![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Classes
So, I've been at school for a while now and haven't really been writing.
A couple days ago, my entry was about how much work I was doing as a PCC acting as a nettech. I'm still a PCC, but after I made myself sick from working too much, I decided that job could just sit and rot for all I cared. So, I stopped going around and fixing computers.
The day before classes start, I stayed up way too late talking to a friend of mine. It was nice to get to know someone really well, but it was quite... well, I was exhausted in class the next day because when you stay up until 5:30, getting up at 7 is entirely too early.
Lessee...
First day of classes. ECE 205 is looking to be a somewhat hard, mostly because it covers a lot of the same material as PHYS 112, which is the class I failed last year, for those of you who remember that. I'm hoping I can pull that one off okay.
Geog 101: looks to be easy (lots of upperclassman taking it as an extra filler course): 2 hours a week plus an hour of discussion. Things like learning about how to map different things, how to draw maps, etc.
No Phys 113 on thursday: lecture starts next week.
CS 311 was on Thursday. Of my classes, that's the one I'm most excited about. It's a database systems class, using SQL. It's really neat - a group project, learning about SQL and query language and query optimization and everything. I'm really looking forward to learning more about WHY what we do on LiveJournal works and all.
I've already got an idea for a project:
Many times, you want to form study groups with people that live near you. So, using the University PH system (http://www.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/ph/) as well as an opt-in emailing of the schedule to the web site for processing, allow users to search for other people in the area with the same classes.
The email the university provides from our registration system is pretty easy to parse: my roomate already has a java parser that produces a pdf version of your schedule. The format isn't that difficult:
Included in there, you can see the "crschmid", which can be used in ph to look up users by their NetID, which we could then store information from. So, an original email is sent to whatever the website email is, which parses the class schedule, stores information on the student (netid/location information) and the courses being taken (Course name/numbers or specific sections: not sure how that would work). Then you can do a simple pull of other people living in, for example, Allen Hall, who are also taking GEOG 101, and contact them using the information available in their PH listing.
If I really wanted to get advanced, I could do distance type searches. However, that might be out of the scope of this project.
We're encouraged to do this project in C++ or Java, but I'm really hoping to get together a group that likes programming in perl or PHP. The prof said that the reason he didn't mention a web-based option is because it would "Take too long". I find those types of interfaces way easier to work with and design, personally, so I'm hoping to talk him into it.
I could get into client/server protocol stuff too. Allow people to upload schedules more directly somehow, by writing a server to accept the information... man, there's all kinds of neat things this could turn into.
I love diving into a new project like this. The class seems really fun, as you can tell by the fact that I wrote about 10 times as much about this one as anything else. My professor is a Hungarian trained vietnemese who is really really funny, and I look forward to this class.
Let's see... I think that about rounds up the classes I've taken so far.
http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~crschmid/schedule.pdf has my schedule. Note that it's missing CS311, since neil had to do his own AM-PM conversion and never schedules classes at those times. :P
A couple days ago, my entry was about how much work I was doing as a PCC acting as a nettech. I'm still a PCC, but after I made myself sick from working too much, I decided that job could just sit and rot for all I cared. So, I stopped going around and fixing computers.
The day before classes start, I stayed up way too late talking to a friend of mine. It was nice to get to know someone really well, but it was quite... well, I was exhausted in class the next day because when you stay up until 5:30, getting up at 7 is entirely too early.
Lessee...
First day of classes. ECE 205 is looking to be a somewhat hard, mostly because it covers a lot of the same material as PHYS 112, which is the class I failed last year, for those of you who remember that. I'm hoping I can pull that one off okay.
Geog 101: looks to be easy (lots of upperclassman taking it as an extra filler course): 2 hours a week plus an hour of discussion. Things like learning about how to map different things, how to draw maps, etc.
No Phys 113 on thursday: lecture starts next week.
CS 311 was on Thursday. Of my classes, that's the one I'm most excited about. It's a database systems class, using SQL. It's really neat - a group project, learning about SQL and query language and query optimization and everything. I'm really looking forward to learning more about WHY what we do on LiveJournal works and all.
I've already got an idea for a project:
Many times, you want to form study groups with people that live near you. So, using the University PH system (http://www.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/ph/) as well as an opt-in emailing of the schedule to the web site for processing, allow users to search for other people in the area with the same classes.
