9:00 am - 4:40 pm

Open Office is installed, and now Firefox is much more finicky. In fact, the HTML Validator extension can't find the C code it needs, or something. New extension I'm trying: Crash Recovery. Very odd behavior - I've almost never seen Firefox disappear completely at the wrong click of a mouse -- it usually hangs for a while, then you see Mozilla Quality Feedback Agent. Maybe the Agent isn't installed, and it just works differently in Linux. Sometimes I have to click the icon several times before Firefox will actually start up. Nate showed me how to start FF from the command line (in the background: > firefox &) and how to list running processes, similar (I think) to what I use Ctrl-Alt-Delete for in Windows (ps -A).

I continued going through the Catalyst tutorial. I made some good progress and am beginning to understand the basics of Catalyst. Right now I'm stuck at the part where you make an auto function to force login. It may be because we don't have all the plugins installed that the tutorial claims to require. That would at least mean it isn't my coding that's at fault! Nate was going to show me how to install those today, but we ran out of time, so that's tomorrow.

I also created a rough banner for my Eldercare web site. I'll have to work on uploading it at home. I need to use my time for more relevant things at work, I think. 

Nate and I had a good meeting about my next steps on the web interface. I read over one of the papers he recommended and started looking at what nurses want in a data visualization. I'll have to go through my notes, but here are some points of action:

• Learn to install plugins, and get them all in
• Get auth working
• Learn to use genchart
• Keep learning Catalyst -- I am barely a beginner, and I need to be comfortable with this system so that it makes sense to not code everything from scratch. This can be done via
  • tutorials
  • looking at Nate's code
• Set up overall site structure. (Does this mean a flowchart of pages?)
• Read the other paper he sent me
• For now, focus more on solutions with what we've got than expansions/improvements to the system
• Think of different graphs and visualizations that would be useful.
  • I could spend my whole summer making one really cool visualization. Not sure that would be smart, though - if it wasn't what someone wanted, that would be a whole summer down the drain.
  • See the papers he sent me, and my notes on one of them
    
  • Sensors on floorplan with time lapse? How to do this, especially with Catalyst? Web 2.0? js? perl generate js? Need flexibility -- we may not have any 2 setups quite alike, especially with 4 x 2 different floor plans!