Bye bye blog!

So everything is finshed, project and thesis handed in, presentation done which I got 2nd place in because yes I am that good and college is over forever!

It was going so well...

So I think I may have fixed the Processing problem, it now prints out 1 bubble for each person.

SQL is back to ruin my life though, I was going to use the UPDATE statement to update a persons location but the TIMESTAMP is making this way too difficult and it doesn't want to. So I think I'll have to go to plan B and reorganise the DB. ugh.

No Pressure!

Yesterday I met with Steve and Lorcan to get feedback on my interim report and discuss my goals for this last part of term.

For my final report, it was suggested that I go through my project specification and with each milestone, write whether I have achieved that milestone or not, if not why not, and if I have what steps I took to complete it. These milestones can also be used as my report subheadings to break up the report a bit.

To complete my mandatory I have to get the display working properly, find a way to get Wireless Access Points, hopefully this should be similar to how I obtained the MAC addresses and then I have to find a way so that the clock gets the updated locations automatically rather than the user manually inputting them.

We also talked about the final demo, so I'll have to come with ways of showing the clock in action even though I'll still be in the room the whole time! Lorcan suggested having 2 bluetooth dongles, each representing a different location.

Testing and evaluation was discussed, the idea of testing it with my family would work, then after a week I could ask them if they used it much, did they like it, the usual evaluation questions.

Back to Work

I have Processing and Java cooperating with each other, although as soon as they did I found a load of problems with the database tables and stuff.

To update a location it allows it only if it is not there so you can really only register a location and not update it. I think I'll have to add a new table and use the SQL update statement so that this tells the clock where people are without deleting locations with their registered addresses.

Another problem is with the display, if a users location does change then the icon appears in the right location but it also satys in the previous one, so i have extra icons! Not good. Not sure how to fix this one at the moment.

Also need to figure out a way of incorporating individuality to the icons so that they can be distinguished between each other and correspond to a specific user. I think this should be ok to do. Not sure if I'll be using text or pictures yet.

Thats my list of things to do in the immediate future, I'm sure after my meeting later on I'll have a new longer list!

Microsoft Trip - 14/03/08

Geeking it up in Cambridge

On Friday, Lorcan and I flew out to Cambridge to go to Microsoft Research and visit some of the researchers who were part of the Whereabouts Clock. We met with Abigail Sellen (who looked after us for most of the day - thank you!), and we had a talk with her and also with Alex Taylor who also worked on the clock. We went through the differences with their clock and mine, the main issue being that mine is web-based and will more be for friends than family or colleagues. Abigail thought that this was completely different from their clock as theirs is designed to be at-a-glance but always there whereas if mine is on the internet then someone would have to log onto that page to see it and this perhaps defeats the purpose. This made me think and I would like to re-explore the possibility of having the clock as a tangible clock that can stand in a room rather than just be on the internet.

We then got to see the Whereabouts Clock and were shown a demo of it. There were a few icons and when an icon was pressed a new display popped up showing text messages that had been sent with the most recent being on top and you could scroll through these messages. One of the icons represented a child who would be too young to take part but when pushed the icon would make a sound and do random animations e.g., the icon would turn into a flower. Also when someone changed location the clock would make a noise which I liked the idea of and would like to use in my project. Below the clock is a small area where the settings are, I didn’t know what these were before so I was curious to find out, the pendulum swings in the middle and this would show the signal strength of the GPRS while on the left hand side was 5 buttons for brightness, Abigail mentioned that in the trials people liked to dim the clock at night and on the right there were 5 buttons for volume as sometimes the noises could be a little loud especially with children pressing their icon. We also got to see other past projects such as HomeNotes.

After lunch we met with Tim Regan, who did not work on the clock but he was full of ideas especially regarding how to acquire Wireless Access Points, and told us about past projects that he had worked on which were all incredible. He kindly took our picture next to the Whereabouts Clock and sent them on. We then got to talk to Sharam Izadi who was behind the technology part of the clock and I showed him what I’d done so far but of course it decided not to work properly!

After meeting everyone we got a chance to go into the town of Cambridge and it is such a lovely town so I’m glad I got to see it. It was such a good day and we didn’t run into any problems which was very surprising!

