Category Archives: Reference

Previous Work: CSR Interface and Dashboard for MetroLINK (2012)

Posted by on July 25, 2012 No comments

Static demo (w/ dummy data)

Source code (zip)

Before I begin I want to say that the code here, along with any other code I have posted, is posted with the expressed permission of the company that originally had me write it.

This is something I’ve been anxious to write about, I’m really happy with the results and it helped out quite a bit at MetroLINK.  It’s a web dashboard to show the call data from Metro’s Customer Service Representatives (CSRs).  It pulls data from an Access database through ODBC, and uses PHP to generate the main dashboard as well as the drill-down pages.  The graphs are provided by the excellent Flot javascript library.

Last year it was decided that more information had to be gathered in regards to how many calls the CSRs were taking, and what those calls were about.  Our phone system didn’t support anything beyond basic logging, so until the system could be upgraded something needed to be put in place that would allow the CSRs to track their own calls.  I opted for Access because it was a database system others were already familiar with, and I could make an interface easily enough by using VBA and Access’ own forms.  We saw results almost immediately, and had a much better insight into what the CSRs were doing.

Just using the Access built-in reporting functionality was great, but it was missing the “live” element.  That’s when I decided to start working on this in my spare time.  I discussed what we would need on a dashboard with my co-workers, and then set out to make it happen.

I had some hesitation when I was figuring out how to get the data from the Access file to PHP.  The same file was being used by the CSRs to input this same data, so I had been worried about the file being locked.  The Access forms were already split to avoid this, but I didn’t know how a connection from PHP  would behave.  With ODBC setting up the connection to the Access file was a breeze, and I was pleased to find out it handled multiple connections without issue.  On top of that I could specify that the connection was read-only, providing some security as well.

When I was designing the dashboard I wanted it to have a similar appearance to the public-facing website gogreenmetro.com, so I borrowed the color scheme and title image.  While the data was only changing on each refresh (more on that later) I wanted the dashboard to appear to have activity in it.  To get to this goal I included several hover-over effects and made things respond in useful ways where I could.  Primarily in the graphs and tables where you can highlight parts and get specific information about a point or pie piece.  While it isn’t perfect, it gives the dashboard a little more polish and makes it feel more “alive” than the same page without those elements.

After the main dashboard was completed I started working on the drill-down pages.  They can both be accessed by clicking the numbers for total number of calls and number of unresolved on the main page.  The unresolved drill-down is just a larger version of the breakdown by CSR, which is just building a table.  But the number of calls drill-down introduced some challenges.

On the main page I used the hour function to group calls by hour, and sent that to Flot.  It was simple, and worked for the purposes of the graph.  Moving on to the more advanced graphs though, that method was no longer going to work.  I had to use Flot’s time support, which means I needed to get milliseconds from the Unix Epoch, as that’s JavaScript’s native time format.  None of this was too challenging until timezones entered the picture.  Using Datediff to give me seconds from epoch gave me a sort of “false UTC” that treats the times as if there was no time zone offset.  Since the data would always be correct in the actual database and the presentation wasn’t affected, I saw no problems with this.  It actually encourages it in the Flot API instructions.

Until I checked the tooltips.  JavaScript corrects for time zone when you start using date functions, so all my times were coming in a few hours off.  PHP provides a great way to get the local time zone offset in seconds, so I used that to correct the difference by changing it before the page was rendered.  A side effect of this is that the times change depending on where the page is viewed, so 3pm Central would be 1pm Pacific and so on.  In this context it would probably be a bug, but in other contexts it would be a feature.

In all, this project taught me a lot.  It reinforced my knowledge of things like JSON, HTML/CSS, and how to implement designs to work cross-browser.  It gave me a chance to use PHP for a project, and I learned about it in the process.  Finally, it also gave me a chance to really use Flot and jQuery.  Being able to bring all these things together in one consistent project was a great experience.

Previous Work: Halo Stats (2010-2011)

Posted by on May 30, 2012 No comments

 

Download the Halo Stats for TouchPad source code

When Halo Reach was released a few years ago, I stumbled upon their statistics API and saw an opportunity for a new webOS application.  I had seen some success with my Quick Subnets app and wanted to develop more, but a creative writer’s block had set in and I couldn’t find something I wanted to build.  When I saw the API that was available, inspiration finally hit!  I created an application that allowed the user to look up any Halo Reach player and see their information.

