Week Nine

Oh woe...

Connie, at the time of publishing this blog, is attempting to contact a programmer who was helpful up until things became a little too complex. We're using some actionscript/flash to create the drag and drop feature that our map will contain.

Anna is stuck in L.A.

Krystle (me) is in the library. I went to speak with the cartographic librarian (fourth attempt) and they are in a meeting currently. Therefore, with limited time available, I asked their assistant for guidance. Naturally I learn that the majority of maps containing data are available online and would therefore be easier just to copy from online.

Adrian ended up attending class and was able to participate in the professor evaluations. Also working on maps and the like.

Week Eight

Crunch Time

Three weeks to go...

Currently we are still trying to figure out how drag and drop will work alongside the variables we'll be assigning. An issue that we have is that once you place down the variables, the variables will not move with the image. Essentially, we are trying to find a way for these things to move together to make it work with being able to turn on and off various layers.

Maps are still chugging along - I finally was able to access the College of San Mateo resources and found some more maps that we can use. An issue is that I have to translate the data from database format to visual format. That should be fun and will probably take the weekend to do. Connie and Adrian are still playing with the programming and looks like we might have it down and ready to go.

In the meantime, we're keeping our fingers crossed, although now the deadline has been extended to finals week - not sure if I'm happy about it or not, but at least we get more time to finish our project.

The Final Exam date is now June 15th at 11:30am (tentatively).

Week Seven

In which the proverbial fire is lit under the ass...

Jeff was ill, so we pretty much had it easy today - attempting to figure out how the heck we were going to do this stuff. He also got pretty irritated with our group - won't discuss it here, but suffice to say it made me angry to get chewed out for something that isn't my fault. I think Connie feels the same. Either way, we sent out a group email.

However now it is coming down to the wire. Who honestly knows what will happen? Connie and Adrian are still working on the code and getting that down pat. I am working on the maps - I have about fifteen done so far and another five that I think I can manage to do so far, but at least we have a base layer for our maps. Have no idea where Anna is or what she is doing.

So here we go...

Week Six

We put together a list of maps for the assignment, although we weren't sure what format we should be listing the information we acquired - meaning do we create these in PNG format and input them as a layer or source/scrape them from a separate XML file that will tell us where the information is supposed to go?

This is a lot harder than we thought it was going to be...

Week Five

The Project of Doom, (or so it would seem)...

Scraping, it turns out, is a lot harder than one would thing. When we went to find an XML code (or some other codex that would allow us to harvest live information from the site), we found ourselves unable to locate it (naturally it would have to be there or else how does SigAlert work?). This caused us to meet at a crossroads.

Do we continue attempting in the same vane that we've been going or do we scrap it and start over?

Unfortunately, we had to scrap the idea. In the amount of time that we have left, there is not chance for use to get scraping down and working. Besides that, we would have to find a way to organize the information better than SigAlert already does. Therefore, we decided to branch off in a new direction.

I will be posting the new Proposal as soon as I can (my webserver is full at the moment), however in summary our group will be dissecting San Diego based on several different elements (statistical information of crime, drugs, education, sexual crimes, traffic, historical sectors, etc.). It will be better for us considering none of us really have any experience coding in Lingo and therefore we will be able to focus on creating the artistic/design portion, something with which we are all more knowledgeable in.

We hope that by next week we will have all the information that we need to compile the information into an interactive interface that everyone can use with ease. In the meantime, Jeff is threatening us with certain death if we don't have SOMETHING soon.