Quantrasoft

Found a place called Quantrasoft.

 

 

Apparently they offer free hosting to students. I’ve sent them an appeal – will have to wait and see how that goes.

 

http://www.aspdotnet.sk/default.aspx

 

Free Hosting

Am going on a little trip to europe. For a month.

 

Now since everything is hosted on my computer, in case of a power outage, or any other unforseen circumstances, should my server at home go down.

 

I have decided to seek the idea of free ASP.NET + MSSQL server hosting.

 

Am using a list from: http://www.411asp.net/home/hosting/freehost to find suitable hosts.

Motorola V3 + GPS

Over the last week I’ve been contemplating on other devices which could implement our framework once built.

 

One of these devices is so abundant in today’s society that nearly everyone has one – the phone.

 

You take a  phone, or a PDA and couple it with a GPS device. Either inbuilt or via Bluetooth and you have a cheap tracking device.

 

There are two benefits associated with this.

 

1.       If Daniel dupes us on the WebTrac, which going by his past record of not coming up with the good is quite likely

2.       This can be used as a proof of concept of other devices integrating with the system.

 

 

I believe the actual communication interface is fairly simple, as all a ‘device’ is to do is use a http POST/GET coupled with the login information and a descriptor of the devices location – and voila – point on a map.

 

Now. If this was to be integrated with a phone. I thought why not use my phone for a PoC.  

 

Here’s what I need:

 

-          Gps device

-          Time

 

So what I did earlier in the week is purchase a Bluetooth GPS device off eBay for $103.53AUD. It’s a Holux GPSlim 236. Then added $24.99AUD for shipping.

 

 

The plan:

 

Use my phone (Motorola V3) to interface it with the Holux via Bluetooth. Then utilize a Simple J2ME NMEA parser to get the co-ordinates out.

 

Then write or find something that will  use GPRS to send a http query to a server.

 

I hope to do all this within the Java Micro-Edition. This is where the secord requirement comes in – time.

 

Hopefully I will find the necessary code pieces and won’t have to write too much from scratch.

 

I have been able to find the RAZR V3 (CLDC 1.1) Developer Guide on developer.motorola.com – which has some great code samples, for both Network + Bluetooth communication

 

Hopefully I’ll find what I need inside.

 

Also I have located a NMEA parser

 

With all the pieces set – I need to find a way to put them all together in an elegant and bugfree [can only hope] way.

Project WebSite

Well, as part of the assessment process we need to develop a "Project Web Site". This is to host our "User Manual" and "Technical Manual". Over the last three days I have put together the frame work for our site. It is broken into a few different sections and has links to our blogs, this being one of them.

The current structure of the site is:

• Home - Contains a little overview of out project
• Documentation:
• Technical Manual which is our RUP doc's
• User Manual.
• Blogs,
• iTrac - link to our tracker website
• Contact - has our details.

I converted all of our doco to PDF and have asked Andrew to add some content to some of the overpages.

GoogleMaps + Australia

Awesome news! - Shawn just brought to my attention that earlier today Australia was added to road level google maps.


Fantastic!

This is a great alternative to ZoomIn and i think that is what hurried google up a little, as ZoomIn launched its service late last week.

pricing

Bummer,

In order to use the system, the developer can only make 1000 calls to the system per month - which is ridiculous.

and if we're to purchase a license - it's $150 dollars per hour

might have to drop them an email to enquire about any other possibilities.

ZoomIn

today I learnt that there's a service offering street level detail of autralian roads.

very excited :) will bring this project one step closer to useability within Australia.

www.zoomin.com.au

now lets see how good their web service is.

Plans, Plans and more Plans

Well, spent the last few hours reading the current Vision document for our "Tracker" project and trying to absorb it. Then tried to tie this into the Microsoft Project Plan I put together at the start of last month. The intention here was to allow me to complete the "RUP Project Plan" and the "RUP Inception Iteration - Iteration Plan". These have both been done, will upload to our "SharePoint Services" once some vpn issues are resolved.

Things on the planning front are going slower then I would have liked, but as we get a better understanding of what we are trying to achieve, things will start to progress quicker.

Andrew has done some initial ground work on the "Uni Project Web Site" while Roman has been working on the "Tracker Portal". Will be great once we see these up and running...I need to do some more work on the "Use Case" document, then plan to work some more with the Google Map API's...they released the new Version 2 at the start of April. It's got some nice new features....

Shawn