Another night of senior design presentations at UC’s College of Applied Science proved a worthwhile investment. The students have made significant progress, as well they should with the May Tech Expo, where they’ll showcase their work, right around the corner. As I walked into the auditorium at a few minutes after 5:00PM, I noticed many of the project teams frantically rehearsing their presentations just one more time. Either that or talking to themselves. Perhaps senior designs will do that to a person. It reminds me of a poem:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I’m schizophrenic,
And so am I.

With three large screens, dual displays, and a good sound system, the CAS auditorium serves as a very nice presentation facility.

I had the opportunity to catch up with Jonathan Ring, a developer with the Hamilton County Probate Court. We discussed his education to some length during the October proposal presentations, and it was good to hear about his progress. I listend as Craig McRae described uploading issues he faced with his application. Of course, as usual, these surfaced only in the last two days. Only when it really counted. Only when he really needed it. As if we’ve NEVER experienced that before. I got a chance to talk with Brian Krahenbuhl, a Cincinnati Bell database developer. Across the room I saw Kurt Scherer. Emelia Kurek-Becca, David Parks, and Erin Osterfeld from Kroger were there. Department Head Hazem Said (pdf) and I setup a meeting to talk about his organization. A number of the professors said hello.

Paul Bachmeyer kicked off the evening reporting his progress on Removing Dependency on IBM Portlet Factory. Paul’s client, a large Cincinnati organization, needed to replace an expensive dependency on the IBM Portlet Factory for a management reporting application. Paul developed a JBoss solution that will ultimately deploy into an IBM Websphere environment. The reporting application delivers the expected reporting functionality including filter and sorting options. Business managers across the enterprise use an existing application that depends on the IBM Portlet Factory. The licensing cost of the Portlet Factory solution became prohibitive when a business case for a custom solution showed that similar functionality could be had for a much lower cost and could be added to the enterprise architecture portfolio.

Lukman Ellis next presented a very nice looking website to serve the local Ghanaian population called Ghanaian Cincinnati Home. Constructed with Drupal modules, custom themes modified with Paint.NET, and an Apache/MySQL back-end, Lukman provided admin, member, and visitor interfaces that facilitate communication within the community demographic. Some of the more feature-full functions include personal account management, PayPal integration, and an events calendar. Ultimately, the Ghanaian Association will provide usability testing for the site. Although the site received good marks from the audience, several security holes exist that will need plugging before going live. For Lukman’s sake I won’t outline them here.

Lorenzo de Amicis, George Spaeth, and Matt Ferris go next providing a solid business case for moving the Brown County Regional HealthCARE network to a new IP Telephony, Data, and Wireless Implementation. Made up of 5 regional facilities, HealthCARE spends about $16,000 for monthly telecommunications bills. Although some of the infrastructure exists, the healthcare network fails to take advantage of existing fiber and gigabit networks, spends more than necessary on long distance, and manages 7 separate vendors. This team proposes to consolidate the vendor list to three and reduce monthly telecommunications bills to $6,575 saving $9,300 on a monthly basis. Given an equipment cost of $500K, the new network will pay for itself in 5 years.

Problems with the current infrastructure include remote sites connected via frame relay, partial T1, or DSL. Exiting wiring looks more like a spider web, no, a cocoon, than a wiring closet. 6 different PBXs serve the network, and the main PBX does not allow expansion. The wireless phone system is not functional as calls drop when users walk down hallways, and the voicemail system is obsolete. Doctors and patients have asked for wireless networks.

The new data environment will leverage existing gigabit. The new telephony environment will provide 4-digit enterprise dialing bypassing long distance providers and reducing long distance charges. A scalable, wireless voice network reduces infrastructure requirements as the same cable carries both voice and data - just plug a new voip phone in and it just works.

Design protocols require redundancy for network uptime, and power redundancy will keep the network alive until backup power sources come online. The team follows Cisco best practices and HIPPA best efforts to apply the highest levels of security.

Brandon Henderson’s Securing the Secure Network project was up next. Okay, I’m going to start spittin’ out some acronyms, and admittedly, I don’t know what some of them mean, but they sure made Brandon sound good as they rolled off his tongue. He obviously knows what he’s talking about.

Brandon assumed a secure network and then went about ensuring potential future threats and weaknesses would not penetrate the internal network. In essence, if I understood correctly, on the internal LAN, an unexpected machine will not gain network access as the port itself will turn off as soon as the machine tries to connect to the network. And to myself I say, “Aaahhhhhhh, that’s what happened to me on my last project.” I didn’t know services existed to do such things. Wow, these computers are pretty cool. Sorry, I digress. The technologies include NAQC, which scans remote machines for security compliance, the 802.1x protocol on the RADIUS server to deny access to rogue machines, Active Directory for account consolidation, quarantined web|file|DNS servers, VPN servers, and scripts to run compliance tests on remote users.

