Wow, today we sat in from 9 in the morning to 13h10 in a workshop which was run by Renske and her group. It was really fun and interesting, all about what our capabilities are and how it is corporated in our studies and where we are moving to in the field which we find ourselves in. We learned a lot and was in and out of our comfort zone, working with people we do not know and working with concepts we do not fully understand. It was really great.

Today we are finishing the app and working on our presentation, we worked on it this morning with Nomvuyelo and Siphethile. It is going to be great!

Over and Out.. PS it is my bday.. 22 2day.

The 21st of June, Day 7...The end of an exciting day

Today we had some good times, Frank is off to a soccer match and Kriya and I sat in a seminar of Robotic Playware. It was really interesting, check out http://www.playwaresoccer.com this is a way they reach people to expand their creativity through the use of robotics and changing the platform, or infrastructure.

Kriya and I watched some of the Portugal game against North Korea and the final score was 7-0 to portugal obviously!!

We started creating the newsletter app in Visual Studios. It went well until Kriya forgot the Zinadoo password and we could not log into our mobi account. We eventually tried all the possible passwords and emailed the support.

Well tomorrow is my birthday and also another day with new opportunities and new challenges.

Over and out....

The 21st of June, Day 7

We have now completed 56 hours of work; it sounds much more than 7 days. The weekend was fun, I would have gone on my usual weekend activity, skydiving, but thanks to the full loads and cold whether, I gave it a miss. This was all in my favour because my girlfriend and I together with my parents went to SandtonCity and Mandela Square to go have a look at the great vibe of the soccer fever and we saw a show on the 3D Sony TV and their broadcasting. Then we took a lovely trip on the Gautrain. It was awesome!!

Lize and I tried to get tickets for the Brazil vs CIV game, but even two hours before the game all the tickets were sold out. We just watched the game at home, the score was 3-1 in Brazil's favour.

Well today is another day at work. We are still trying to figure out a way to write an app and to add it to our site.

Over and Out..

18 June - Time to leave...

Today was hectic; I'm tired, I'm confused, I've had enough. We started off the day on a really high note, we figured out the RSS feeds and got them incorporated into our mobi site. While Kriya designated herself for that task, I searched and downloaded a program to start writing an application for the newsletter. Frank and I created a possible app for the mobi website. It did not turn out to be what we wanted and thought it to be. Non the less, we struggled the whole day to find open source technology to link the created app to the mobi site. We really need to go back and weigh our options and start to make decisions to what we want to do and start again from the beginning to get this thing going and in the way we want and need.

I'm going skydiving this weekend, nice to get away for a bit.

Over and out...

*Blue skies, no wind!

18 June - The Moring...

This morning we got here and all a bit tired and irritated because of the soccer and moaning about it. We are all busy with bloging and trying to figure out exactly what we achieved and decided yesterday. After this blogging we will sit down and brain storm that which we have done and that which we still need to do.

Over and out..

17 June - End of a hectic day

Today I came to a huge realization... We thought we were nearly done with our project, THEN we went to speak to Adele Botha and realized there are so much we could do and she made us feel so like we have not achieved anything and what we have done is far from sufficient. We came to conclusion, after having a nice burger and chips, that we are not as far off as we thought.

We needed to verify who are our target market and needed to get an objective and a focus area. We linked our mobile site up to Ebsco host, which allows access to resources needed. Next we decided to use RSS feeds and design an app for mobile phones.

A website came fourth when I browsed for RSS feed creators and I came across a site which enables the built-in use of RSS feeds and many other applications. We made the decision of changing our mobile site to this site, called "http://www.wapamama.com".

Earlier today we were invited to a meeting where the current interns told us about all their experiences and how they got to be where they are. It was really interesting and it is a MUST!!! I am going to apply myself and the plan is to do my honors next year as well as being an intern.

This was a successful and relieving day.

Over and out..

The 17th of June.

Yesterday the 16th was a public holiday and I had a good off day, went home and we will not even go to the topic of the soccer, because I'm a bit upset.

Today I got dropped off by my girlfriend who is visiting and like usual the three musketeers are once again sitting at the square table with our weaponry flipped open before us(aka our laptops). I got a reply from James Gowers who is in SVP Business Development of the company

Boopsie, Inc. - "Native App Mobile Solutions for ALL Phones". I am trying to mobilize a library of the CSIR for the mobile site and this is quite a struggle. The company Boopsie is able to mobilize anything, but the problem we have is that it will not come without a price and we do not have a budget. I really hope they can assist us.

Well lets start working.. Over and Out..

The 15th of June end of the day

Today was great! We succeeded in doing so much and completing things we did not think possible. We looked at the project plan this morning and we concluded that we need to research the mobile interface really well. We actually did not have a clue of what to do and how to complete or even begin the project.

