Entries

03 February 2003—I updated my webpage to account for the beginning of Quarter III. Specifically, all of the appropriate dates have been entered in the journal and a a list of the iterations for this quarter are now in the section on Progress. Mr. Latimer offered a draft of his grading scheme for this quarter, placing equal emphasis on coding, drafting the final paper, and documenting progress. The goal for lines of code is now a lofty 1000, not including comments. Many of the criteria within the basic requirments show a desire for a modicum of profesionalism in the creation and presentation of the project.

04 February 2003—I attempted to retrieve historical prices for a stock that Nick is analyzing. This task involved researching file-input functions in PHP and refreshing myself with the versatile preg_match function. I attempted to accomplish this goal in several ways, but the lack of detailed information on the errors leading to the failure of the program and my unfamiliarity with PHP limited any sort of results. Regarding the search using preg_match, I first used detailed parameters to pinpoint only the desired data; in later attempts, the searched string was broader, but to no avail.

06 February 2003—Mr. Latimer encouraged research, showing several students a site on the design of user interfaces by Joel Spolsky. This online nine-chapter tome begins with a fundamental law: "A user interface is well designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would." The author continues with corollaries and specific advice. Some of the technical aspects of his work are based on Windows "operating systems," but I found the guiding principles to be generally useful. I plan to work on the aesthetics of the interface after the current iteration.

Week 2

Goals

Entries

10 February 2003—I discovered that some of the functions to identify historical prices were interfering with the retrieval of previously obtained types of data. I began to make a line-by-line search of index.php, fn.php, and result.php.

11 February 2003—I continued my analysis of the three pertinent pages, testing possibile soultions as I found discrepancies. As expected, the function to collect historical prices for storage in a text file is the source of the disruption. I have made the objectionable code into comments until such time as I acquire better knowledge of the file-writing process.

13 February 2003—I conducted research on php.net and other similar sites, looking for information pertaining to the file-writing process. In addition to this work, I continued my research of the design on user interfaces, reading from the online text by Joel Spolsky.

Week 3

Goals

Entries

17 February 2003—SNOW!

18 February 2003—SNOW!

20 February 2003—SNOW!

Week 4

Goals

Entries

24 February 2003—I began writing a description of my project for an imaginary technical journal and linking the iterative process of my project to the scientific method, as per Mr. Latimer's requirments. I consulted the resources that he provided to review the elements of a brief description and to refresh my knowledge of the scientific method.

25 February 2003—I completed the two administrative requirements explained above. My description and scientific method are listed under Progress. Mr. Latimer has added another requirement, a working version of the project.

27 February 2003—I spent time updating the various features of the web site to account for the recent advent of Quarter III.

Week 5

Goals

Entries

03 March 2003—I began to prepare my statements to describe Version 3.1, obtaining a screenshot of the project and saving it as a .jpg file. Another step in assembling the text for this latest administrative requirement included reviewing the previously written Description and Scientific Method.

04 March 2003—I completed all of the benchmarks for describing Version 3.1.

06 March 2003—Nick and I, using our recent writings on our projects, evaluated our progress discussed our plans for the future.

Week 6

Goals

Entries

11 March 2003—I described the progress made in Iteration VII, which included a description of the project, the scientific method of the project, and a working version of the project ("Version 3.1").

13 March 2003—I reviewed PHP and MySQL in preparation for Week 7, during which I intend to create the necessary MySQL databases for the initial version of the interface and to create a shell of the interface.

Week 7

Goals

Entries

17 March 2003—I made a portfolio table with fields for the user and his password. The first two users are "Mr. Latimer" and "Yosemite Sam." Their portfolios comprise two separate tables, latimer and sam. The fields in these tables are for the ticker symbol of the stocks in their portfolio and the quantity of the stock held by the user.

The information for portfolio is shown in the following MySQL command and response:

mysql> select * from portfolio;
+--------------+----------+
| name         | password |
+--------------+----------+
| Mr. Latimer  | compsys  |
| Yosemite Sam | boots    |
+--------------+----------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The information for the accounts of Mr. Latimer and Yosemite Sam, respectively, is shown below:

mysql> select * from latimer;
+-------+------+
| stock | qty  |
+-------+------+
| MSFT  |  100 |
| DELL  |  100 |
+-------+------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from sam;
+-------+------+
| stock | qty  |
+-------+------+
| CSCO  |  100 |
| KO    |  100 |
+-------+------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

18 March 2003—I prepared the necessary web pages for entering the interface, including a page requiring the password for Mr. Latimer or Yosemite Sam, a page to inform users of entering the incorrect passowrd, and a shell of the interface through a PHP result page.

20 March 2003—I wrote the appropriate PHP code to display information regarding the holdings of the users on portfolio.php, obtained as a result of entering the correct password on interface.php. I managed to display the symbol and quantity of the stock owned. My next objective is to obtain the price and change data from Yahoo! Finance.

Week 8

Goals

Entries

24 March 2003—I displayed in the interface the price and change data for the stock owned by the users form Yahoo! Finance. I tested several options for the visual display of this information. The display is now in a basic form, which I will change after reaching a higher level of functionality.

25 March 2003—My attempts to calculate the worth of the stocks held by the users on a listing-by-listing basis were frustrated with discrepancies in data type. I managed to contrive the worth, but the method is not suitable to prices with more or less than two digits following the decimal point.

27 March 2003—I wrote the report for Iteration VIII and began completing the administrative requirements for the end of Quarter III.

Week 9

Goals