I had such a good day and a big thank you to Microsoft Research for having us and also to the college who funded this trip – I really appreciate it and came back eager to get started on my project again! But first there is the small matter of exams…

Php and java

I have a java class that connects to the server through php and it prints out the information my php displays in the command line
e.g., Colin's location is unknown etc...
Go me.

Meeting - 25/02/08

Met with Graeme, Steve and Lorcan yesterday for a meeting. The aim is to get my project working so it's an end to end version, this invovles doing some more java to get updates from the server, I'll probably do this via php, I'll look into that first.
Next I have to combine the java with Processing so that the java code is linked to my clock and the animation is updated whenever someone changes location, Processing is a form of Java so hopefully this won't be too difficult to implement.
I'll be meeting with Lorcan next week at some stage to sort out the plans for the Microsoft trip and he'll run through his presentation.
Then there's the interim report which I hope to have my first draft finished by the end of this week.
After that I'll then get to work on adding a way of getting wireless access points.

Coding Schtuff

I added JOptionPanes into my code to start off a GUI, I don't really like the default look and feel so was thinking of having a JFrame just so I can change that but that's really just me being picky!
Also I noticed when no name was entered, the record would be added to the database with the name field being null so I changed this where it gives an error if the field is left blank and it quits the program.

Designing woop woop

So I've come up with one idea for the clock and hopefully its ok!

Also wanted to have my icons in a bubble like this

now i have to work on the text with HOME, SCHOOL etc.

teeny tiny update

thought i broke my code but i had it trying to send info to a php file that i'd deleted! oopsies. Luckily I had a backup coz I'm great.

I have my java code giving an error whenever its not connected to the internet as me and Graeme couldn't figure out why it wasn't getting the MAC address over in CASL where there is no internet where we were, go us, although in fairness to Graeme he figured it out!

My webpage has two extra pages, one to register a username, one to register a location, at the moment the php page doesn't get the MAC address, it just gives directions on how to get it and the user has to put it in themselves.

Meeting - 07/02/2008

I met with Graeme and Lorcan today and discussed my presentation, basically I have to not apologise ever and get less nervous! I'll work on that.
Also discussed the trip to Microsoft Research, plan is that Lorcan will talk about my project, some of the other final year projects and some of his research which will be interesting, then I'll demo my project which should be pretty good by then (fingers crossed!)
Spent a while cleaning up my code, I had an extra table in my database which I didn't need and I'll incorporate user inputs into my webpage so they can register a location and register their usernames which will then be saved in the database. This shouldn't be too hard so I'll do this first. I will also update my System Architecture diagram and post it when I get round to doing it.
Next step is my clock display, can't wait! Graeme gave me a list with Flash, java 2d etc, which I will look into, was talking to Owen about Processing which he is using, it can be used in Eclipse which sounds handy.
I'm gonna make a start on my report as well wrt the design and why I've chosen to use the technologies and other possibilities I considered etc.
Also have to make a java GUI such as a JOptionPane but this is less important for now.

So I now have my php displaying where people are refreshing every 60 seconds for when the database is updated.
I also have it displaying when someone's location is not known, but instead of printing out their name it prints out "Resource id#3's location unknown", I'm not sure why...!

Presentation plans

I followed pretty much the outline Lorcan gave to us with regards to our slides for the presentation, I've sent them to Graeme just to check that they're not crap so hopefully they're ok!
Been panicing slightly over the demo we have to give, my Java code is interacting with the database although it isn't inputting the information it takes in, it just adds a blank row, grrr.
I should be meeting with Graeme tomorrow to go over the code in person, this should solve the problem

More Java

I'm still working on the Java program, and after a very dumb half an hour yesterday (sorry Graeme!) I now have the MAC code and all the Java code works together and prints out in the command line asking for a user name and prints out the MAC address. But now it doesnt print out on my php page so I'm once agin confused. I think it's because I have more than one Java file I'm not sure so I'll troubleshoot this and see what information I can find.

