It looks like UTS is holding us up with cgi, unless something amazing happens in the next 24 hours. This actually means my requirements/ambitions for Project 1 will be scaled back a bit.
This is an individual project but students are encouraged to discuss and help each other.
REQUIRED:
+ download data from a website (preferably legally, but educational uses might trump the language of unilateral user agreements, copyrights)
… if you are ambitious, this website refreshes its data, so you can repeat this step with new results, and you might want to script the download itself; your project may require you to download several pages but DO NOT risk getting locked out by the server (put sleep commands between web requests in a script), and do not generate more than, say, 100MB of data at this stage please.
+ clean and extract data of interest using awk/grep/sed/vi
… vi is the minimum, but awk is what we are looking for; if your data comes preformatted, perhaps that’s not the most ambitious thing at this stage, but lucky you.
+ generate a more pleasant, intuitive, well edited, well-selected economical, cogent, visual, dynamic, colorful representation of the data you extracted in html
… if you are good, you will add some css and perhaps even an inline js behavior, but that’s by no means required; on the other hand, if you’d like to use js you find online, such as pie-chart generation, fine with me; note that any css and js in the html must be generated by the script, even if it is just an include external script directive
+ do something novel, fun, interesting, important, extensible, marketable; yes, I have a penchant for open-ended projects; this is not just a hw where I tell you what to do.
Probably a minor incentive will be given to those who want to present their code (“stand-up”), where time will constrain us to First-come-first-served.
GRADING
I will not be considering beauty of the code, time/space measures, or comments. However, complete code messes will be penalized. One should at least keep code clean enough to have some self-respect. 50-50 one has to alter a script like this in a subsequent round, and if it isn’t readable, your loss. So inconsistently indented and poorly spaced code will be penalized for sure. Variables should make some sense even if they are not self-documenting. Lines of code that are 30-lines long should probably be made into functions, or broken into clear sections. Safe reuse of variables is expected self-discipline. But this is about scripting the behavior, not programming aesthetics, and usually this kind of thing is done in a hurry 1-off. So 95% of what I care about is what it does and that it works, and that it’s done on time.
TURNING IT IN
I prefer just finding links/paths to code and sample output on eecslab-16 (e.g., ~rxl637/397p1/{download.awk,extract.awk,build.awk,sampleout.html} ). But if for some reason someone wants to build a summary web page or video, a URL is fine. Keep that short, as there are diminishing returns on this project once the code is done and working.
20%, Feb 26 in class.