Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Find: Google to FCC: If you go with Title II, don’t forget our favorite part

Google to FCC: If you go with Title II, don’t forget our favorite part
// Ars Technica

The FCC is currently getting public feedback about the possibility of regulating Internet service providers under Title II of the Communications Act. Cable companies are stridently opposed to such rules, but a relatively new competitor in the space, Google, sees an opportunity.

In Google's public comment, filed yesterday with the SEC, the company emphasizes that any such regulation must be careful to confer the benefits of such regulation along with the responsibilities.

The benefit most interesting to Google? Access to utility poles and other infrastructure.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

E-mail matters, Twitter doesn’t, to American workers [feedly]

E-mail matters, Twitter doesn’t, to American workers
// Ars Technica

In spite of challenges from LinkedIn, Skype, BBM, the never-ending threat of spam, phishing, and hacking, and a generation of Millennials who dismiss e-mail as being something for old people, e-mail remains important to a majority of Internet-using American workers, according to a new report from Pew Research.

Social media, however, is useful to only 4 percent of Internet-using workers.

Pew Research has put together a series of reports to look at how the Internet has changed the world in the 25 years since the Web was invented. The most recent survey looks at the impact it has had on the workplace and how the Internet has changed our relationship with work.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Project: SAS Team 3

Project: SAS Team 3

Team: Caitlin McCright, Jerald Narron

















Tagline: SAS Campaign Management System

Problem: To facilitate project management communication in an easy and efficient way.

Implementation:
The goal was to create the front-end of a campaign management system that tracks the progress of ongoing projects. We wanted to add a chat feature to allow people to easily collaborate on projects. We used Twitter Bootstrap to create the front-end framework, as well as Font Awesome for some of the web page elements. For the chat, we used Kiwi IRC.

Future work:
The back-end of the webpage would have to be implemented for full functionality.

Link to page:

Monday, December 15, 2014

Announcement: opportunity to give feedback on your teammates

Hey folks,

If you would like to give feedback on your teammates project performance, you may do so at this form. We can only act if there is a consensus about a team member.

It isn't necessary to give feedback about team members who did well.

Professor Watson

Friday, December 12, 2014

Project: Recognition 2

Team: Aiden Cowart, Gregory Daniels,Neelkanth Patel, Akshit Patel, Logan Valentine, David Harvey-Macaulay

Tagline: Recogneyes - Take a closer look



Problem: 
Many games seem like a waste of time, nothing more than a mindless distraction to kill time. Why not try to turn that wasted time and energy into something more productive? A game where it helps sharpen your mind while you are playing? This is the goal of Recogneyes. Recogneyes is a game in which you match pictures, one that is at first pixilated and is progressively de-pixilated, to a picture selected from a group that matches it. This game serves to hone your visual perception skills, and rewards you for doing so! The faster you can match the pictures, while the main picture is still heavily pixilated, the more points you earn! 

How it Works: 
This game has been converted from an Android platform game to a full Web browser experience! This site uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, and Java Servlet pages for back-end communication. The backend is built on an Apache Tomcat server using Java for server-side work and MySQL for database needs. Recogneyes uses the jQuery library Fancybox to display the game images, Prefixfree JavaScript tool to allow for better cross-platform compatibility, and the ClosePixilate JavaScript library to do real-time image pixilation within the browser. The requests are handled by the JSP pages, which pass those commands to the Java classes imported into the JSP page, which then accesses the resources necessary to fulfill the request. 

Unfinished and Future Work: 
Future work for this game would be a “rapid-fire” play mode. This will entail a new picture from the album every 10 seconds with no choice of pausing. Adjusting the difficulty level and the points assigned to it is also for the future. Also developer input on the design of the game screen is appreciated. Integration for Facebook profiles for login is not implemented, but is wanted for the future. 

Working Site: 
This site is not hosted at the moment. In order to check the game out, follow these steps: 
1. Download Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (link: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/?)
2. Download and unpack Apache Tomcat 6.0 server: (link:http://tomcat.apache.org/download-60.cgi) 
3. Download and install MySQL server, workbench, and JDBC Connector for your OS (link: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/) 
4. Open Eclipse, and import from the GitHub repository link below. 
5. Set up the Tomcat server for the application (Window -> Show View -> Servers; then switch file inside of it) 
6. Make sure in the lib directory of Apache Tomcat, you have the Java MySQL Connector .jar 
over to the server tab, click the link for the new server wizard -> choose Tomcat 6.0 and click 
next -> and add the project to the server)
7. Open up a web browser, enter localhost:8080/Recognition/login.jsp and enjoy!

Project: SAS Team 4


Team Members:  Caroline Lima-Lane, Ronald Miller, Vatslav Orlov
Tagline:  Task Management Dashboard
Problem:  To create a Task Management system for the persona of a Project Manager organizing a large collaborative team project for a film campaign.
Implementation:
We wanted to create a Collaborative Task Management system that shows the workflow of the product cycle of a film campaign. We used the jQueryUI API for sortables, collapsible portlets for the objects, and progress bars inside each portlet. Adding a new portlet inserts via javascript into the HTML after that element.  We used extensive CSS to set up the columns of each task and format the look of each portlet.  We implemented a date in the upper right corner from Javascript.  We used the Facebook API to embed the live feed from SAS into the right side of the page.  The page is divided into 3 sections via frames: Top, bottom, and right.  Scroll bars were disabled to increase the aesthetics of the page.
Future Work:
The current site is a prototype with no backend.  The elements are reloaded each time the page is refreshed.  We would add some backend database to save the state and fully implement the login.  We also would like to filter tasks by category with menu items at the top of the page, and polish the interface.
Links:
Link to Working Site (Use any email and any password to login)

Project: SAS Team 1

 

Team:  Waqas Goraya, Galen Keene

Tagline:  Project management tool for browsing previous campaigns and crafting new ones

Core Problems:  The primary issues faced by campaign developers is a lack of information on both previous and current campaigns and, as such, newly created campaigns aren't always as efficient or effective as they could be.  This application provides an interface for users to browse previous campaigns and all of their various attributes (such as channel, target audience, budget, success rate, etc.) and make decisions on the direction they would like their new campaign to take.

Some Background: This web application is implemented using JavaScript and HTML web code to produce a responsive web-design that is both flexible and easy-to-use.  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were used to form the design of the web app on other platforms such as mobile and resizing the browser on a PC. The usage of plugins in our application makes it easily extensible for any future needs.

Unfinished and Future Work:  While we created a solid design for the database, we didn't have enough time to completely integrate it with the application, nor did we have time to build out fake data to populate the database.  Once these two things are done, they can be quickly/easily integrated with the application to support live project information and queries.  Once there is a supported database, the next step would be to implement the ability to create new campaigns, both from scratch and based on historical information retrieved by a user's search query.  Beyond this, multiple users with various administrative levels should be added along with a less important messaging feature between users.

Github: https://github.com/NCSUWebClass/fall14-sas1
Video:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxtyc1CYEMzqU1l6RzlfNklLQ1E/view
Website: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wagoraya/SAS_Project/homepage.html