Nathan Tornquist.com

Over the last few months (being 1 or 2, not 3) I’ve been working on a card swipe based login system for the engineering advising offices here at Purdue.  The Freshman Engineering office has an old card swipe system, but hopefully my software will provide a system that can be expanded to every office and will ultimately make everyone’s job easier.

To start off the process I updated the Student Information system that the advisers use.  It needed to be revitalized, and ultimately a lot of the changes paved the way for the new system.  I went from a page that is rendered based on static tables that just display data from the database to a dynamic page built with HTML5.  One of the coolest things is the auto-completion feature when students are being looked up.

More recently it came time to add the android side of things.  It took awhile to find a card reader that not only functioned the way I wanted it to, but also had a good SDK.  After being delayed as a result of purchasing a reader that only passed encrypted data, we ultimately settled on the UniMag II card reader and it works perfectly.  The system came with an example that could easily be stripped down to almost nothing.

Once the card reader was active, the rest of the program flow could be set up.  The integration with the Purdue systems is pretty cool.  Due to the way the database is set up, direct SQL connections are a pain, so I’ve built an entire backend that authenticates with the device every time something is requested.  Ultimately this allows us to distinguish which office the requests come from, and disable tablets at will remotely.

This is also my first Android app that is built around the activity system.  Arcis and SoloDefense both were single activity applications where I managed all of the switching between pages manually. Although I can’t really talk more about the integration setup, nor can I post tons of screenshots, but the app is really cool.  You can swipe your ID, or manually sign in to get added to a queue.  The queue integrates with the online systems I’ve built quite well.  It should be about finished when the semester concludes and if summer testing goes well, hopefully we can roll this out to larger groups of people, and maybe even other departments next year.  I’m certainly excited about the way this project has gone.

I recently got a MSP430 (Microcontroller) and have started playing with it.  The device is essentially Texas Instrument’s version of the Arduino.  Unfortunately there is no easy way to connect the dev kit to a breadboard for quick prototyping and testing.  To solve this I had to make my own cables.  Following is a demo video of the cable setup and a simple app to test the connections to the board:

Last night I went to see the Joffrey Ballet perform Rite of Spring at Elliot with a beautiful girl.  I’ve seen a fair number of musicals and plays, but ballet was a whole different world, and other than Black Swan, this was my first exposure.  I really had no idea what to expect going in, but was certainly impressed.  I do not have near enough experience to really appreciate the skill of the dancers, but I was intrigued with how well they moved within the music.  As I sat there, it seemed almost as if the music was an expression of their actions.

The first two pieces they performed were modern ballet (or so I’ve been told) and featured what seemed to be more traditional dancing (although it is probably blasphemous to compare modern dance to classical).  Regardless, the third and feature piece, Rite of Spring, was completely different. Instead of wearing almost nothing, the dancers were in full costumes and the ballet told the story of a tribal girl being chosen and featured various ritual dances around that vein of thought.  The dances featured much more percussive movement and ultimately ended in the girl’s death, or so it seemed.  I spent the duration of that piece thinking that the girl was being rejected and held prisoner from the tribe and ultimately that lead to her death, but the titles of the songs within the piece tell a very different story.

Between the first and second act they put up a painted divider to allow the dancers to change costumes or whatever they needed to do.  It showed what looked like dragons being hunted.  I later learned that the dragons were in fact moose, much to my dismay.  Overall though, it was a really cool experience and following the night we got interviewed by the exponent.  Not really knowing what to say, and in line with my terrible sense of humor, my one word response to the final piece was “Bears” as some of the dancers in that piece were in ceremonial bear costumes. The Exponent declined to use that quotation and instead mentioned the comments I had comparing the styles.  Oh well, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t go down as seeing a famous ballet company and walk away with the word bears.