Felocity

• User Interface designed for touch screen monitors
• Networked system to allow multiple kiosks
• Simple reporting / tracking proceedures for administration
• Written in Microsoft Access

!/images/portfolio/asapsigninkiosk-thumb.png(Click to Enlarge)!:/images/portfolio/asapsigninkiosk-2.png The Academic Skills Achievement Program (ASAP) needed a replacement for their existing tracking system for student sign in reporting. The old system used a campus swipe card system known as C-BORD. Unfortunately, infrequent updates, network outages and card problems made the system ineffective for large amounts of user tracking. The solution needed to be portable from system to system, be intuitive for students while providing important reporting features for administrators, and use only the existing load set for the university computers at California State University, Monterey Bay.

Microsoft Access was chosen as the platform for development for its likeness to Visual Basic for form level control, and it's ability to link tables over Windows file sharing. The final package uses a client and a server architecture. The server is a set of tables and common administrative functions, while the client contains all the applications front end functionality. In order to accommodate a Kiosk style of data entry, the interface had to be modified for use with a touch screen.…

• Web accessible for coordinators and administrators
• Networked with Asap Sign In Kiosk
• PHP and MySQL

!/images/portfolio/asaponlinescheduling-thumb.png(Click to Enlarge)!:/images/portfolio/asaponlinescheduling-1.png After the development of the ASAP Sign In Kiosk, there was a need to replace the paper based scheduling that was being used in the tutoring center. This, along with the sign in kiosk, could make it easier to manage tutor schedules. The application's initial design was to track tutoring hours, and then cross reference that with appointments made by students. This interface would be accessible both from the in-ASAP kiosks, as well as over the internet.

PHP was chosen because of its widespread use on the campus web servers. MySQL was chosen for similar reasons. Cost also played a significant role in software and platform selection. With this project would also come a redoing of the ASAP Sign In Kiosk to use HTML / Javascript.…

• Enterprise Horizontal Portal
• Java Server Pages and interactive web development
• PHP Development for backend applications

!/images/portfolio/hsdl-thumb.png(Click to Enlarge)!:/images/portfolio/hsdl-1.png Developed at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, the Homeland Security Digital Library is an online resource targeted towards military professionals with a concentration on Homeland Security and National Defense. The portal offers individuals a customized set of resources based on their institutions access to comercial content, restricted documents, and in-house generated content. The largest challenge facing the HSDL staff was the integration of it's subsystems that comprise the in-house content.

On the backend of the portal, the Scout Portal Toolkit has been put in place as a document repository for over 18,000 documents (commercial, public, and private), while Drupal was implemented for content management for things generated by the HSDL personnel. Both applications had to be heavily modified in order to meet staff needs, as well as create methods for data extraction from the HSDL portal application.…

Our homepage on the Internet is located at http://www.felocity.org Rudolph J Heuser…

It's time to break out the design skills. I can't work on Felocity (directly), else I will finish my design before May 1 and be compelled to try and push it before I'm allowed to. And so, I turned my attention towards other sites. My friend and I enjoy talking about Anime Conventions and their web sites. Especially given the nature of an anime con, the web site is your primary point of contact with the individual. And yet, the designs are often week, lack power, and even break basic usability guidelines. Our conversation this evening was actually focused on Anime Expo web site. Between the flash intro and their front page, it took me more than 20 minutes to figure out where I was supposed to go to register. (I clicked on the only lit up icon, the blue girl in the middle, but I'll get to that in a minute.) I did however, swing by the contact form and let them know that there were some major functional problems with the web site.

But complaining doesn't accomplish much. You need more; no matter if it is ideas, examples, or even the raw code, you need something to show them, to explain what is wrong. And so was born the challenge from my friend. Redesign the Anime Expo web page without creating any new images. And so, here was the analysis of the problem, the proposed solution, and the means by which the final solution was achieved. At the end are some additional adjustments that would be great ideas to further improve the design if it were not for the requirement of using only the current image set.…

My macintosh just got 100 times cooler today. Thanks to John Hicks and his entry on menubars I just added two great applications to my Macintosh. The first of these is QuickSilver which is nothing short of amazing. It's been a long dream of mine to be able to just type in what I want and have the application return it to me. And now, that dream is real. I simply trigger QS, type in what I want, and away I go. Oh, and it also can control iTunes, send messages and files over Adium, locate documents, run scripts and commands, and I bet it could even make an iced mocha if someone had the time to create the plugin. I must say though, their site does little to explain what exactly QS does. Let me take a moment to say that what it does on the surface is launch programs. What it really does deep inside is provide a text-searching interface to anything on your computer with a robust menu that lets you do pretty much anything with anything you find.

The second of these applications is known as Synergy which I had actually heard a lot about, but had never grabbed. Having seen it's interface and having become annoyed with alt-tabbing into iTunes to switch tracks, I decided to give it a whirl. As of Synergy's install, iTunes has been given the Cmd+H treatment, and I don't miss it at all. Plus the next-track flyout reminds me of all those music notices when you are playing an EA game. As if that wasn't enough, it also downloads album graphics off of Amazon for me and is pretty customizable. I have yet to try it with multiple monitors, but I'm really confident it will do fine.…

This last Wednesday, I appreared with [The Pickle Bandlt" on O.S.T., part of California State University, Monterey Bay's radio program. The topic was Gaia Online, and the interview was awesome. We actually managed to kill the servers, as people were reporting the maximum number of connections were reached. I want to thank Steven Levinson for his ambitious program, and Pickle Bandit for having me. For those who were not able to get the low down on the Gaia goods:

"Piece 1](http://www.felocity.org/media/2005/03/09-gaiaonost/Jakobo-1.mp3) (3.08 mb) Piece 2 (3.85 mb) Piece 3 (1.81 mb)…