| Edmon Begoli 的个人资料hGadget Project Space照片日志列表 |  工具  帮助 |
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8月7日 What a Complex Piece of WorkThat I knew that I would end up building such a beast I would probably give up.
Just kidding.
Actually, I am not. We Judoka never give up when faced with the challenge. It is all part of the mindset.
So what did I finally build. A little monster hiding behind three innocent web pages.
I ended up implementing a motion detector, X10/INSTEON controller, web services bridge for INSTEON DeviceManager and webcam area monitor.
My little hGadget component has a relational backend, webservices interface, integrated security and bunch of other bells and whistles.
And you can barely tell ... all because of that awful CSS that I love and hate so much.
I've spect 20% of the project time implementing all these wrinkled features such as WebServices, image recognition, device controls ... and 80% tweaking UI. I discovered along the road that Visual Studion Express has some strange feature where it overrides the style of the component if for instance image is bigger than expected.
Uuu, that really messed me up.
All in all, the biggest discovery of the project was ASP.NET. It is amazing how productive that technology is. With the browser open and Google handy I was just flying through the API. I never spent more than 30 min on an issue (except for CSS that just ate me alive).
I am just too tired to type any more.
Just to mention that my daughter is doing much better.
One more thing:
I wish all finalists the best of luck and lots of success in the final "grading" as well as in their professional careers. I wish all my projects are this much fun.
8月2日 While we are waiting ...We did not have any results yet regarding my daughter. She is doing fine but only lab results will tell us complete story.
Went to bed last night around 4:00 AM, maybe 4:30 AM.
Woke up around 10:00 AM. Could not go to work because we had to wait for the doctor to call. I also could not be on a conference call for the same reason.
While waiting, in a half-asleep state I was writing some web services and UI component for device management.
I was once again reminded and impressed how simple and easy is to do web services in .NET (my primary skill was always J2EE).
Here is the class that delegates device management operations to INSTEON's objects:
[ WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")][ WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]public class DeviceManagerWS : System.Web.Services.WebService {... and here is one method that allows me to verify status of my home devices/appliances:
[ WebMethod] public String GetStatus(String deviceID){ return sdm3.GetOnLevelText( deviceID ); } To test it from the browser just right click on the WebSerbice and select "View in Browser" WebService interface opens in the browser:
then select the service. It opens the very handy form for testing of the service, plus it gives the SOAP 1.1, 1.2 and REST interface descriptions.
Medical trouble with my daugtherMy three year old daughter was admitted to the emergency room in the local children's
hospital after the significant bleeding from her left ear.
At this point causes of the bleeding are still unknown.
They've done a culture testing so we should hopefully know something by tomorrow (actually later today because it is 3:39 AM now).
You may ask how will this affect my project.
I honestly don't know.
I was on track so far, but I am not sure how will the upcoming days look like. 6月30日 Images Instead of Live Stream for MonitoringAt this point I am really considering utilizing the technique for the area monitoring outlined at
Coding4Fun web site:
I should probably have a working module today and hopefully demonstrate it over the weekend.
The reason why I want to opt for this approach is a bandwith utilization. Having a live stream over the web may be a little bit too network intensive, specially if you want to have mutliple monitors enabled.
For now I plan to have a refresh option and most likely a motion detector indicator that shows
if the motion was detected since the most recent viewing or reading.
I will see how things go in the next few days, I will monitor the bandwith and make the final decision based upon
the observations. 6月23日 Building on VistaI've decided to contine development on Windows Vista.
Since I have to buy a new hard drive for my other laptop I am thinking to install the Windows Vista on it.
It is a decent laptop (Gateway GX 7422 )
so I expect that it will be able to handle Aero and all the other goodies. I am sort of taking a risk on introducing the new project variable but I am just too curious ...
In the next edition I will share some design decisions related to the product I am developing. 5月28日 Let's rollI think it is appropriate to start the blog about my project for "Made in Express" by talking about the project itself.
What I am really trying to do?
We have PCs. Some of us have laptopts, maybe Pocket PCs, tablets, smart phone.
At the fingertip we can control, access, automate, schedule, manipulate so many aspects of our highly wired life.
Always in touch, always in control, informed.
However, one important aspect of our life is always left out.
Instead of talking about that aspect diretly let's look at the common situation that we also face:
and list goes on and on.
Our home has been left out of the information revolutions. It is either notoriously low tech, or the proposed virtual home solutions are just to expensive for the average person to afford it. I am planning to work on reversing that trend - with the help of free Microsoft tools and with few home automation appliances.
In the next edition: Project idea details |
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