Now, I’ll be the first person to downplay the abilities of Halo Stats.  It basically only loads player and challenge data, when other applications load all kinds of per-match statistics and information, and even display it in a better format.  But at the time, deciding to write it was a lofty goal.  I had never written an application that connects to the internet before other than some class projects in college, and I didn’t really know about AJAX and JSON beyond just the concepts of them.  Writing this was an opportunity to learn both of those concepts, and through that further expand my Javascript knowledge.

One thing I remember in particular is finding out how easy it is to access JSON compared to XML or other formats.  To do this day I opt for JSON when I can because of that.  I also remember that the frameworks used on the webOS hardware would block XMLHttpRequest calls, and wanted their abstracted versions to be used instead.  That was an adventure in troubleshooting almost worth its own post!

After I had written Halo Stats for the Palm Pre, I was actually contacted by a programmer representative at Palm who wanted to get me set up to write more apps, and even encouraged me to get a TouchPad version of the application together before it launched.  The TouchPad was using a new framework called Enyo, while the Pre had used Prototype.  So at the time I was writing code for a framework with no documentation outside the HP/Palm forums, for hardware that hadn’t been released to the public yet.  All my testing was done via web browser or emulator.  It was quite the challenge, and experience!

There are things I would definitely do different if I were to write this again though.  For me the biggest problem is in the code itself, I had some problems associating the style information to the elements that Enyo was generating; so I chose instead to set the innerHTML property of the elements to some HTML I was generating, and then I would control the styling via CSS.  This was beneficial in many ways,  I could centralize my styling, it allowed me to use techniques I was already familiar with and made the development process faster.  But it was detrimental in that I had no control of the display or positioning that was happening higher up in the software, and couldn’t predict some of the output because of that.  And the resulting code now has chunks of hard coded HTML in it, which is ultimately harder to work with in the long term.  When I made MD5 Lookup I worked around that, but I had far lower styling expectations for that program.

Staying on the styling issues – looking back I really wish I had put more time into it.  I will always claim to be a web developer before a designer, but I’m not completely blind to a bad layout.  The commendations are off-center and not vertically aligned with each other, there is a blue border around the right frame for no real reason, the challenges don’t like up with the map and other elements – and I could go on.  Ultimately the design was rushed and it makes the entire application worse.  In the future that is something I be sure to avoid, by putting in the time to properly test the styling and nitpick over the small details until it looks more refined.  Again, I’m not a designer – but that doesn’t excuse a poor layout and appearance. In retrospect I’d rather have a simple design that looks great than what happened here.

At this point the TouchPad, Pre, and webOS are outmoded, and even Bungie’s stat servers only give back historical data.  No new games are being registered on their servers.; everything has been replaced with 343’s Halo Waypoint.  But, if you have some webOS hardware or an emulator image Halo Stats is still available in the app store, and you can even look up a player’s info, as long as they played before the switch over to 343. I’ve posted the source code above as well – most of my writing is in the source folder, under SplitView.js and Splitview.css.

Thanks for reading!

Previous Work: Transfer Chart at MetroLINK (2009)

Posted by on May 18, 2012 No comments

This is my first post in a series detailing some of my previous work.  It serves to remind me of how I accomplished tasks before, formats and techniques I used, and gives me a means to show my work to others if needed.

When I started at Metrolink I was tasked with finding ways to improve their Computer Aided Dispatch / Automatic Vehicle Location (CAD/AVL) system and implement the data it was using.  Part of that process was filling in for dispatchers and learning the routes and stops used by the buses.

The most difficult part of this was sending passenger requested transfers.  They had to be sent from the requesting buses to the receiving buses manually, through the dispatcher.  For a seasoned dispatcher this wasn’t a problem, but in my case I never had enough time on dispatch to really cement in my mind which buses would be at each transfer location.  Eventually I found a way to make a cheat sheet:  I would use SQL to query the scheduling database, giving me an always up-to-date schedule from the current time to about an hour after that.  I would use JSP and Spring to get that information onto a web page and formatted in a way that makes determining where the transfers are going easier.  Then I could access this sheet from any browser to figure out the transfers more quickly, and give it to new dispatches to aid them as well.

Here is what it looks like, or click here for an offline demo:Metrolink's Transfer Chart

I don’t want to write pages of material about how Metro’s route system works, but suffice it to say that the Route (the colored section) is a path the bus takes, the block number next to it designates different buses on the same route, and the location shown on the right tells you where the bus will be at the time shown on top of the box.  Up top you can filter out just the routes you want to see.

