USC Course Planner

Last summer I created a Python app to simplify the process of making course plans for the next semester. It features a course bin where one can add courses and filter sections to be scheduled. The app automatically retrieves and parses course information from USC Schedule of Classes page on user request using a Beautifulsoup based scraper. The user can edit his or her preferences on the “preferences” page in terms of how he or she likes early / late courses, how much time he or she likes to have between sections, and when to have lunch / dinner breaks. The app uses a depth-first search algorithm to find the […]

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Code Smart Timer and Ultimate Calculator with Qt

This time, I’ll show you a few projects I did last June. First, smart timer. Back then I wanted to learn some basics about GUI design, so I looked into PyQt. After doing some digging in the documents, I decided to do something for real. I really liked the simple design of Chris Dziemborowicz’s Hourglass, so I tried to imitate it to practice. I ended up with a timer which had more or less all the primary functions Hourglass had, and looked fairly similar. It could parse simple natural language inputs like “3 hours 5 minutes” or “5m 30s”, but once I press the “start” button, time would turn into […]

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Scraping Course Schedule with Beautifulsoup

Class registration is no easy task. Getting all the courses one likes often takes a lot of researching and planning. To complicate the matter, some of the sections do not have instructor listed. Today (well, actually a month ago) I am going to deal with this problem.

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