Java fun

Just an update on what I've done recently, admittedly it's not much with the first week and the fact that it was Java I needed to do!
At the moment I have two seperate Java programs, one can read in input from the command line which I need to get a username.
The second is a program that communicates with php, at the moment it's a simple hello world test that prints to my web page but I have it working so shouldn't be too bad to get it to do what I want.
So I've saved the best till last, to get the MAC address through Java.

Meeting - 18/01/08

On Friday I had a meeting with Steve and Graeme, they helped solve my problem with the database taking in the usernames and showing their most recent time, the php can now take in any number of users and output their max times.

I had to make a few minor changes to my code, just clean it up a bit.

My next task is to write some java code that takes in a username string and obtains the MAC address, thank you Graeme for sending on the code to help with that section! I'll have to look into how to connect to the web from java such as httprequest or something.
Then I'll have another php page that gets the username and MAC address from the java code and it will then send this to the database.

yaaay

So the for loops and all that was hurting my head and I tried two different queries in the one php file and when I had it for my name it printed nothing as I didnt have the Max(time) the other user did. This was a problem but Colin was the bestest and helped me so I used ASC LIMIT which prints out the two most recent times and it works woop woop. I'm going to add another user to see if it still works for more users.
The code needs to be cleaned up but that can wait.

I'm stuck

So the printing out a line for each person is hard and I'm officially stuck, I used the MAX(time) method and that works for only the most recent obviously, so it only prints out "Christine was last seen at home at [maxtime]".
I tried a few other methods I think the LIMIT method could be a possibility but I wasn't able to incorporate it into my code.
I was thinking maybe there could be a way to have a query for each person to print out their max times but once again I'm not sure how to go about this, any ideas?

I got my table printing out stuff in order of the most recent input, that was ruining my life for a while but I've gotten to grips with how time works in sql, I had to change it back to TIMESTAMP but it doesn't seem to be a problem.

I've been trying to get it to print out the most recent input rather than all of the fields and it now prints out the most recent one, I'll have to do a bit more to get it to print out a line for each person but hopefully that won't be as time consuming as the other one which turned out to be one line of SQL code

Database Fun

Yesterday I added some test data to my two tables and I have a php page displaying fields from both tables in a table, e.g., Name, Location, Time using the SELECT keyword, i preferred this over the JOIN keyword. I have to change it from text into sentences like Christine was at home at 1.20p.m.
At the moment it just prints out everything that is the same in both tables so I have to get it to print out the recent location added by someone. I had my 'time' field as type TIMESTAMP but apparently this doesn't work well with comparisons so I'll have to change that probably to DATETIME. TIMESTAMP was handy because it printed out the date and time by default, hopefully DATETIME does this too.
I'll probably need to alter my database a little once most things are working, like the IP address is of type TEXT so it takes in anything at the moment but that's not hugely important right now, also the collation default in phpmyadmin is swedish for some random reason but it works in english so i'll leave it!

First meeting of 2008

I met with Graeme and Steve yesterday to discuss my progress and what I need to do next with regards to my database.
I need to input some test data and work from that to get stuff working, i'll need to have two tables in my database using each other to get all the information required, one table will have ID, IP address and location e.g., HOME, SCHOOL etc, the other table will have ID, IP address and the time it was last updated.
I'll then need to have the two tables working together and printing out a line for each person, e.g., Christine was at home at 1.20 p.m.
Once I have that working I can try to find a way to obtain the IP address rather than typing it in manually.

Database Interactions

I have my website getting the information inputted by a user and storing it in my database using PHP and today I did the opposite, I can now also display the contents of my database on a web page so I'm a happy camper.
I have to think more about my database now and decide what needs to be stored in it.
I have a meeting tomorrow so there'll be a huge long blog to write after that more than likely.

Christmas is over, sob

So I started work yesterday and I got my Chapter 2 draft finished and have included my abstract and stuff in the final report template.

Today's goal was to fix up my simple php file as the input from my html form wasn't outputting to another php file but I have that fixed and working now although it is very basic but as long as it's working that's enough for me at the moment.

The next task is to try and get my php file to interact with my database. Not quite sure to go about this but google will be my friend and I'll read up on it.