfing: Source and Schema. The Source class contains the URL of the source, the schema for parsing the page, and a data array of the snarfed source. The Schema class contains an regular expression string and an array of back reference names for the regex. This setup allows the user to create a Source (with a Schema) and access the associative data array using the named back references.
I created four postgres tables: countries, banana production, banana production per capita, and last updated. I wanted to learn about references between tables and then joining them back together.

• Source

I installed mt-daapd following this how-to: Setting up MT-DAAPD on Ubuntu 5.10. mt-daapd’s wiki page Quickstart Ubuntu was also helpful (adding to startup script, making sure permissions were correct, etc). AAC and MP3s work fine, but I noticed ID3 tags must be v2.3 or lower.

The group project is about making existing data sets more accessible, and presenting them in ways that allow them to be more useful. Find at least one historical example of a case where having a different (better?) view of a particular data set would have had some significant impact on an important decision that was made. Choose an example from a field that affects some non-trivial population size - social services, politics, emergency response, travel/tourism industry, ecological/environmental protection, large-scale architecture/construction, etc. Share your thoughts on what it means to be able to “slice” data in new and different ways in those kinds of contexts, and how trends and progress in related tools and technologies can affect how humans live.

Old landfills do not have proper liner and collection systems for proper storm water and leachate management. Environmental pollution is a seriuos problem, especially if landfills leak major leachate quantities to underground aquifers. Landfill gas (e.g. methane) management is an important issue as well. If local ground water contamination levels had been published in coorelation with local landfills, more attention might have been focused on the issue. Maybe more research could been put into power generation and methane burning.

I wrote a PHP script to convert spaced delimited files to the comma-separated values (CSV) file format. Basically, the script uses a regular expression to split on all of the space delimited values into an array. The script then uses a handy php function is_numeric() to tell whether or not the value is a number or not. If it’s not a number, then it surrounds the value in quotes, otherwise it leaves it alone. Then it writes the modified value to a new CSV file.

• Source: /clients/users/copelco/www/cs345/lab3/