On the subject of... new projects...

I think I can safely reveal to all a couple of projects I'm working on just now, cause if somebody stole the ideas I'll be honest and say I couldn't care less....

• \My First Facebook Application- Jarv AI Predictor. I was all set to release this last weekend, but it went horribly wrong when my ASP script went all terminal looping on me when subjected to a new login... not a good start. Still, the idea is sound enough, my nice little back end application analyses your friends for patterns and attempts to do so crazy predictions use a combination of genetic algorithms and pattern recognition- basically it's the same back end as I've been using since Uni (good to know I got something good out of my degree!).
  What does it mean in terms of a facebook application- well, in keeping with the theme of all facebook apps, it's quite pointless, but you can basically run it against your friends and it will scope out the likelyhood of one of your friends liking your other friends (either romantically or just friendly) calculates the likelyhood of your friend liking one thing or another. It's been done before, but not, as far as I'm aware, with the computation in the background, and thus far, it's uncanny if slightly pointless. Hm.

• \My Alternative Support Desk - I've been working (on the sly) on a mini version of support desk for my own private use. I saw a couple of problems with the existing version which I could, in my mind, easily fix.
  First off, is accurately recording time spent on a task- so I've added a simple timer which automatically starts recording when I start looking at a ticket and generates me a log file - it doesn't complete the ticket for me, it merely shows the time I started looking at an issue.
  
  Secondly, multiple tickets- I'm often having to fill in dummy entries in order to save my progress so far on a issue just so I can look at another ticket- so I'm now running multiple tickets.
  
  Thirdly- Ticket logging - I loved Paul's new interface for it's "tab-keyboarding-full visibility of data-ness" - everything a key press away, all the info on screen, but as I see it, it's all a bit too much info. So I did a bit of thinking, and decided that call logging should be a seperate process - so my front page is all about the logging, and my second page is about filling in the tickets...
  
  But the special pixy dust comes in on the third page- the knowledge centre page- this pulls down information from various resources to give you the best information available - previous tickets using a smart filter to get relevant data out, shortcuts to network resources from the Service Desk\Remote Admin folderset, passwords from the encrptyed database (without compromising security- the database must be authenticated to first before you can view the data!), network diagrams and health check documents, VPN method, assets (which are starting to make a comeback, thanks Smithy!), dial up configs, etc.
  
  Because I'm afraid of Paul (he is a big guy) I've actually be creating a transactional database using a ridicous bit of screen-scrapping using auto-hot-key-it to tear data out of his database into my own and then pushing data out via the Support Desk app itself- tacky, I know, but I'm not up for asking for the source code to the app, and I'm not up for breaking a "live" system!
  
  I'm actually thinking I might dump the VB tester I'm currently working with and switch to HTML/ASP, but haven't quite commited yet...

There you go, a small sample of what I'm upto at the moment... more to come

On the subject of... why I'm blogging again....

Long time, no blog. Typical of me really, getting distracted by all the dull things that exist in the world, selfishly using all my time for internal self-inspection (aka navel-gazing) and doing work which doesn't really need to be done!
I wanted to blog again, because:

• My memory's getting worse and it won't do any harm to be quote by others about the things I've forgotten (probably)
• I'm back into the swing of working on projects outside of work- and I'm loving it.
• I'm back to questioning a lot of things in my life, and I find that's the time I'm most likely to blog, because voicing my opinion out loud in a completely unread forum can't do any harm, can it?