Relocated to Knoxville

Today I spent 13 hours in transit from the Quad Cities to Knoxville. All the stuff got unloaded pretty quickly but is currently in a big mess around the house. Tomorrow I'll start unpacking for real and take care of things like getting Internet installed.

Registration complete

The online registration system was giving me some trouble, but with the assistance of university staff I have now successfully registered for all the core first-semester courses in my graduate program. I checked the bookstore's web site but textbook information doesn't seem to be available for fall yet. I will keep an eye on that and order books as soon as possible.

Another app workaround

Today while testing the app features I added yesterday, I noticed that my bus app was completely failing to display departure information. The bus company's server is currently returning empty departure lists for all stops, and very slowly at that. I had a workaround ready to go for when that server doesn't provide departures, but the slowness in response was causing my server to give up before reaching the fallback plan. I reorganized the error handling and my app can now use a fallback for all routes' information.

Yet more app improvements

I spent today making several more improvements to my bus app before more students (?) arrive back on campus next month. I started by making it possible to switch off the display of specific information on the trip list screen in case it was too dense for people. I went to finally finish the half-done vehicle lookup feature but then noticed a serious problem: the trip information as called up from departure details was often for the wrong trip. This seems to have been caused by a recent change to code that loads data from the bus company into the database. After fixing that, I did complete the vehicle lookup feature, filling in the missing UI. Finally, I fixed the longstanding strange behavior of navigation directions displaying the bus's whole route shape. The server now tells the app which shape points are associated with stops so that the app can draw just the subsection of the trip that's relevant to the user.

Revisiting ENCODE data

Last year I wrote scripts to do a big search of the ENCODE Project data for proteins that could affect the one we're focused on. We identified one that happens to be a member of a family of proteins. My task is now to search the data for relationships between that regulatory protein family and the family to which our protein of main interest belongs.

More app tweaks

Today I addressed a handful of tiny inconveniences in my app, mostly surrounding the route trip listings. Those listings now require less jumping around when trying to learn about a route that isn't currently running. I also adjusted some of the "landmark" stops used in the new trip summary feature. Once the bus company releases the full data set in August I will probably need to add a few more landmarks to display the (numerous and arcane) school district diversions in a helpful way.

App improvements for fall

UIUC is planning to have some in-person classes in the fall, so some students will likely use the bus system. I want new students to have a good experience with my bus app, so I spent yesterday and today making some improvements. I finally fixed a longstanding issue where the app's main screen failed to identify the user's location. I then added a new feature to display a "fingerprint" of each trip in the route trip listings so the user can tell apart variations on and brief diversions from the common route.