A really basic example of how this would be used is this:  Assume it’s about 7:50am, and I have the screen shown above. I receive a transfer from block number 2102 requesting the Route 30.  Looking over the 8:00am entry, I can see that the 2102 is a route 10 bus that will be at Centre Station at that time.  So now I need to look at the route 30s – there is one that will be at Black Hawk College at 8:00, and another that will be at Centre Station.  The Centre Station bus is the one I want, so I’ll send the message to the bus with the block number 2302.  The whole process takes just a few seconds, which is important because there are a large number of transfers that come in.

When I was designing this I had several objectives in mind, along with making sure the chart functioned correctly.  First I wanted to keep content and presentation as separate as possible.  It makes for cleaner code – especially since this is written in JSP for actual use – and I love the idea of swapping out the CSS and some images for a complete appearance overhaul.  The only portion of this page where I break that ideal is the table up top – the background colors are set on the page.  That said, there isn’t much of a reason to change that table, and doing this via CSS is easy enough by setting an ID for each cell.

I wanted the design to be consistent cross-browser as well.  Unfortunately when dealing with IE6 there is only so much one can hope for, but generally speaking this looks the same no matter how you load it.  And it doesn’t lose functionality in any browser.  That said, since I wrote the code some display inconsistencies have popped up in the newest version of Firefox.  Specifically in how the table is handled in the top menu bar.

This project had its share of problems too, I hadn’t worked with visibility and display CSS settings before, so learning how they worked took some time and made for some unusual results.  This was exacerbated a bit when I added the ability to jump between “time points” where the buses are at one of the transfer locations.  I had to put an anchor link in an invisible div that remained active in the DOM, while not disturbing the rest of the layout, and also jumped to exactly the right position when click.  It took some time tweaking to get all of that working, but I love the results.  When you jump to an item it lines up with the top nearly perfectly.

Also, if I had to do it over I wouldn’t use Spring for this chart.  I had done some internship work at Pearson where I used Spring and JSP to display database information, and having heard about how much easier Spring makes database access I figured it would be foolish not to include it.  But this project only needed one query to be sent on load time, and all the excess that Spring brought to the table wasn’t worth it.  If I had more queries to run it would be a whole different story, but for something this simple I think Spring was excessive.

Overall, I’ve been very happy with how this project turned out and how useful it’s been.  The first day I used it I was nearly able to keep pace with the other dispatchers, and the drivers noticed that I wasn’t taking as long to get them their information.  It was even used for dispatchers in training up until about a month or two ago, when the CAD/AVL system automated the sending of transfers.  Not bad eh?

Changing ownership on a Linux CIFS share

Posted by on November 18, 2011 2 comments

This is one of those very simple things that just doesn’t seem to come up right away in Google search results.  Especially if you’re new to how Linux handles ownership and file permissions.

Working on the server I mentioned in my last post, I couldn’t get some of the applications I am using to properly access my NAS mount point.  Specifically, any time permissions were trying to be changed it would fail because the program was running as my user, and not root.  Normally I’d just run the scripts as root, but I felt it’d be more secure to instead change those mounts to my user account.  Especially since these would be running unattended.  Also, I wanted fstab to bring up the drives already associated with my account.

First and foremost: Using chown on a mounted share will not work.  The command will behave as though it succeeded, but the ownership will not change.  Ownership can only be assigned at mount time.  Be ready to umount the share you wish to change ownership on.

The trick is to add the gid and uid to the fstab line for the mount.  So this:

//192.168.1.100/share      /media/nasshare          cifs    guest,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0770,dir_mode=0770 0 0

Becomes this:

//192.168.1.100/share      /media/nasshare          cifs    guest,rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,gid=1000,uid=1000,file_mode=0770,dir_mode=0770 0 0

The above examples give full access to a share with no credentials, so it’s only shown as an example. But the gid and uid parameters specify the user and group that the share will mount as.

The source I’ve been using to learn all of these mounting procedures is here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=288534

Any more information needed about mounting shares in Ubuntu can be found there.

A real home network and server

Posted by on October 31, 2011 No comments

Over the last few months I’ve been making steady improvements to the network and sever situation in the house I live in.  I have two roommates, so finding time to implement changes is sometimes a challenge.  They aren’t big fans of the internet going down while I upgrade things.  And when I set up a server I want to present it only after I have it running and know they can expect it to be reliable.

A few months ago I upgraded the existing network.  There were some specials on Newegg that allowed me to change up several components.  The Linksys router was switched to the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH.  I wanted something with the customization capabilities of DD-WRT, but a with little more memory and speed than the (still great) Netgear WNR2000.  Unfortunately, the WZR-HP-G300NH has some problems, namely the current official firmware – which is a DD-WRT build – has a wireless dropout issue.  While I linked to the DD-WRT site there, I don’t approve of the fixes on the Wiki.  Monitoring for a dropped ping and restarting the wireless interface is not a fix, it’s a hack in the derogatory sense.

