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.