Timothy Lau's blog

This week, we did a polycom meeting with the Astoria field team so they could suggest changes and improvements to my pages - the Station Stack Plot page, the Station Input page, and the new Daily Report page. It went better than I expected, surprisingly - not too many surface/cosmetic elements of those pages needed to be changed, and the ones that did were relatively easy to implement.

This week I continued expanding features for both the deployment and daily report page. I made my code more efficient by implementing three different ways to display and retrieve data for my deployment page, and I also added a feature so that when you scroll back to past dates on the daily report page, it will show past statuses of instruments (this was the most challenging part of my week, because I had to try many times to get the code right).

This week I worked on and finished a page which shows a report of the statuses of all the instruments in the Saturn observation network, much like this page - http://www.stccmop.org/datamart/observation_network/dailyreport only it is automatically generated based on the data that a user enters into the Deployments page which I finished last week. Building the table was very challenging for me since it involved many loops and the logic was hard to capture in programming language, but I'm glad I finished it.

This week, I finished up the Deployments web page that I started working on last week. It's the hardest page I've ever done, as it involves selecting from a central database, saving many pieces of information and writing them back to the database by constructing tables. Unlike other pages, a huge portion of the code I wrote for this page was for the purpose of avoiding/correcting different types of errors that might occur, since there are so many. This week has definitely been very, very challenging.

I just got back from China this week and have started working on the changes I need to make to my webpages for the Astoria field team scientists. This week I made another Image Entry Page which displays only stack plots and allows the user to view graphs of any stations' data in a 2, 7, or 15 day period, a very useful feature that was requested.

This week I built two versions of a single webpage, the Station Image Entry Page, in addition to my Station Image Display Page last week. These two pages basically display all the graphs for each variable for each station, and allow a user to submit information into the database (such as a date/time and a status update and comment) for each image if he or she so chooses. Below is one version of the Entry Page, needs to have php extension to work.

This week I finally got to start working on "real," relevant webpages that will be prototypes for what might go on the CMOP website later. I designed and created a page, the Station Image Display page, which cycles through stations and displays all the images/graphs as well as some information associated with them. The page looks pretty rough around the edges but the code works perfectly - with input from the field team hopefully we will be able to get the page up and running in a short amount of time.

This week I learned the basics of the SQL language and how to incorporate it into HTML/PHP. I had to figure out a ton of stuff for myself which I am proud of doing. Although it's a headache sometimes trying to fix my code...

Well, my first week here at CMOP was pretty eventful. Before coming here I didn't really know a whole lot but this week, I really learned about the big picture - the CMOP projects that are going on and what scientific questions we are trying to answer. On Thursday I took a trip down to Newport to see the boat that collects data on cruises - this really helped me grasp the importance of the project that my mentors and I are working on. I met a lot of different people and saw many of the scientific instruments that we use to gather data.