I was seeing daily drops of the Wifi connection, and ultimately had to add in the old Linksys back as an AP.  I’m still using the Buffalo for wireless N, and my N devices are laptops and phones that don’t need constant connections.  Fortunately the router is rock-solid for wired connections, so with a Gigabit Switch that was also on sale I was set with enough connections and speed to set up something cool.

For the servers I had two machines:  A 2.26Ghz Pentium 4 1GB, and a Core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz  8GB server that I picked up very cheap from a friend of mine.  The Pentium 4 was already working as a media server – it couldn’t do any transcoding though, so it was actually behaving more like a glorified file server.  It also has 400GB of hard drive space, so eventually it will become a dedicated NAS.  To that end I installed a gigabit NIC in it for faster transfers.

The Core 2 Duo server is where things get fun.  It supports virtualization, so it is now a XenServer box with a few different VMs on it:

XenCenter showing off my virtual machines!

Here is the VM breakdown:

  • FreeNAS – A NAS test install before I move to the actual hardware
  • Ubuntu Server – SSH tunnel entry point, as well as webapp test server
  • Windows Server 2008 – To be used later for a domain building project
  • Xen-Media-PC – The new media server to replace the Pentium 4 box

The Ubuntu server and Media PC are the most noteworthy.  The Media PC VM will be taking media streaming responsibilities as well as acting as my CrashPlan backup point.  Originally I planned to have it act as an FTP server as well, but with the NAS in place I don’t see a real need to bring that functionality in.  And with the jump in power for the Media streaming software, things like real-time transcoding and subtitle overlays are now a possibility.  Which is doubly impressive to me considering this is a virtualized environment!

The Ubuntu server isn’t as immediately impressive (it doesn’t exactly “do” anything yet) but I’m very happy with it because I’ve finally learned how to set up OpenSSH with shared key authentication.  It’s something I’ve used at work (after it was set up) but I’ve never done it for my own purposes.  I was amazed at how easy it is to set up and how much you get with that setup.  I was expecting a console session and that’s it.  Instead I was able to begin using things like SSH tunneling, proxies, and SCP immediately!

The SSH tunneling was of particular interest to me, I use LogMeIn Hamachi to remote into my home machine nearly anywhere I go, but Hamachi has its limits.  It doesn’t run on everything, and offers nearly no ability to remote through phones.  SSH works nearly anywhere, I even got my phone working with remote access, and I expect my iPad and TouchPad to work with it too.  And to be frank about it, I found RDP through SSH to be snappier than through Hamachi. That surprised me, I believe Hamachi is a direct connection after it negotiates with the LogMeIn servers; I expected there to be no real difference in speed switching to SSH.  Now that I have it set up though, I can see why this is considered the standard for remote access.  It’s secure, it’s open, and it’s fast.

What all of this means is that I now have a fully configured media server than my roommates and I can access and push files to without worry, as it has the power to transcode on the fly.  And the ability to access it anywhere I can use SSH.  But more importantly I’m familiar with XenServer and OpenSSH now, which I wasn’t before.  It’s been exciting setting all of this up, and I can’t wait to get more uses out of this hardware!

Blackberry 9900 missing “Mailbox” option in OWA setup.

Posted by on September 19, 2011 No comments

I’ve been setting up some new Blackberry phones at work, and I’ve run into an issue on the 9900 models.  Sometimes they are missing the “mailbox” option in OWA setup.  From what I’ve seen, the only way to set this up is via the carrier specific Blackberry website*.  You’ll need to use your BlackBerry ID to get in.

If your Blackberry ID doesn’t work, try calling Verizon / your carrier.  In one case here we had to remove the ID and re-create it before it would allow access to those settings via browser.  Good luck!

*Here is Verizons: https://vzw.blackberry.com/html?brand=vzw

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Temporarily changing print margins in Access 2003

Posted by on July 13, 2011 No comments

I didn’t see a good resource for this when I was searching through Google, so I figured I’d type up something 🙂  It’s easy enough to determine through the Excel commands that show up everywhere, but here is a version for Access.

What the code below does is grab your current margin settings, switch them to the settings you need for your form, print, and switch them back afterwards.  The four MsgBox lines are for debugging purposes, since I’ve seen a few different numbers for “points per inch” online.  The most likely numbers are 1440 or 72.

