Looks like this whole project thing is starting to get off the ground. Got my first return results from the ACIS live feed the other day, plus I have a reasonable idea of how to interpret them…now it would appear to be more a matter of what to do with the data now that I’m getting it. I have a couple of ideas floating around my head about the best way the app itself should work, but at this point I’m not sure which is the best to go with. Could really do with some potential consumer feedback on that.
Oh well, some progress is better than no progress after all.
Looks like some genius script kiddie just tried to exploit his way into the AdminCP. Nice try, assclown. Next time try going after a real target rather than an (admittedly, horribly outdated) Wordpress blog. Although, that said, your apparent failure to get past even this antiquated pile of crap leads me to believe that perhaps I don’t have much to worry about.
Anyway, if anyone’s wondering why user registration is currently disabled…this is the reason. In the meantime, I’m going to get onto my hosting provider about getting a newer version of Wordpress up in this bitch. God knows why they couldn’t just give me FTP access and a database user and let me do it myself, but there we are.
So, I’m getting quite close to the end of my year in industry now - only 7 weeks or so to go. As such, I’ve been giving serious thought to the topic of my final year project /dissertation, which I’m due to start in September.
For the last few weeks I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of a reasonably original idea (it’s a good job placement students don’t have to hand in their proposals until the first week of next semester or I’d be utterly screwed), and it all came to a head when I was sitting at a bus stop the other day waiting patiently for my ride to work to quit being held up by the ridiculous roadworks we have in Oxford city centre at the moment.
To pass the time I was playing Tron on my phone, whilst occasionally glancing at the digital displays we have on 90% of the bus stops in Oxford which display the name of the next service and its ETA in minutes. And suddenly, it clicked.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if I could access that information on a phone?
Granted, there’s already a web interface for OxonTime, however if you were to mash that up alongside the location-awareness feature of most modern smartphones, an OxonTime “app” could potentially tell you, given your destination, what bus you need to take, the directions to the nearest bus stop and the estimated time of departure.
I’m initially looking into developing this for Android, purely because I happen to own an Android phone and therefore have a convenient method of testing right from the start.
Now it all depends on how easy it is to scrape OxonTime’s data - or whether there’s even an API I could use…which is unlikely, but possible. We’ll see.
Over the past week, I’ve been working on updating the old, scabby UI of one of our products that integrates with the Microsoft Office platform with the new Ribbon interface that appears in 2007 onwards. If you don’t know what the Ribbon is…
…it’s that tabbed…well, Ribbon of commands you see at the top of all common Office applications, with the apparent exception of Outlook. Anyway, turns out that customizing it is a simple matter of either mashing up some XML and packaging it up in your Office Open Document (which is actually nothing more than a .zip file containing various XML documents with a fancy extension), or injecting it directly into the application at runtime. We’ve chosen the former approach out of sheer simplicity for now, however we’re looking into the latter for future versions. In either case, you can then use XML to define any new Ribbon tab(s) you need, what controls they contain, how they are laid out and probably about fifty other things that I haven’t looked into yet. The end result is that you end up with a very swish and shiny UI - but only if you’re running Office 2007 (or the beta of 2010). Otherwise you’re stuck with bog-standard addin menus, so nyerr.
On the topic of Office 2010, I’ve had the opportunity to work with it over the last few days, and whilst it does look fairly impressive, Microsoft’s new Click-to-Run installer is creating all kinds of hell with our deployment plans due to the registry keys not being in their correct places (or not even existing in some cases) - it even adds a virtual local disk drive, usually labeled ‘Q:\’, so that it can download files as it needs them…I mean, seriously. Why? Surely there is a less obtrusive method of content delivery. Steam manages perfectly well without its own fucking drive letter (…well…actually not so much in my case, I have an entire partition dedicated to Steam, but that’s not the point!) to stream application content, and it deals with files a LOT heftier than a spreadsheet app, a word processor, and a few megs of clipart.
Bah.
