Carleton Weather

I spent the bulk of today reading the book on relational database systems, taking breaks to play around with PHP a bit more and to track the storms that have been hovering and swirling around Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas all day on the Weather Underground radar. The book is a bit dense and therefore slow to get through, but I think I’m getting closer to an understanding of relational databases (the first three chapters have only discussed the conceptual end, not implementation yet). Even if we don’t end up using the relational model, and despite the fact that the implementation specifications in the book are specifically geared toward a couple Microsoft database engines which we won’t be using, the book seems to be a great source for general principles of strong database design and has got me thinking about efficient ways of structuring our database. At the end of the day, I read the additional data files Doug put on the server into the mySQL weather database I’ve been experimenting with on my computer, and I’ll be exploring them some more tomorrow.

-Katherine

Today I took a break from playing around with mySQL and spent most of the day going through the PHP tutorial that Will recommended last week, which is extremely engaging.  I was planning on delving a bit further into the book on relational database systems later in the day, but around noon I got a notice from the library saying I have to return the PHP and mySQL book tomorrow because someone else requested it, so I spent the late afternoon trying to get as much as possible out of the sections on administering mySQL databases and processing PHP queries.  Relational database research will have to wait until tomorrow.

-Katherine

The first half of yesterday was devoted to loading the 2010 raw weather data into databases that Will and I could use on both my own computer and the second lab computer.  I spent a lot of time playing around with the rawdata table and getting a feel for isolating and displaying different chunks of interesting data – all data for a certain day, times when the temperature was below -20, times when the daily rainfall exceeded 4 inches, etc.  The rest of the day was spent trying to pursue the questions of what exactly a relational database is, what’s so great about it, and whether our database should be one.  Everything I’ve read so far has described the relational model in pretty arcane language, so I’m still not entirely sure what the bottom line is, but the general idea seems to be that structuring the database with particular connections between fields of data in different tables makes the long-term organization and manipulation of the database more easily understandable.  For example, in theory, with a relational database we could delete the faulty data for a specific date in the monthly data table and the database would automatically delete that date’s data in the yearly data table as well.  The tricky part would be setting up the relations correctly, and I’m not sure how much that’s worth it for the types of tables we maintain and the ways we operate on them.  Also, I would guess there’s already perfectly fine code in place for handling situations like that, and if not I think it would be pretty easy to do without adhering to the relations rules.  I am going to continue to research the relational model, and hopefully I will have a better sense for its relevance to us as I become better acquainted with our database.

-Katherine

I spent all of today slowly plowing through all of the current site files. There are a lot of files in the directory, some of which are in use and some of which that arent. It was hard to discern which was which, but I’m starting to piece together just how everything works. The most confusing aspect is the graphing functions. There are multiple copies of the same thing and some of the files have little to no documentation, so making sense of those is hard. My head hurts a little, but I’m getting there.

-Will

After getting access to some of the past drafts of the weather site this morning, I started designing my own version of the site (essentially the same as what is in place right now) to get more comfortable with PHP. Once the afternoon rolled around, we got access to all of the data for 2010 which Katherine put into a mySQL database on the second lab machine. I spent a good chunk of the rest of the afternoon wrestling with different settings to try and make my code, running over on the other lab machine, be able to access that database, but I was not able to do so. I wrote a sample PHP script on the hosting machine just to check that the database worked, and it ran successfully. I think there is something wrong with how I am trying to connect over the local network or there is some setting on the server that is preventing me from accessing it. That will be tomorrow’s project, I got too frustrated and went back to my PHP work. On the docket for tomorrow is getting that mySql issue fixed and investigating ways to tell time and issues that we are going to have with daylight savings and the like (that was for today, but I got sidetracked by all the mySql stuff).

-Will

Today with Doug’s help I successfully installed XAMPP on my computer so that I could really start playing around with mySQL!  The excitement wore off a little bit as I realized there are only so many neat tricks I can do with various fake databases of fake tables I created on the mySQL end through the terminal – either that or I just haven’t discovered the really cool stuff yet.  Still, I worked through a good portion of the “PHP and MySQL” book on using mySQL databases and now feel pretty comfortable performing most of the basic operations involving tables of data, so I’m looking forward to getting to work with some actual databases from the weather project.  I also started reading about using PHP script to communicate with the mySQL databases and pull data to display on a webpage, and even though that’s more Will’s end of things I started going through a PHP tutorial towards the end of the day.  I’m not sure how much I’ll get to deal with that on my end of the project, but it was fun anyway.

-Katherine

My first two days on the weather programming job consisted mainly of getting a feel for the Carleton weather website and the tools I’ll need to be comfortable with to work with it.  I looked at the Carleton weather page and various other weather websites with a critical eye for both aesthetics and features, became familiar with the meanings of terms like heat index and relative humidity, and figured out where various sites get their forecast and past weather data (mostly NWS and NDFD, it seems).  I also read through a bunch of mySQL tutorials online, and then began browsing through a book I picked up from the library on using PHP and mySQL to create database driven websites.  The book is actually more helpful than the online tutorials I was looking at, and I think Will might find it to be a great resource when he starts using PHP to communicate with the weather database.

-Katherine

Today was spent on learning PHP. Pretty cool stuff, a lot of fun to work with. The tutorial I was using was located here. Using Xampp, I set up an Apache server and began playing around with PHP scripts as I progressed through the tutorial. Unfortunately, I got to the section on mySQL in the last hour and felt like it would be too tedious to set up a sample database then play around with it in such a sort time frame, so I skipped that section. Tomorrow I can hopefully play around with interactions between mySQL and PHP.

-Will