Sunday: starting reading …

… up on traffic models. Some link of suspected use/interest over and above the standard spreadsheet:

• Visualising Transport Data for Data.gov.uk http://itoworld.blogspot.com/2009/10/visualising-transport-data-for.html

• SPARQLing data.gov.uk: Transport Data http://blogs.talis.com/n2/archives/836

• Something to do with TALIS — not quite sure what this is though http://n2.talis.com/wiki/Introduction_to_the_Platform

• The Real Deal: data.gov.uk http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/115

• Annual Average Daily Traffic Flows http://www.dft.gov.uk/matrix/

Good luck on the stylesheets everyone

Tue II: Completed unit tests for Car class …

Title kind of says it all. Car unit tests completed: am taking perverse geeky pleasure in re-running them and seeing that magic output from the console:

Ran 14 tests in 0.000s

OK

Hmmm, heavenly.

However next up is the unit tests for the World class. I think the _assignCars one is not going to be a hoot. Oh well, fun fun fun for tomorrow.

Tue I: more coding …

Getting there … today was trying to understand why I had inserted a particular inner loop, which in the end was the source of a bug. Continued writing unit tests, and will continue tonight.

Notes from meeting with VR F2F, Fri 6-Nov-2009 …

Keep going on model development, and focus on this as the primary goal, as the thesis depends on this.

Start thinking about what the thesis structure will look like: create an outline of the thesis in bullet point format — this will act as a “sign post” / goal for what the research needs to show and include.

Generic structure of thesis:

• Introduction (Motivation)
  • The problem
  • Overview of solution
  • The wider case
  • Structure of the document
• Background and related research
• Experiments — for each:
  • Methods
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion
• References

Mon: 2 steps forward, 1 step back …

Been messing around with code. Hmm, not going great, but have worked out logic for braking that appears fairly solid:

• work out distances between you and other cars
• if velocity is smaller than the distance, use velocity
• if distance is negative, ignore
• find the minimum value, i
• subtract 1 from i — this is the distance between current car and next car.

Thu II: More TDD delights …

Some links from today and yesterday of probable use:

• http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/python_201/python_201.html Misc slightly advanced Python topics
• http://docs.python.org/library/unittest.html unit test documentation
• list of python beginner topics http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers

Thu: I’ve seen the light …

… and TDD is wonderful. Links of use from today’s unit testing efforts:

• http://onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2004/12/02/tdd_pyunit.html

… er, and that’s it: have referenced previous links prior. There was a good link I was using at home yesterday that I need to dig out. But this link: http://www.awaretek.com/tutorials.html seemed to have a bunch of interesting stuff in it, including using links to TDD approaches.

Wed: documentation FTW …

After last night’s coding session, where I refactored the TCA simulation into something reasonable, now going through the process of documenting the code, as did not exactly do a top-drawer job last night …. whoops. This page is excellent though on coding standards for Python: http://jaynes.colorado.edu/PythonGuidelines.html.

And then: onto Unit testing!!! In a bid to try and produce some code that is reliable going forwards. (Yes, doing this back to front I know, but noob at work here !)

Tue: coding TCA …

Right, been spending the last few days coding a 1d TCA .. and have now got to the point of concluding vs. 1 of model *works* but is pretty nasty … so will probably cut version 2 later this evening.

I need to start putting unit tests in as well, to give me some faith in what is happening …