Yesterday at lunch if someone told me we will be as far as we got today, I will really have thought that they are mad.

We sat down and started discussing possible problems which we thought would be relevant to the integration of the internet site of CSIR and the intranet. The problems there included who the clientele was. The clientele we assigned as the target market and got that established. It was hard to get around the fact that the intranet is private to the CSIR and the internet is public. We had to use both sources to construct the mobile site. Questions that came to mind was the fact that must we now implement a database and create a log in profile for all the employees? This was just ridiculous and and almost impossible not even mentioning really unnecessary. We concluded that we will only add information that is relevant and not private, which can not be used to harm the company.Other problems was to figure out why we need to use the intranet because the internet has sufficient information.

Then we looked at the way we could create the mobile site. Problems posed as what domain are we going to use for the .mobi site and whether we have a budget to use to buy a domain. It turns out that we do not have a budget(go figure) and we had to look for free domains.

A problem we have with the future of this project, maintaining it, is updating the site and the usability there of. It turns out the Zinadoo website is not too bad and we will leave it in the hands of the project leaders.

Another alternative we had was to create a full scale website in DreamWeaver and then mobilize the website like we did with the blogs.

I used the CSIR's logo on my blog and was kindly asked to remove it, I do not understand why because it is good marketing for the company, but I know thy have their rules and regulations and I will respect it. This posed another question, will we be allowed to use the CSIR's logo for the .mobi site? (Well we did anyway)

The last problem which I was working on while Kriya was creating the .mobi site and Frank was busy typing and formulating the report, was to investigate and research to mobilize the “CSIR Research Space” and add it to the mobile site we are creating for the CSIRIS. The problem was that we could not find a way to mobilize the library. We discovered a website http://www.boopsie.com/ which states that they can mobilize any information, we sent them a few emails and did not get any reply from them. Our project leader Siphethile Muswelanto, put us in contact with Bram Luyten who was in Belgium when we communicated across a social networking technology, “Skype”. Bram Luyten works for a company called “@mire” in Belgium; they develop add-ons for DSpace and Fedora softwares. DSpace is the software that the library is written in and uses.

What we found and gathered from the advice we got from Bram Luyten, is that DSpace out of the box, doesn't support mobile devices. One alternative would be to tie your application with the DSpace services framework (http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/DSPACE/DSpace+Services+Framework) which is based on Java SPRING( http://www.springsource.org/ ). If you know how to deal with a SPRING framework, you'll have no trouble using the DSpace services framework, and we are not programming students and this posses a problem.

A more lightweight approach to mobile integration would be to use the DSpace RSS feeds into a mobile interface but the possible functionality is much more limited.

We decided to look into the RSS feeds because the CSIR DSpace is updated often and employees are subscribed to various collections and will get a message if it is updated.

It was so cool to speak to a person in real time from a different country.

Then we emailed the report to Siphithile and asked very nicely if we may have off because of the soccer that starts at 16h00. We went and chilled on the couch and watched the last minutes of New Zealand against Slovakia which ended 1-1 with New Zealand scoring their goal in aftertime...very lucky!!

Anyway I'm off.

Over and out..

Friday 11 June 2010

This was the first day of work, we got here at the CSIR at 7:30 and waited for all the class mates to pitch. Everyone was very excited and looked forward to our next two weeks here. We all moved into a meeting room and discussed what the CSIR was and what they do. Something that was on everyone's minds but no one know the answer, is wat the acronym CSIR and CSIRIS stand for. Only Monday the 14th of June I saw it on the website "The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research".

We got allocated to our groups and to our projects. Frank and Kriya are in my group and our topic is Mobile Technology. This is by far the best project of all the projects that the CSIR is presenting. We have to create an interface for a mobile device and it is insanely awesome.

We went home early that day because of the soccer, the opening of the World cup, South Africa against Mexico, the score ended up to be 1-1 and we are very proud of our boys.

Over and Out..

The 15th of June

Today we came in and really amped to work, it is great working with Frank and Kriya. We have a lot to cover today including to start brainstorming the interface for the .mobi site.

14 June, working at the CSIR

Yesterday our group worked on our report about our findings which we researched the weekend. These included all the newest and important mobile technologies. The report took quite a while because the research was not complete, we did not have the project plan as a guideline but soon got it and setup a mean report with links to our findings and all.

We linked our personal blogs(ie this blog) to the Wiki "Information Service Project" of the CSIR.

I created a mobile version http://csirmobitech.mofuse.mobi/ for my blog so that it can be accessed to via mobile. By using the site Mofuse to create, it was very simple and easy.

This is a crazy awesome learning experience and I am enjoying every moment.

Over and Out..

The weekend's research 12 June 10

The weekend I read 3 articles on Mobile technologies and setup this blog.