Hit a new record low in the dog box this morning, a chilly 2.5 degrees celcius when I first arrived, my little foot heater is buzzing it’s ring off, we’ve just tipped over 7 now.

Joy!

It was an invigorating 6 degrees in the bog box this morning, thankfully it warms up pretty quick with my foot heater. I’ve had a few pretty big weeks at work of late, possibly a little too big seeing I’m on my second coldsore within a week, a sure fire sign that I’ve been pushing a little too hard and need to back off a little. To the leftis a screen shot of the fruits of this labor, as per usual the simplicity of how it looks disguises the technical jiggery pokery going on behind it.

[Warning nerd content]

Here’s a list of the trickiest parts of the project

• Extract press run information (product produced) from the automated process control system C applications into SQL database(very old shoddy code ported from unix, can’t take the credit for this as Daniel from Honeywell did most of the grunt work on this)
• Find a way of calling a .NET 2.0 web service method from our weighbridge system (Delphi 2005), has some support for SOAP/Web Services but it encodes the packet it a strange way so I ended up encoding the SOAP packet XML my self and sending it via raw HTTP, should come in handy in the future as a bridge between our old delphi apps and the new .NET stuff.
• A service app to process the information logged by the above processes to alter the level and current product in the bin.
• Embed a managed directX device into a panel on a form and get it to behave properly.
• Render the bin info so it’s usable at any res above 800×600 (Big numbers are acutally 3D objects, getting small 2D text for the product names to wrap around in the 3D view is not trivial, end up projecting translated 3D vectors of the bin bounding box to screen co-ordinates).

[end of nerd content]

Thats pretty much got it sorted now, for all the hard work it’s been a fun project, certainly something I could really dig my teeth into, there are a few enhancements to come but the bulk of it is out of the way. Now I’m on the taper till the wedding, just need to knock off the last boss character for Rhys Quest and I’m back on the beer