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.