Carl Bomkamp presented his Driving School Management System next. The idea here is to develop a system to manage the day-to-day tasks of a driving school. The Driving School Management System provides an interface to manage the data for employees, students, clients, vehicles, and classrooms, and displaying some reports. Users include administrators who configure the system, receptionists who manage student and client data (a client may be the parent of a student), and instructors who manage lessons and grades. Leveraging .NET 3.5 and XAML, the Windows interface looks fairly nice and remarkably simple. The .NET framework provides rich functionality out-of-the-box which makes the controls quite easy to work with as an end user. Simplicity, it turns out, is one of Carl’s goals. The UI contains all the elements necessary to view all the information for any particular function on one screen which eliminates much of the drill-down and screen navigation found in many Windows applications. Functionality of interest includes automated scheduling and payment notification as well as integration with Microsoft Outlook for scheduling functionality. A local driving school will beta test the application.

Thomas Ervin presented his Cosmos HA Server project. Wow, things really got interesting here with the next few presentations setting the bar higher and higher. Let me just say Thomas’ presentation had the WOW factor as he scripted a real-world test of his project across a number of virtual machines and then he played back the test while narrating the action for us. Super-sharp job and great presentation skills capturing my attention.

The business problem Thomas proposes solving, if I got the idea, is how to make data highly available without incurring delays inherent with restoring backups or the high cost of big iron systems like those of EMC. Thomas’ solution is a DRBD implementation over an internet connection. HA server provides realiable, potentially nearly instantaneous redundant infrastructure in a cost-effective and unified solution. The solution combines the proven principles of RAID over a network and network storage as well as the new technologies of virtualization and virtual appliances to create a quickly deployable redundant network.

I watched the presentation and couldn’t help but smile most of the time as I was Impressed. Thomas took us on a whirlwind tour of three VMs if I counted correctly (although this may have been two VMs), and we watched his script open editors, type and save text, run commands, view files, and transmit over the self-contained network. Then the script switched off the primary VM mid-test, and we watched as the network synchronized itself, bringing all data to its current state, as the machines came back online and started communicating. True disaster recovery allowing migration to an entirely replicated and synchronized network at the flip of a switch.

Craig McRae - Kill the Messenger. The presentations remained strong for the rest of the evening with Craig McRae demonstrating Killthemessenger.net, a social networking space for comedians and fans of comedy. Craig treated us to a full-featured comedy video content portal where amateurs and professionals alike can join, contribute, rate, and provide feedback for each others’ work. A comedian can upload personal, original content, or link to content stored elsewhere. In either case Craig’s site consolidates the video metadata on killthemessenger making it the one-stop-shop for end-to-end collaboration for the comedy production community.

On the back-end, killthemessenger uses VShare for video encoding and FFMpeg as the server-side video encoder that converts an uploaded file to flash video. Craig modified the existing modules to enable rating, commenting, and flagging of content. He also built custom modules to schedule recording of live events and uploading of live shows.

Technical difficulties hampered part of the demonstration (note to self - don’t put a Logitech quick-cam into standby mode if I’m going to do a live demo). Once the camera worked, the rest of the demo proceeded without a hitch, including uploading the test clip the first time - something that had not worked consistently for a number of days.

The next one is live on the internet waiting for your feedback. Erin Osterfeld and David Parks created the Quickblox Intelligent Scheduling application built on the Coldfusion Fusebox framework and incorporating liberal, and truly user-friendly use of AJAX. I waited for this presentation. This was the whole reason I came tonight. And I was not disappointed. First, the application was out of this world. Second, these kids can P-R-E-S-E-N-T. They rocked the house in Q1 with their proposal presentation and I was eager to see if they could one-up themselves. A number of presenters used the strategy the David and Erin applied so successfully in Q1 by providing slides to answer anticipated questions, so that was old news. Now, in Q2, the Quickblox team had their application print out take-aways and these were distributed with perfect timing at the presentation point that made the most sense. Can you say VALUE-ADD?! David and Erin understand what their contribution to the world is.

So what the heck does this thing do? Okay, first the business problem. Assume UC is similar to any large institution of any kind. You think of old systems, this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it processes, slow turnaround, and other characteristics of large institutions. This describes UC’s class scheduling system as there is no visual interface to aide scheduling classes for new quarters, and a student must deal with an archaic, textual interface that is difficult to use.

Nice looking, easy to use, shows all the available times in a personal schedule, allows for degree auditing, and provides both a visual and textual representation of a class schedule. Searching for just the right class is a breeze. Color coded cues highlight classes a student needs and classes already taken. If a student provides a work schedule, Quickblox will visually notify the student of any class conflicts. Theoretically the application will withstand 200 concurrent users on 5-year-old hardware. And David asked us all to take it for a test drive. So drive away. The Quickblox team relishes feedback.

As cutting edge as the application is, the platform keeps in lockstep as the team has built on the Blue Dragon server to take advantage of multi-processing capability. A slam dunk again. Great job.

Finally, Jonathan Ring demonstrated his Asset Management Application for Hamilton County Probate Court.As the night progressed, the user interfaces got stronger and stronger. I thought Jonathan created one of the most professional UI designs on the day. The asset management application provided the expected functionality including the ability to add, modify , transfer, and dispose of assets. Users can also account for and run reports on assets.

The application implemented a dashboard tied to a user’s role. Barcode printing and assigning facilities demonstrated some of the more interesting functionality. Some of the user screens seemed a bit more kludgy. I’m sure the final product will provide a more organizaed screen layout. Good job, Jonathan.

And that was it for the evening. As soon as the last presentation wrapped up we all scattered like cock roaches. It had been a long night.

- Andy