| Library Management | February 20, 2004 |
As you may know, ACM has an ever growing library of computer related books. At one time we maintained a list of the books, in hopes of using a free barcode reader to set up a basic lending library. At the time, however, we had no way of demangling the CueCat's output. That's all ancient history now, so our library project can proceed without having to worry about barcode mangling and serial numbers.
The first step in this project would involve developing a script capable of taking a scanned ISBN, querying an online databse (ie amazon.com) for the book info, and adding the book to a MySQL database on our server. Something like this will undoubtedly make updating/maintaining a book list much easier, and beats entering the title, author, etc. by hand. Secondly, we'd need something that would allow ACM members to quickly checkout books. The act of checking out a book would be useful for both ACM and the borrower for remembering who has what book. It would be entirely honor based, but without it, I know I'd forget that I had borrowed a book. The sooner we get this application developed, the sooner we can let members take books from the library.
| LoungeCam | February 18, 2004 |
At the end of last semester, ACM got a nice LogiTech web cam. The plan is to mount it in the lounge, hook it up to one of the computers, and use it to stream video onto the ACM server. In order to do this, we'll be developing a client to run in the background of the iMac in the lounge, which queries the camera and sends the data over the CS network to the server. The server in turn will publish the video to the website. The trick will be to only send video frames with significant change to the server, in order to conserve network bandwidth. Charlie and I are going to be working on this project, and it's not really that big, but it's worth mentioning the web cam in case someone else wants to develop their own application for it.
| Website Redesign |
Well, it took a few days, but I'm 90% finished giving the ACM website an overhaul. Those of you familiar with the old one may miss the message board, defective as it was. Instead, it has been replaced by MovableType's commenting abilities. This will let you leave comments on specific ACM news articles, events, or projects. Also, the join page should be fixed soon, actually allowing people to sign up for our mailing list / become members. We'll have some more news up soon.