The email the university provides from our registration system is pretty easy to parse: my roomate already has a java parser that produces a pdf version of your schedule. The format isn't that difficult:
Schmidt Christopher Robert crschmid
CLASS SCHEDULE - FALL 2003 8/21/03
Course Call# Section Credit Schedule Location
C S 311 01547 Q LECD 3.00 H 12:30- 1:45PM TUTH 1320 D C L
ECE 205 02540 A LECT 3.00 H 8:00- 8:50 MWF 151 EVERITT
ECE 206 02546 F5 LAB 1.00 H 10:00-11:50 TH 268 EVERITT
GEOG 101 03628 9 LABD 3.00 H 9:00- 9:50 F 137D DAVENPORT
A LECT 10:00-10:50 MW THEAT LINCOLN
PHYCS 113 06510 A LECT 2.00 H 8:30- 9:45 TUTH 151 LOOMIS
06513 N1 DISC 10:00-11:50 TU 242 LOOMIS
06537 E1X LAB 1:00- 2:50PM M 164 LOOMIS
PHYCS 114 06560 A LECT 2.00 H 8:30- 9:45 TUTH 151 LOOMIS
06563 N1 DISC 10:00-11:50 TU 242 LOOMIS
06587 E1X LAB 1:00- 2:50PM M 164 LOOMIS
Included in there, you can see the "crschmid", which can be used in ph to look up users by their NetID, which we could then store information from. So, an original email is sent to whatever the website email is, which parses the class schedule, stores information on the student (netid/location information) and the courses being taken (Course name/numbers or specific sections: not sure how that would work). Then you can do a simple pull of other people living in, for example, Allen Hall, who are also taking GEOG 101, and contact them using the information available in their PH listing.
If I really wanted to get advanced, I could do distance type searches. However, that might be out of the scope of this project.
We're encouraged to do this project in C++ or Java, but I'm really hoping to get together a group that likes programming in perl or PHP. The prof said that the reason he didn't mention a web-based option is because it would "Take too long". I find those types of interfaces way easier to work with and design, personally, so I'm hoping to talk him into it.
I could get into client/server protocol stuff too. Allow people to upload schedules more directly somehow, by writing a server to accept the information... man, there's all kinds of neat things this could turn into.
I love diving into a new project like this. The class seems really fun, as you can tell by the fact that I wrote about 10 times as much about this one as anything else. My professor is a Hungarian trained vietnemese who is really really funny, and I look forward to this class.
Let's see... I think that about rounds up the classes I've taken so far.
http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~crschmid/schedule.pdf has my schedule. Note that it's missing CS311, since neil had to do his own AM-PM conversion and never schedules classes at those times. :P
no subject
no subject
I don't know exactly how theirs works: it's down for "renovation" right now. Any idea if they publicized the source code?
no subject
As far as I know, yours is unique in that it uses geographic info. U-Match only gave you online contacts of others in your classes, which made sense, because there were very few matches, so the chances of you living very close to someone in the same class as you was slim. Now that it's become more popular, a class AND geographic match might be cool.
You couldn't do much at the site before it was down, anyway. You needed to log in with your UW NetID before you could use it. UW has a custom Apache mod installed that lets any user securely authenticate others (http://www.washington.edu/computing/web/publishing/access.html) using their UW NetID.
no subject
I actually would prefer to do most of this on my own: I think I have most of the technical knowledge available through myself or others, and I need to hone my coding skills on a small-group project, since I haven't really done that before. LiveJournal is too big to fall under that category.
Since we have such an extensive ph, getting contact info is easy. Because the school is so large, pulling geographic info seems like the right idea. I mean, it's a 10 minute walk from Allen to the 6pack: I wouldn't want to do that just for a study group, so knowing who's near me would be nice.
Hell, since we have the two towns, I could even just do seperation based on town: Champaign or Urbana. Hmm....
no subject
no subject
Anyway:
I like the pdf rendering, but it's not my project anyway. You'd have to let
There's already a couple of web-scheduling utils for UIUC: http://www.betteruiuc.org has one of them, I think, but I can't remember off the top of my head.
I just don't like trying to get html tables to print: that's what pdfs are good for ;)
no subject
I took Physical Geography for my natural science-- and loved it (if I'd been a scientist, I probably would have done geography, though I don't know where).
I took California Geography as a social science-- which was also fascinating and taught me much about California (including how much food we produce and how, and why all politics in California can be traced to water).
no subject
It's kind of like a "Here's the world, here's a mountain, here's how the people near the mountain live because they live near the mountain" kind of thing, I think.
I'll see if I can drag up syllabi for these courses.
no subject
no subject
IIRC, it also includes a writing section that fulfills the campus writing requirement or something like that, but I dont' know that for sure.
Course is:
GEOG 101. GEOGRAPHY OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES.