OK, so to decide what to start off with.

OK, I decided to start off with TA work – Padmini’s reminder email virtually left no choice. I was going to begin with that anyway. Right looking at the crawler code. Must remember there is a lot for me to learn here as well. First the importance of a good readme file. Placement and visibility of instruction comments. Precise instructions on how to run.

OK this thing works but the question is how to interpret it. What is the Maximum Frontier ? It is the maximum allowed number of URLs from a page that are yet to be crawled. Here it is set to infinity. Then it says Frontier: 1. It means there is only 1 seed element in the frontier. i.e. http://www.uiowa.edu.

OK I need to refocus on what I need to do. Padmini has asked me to

a) Go through the crawler code

b) See if I can run it

Well, a) seems harder. Reading the README file it asks me to make some change in the Tester file (email address) and clearly recompilation is an issue.

When I try to run it, it does run to completion and spit out the stats but gives a couple of OutofMemoryExceptions while creating threads. It is hard for me to figure out what exactly the problem is.

Question is – do I have enough to get back to her? I can tell her that I looked at the code.

OK, first pass done … question is now what do I do? I need to understand the code better.

OK I need to get up to date with compilations and stuff with java.

It is time to turn to research work. I had a meeting with Kasturi today. He seems intent on going into the details of the bad example. This should be interesting. Let me look at the bad example. Oh crap! I may have been wrong again! Perhaps not, I have the figure now.