Friday, January 11, 2013

Even though nothing particularly good or bad happened yesterday, apparently it was enough to entertain me throughout, causing me to totally forget about blogging.

Why was yesterday good?
Because I had a good balance of everything in life.

I went to school and studied what I loved. Played truancy and skipped a class. Had lunch with friends in school. Continued to do my FYP with my teammate, making great progress. Had a decent dinner,watched a show. Then played games with friends before sleeping.

I don't know man, maybe everyone lives like this all the time, but I don't. It has been a long time since I've had such good balance in my life. Working, rebelling, socializing, playing.

So a mini-rant about my FYP. Finally implemented the Halal / Non-Halal option. Search is working with proper error handling. The only annoying thing is that the Halal option doesn't stick throughout the entire app. You have to toggle it every time.

This has been really hard. I have to use like 4 programming languages to make this work. Java, HTML5, MySQL, PHP. (I'm trying to avoid Javascript for now) Sadly, only Java and SQL being taught in school. Also, having to set up my own servers is a pain.

However, thanks this I'm getting exposed to more stuff, and I'm loving my desktop more and more as it takes all the work I throw at it and churn it down like tofu. Well, I'll just end it off with the ridiculously long list of food in Food Court 3.

Labels: FYP, good, happy, life, random, rant, sp food

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Wednesday, January 09, 2013

I realized that I haven't written about my Final Year Project yet, seeing how I was just working on it just now, it's probably good to put it down on my blog.

We're making a Food mobile app that allows people to view all the food available in Singapore Polytechnic. So you're able to easy browse through what food is available, with all the pricing available. There is a heck lot to expand on, but we're just trying to get the basic functions down first.


As you can see, it's running in a browser. Which is the whole point of this project. To create a mobile application using HTML5. To put it in simpler words, we're trying to create a mobile application using web technologies.

Why?
So it could run virtually anywhere. It'll be able to run on iPhones, Androids, Blackberries or any arbitrary device that has a browser.

The difficulty? HTML5 is an emerging technology, even though it has been around for a couple of years, the standards aren't fully finalized yet. Everything we're trying to do here is pretty much on the bleeding edge of web technologies.

Offline databases is something that is currently implemented awkwardly. Half of the devices do it one way, and the other half do it another way. So we pretty much gave up and do it the online way instead. (it is the interweb after all)

In case you're wondering, the HGW stands for hungry go where. Which is kind of a blatant copyright infringement but we're not really planning to upload to the store and it'll only stick around until we've finished presenting it. Unless the school is interested in keeping it, then we'll rebrand it or something.

So HGW is just a button you press on, that randomly picks a food and tells you where to find it. Perfect for those fickle minded wimps who don''t know where to eat.

We've just finished setting up the database and is all set and primed for importing all our data. The hardest part right now is learning how to access it. I really don't wanna rewrite the code, I hope I won't have to. We will try to implement a rating system once we're done with all of this. We'll see...
*we = me and another dude. 2 man team, le sigh.

Everything aside, I am rather impressed by myself.
There's another project that requires us (another team) to create a Windows Application and connect to a SQL database. It doesn't seem that hard now but we'll see how it goes!

Hopefully we'll be able to complete this in time. The next update will probably when we manage to fix all the bugs!

Labels: FYP, project, rant, school, sp food

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