Wow!
Not a bad couple of days, on the whole.
Monday was a change from the norm; I was ahead with my workload at work and short of something to do, so I thought I'd repair the alarm system that's been down for over 2 years. Yep, you read it right ... the alarm has been broken for that long and no-one has bothered to even try to repair it. I soon found out why *lol*
Whoever had set up the system previously had made a big mess of it. I did a little searching (it has no model or ID on it, to prevent people just contacting the manufacturer presumably) and finally found who makes it, found an installer's manual, worked out how to fool the system into performing a restore to default, entered new codes, and hey presto, it works! Erm, almost. Someone had put a 500mA fuse in for the outdoor strobe light and ringer, and thanks to the manual I worked out it's supposed to be a 1A fuse - so it's failed before and not been repaired correctly. I discovered one of the zone sensors is damaged (ran over with a forklift, by the looks of it) so needed to remove that from the loop, and hey presto - a working alarm, saving my company money. Will I get anything for it? Hell, no, but I do get satisfaction and some gratitude, which makes it somewhat worthwhile ;) And since it's the first alarm I've ever looked at, then .... it's a miracle it still works, and I've not had an electric shock!
Today's been even more fun. About 2 weeks ago Antony - from the mobile company we deal with - told me that a client of his is looking for a PoD (proof of delivery) system. Antony's company offers a "digital pen" technology, which is the primary reason we didn't go into a partnership with them with some of our software 6 months ago. The problem is - and I say this with no amusement at all *winks* - the pen system doesn't work. Not only doesn't it work, it's more expensive to design, setup and run that my solution is. So with this in mind, we went into this client of his this morning - 5 minutes away from where we work. The only work I'd done on this was over a weekend where I rewrote it completely from scratch, not using any previous code; I then went off and developed a signature capture class for the PDA and coded that in, so hey presto, within 2 days, a simple PoD system. I showed it to the guy, explaining that it's still basic as there's no point in my developing a 500-feature program when I have no idea what he wants ... and his exact words were "it's exactly what we want". We're trialling it next week for a couple of weeks to see if he's still as happy, and if he is, then I think we have a sale!
Now, how could it get better than this? Well, simple ....
Antony brought Martin in with him - the head of his company's data department. He's a good person to have on our side, and we've explained how things are to him - so he's likely to try to put business our way, and seemed mildly impressed I'd done this in 2 days ;) He also brought with him two rather lovely devices, one of which was a Symbol MC9090. I've only heard about these through the internet, but Symbol devices are used in warehouses and the like, anywhere something rugged is needed which also needs to scan barcodes. Scanning barcodes has always been something that we've wanted to do with our software as an option (it would cut the engineer's time on site down to about half what it is now), but we couldn't develop any software for it as (a) Symbol charge over £1000 for the software development kit, and (b) the device itself costs about £1000-1800 a throw; add to that they used to use their own operating system I couldn't work with. I spent about 3 weeks not so long ago trying to work out how the hell I could work with barcodes without using all kinds of arcane strange add-ons and software tricks.
Well, now we've been loaned one of these devices, this model being about £1500; here's a photo for the nerdy out there ;)
They now run on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 meaning I can code for them; and since Motorola took over Symbol they've made the software kit for it free. Within 45 MINUTES I've already written an application that reads any one of 12 different styles of barcode, and we could add this to our software in a matter of days; meaning we now, in essence, have a barcode solution to offer to people when it's been tested a bit. I can't tell you how chuffed I am at THAT, after all that time wasted on it not so long ago. And the funniest thing? I can do it in about 5 lines of code!
Other than the nerdy stuff .... not a whole lot to report really! I do know that if this sale comes through then the money will be spent on home improvements, on getting that MCP certification I wanted, and perhaps a short trip to see friends ;) Here's hoping eh?
Hope everyone's doing well ... been missing hearing from my friends lately! :)
Monday was a change from the norm; I was ahead with my workload at work and short of something to do, so I thought I'd repair the alarm system that's been down for over 2 years. Yep, you read it right ... the alarm has been broken for that long and no-one has bothered to even try to repair it. I soon found out why *lol*
Whoever had set up the system previously had made a big mess of it. I did a little searching (it has no model or ID on it, to prevent people just contacting the manufacturer presumably) and finally found who makes it, found an installer's manual, worked out how to fool the system into performing a restore to default, entered new codes, and hey presto, it works! Erm, almost. Someone had put a 500mA fuse in for the outdoor strobe light and ringer, and thanks to the manual I worked out it's supposed to be a 1A fuse - so it's failed before and not been repaired correctly. I discovered one of the zone sensors is damaged (ran over with a forklift, by the looks of it) so needed to remove that from the loop, and hey presto - a working alarm, saving my company money. Will I get anything for it? Hell, no, but I do get satisfaction and some gratitude, which makes it somewhat worthwhile ;) And since it's the first alarm I've ever looked at, then .... it's a miracle it still works, and I've not had an electric shock!
Today's been even more fun. About 2 weeks ago Antony - from the mobile company we deal with - told me that a client of his is looking for a PoD (proof of delivery) system. Antony's company offers a "digital pen" technology, which is the primary reason we didn't go into a partnership with them with some of our software 6 months ago. The problem is - and I say this with no amusement at all *winks* - the pen system doesn't work. Not only doesn't it work, it's more expensive to design, setup and run that my solution is. So with this in mind, we went into this client of his this morning - 5 minutes away from where we work. The only work I'd done on this was over a weekend where I rewrote it completely from scratch, not using any previous code; I then went off and developed a signature capture class for the PDA and coded that in, so hey presto, within 2 days, a simple PoD system. I showed it to the guy, explaining that it's still basic as there's no point in my developing a 500-feature program when I have no idea what he wants ... and his exact words were "it's exactly what we want". We're trialling it next week for a couple of weeks to see if he's still as happy, and if he is, then I think we have a sale!
Now, how could it get better than this? Well, simple ....
Antony brought Martin in with him - the head of his company's data department. He's a good person to have on our side, and we've explained how things are to him - so he's likely to try to put business our way, and seemed mildly impressed I'd done this in 2 days ;) He also brought with him two rather lovely devices, one of which was a Symbol MC9090. I've only heard about these through the internet, but Symbol devices are used in warehouses and the like, anywhere something rugged is needed which also needs to scan barcodes. Scanning barcodes has always been something that we've wanted to do with our software as an option (it would cut the engineer's time on site down to about half what it is now), but we couldn't develop any software for it as (a) Symbol charge over £1000 for the software development kit, and (b) the device itself costs about £1000-1800 a throw; add to that they used to use their own operating system I couldn't work with. I spent about 3 weeks not so long ago trying to work out how the hell I could work with barcodes without using all kinds of arcane strange add-ons and software tricks.
Well, now we've been loaned one of these devices, this model being about £1500; here's a photo for the nerdy out there ;)
They now run on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 meaning I can code for them; and since Motorola took over Symbol they've made the software kit for it free. Within 45 MINUTES I've already written an application that reads any one of 12 different styles of barcode, and we could add this to our software in a matter of days; meaning we now, in essence, have a barcode solution to offer to people when it's been tested a bit. I can't tell you how chuffed I am at THAT, after all that time wasted on it not so long ago. And the funniest thing? I can do it in about 5 lines of code!
Other than the nerdy stuff .... not a whole lot to report really! I do know that if this sale comes through then the money will be spent on home improvements, on getting that MCP certification I wanted, and perhaps a short trip to see friends ;) Here's hoping eh?
Hope everyone's doing well ... been missing hearing from my friends lately! :)