Netsoc

Hey Folks

Project proposal for redpill. This is will not be a teaching workshop but a chance for anyone who is interested in coding to work together on a project.

Problem: Webtimetables, it goes down often for large periods of time to backup, it crashes a lot, slow and looks god awful plus you don’t get notifications when something changes.

I came up with a few ideas on the bus on what we could do. Myself and apparently some other people have written some variously polished versions of this (mine being pretty crappy and makeshift). I want to expand on it and run it into a full blown project with a lot more to it though.

1. Pull out the data giving a course code and a year.
2. See if we can display this in many nice ways. For example, pdf, push it into a google docs spreadsheet using their api.
3. Cache the result.
4. Query webtimetables periodicly and check if any changes have been made
5. publish results by (email, mailing list, google groups, rss feeds, carrier pigeon)
6. Fancy gui, click the module, have all the other instances highlighted, see when it’s next one
7. mobile android app (or iphone if you have a spare 100 euro for a license) where you save your course + year and it pulls the results out of google docs in the form of “what class do i have now, what class do i have next, what room etc”
8. Who’s in this room – pull out  timetables for rooms
9. we could generate timetables as all sorts of files and drop them either in a google apps collection folder or in dropbox or give out the raw data as xml,csv etc.
10. monitor when webtimetables is online/offline + graph it and tweet out alerts when it’s down/up
11. command line version of all of the above