End of Spring Semester
Well the end of the semester is approaching (tomorrow at 10am) and man I can not even begin to explain how much i need it. Between project classes eating up time like crazy, I have not have had much time to see just how much I have done this semester. Here are some of the highlights:
- Trying to get Club Tennis better situated to be a top 5 school in the section. It's recruitment time!
- Winner of the Individual Sportsmanship Award at the 2009 Mid-Atlantic Tennis on Campus Sectionals
- Winner of the Team Sportsmanship Award at the 2009 Mid-Atlantic Tennis on Campus Sectionals (Yes, I won both! )
- Served as the league coordinator for Morgantown USTA Leagues. Attempted (But failing. I was close though!) to get Morgantown tennis more united... Guess there's always next year!
- Started my "summer project". More will be revealed later in the project. It is tennis related, and should be pretty epic. If all goes well, it may shake up the tennis world pretty good.
- Bought a car
- Pulled my first all nighter. (had to pull about 6 this semester)
- Was picked for the Webmaster position in the Student Government Association.
- Stepping up Club Tennis's role at the Sport Club Federation meetings. (Ran for VP, but didn't get it)
- First Tennis on Campus Mid-Atlantic Section Committee meeting
- Found another club tennis president who is also computer science major! (how rare!)
- I'm sure some other things that I'm forgetting.
Those are some of the highlights. I'm glad that the semester is over because now I can really focus on getting Club Tennis ready for the fall semester, where i fully want us to be much more powerful next year! I'll also focus on my summer project a lot now. I really believe that it can change how things are currently done, and can't wait to release it in a beta form later this summer.
USTA WV District Article About WVU Club Tennis
Was interviewed by the USTA about WVU Club Tennis. You can find more here.
On the USTA WV District Website
Well, so it turns out that WV District also put up the information about the sectional awards we won!
Check it out here...
On the USTA Mid-Atlantic Website
USTA Mid-Atlantic wrote an article about the Mid-Atlantic Tennis on Campus Sectionals, because WVU Club Tennis won the Team Sportsmanship Award and I won the Individual Sportsmanship Award.
Check out the article about the tournament here.
http://www.midatlantic.usta.com/news/fullstory.sps?inewsid=6627688&iNewsCat=%3CCAT%3E
In the DA Newspaper
I was in the newspaper a while back! They interviewed me for an article covering WVU Club Tennis.
Read the full article here: http://www.da.wvu.edu/print_edition/pdf/2009-02-05Page2.pdf
Bazaar + Loggerhead = Greatness
When I changed servers, I lost my svn repositories because of me "losing" the files. I swear i downloaded them somewhere... i just have no idea where! Anyways, I have recreated them using bazaar instead. You can view my computer science course projects and other misc projects on the loggerhead page I have setup, http://loggerhead.petederemer.com
I must say.... Bazaar is a nice upgrade from svn
Google Chrome Coming To Linux… Soon
According to Lifehacker we could see Google Chrome on Linux as soon as the first quarter of 2009.  Personally I almost switched operating systems because I like Chrome so much, so the fact that it is finally making it's way to Linux is great news to me!
Family Tree Project
I have started a project to create a free version of our family tree. Basically it is like Ancestry.com, however it is hosted on my server. This means that my family would not have to pay for ancestry.com accounts, and we don't have to rely on Ancestry.com. I'm never a fan of hosting something on a companies server when you can do it yourself.
So far there are close to 800 people added to the family tree. I've managed to find things online, taking the Spiker Family back into 1702, in Switerzland.
I want to invite everyone in my family to create an account (for free) and add your details to the site. Its the best way to get all of the family information into one spot, and it is up to multiple sides of the family to do this because one person can not possibly know everything. I would really like to see this project because something big that the entire family learns about and spends 5 minutes of their time to fill out there families information, and anything else they can add to other people they know.
Note: Living people can not be viewed on the site unless you login. This is to protect the privacy of those still living. Everyone can see those who are not longer living, without logging in.
The website is http://family.petederemer.com.
Server Move
Andrew Butcher and I have teamed up and bought a new server. We now have a SliceHost server. If you switch to SliceHost, please use this referal.
There might be a few bugs in the system, but I believe everything should be setup correctly. Please just comment if you notice anything wierd.
Tennis on Campus Data Project
Over the holidays I was looking for a cool little project to work on. What I realized is that it would be really cool to see how many people and teams are currently tallied up in the Tennis on Campus program.  So I started to think about doing it.
Limitations: Now, this little experiment is limited majory because the Tennis on Campus site is still new and does not list all of the teams. In fact it only lists about 1/5 of the total data right now. However these are the only numbers we have available to us right now
Results: What I ended up doing was writing a screen scapping program that does the following:
- Finds the URLs of all the teams listed on the Tennis on Campus website
- Tallies the total number of teams
- Finds the number of players from each team (listed on the profile page we discovered earlier)
- Adds all of the players up for a total number
I originally was going to stop here because I had the data: 131 teams, and 5,153 people. However, I realized that this little project could go one step further. I could actually create a data page where people could see just how many teams there where (listed on the website), per month. I went about a made everything more dynamic and made the script output the data into files that would be easier for parsing.
Next thing I tought myself was how to parse data in PHP. I hadn't done it before, but it proved to be a very easy process. The end result is that I was able to take all the data and put them into arrays. These arrays can be used in any number of ways now.
What I did with the data was to use it and dynamically create Google Charts using it. So now we can not only see how many people and teams are in the program, but we can see (visually with charts) just how much of an increase the numbers have each month.
To run it each month, the scrapping tool I had built previously is just setup on a cron job to run at the first of every month. The new data is added to the bottom of the data file and is dynamically added into the tables!
Check it out: http://www.petederemer.com/toc
License: GPLv3
Source: Download
