Giancarlo’s Status Report for 9/21

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

• Set up the group’s WordPress website
  • This took longer than expected. I am unfamiliar with WordPress, and getting the website to look reasonable, and have all of the components that I wanted took longer than expected. However, this hopefully won’t be too large of a time investment in the future, as from now on, the group and I should be able to just make posts without having to worry about the general structure of the site.
• Worked on and reviewed proposal presentation
  • I created the content for some of the slides, and provided feedback on the presentation as a whole once the slides were finalized and formatted as they would be for submission.
• Began looking into some of the infrastructure to be used for our project
  • For our project, we intend on having a web server that receives data from our house cameras, and can recieve/respond to queries from our users. I have begun looking into using the Apache HTTP server, but I realize that more research must be done to have a functional and reasonably performant website.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be
taken to catch up to the project schedule?

At this point, much of our group’s work has been directed to the proposal presentation. As such, I think is reasonable that we have not yet given too much thought to implementation details, but it is something we must have sorted out soon, as our design review presentation is due next week.

My progress is currently not behind, as I was focused on the website and presentation, but in order to ensure I will not fall behind, I will dedicate enough time to be able to confidently describe a critique-able implementation for the group’s design review presentation.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Much of this week’s work will focus on nailing down specific tools, interfaces, and systemic structure. Many design decisions will require some research on how our subsystems are typically used in the industry and so I hope to learn enough about said components to be able to make a good design review presentation.

In particular, I was assigned to look into how we would make a server to send/receive user requests, and run our necessary ML workloads.

In order to make a solid server, there will be many design considerations to be made, and research to be done, as I have never worked with web servers before, and will need time to understand its typical use patterns and capabilities. A few questions I currently have include:

1. What sort of information is typically returned in an http request (website, dynamic content?), and what might be sent through other means?
2. What is a websocket, how does it work, and can it run on a standard http server?
3. How do http servers execute workloads? Do they need to spawn a new process, or can they call straight into my own (ML?) code?

I hope to answer at least these questions, along with the many others I have, and will inevitably come up with throughout research, during next week.

Additionally, I hope to finish our design review presentation in time for the deadline next week.