Finally, be sure to switch out DatabaseName.Form_FormNameForm with your Database Name and Form Name as appropriate.

Here is the VBA code:

    'Record set margins.
    'Access records margins in points. There are 1440 points in an inch.
    Dim intPointsPerInch
    intPointsPerInch = 1440

    'Getting the original margins and storing them.
    Dim orgLeftMargin, orgRightMargin, orgTopMargin, orgBottomMargin
    orgLeftMargin = DatabaseName.Form_FormNameForm.Printer.LeftMargin
    orgRightMargin = DatabaseName.Form_FormNameForm.Printer.RightMargin
    orgTopMargin = DatabaseName.Form_FormNameForm.Printer.TopMargin
    orgBottomMargin = DatabaseName.Form_FormNameForm.Printer.BottomMargin

    'These lines are for debuging purposes.
    'They can be left commented out, or even deleted.
    'If your margins are off, these will show you the original margins in points.
    'MsgBox "Left: " & orgLeftMargin, vbOKOnly
    'MsgBox "Right: " & orgRightMargin, vbOKOnly
    'MsgBox "Top: " & orgTopMargin, vbOKOnly
    'MsgBox "Bottom: " & orgBottomMargin, vbOKOnly

    'Here the "1"s are inches for each margin. Replace as needed.
    With DatabaseName.Form_FormNameForm.Printer
    .LeftMargin = 1 * intPointsPerInch
    .RightMargin = 1 * intPointsPerInch
    .TopMargin = 1 * intPointsPerInch
    .BottomMargin = 1 * intPointsPerInch
    End With

    'Print Commands.  Change as needed for your database.
    DoCmd.DoMenuItem acFormBar, acEditMenu, 8, , acMenuVer70
    DoCmd.PrintOut acSelection

    'Changing the margins back.
    With DatabaseName.Form_FormNameForm.Printer
    .LeftMargin = orgLeftMargin
    .RightMargin = orgRightMargin
    .TopMargin = orgTopMargin
    .BottomMargin = orgBottomMargin
    End With

Hope you found this useful!

Cannot make an MDE file in Access, even with a low form / table count.

Posted by on July 8, 2011 1 comment

I was working on an Access Database today, and when I tried to make a new MDE I got the “Microsoft Access was unable to create an MDE database” error.  Specifically, it said I may have too many tables or forms, since the limit was 2048.  Having a total of about 4 forms and 3 tables, I doubted that was the problem.

Turns out if you have a VBScript error the MDE creation will fail as well.   In my case I had deleted a form control but was still referencing it in code.  Fixing that solved the problem.  To do so, open the code editor in access, then go to Tools -> Compile.  If there are any errors it will alert you right away.  Fortunately for me it was just one 🙂

Just another reference for myself.  Thanks for reading!

Working with webOS Enyo Web services in Google Chrome

Posted by on June 30, 2011 2 comments

The options described below are very useful for development, but equally dangerous. Enabling these options is a huge security risk and should not be used for normal browsing.

If you need these options enabled but still want to browse, please consider using Chromium as a development browser with these options.

I’ve been writing code for in HP’s new Enyo framework for webOS, and a constant issue has been that WebServices can only be run in the emulator.  Webservices are Enyo’s abstraction of XMLHttpRequest, basically.  One of Enyo’s biggest strengths is that it can be tested in any Webkit based browser, but when you get to the internet access portion of testing (usually the biggest part!) you have to move to the emulator.

Fortunately, there is a fix!  As noted above, do not leave this on by default as it is a huge security risk.  This disables the file access and same origin protections, allowing you to perform webservices calls in Chrome.

To do this, run Chrome with the following command line options:

--allow-file-access-from-files --disable-web-security

In windows, you can add these to a shortcut (after the quotes, if present) just be sure to make the double hyphens a single hyphen.  On OSX you can copy and paste the command line options above.  For OSX you’d want to use a script unless you want to run it from the command line each time.  If you’ll be spending a lot of time within Enyo, you may want to download Chromium and use that for development work.  Again, browsing with these options enabled is a significant security risk.

Thanks for reading!

Samsung N120 screen replacement

Posted by on February 14, 2011 2 comments

So remember the MacBook Air I bought? And how I mentioned something happened to the NetBook? Well…

That’s what I was talking about. My sister took it with her to a family reunion in Sweden, where my cousins would break the screen while playing around.  Not a big deal, so I made my sister a deal.  If she would help me replace the Netbook, I would attempt to repair the screen. If I could, it’s hers. If not, she can use the replacement I buy until she can afford her own.

Details of the repair follow:

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