Friday, October 19, 2007

2nd Meeting 17/10/07

I went to CASL to see Graeme, Steve and Lorcan and yes I did manage to get lost. Mainly talked about the technology and what I will be needing to research in the next week or so to help me choose my candidate technology, a lot of information! Basically my project will be divided into 5 core components:
  1. database in background to store the necessary fields such as person, location, etc.

  2. web server such as LAMP that gives access to the database from the web server.

  3. query component that resolves the information (maybe php or jsp; php links nicely with mysql – an open source database) how to find IP(global IP/gateway address) and Wireless Access Point

  4. client component to get their location and updated location (could even use a url type thing such as REST?Spring, hibernate and tapestry were also mentioned although hibernate less)

  5. actual clock display

So it's pretty much all going to be web based which will make life slightly easier (I hope).

Lorcan sent me his lecture slides on php just to help me get started and I will look at Miktex this weekend, and Texnic center was mentioned so I will have a look at that website as well.

All 6 of us doing Aaron's projects will have to give a presentation at the beginning of November, we will have to talk about what the project is, what technologies we will be using and we should have a system architecture diagram as well. I can't wait.

Lorcan mentioned Lorna Brown who works for Microsoft Research in Cambridge, apparently there has been interest in this project and a possible trip over to Microsoft Research could be in the future, it would be amazing!

At the beginning it's the big picture that has to be addressed but when it comes down to it, it's split into chunks that will be manageable.

My aim this weekend is to finished the rest of the research papers and get that bit sorted and have a look at the technologies that were mentioned to me, basically I have to research a lot this weekend! I'll probably get this finished by next week some time hopefully.

I think I got this all right and remembered most of the stuff said in the meeting if not I'm sure you'll let me know!!!

2 comments:

Lorcan Coyle said...

Sounds like you know what you're doing for the next few weeks... finish the initial research and document it, and start playing with the technology. As you say, every time something looks too big and complicated, just keep breaking it into smaller chunks till the next task is straightforward.
As far as i can see you've covered the main points of the meeting, maybe Graeme and Steve may remember something else... Graeme and I will start chasing up the Microsoft Research visit to see what we can do over the next week so we should have more information next time we meet. Keep up the good work, looking forward to more posts over the weekend :-)

Graeme said...

That summarised the meeting nicely. The core of the system architecture diagram that you need to produce is in those 5 points you mention (I'll comment more on a later post). As Lorcan says, the key thing now is to get that initial research phase out of the way.